What is missing from rationality?
“In a sufficiently mad world, being sane is actually a disadvantage”
– Nick Bostrom
Followup to: What is rationality?
A canon of work on “rationality” has built up on Less Wrong; in What is rationality?, I listed most of the topics and paradigms that have been used extensively on Less Wrong, including: simple calculation and logic1, probability theory, cognitive biases, the theory of evolution, analytic philosophical thinking, microeconomics. I defined “Rationality” to be the ability to do well on hard decision problems, often abbreviated to “winning”—choosing actions that cause you to do very well.
However, I think that the rationality canon here on Less Wrong is not very good at causing the people who read it to actually do well at most of life’s challenges. This is therefore a criticism of the LW canon.
If the standard to judge methods by is whether they give you the ability to do well on a wide range of hard real-life decision problems, with a wide range of terminal values being optimized for, then Less-Wrong-style rationality fails, because the people who read it seem to mostly only succeed at the goal that most others in society would label as “being a nerd”.2 We don’t seem to have a broad range of people pursuing and winning at a broad range of goals (though there are a few exceptional people here).
Although the equations of probability theory and expected utility do not state that you have to be a “Spock rationalist” to use them, in reality I see more Spock than Kirk. I myself am not exempt from this critique.
What, then, is missing?
The problem, I think, is that the original motivation for Less Wrong was the bad planning decisions that society as a whole takes3. When society acts, it tends to benefit most when it acts in what I would call the Planning model of winning, where reward is a function of the accuracy of beliefs and the efficacy of explicitly reasoned plans.
But individuals within a society do not get their rewards solely based upon the quality of their plans: we are systematically rewarded and punished by the environment around us by:
Our personality traits and other psychological factors such as courage, happiness set-point, self-esteem, etc.
The group we are a member of, especially our close friends and associates.
Our skill in dealing with people, which we might call “emotional intelligence”.
The shibboleths we display, the signals we send out (especially signaling-related beliefs) and our overall style.
The Less Wrong canon therefore pushes people who read it to concentrate on mostly the wrong kind of thought processes. The “planning model” of winning is useful for thinking about what people call analytical skill, which is in turn useful for solitary challenges that involve a detailed mechanistic environment that you can manipulate. Games like Alpha Centauri and Civilization come to mind, as do computer programming, mathematics, science and some business problems.
Most of the goals that most people hold in life cannot be solved by this kind of analytic planning alone, but the ones that can (such as how to code, do math or physics) are heavily overrepresented on LW. The causality probably runs both ways: people whose main skills are analytic are attracted to LW because the existing discussion on LW is very focused on “nerdy” topics, and the kinds of posts that get written tend to focus on problems that fall into the planning model because that’s what the posters like thinking about.
1: simple calculation and logic is not usually mentioned on LW, probably because most people here are sufficiently well educated that these skills are almost completely automatic for them. In effect, it is a solved problem for the LW community. But out in the wider world, the sanity waterline is much lower. Most people cannot avoid simple logical errors such as affirming the consequent, and cannot solve simple Fermi Problems.
2: I am not trying to cast judgment on the goal of being an intellectually focused, not-conventionally-socializing person: if that is what a person wants, then from their axiological point of view it is the best thing in the world.
3: Not paying any attention to futurist topics like cryonics or AI which matter a lot, making dumb decisions about how to allocate charity money, making relatively dumb decisions in matters of how to efficiently allocate resources to make the distribution of human experiences better overall.
There’s too much individualism in the current LessWrong rationality. I remember a folk tale I read, describing the adventures of two individuals named something like Solves-Problems-By-Himself and Asks-Others-For-Help. Given the task of preserving meat from rotting, the former shielded the meat from the sun with large leaves and dripped water on it. The latter gave away the meat in exchange for an identical piece delivered at the end of the contest.
It was sort of cultural-shock jarring to me when I read it, because “obviously” producing the “identical” piece shouldn’t be counted as having preserved the original. But we have too many lone-hero-genius stories, and not enough “so-and-so was stumped so he asked his sister” sort of stories.
Afaik, LW is a spin-off from work on FAI. Since FAI needs to be gotten right the first time, it isn’t surprising if LW is oriented towards planning.
One thing I haven’t seen discussed is the process of generating new ideas. I was thinking about this as a result of the lurkers thread—some people said they didn’t post because anything they thought of had already been said.
I’m a lurker, and have read more posts than comments, but it seems that there actually is attention paid here to how to increase one’s emotional intelligence. How to influence one’s own emotions, how to help emotions correspond to reality, how to forget them when it’s necessary. The same issue which (to my limited knowledge) Roman philosophers were very concerned with.
Maybe it’s not explicitly applied, in a “How to Win Friends and Influence People” style, but I think the population here (myself included) tends to be turned off by that style. This blog’s style is the type of style someone like me can understand and apply. But I think we need to distinguish between style (which is optimized for nerds) and substance (which is quite human and universal, as I understand, and not at all confined to making “society” better at the expense of the challenges of one’s own life.)
In other words, if LW isn’t helping me win, then it’s I who am doing something wrong.
Yes, it is true—debiasing is a form of emotional intelligence.
Do you find that you personally do well at challenges that require emotional intelligence? (Obviously you don’t have to give specifics in a public forum, but in general) If a third party observer assessed your life, do you think that they’d put you above the 90th/80th/70th etc percentile in terms of:
Quality of personal relationships
Ability to successfully deal with others and comprehend social networks
Ability to read others’ emotions and project the right emotions to others
Ability to be in control of your own emotions and sense and express how you feel?
No, I’m not very good, which is actually why I’m here. My personal relationships are fine; my emotions, not so much.
As I wrote earlier on LW:
Skills other than rationality matter a lot, and a rational person will seek to learn those skills (to the extent that they’re sufficiently useful/easy), and it isn’t implausible that those skills should be discussed on LW, but that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with our conception of rationality.
ETA: I guess you could argue that there’s different skills involved in being rational about nerd topics and being rational about non-nerd topics, and we haven’t focused enough on the latter.
I think who you know is probably the most important element of social and financial success. To win more rationalists need to help each other along, for example, by hiring and mentoring each other.
Seriously though, people always underrate how important this is.
You may be interested in the Existential risk career network if you are thinking of making even moderate donations to reduce existential risks. if you email me at rmijic “at” googlemail dot com, I can get you in touch with Frank who runs the network.
And what is your domain of expertise?
Philosophy, public policy (and political strategy), writing and decent grounding in cognitive science and associated fields.
Which I felt a lot better about before the recession.
That’s a tough one; you can do a wide range of things with that background, but it’s not specialized enough to easily bootstrap yourself with a first job. I’m sure I am saying the obvious, but law is a good possibility with that background. Another possibility is to specialize in something more applied, if you can stay in school longer. What do you see yourself doing, short of being a political strategist?
I think you make some great points in this post:
There used to be more activity on this regard with a lot of people writing about the pick up community and pick up artists. Unfortunately there were complaints about women being objectified and after that you didn’t read much about this topic anymore.
Another thing is that I have the impression that LW is becoming more and more about signaling(I got this from Robin Hanson’s writings) rationality as opposed to actually working on it. That is, what counts is making an elaborate post with sophisticated reasoning in order to impress, regardless whether it can or will be actually implemented. Maybe useful if you are bulding a GAI, not so much if you want to improve yourself.
A useful analogy would be doctors discussing smoking vs. people actually trying to stop smoking. LW is more similar to the former.
I’ve also witnessed a certain disrespect for dissenters, comments that contradicted certain established views where downvoted. Eliezer’s post about well-kept gardens contributed to this problem. What should be considered is how to distinguish dissenting views that are actually wrong from those that only seem wrong.
If you get rid of all people with different views(this also applies to my point about pick up artists above) you will end with lots of people who all share the same mindset, or some subjects that won’t be discussed anymore. No longer a garden, but a mono-culture.
Status: few people with high status have a disproportionately high influence on the group. Status here is not only by the amount of karma points but also by gender, females have inherently higher status.
One procedure that could help bring this site on track would be to do continuous Kaizen style self-analysis and improvement. Use rationality to analyse LW, the behavior of the people, voting patterns, how are dissenting views treated, how strong is the influence of status etc…
Not more and more. You’re just becoming more socially aware. You’ve taken the Red Pill, now the trick is to learn to live with what you see, without becoming embittered. Because, as the name suggests, LessWrong has slightly less signalling bullshit relative to information than average for humans. That’s the best you can expect, now make the most of it.
-delete-
Or he just watched The Matrix. I don’t think Roissy can take credit for that particular expression.
Virtually nothing Roissy writes about game is new or original, including his reference to the Matrix, which I’ve seen used about 5 years ago. He just succeeded in popularizing it to new audiences, and linking it with conservative politics. Roissy is not an important or representative figure in the larger community.
As a note of caution to those not familiar with the name, Roissy might be construed as an example of the ‘worst advocates’ of PUA by many. He is a talented writer and at least thought provoking, arguably quite insightful, but Tyler Cowen described him as EVIL and he is not for the faint of heart. Anyone tempted to google the name is probably at least owed a NSFW warning (purely text based NSFW) and possibly a NSFTEO (The Easily Offended) warning.
I stopped reading his stuff when I realized it was having a negative effect on how I think of women, sexuality, and my own sexual identity. (I am a hetero male).
Funny that he does so partially for a set of reasons that are falling into disfavour on LessWrong.
This also piqued my interest:
I’m not quite sure what he is referring to.
Who on earth is Roissy? Never heard of him.
Roissy.
The title of his blog, “Roissy in DC” alludes to another Roissy of literary significance.
Roissy talks about “game” which has been de-facto banned from LW because it causes the site to go all ga-ga about gender politics.
Regrettably, I think that LW is not yet strong enough to tackle this issue head on. Note though, that if we move LW more towards real-world winning, we may find that the discussion quality for real-world issues gets to the stage where the issue can be mentioned.
Whence this idea?
Rarity value. :)
This seems to be my impression too, though I must admit to possible bias.
Observation of a few weeks of commenting would make this apparent to anyone with a modest amount of social awareness. This is not something that should be surprising. I find my own popularity skyrocket when doing, for example, yoga. Being the scarce gender gives all sorts of power! :D
I honestly don’t see it and think of myself as being fairly socially aware (though I suppose I wouldn’t know if I was wrong about that). What power do women here have that men don’t?
I’m not sure that higher status (as claimed in the OP) is quite the right way to phrase it but it seems to me that women are treated differently and I am also aware that I do it myself. Some observations:
Society teaches us that women are fragile and that men should be careful not to hurt them. This is an observation about physical differences but it carries over to verbal interactions. I find myself being more careful with my words when I know I am communicating with a female. I get the impression that others are too.
Women are a minority here and we are often reminded of this and encouraged to create a welcoming environment for them. I know of no other clearly defined group we have a similar community norm for.
Many males here are of a personality type that means they will not have a lot of natural success with women and will be enthusiastic about the prospect of talking to women who appear to share their interests. They will not always act on this enthusiasm in an effective way. This phenomena is also common in other communities that attract similar personality types.
Females legitimately offer a perspective that is novel here and so their insights are inherently more valuable than those that can be offered by the many nerdy male computer programmer types who share similar perspectives with each other. They thus are more likely to post insightful comments than average in some areas.
There’s probably others but I hope this gives you some things to consider.
Good points. I can see some of this. I also agree that “higher status” is not the way to describe it.
My experience, here and elsewhere, is that on average women are more interested in exploring ideas and less in getting into a debate. A very high percentage of comments here basically say “Some aspect of the post above this one is wrong” so often my default reaction to a reply to one of my comments is to take the reply as a reason why I’m wrong. But I’ve found this default fails more often when the replier is female. Relatedly, I do find myself being less belligerent and aggressive in replies to women, but I think this is mostly me just matching their tone instead of automatically altering mine when I see they are a woman.
Another aspect of this issue, is that debating between males probably triggers egos more readily than debating between males and females, so perhaps some men here are less aggressive when arguing with females because females don’t trigger programming that evolved to guide us in battles for alpha male status, tribal supremacy and mating privileges. This might be one reason more female posters would help the community, egos care not for truth.
True. But this isn’t really because women are special or unique among such groups, it’s because we aren’t even diverse enough to worry about other groups. There are at least enough women here to point out blind spots and excluding language. Not so for lots of other groups.
(I’ve felt like we do pretty well on neurodiversity issues, for similar reasons.)
Okay, I have seen this. Heh.
I have to agree with Morendil below, AFAIK there are only few women contributing here and at the same time there is definitively some concern about increasing this number, I remember that Eliezer wrote one post about this.
You see Alicorn, women are not the only group who is underrepresented, but I don’t see the same concern regarding others.
I see a pattern here as in the real world “women need more fairness” and the end result is often that privileges are granted to them. Your post certainly contributed to that impression. It’s just an impression, maybe I’m seeing it totally through the wrong lenses.
Eliezer says(sorry for another example regarding PUA but it’s just so salient to me, and yes, unfortunately I feel the need to excuse myself, strange, isn’t it? Why do I feel this need?) In the end, PUA is not something we need to be talking about here, and if it’s giving one entire gender the wrong vibes on this website, I say the hell with it..
What is wrong with this sentence? What about those here who maybe want to discuss this? Shouldn’t they be entitled to it? So there is more concern about a gender that is underrepresented(people that are not even here) but that could hypothetically contribute more members in the future as for those who are active or passive(lurkers) members in this community and have great interest and could possibly learn a lot from this topic. Alicorn I read your comments on how to make friends and there are similarities to PU.
And for those women/men who don’t want to read about PU why not ignore the respective articles?
Edit: sorry for making my argument so PU centric. It’s just something that was salient to me.
That’s a very interesting point. I suspect it’s because there’s a lot of social pressure to assume that something is wrong if a group contains no or few women, while the lurkers don’t have a political constituency.
I think it would be worthwhile for LW to be a more comfortable place for women, but figuring out how to encourage people who are already interested and would be valuable contributors to post is important even though it doesn’t have obvious signaling value.
All I can say is that people don’t necessarily work like that. If they don’t have a strong preference for a social group, they aren’t going to ignore things they don’t like.
Also, a common reaction to PUA isn’t “don’t want”, it’s revulsion. There’s a spread effect.
I think roland’s point is that neither of these reactions are terribly appropriate for a community of aspiring rationalists. The conflict between this and the desire for broader appeal is really at the heart of the issue.
Personally I am an ‘elitist prick’, at least in the context of this site. I want to be able to freely discuss things that are not usually discussed because of revulsion reactions. Robin Hanson’s fearless approach to this is what originally drew me to Overcoming Bias. I have plenty of real world friends and acquaintances to discuss safe topics with, the value to me of this site is the ability to discuss things that are not safe topics amongst normal people.
Have you noticed that the people who are remembered as making the most accurate and useful observations about PUA are the same people who didn’t cause the disgust reaction?
Also, remember that every post we promote is another possible first impression. I wouldn’t want to join a community of people, mostly men, describing Women as an undifferentiated mass distinguished by an array of mental flaws to be exploited for personal gain—that’s a sign of some hardcore irrationality, to make claims which are that self-aggrandizing and that easily refuted. (Easily refuted because they are hasty generalizations, I hastily add.)
Edit: I’ll admit that I’m exaggerating the degree of bad rhetoric displayed here during the whole PUA flamewar, but the point about the hasty generalizations shouldn’t be ignored—I know too many people who don’t fit the stereotypes promoted in those discussions to view these stereotypes sympathetically.
I wouldn’t want to join a community that did those things, or which uncritically praised a community that did. Still, I think that even if the seduction community were an undifferentiated mass of irrationality, it would be worth discussing here for the same reasons that we talk about religion and astrology.
Personally, when I see people being successful in a certain domain (or believing that they are successful), yet holding some obviously irrational beliefs, my interest is piqued. If these people are successful, is that despite their irrational beliefs, or could it be because of those beliefs? Could it be that some of the beliefs of PUAs work even though they are not true?
I don’t understand why other rationalists wouldn’t be wondering the same things, even when confronted with the negative aspects of pickup. As I’ve argued in the past here and here, pickup relates to many rationality topics:
Instrumental rationality (how to succeed according to one’s criteria for success)
The availability heuristic (the theories of PUAs are based on the women they most commonly encounter, and the most salient experiences with those women; the opinions of outsiders on the seduction community are also subject to the availability heuristic)
Underdetermination of theory by evidence, and the problem of induction; how much ad hoc support which should allow to a theory about social interaction before we trash it
Self-fulfilling prophecies (to what extent believing certain notions about oneself makes them come true in social interaction; how believing certain PUA theories and acting on them might produce experiences that appear to confirm those theories)
Empiricism (PUAs advocate “field testing” ideas about how to interact with women)
Kuhnian paradigms (the theories of PUAs have gone through several Kuhnian revolutions, and PUAs tend to interpret their experiences within the reigning paradigms in the community)
Lakatos’ notions of progressive vs. degenerative research programs (to what extent do the theories of PUAs allow them to make predictions of novel facts? How progressive is the research program of PUAs?)
Demarcation criterion (some PUAs claim that their teachings are based on “science”… to what extent is pickup scientific?)
Naive realism vs. instrumentalism (many practices of PUAs work, but to what extent are the theories behind them actually true?)
Heuristic and problem-solving with limited information (how do solve the problem of a lack of social knowledge, given only one’s own anecdotal observations and those of others? What theshold of evidence you should accept for a certain piece of advice before you act on it?)
The psychology of influence and persuasion, status, and signalling (revealing biases in how people perceive each other)
Perhaps I’ve been committing the “typical mind fallacy” by assuming that just because these links between pickup and rationality are obvious to me, that they are also obvious to others.
We appear to have a topic that has a lot of connections to rationality, some of which have been discussed here with a lot of approval, judging by upvotes. There are also people who discuss this topic in a non-rigorous way that causes feelings of repugnance in many observers. In my view, the relevance of pickup to rationality and the philosophy of science is so great that we would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater to discourage discussion of the topic. The solution is to discuss this topic in a rigorous way, and the connections to rationality made clear. When the topic is discussed in a non-rigorous and repugnance-causing way, the appropriate recourse is the reply button and the downvote button.
(Building on this earlier comment of mine.)
I appreciate your list of connections between PUA and rationality, because it’s gotten me closer to working out why I don’t see PUA as having a special connection to rationality.
I think it’s because I find the connections you suggest generic. Most of them, I reckon, would hold for any subculture with a sufficiently active truth-seeking element, such as (picking a few examples out of thin air, so they may not be good examples, but I hope they communicate my point) poker, art valuation, or trading card gaming. Though I’d guess that each of these topics has links to rationality like those you mention, in depth discussion of them on LW would tend to feel off-topic to me.
This doesn’t really relate to the more typical complaints about PUA that I see upthread—i.e. that some of the discussion of it grosses people out, and that it’s inaccurately reductive—but I thought I’d add my two cents to convey my mental context for my last reply.
Thanks for giving additional context. I think you are correct that we have a difference of opinion. Personally, I would be absolutely thrilled to see a discussion on LessWrong of how poker, art valuation, or trading card gaming relate to rationality. Would these subjects not interest you, or is your worry that discussion of them would get too far off-topic to a degree that is bad?
I suppose delving very deep into those subjects could also feel off-topic to me if the connection to rationality was lost, yet I would be comfortable with whatever level of depth people more knowledgeable than me on those subject felt was necessary to elucidate the links to rationality. (And if other people were making truth-claims about the content of those disciplines, and those people often displayed bias or misunderstanding in either a laudatory or critical direction, I would be comfortable seeing those truth-claims evaluated. Even if debate about the merits or nature of a subjects gets away from the direct relationship of that subject to rationality, that debate itself may demonstrate applications of rationality to a controversial subject, which I like to see.)
Your mileage may vary, but I find that I learn in a “hands on” way, and attempting to apply rationality to a practical problem helps me attain a more abstract understanding. See the notion of Contract to Expand, where sometimes solving a specific sub-problem can be helpful for solving a larger, more general problem.
I would consider any subculture or discipline with a “sufficiently active truth-seeking element” to be excellent LessWrong fodder, as long as the discussion (a) was connected to rationality, or (b) addressed the nature of the subcultures and disciplines so that readers can know how they work well enough to evaluate their potential relationship to rationality (particularly if there is disagreement on that nature or relationship). Anyone else have feelings either way?
The second I think. (I feel about the same for topics in which I have shown interest, so it’s not about my level of interest.)
If I wanted to force a conversation about a particular subculture or hot-button topic not obviously related to rationality, and I were called out on it, I could probably contrive a defensible list of ways my desired subject relates to rationality. For example, I took your list of bullet points for PUA and adapted most of them to race and IQ (a subject I’m more familiar with):
Instrumental rationality (IQ relates to indicators of life success, so one can argue about the degree to which IQ is a measure of instrumental rationality)
The availability heuristic (use of convenience sampling when testing psychological subjects; availability bias as a source of racial stereotypes about IQ)
Underdetermination of theory by evidence, and the problem of induction; how much ad hoc support which should allow to a theory about race differences in IQ before we trash it
Self-fulfilling prophecies (stereotype threat and other situations where a white or black person’s beliefs influence performance on IQ tests; how the social impact of race and IQ theories might perpetuate the IQ gaps those theories try to explain)
Empiricism (psychologists involved in the argument do their best to present themselves as grounded in the facts, and the extent to which they succeed is a possible jumping-off point off discussion)
Kuhnian paradigms (historical shift of the IQ argument from ‘it’s in the genes’ to ‘it’s all the environment’ to an uncomfortable, hedging mixture of the two)
Lakatos’ notions of progressive vs. degenerative research programs (Nuff said)
Demarcation criterion (is the argument about race and IQ even a scientific one? Which contributions to it should be considered scientific?)
Naive realism vs. instrumentalism (psychologists’ obsession with defining ‘validity,’ in all its forms, often touches on this)
Heuristic and problem-solving with limited information (this is the kind of thing IQ tests try to test, but to what extent do they successfully do so? Do they do so without bias?)
In spite of the connections to rationality just listed, I’d expect a discussion of race and IQ to flirt with the failure modes of (1) adversarial nitpicking of minutiae and/or (2) arguing about the politics surrounding the topic and not the topic itself. The first time I walked into this argument on Less Wrong, I felt I ended up in the first failure mode. When it came up again in this month’s Open Thread, the poster starting the discussion seemed to want to discuss the politics of it, and I didn’t see the resulting subthread as casting new light on rationality.
I say this even though threads like that do often have people making and evaluating truth-claims; I just don’t count that kind of thing as ‘real’ rationality unless it could plausibly make a rationality lightbulb go off in my head (‘Ooooohhh, I never got Eliezer’s exposition of causal screening before, but this example totally makes it obvious to me’ - stuff like that). I can find intelligent arguments about various subcultures and issues elsewhere on the internet—I expect something else, or maybe something more specific, from LW.
This doesn’t mean I don’t/can’t/won’t learn about rationality in a hands on way—applying what you learn is how you know you’ve learned it. Still, on LW I expect discussions presented as ‘here is a general point about rationality, demonstrated with a few little examples from my pet issue’ to stay on topic more effectively than if they’re presented as ‘here is my pet issue with a side serving of rationality,’ and I expect that whether or not I can draw abstract connections between my pet topic and rationality.
Hmmm. I’ve written a lot here because I don’t feel like I’m adequately communicating what I mean. I suppose what I’m thinking is something like a generalization of ‘Politics is the Mind-Killer’ - even things tangentially related to rationality can mind-kill, so I’m wary about what I label on-topic. Quite likely more wary than whoever’s reading this.
On a side note, I tried profiling (albeit crudely) a thread about a hot topic to find out how well it focused on relevant data and the elements of rationality discussed on LW. I picked this month’s Open Thread’s subthread about race and IQ because it wasn’t very long and I posted in it, so I had some idea how it progressed. On each comment I ticked off whether it
talked about actual evidence about race and/or IQ
made a testable prediction about race and IQ
referred to specific Less Wrongian heuristics or concepts that I recognized, like ‘applause lights’ or ‘privileging the hypothesis’ (I didn’t count generic pro-truth statements like ‘freedom to look for the truth is sacrosanct’)
with the rationale that comments that did any of these were more likely to be rationality-relevant than those that didn’t. (I also tried ticking off which comments were mostly focused on politics and which weren’t, but I couldn’t do that quickly and fairly, so I didn’t bother.) Here’s my data for anyone who wants to check my work.
The subthread has 74 comments: 13 mentioned evidence, 3 made a testable prediction, 10 explicitly made connections to LWish heuristics and catchphrases, and 50 did none of these. Those 50 comments had a mean score of 2.7; the 24 comments that mentioned data/predictions/rationality tropes had a mean score of 2.4.
That suggests that not only were the overtly rationality-ish comments outnumbered, but they scored more poorly. I wouldn’t want to generalize from this quick little survey, but I do wonder whether the same trend would show up in arguments about feminism, PUA, global warming, 9/11, or other subjects that can be controversial here.
Regarding the ratios of comment types have you compared that at all to subthreads about other topics, possibly less controversial ones? Without some idea of the usual level for an equivalent LW conversation about a less controversial topic, it is very hard to evaluate this data.
I’m not sure incidentally that I agree with your breakdown of comments. For example, you include the comment that started off the conversation as in none of the categories. Even just asking a worthwhile question should be worth something. And since this comment was at +17, even just by removing it we already substantially alter the average score of the 50 nones. The score goes from 2.7 to 2.4. This also illustrates another issue which is that if even a single comment can cause that sort of change then it doesn’t seem like this sort of data is statistically significant. Frankly, after realizing that, I’m not that inclined to check the rest of your data since that already puts the two at both 2.4 on average.
The fact that it seems like this comment itself would be put into the none category when I’ve made criticisms of the interpretation of evidence suggests that your break down isn’t great. (Please forgive the mild amount of self-reference.)
It would be interesting to see what the patterns would be like in other subthreads. I sampled only the one subthread because I was curious about variation among comments within the single subthread and not variation between subthreads, so I figured one subthread would be enough.
It’s certainly not perfect! I would have liked to have used a finer and more sensitive breakdown, but it would have become difficult to apply. I tried to invent the simplest breakdown I could think of that wouldn’t need much subjective judgment, and could approximate the types of discussion HughRistik had in mind.
That’s true—my list of categories is conservative, so some well-regarded comments that didn’t discuss data, predictions, or heuristics nonetheless didn’t end up in a category. That said, although my category list wasn’t exhaustive, I did still expect about as many comments to fit a category as there were comments that fitted none—I was genuinely surprised to get a 2⁄3 to 1⁄3 split.
Fair point. The distribution of comment scores in that subthread is very skewed with a few outliers:
If I drop the four high scorers on the far tail I can recalculate the averages for the ‘nones’ versus the non-‘none’ comments without the influence of those outliers. The 47 remaining nones’ scores have mean 2.0 and the 23 remaining non-nones have a mean score of 1.8; the gap shrinks, but it’s still there.
If I did a statistical test of the difference, it likely would be statistically insignificant (and it’d likely have been insignificant even before dropping the outliers) - but that’s OK, because I don’t mean to generalize from that one subthread’s comments to the population of all comments.
Yes—if I planned to apply the breakdown to other subthreads, I’d add a category for comments that criticize or discuss evidence mentioned by someone else. Fortunately, it shouldn’t make much difference for the particular subthread I picked—I don’t remember any of the comments making detailed criticisms of other people’s evidence.
Piling on to this excellent comment, I have a more specific interest in “how scientific is NLP”.
That is indeed a good question that I don’t know the answer to. Though it has been my impression that some of the ideas in NLP are parasitic on mainstream psychology. For example, “anchoring” seems related to classical conditioning.
I think it is a species of logical rudeness to judge an idea by its worst advocates. I’m sure any atheists who have been reminded that Hitler was an atheist can sympathize.
Neil Strauss (author of The Game) recently made some good points:
I think we’re talking past each other. I’m not talking about judging the ideas, I’m talking about judging the worst advocates. Those people are the ones who cause the revulsion, and we as a community need to deny them the spotlight when they act up until they learn better. Otherwise the community comes off as not being a rationalist community, and aspiring rationalists who might be interested walk away.
I don’t even think we’ve been doing a bad job overall. But it’s a job we’re doing, not something that happens automatically.
And this is where differing perceptions are probably causing issues. I haven’t seen any posts here from anyone who is anything nearing the worst advocates, but then I’ve hung around places where these topics are discussed much more confrontationally. I’ve seen nothing I deem worthy of censorship from the advocates, even the ‘worst’, but I have seen examples of what I view as completely unacceptable over-reaction, revulsion and guilt tripping from a small but vocal minority who claim offense.
I am very unsympathetic by nature to people who claim the right to block any conversation that they personally find offensive. My natural reaction to such people is to become more offensive, which while it has some merit from a game-theoretic standpoint is generally not conducive to social decorum so I make an effort to restrain such impulses. So for me, those people are the ones who cause revulsion, and we as a community need to deny them the spotlight when they act up until they learn better. Otherwise the community comes off as not being a rationalist community, and aspiring rationalists who might be interested walk away. So far people who share your perceptions seem to carry the support of the majority but I think there is a significant minority that share my perceptions.
Despite some of the rhetoric flying around at the time, I don’t think anyone involved made that sort of claim. It was rather more like “I find this sort of thing offensive” and “Maybe we should listen to him, since lots of people probably would be turned away by that sort of thing, and the offensive bits aren’t really necessary.”
See Eliezer’s contribution, Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics. Nutshell: We should avoid doing things that make people feel excluded, and that includes being sensitive and not being all feministy. So basically we want both of the potentially-interested groups you’ve identified to stay.
ETA: Surely I’ve overstated my case. Eliezer did suggest that he didn’t think it would be a problem to ban PUA if it bothered people; the main idea is that PUA isn’t that important of a topic in the grand scheme of things, so whatever.
It’s not an either-or proposition, I think. I’ll freely concede that I haven’t been particularly sensitive to those sharing your revulsion for political correctness*, but it would be a mistake to offend either group to flatter the other. It’s possible—it’s even been done here—to hold these discussions in a way which is fair to both sides.
It’s just hard. Which is why it’s usually a bad idea to go there.
* I apologize if my terminology is incorrect.
Agree with first quoted sentence. Disagree with second one.
In my view, LessWrong should be a place where we rationally attempt to discuss subjects that would be too controversial to discuss anywhere else. On LessWrong, we can hold arguments in such discussions to higher standards of scrutiny than anywhere else.
I don’t agree with the “it’s hard, so we should give up” approach to discussing controversial subjects on LessWrong. Controversial, mind-killing subjects are exactly where rationalist scrutiny is most needed.
Here’s a potential conflict in our views of LW’s purpose. I think of it as being about discussing rationality, and things that touch directly on rationality and being rational. In that case discussing controversial, mind-killing subjects is only relevant inasmuch as they cast light on rationality—they’re not inherently interesting.
I’ve posted here before about race/IQ and global warming, and for both of those I’ve felt as if I was covering territory that’s basically offtopic. This didn’t stop me from posting about them, or make me feel bad about it, but I did feel that if I had picked arguments about those topics just because I could, that wouldn’t have suited LW’s purpose. I would avoid writing a top-level post about subjects like that unless I thought it was a good way to make a compelling, more general point about rationality—otherwise I’d likely just be axe-grinding.
To me, it seems obvious that there a lot of links between pickup and rationality (both positive and negative). It’s occurred to me that perhaps I’ve been over-estimating the obviousness of those links to others who don’t have the same background in the subject matter, so I’ve tried to sketch out a bunch of them in my reply to RobinZ.
I’m down with a “one does not simply walk into PUA” attitude. I apologize for not saying so.
We may need a category of “this is too hard for us now”, with the possibility left open that as more of us get better at rationality, more difficult topics can be addressed well.
Your terminology is fine. The asymmetry that disturbs me is that while ‘political correctness’ annoys the hell out of me I’m not demanding for it to be a banned topic of conversation to avoid offending my delicate sensibilities. I don’t consider the causing of offense by particular views or topics to be a valid reason to avoid them. Note that this is different from discussing them in a deliberately offensive manner. I generally dislike an unnecessary impolite or aggressive tone to discussions but objecting to an entire topic is going too far in my opinion.
You’re correct. My “usually” was an attempt to acknowledge this—in retrospect, not a competent one.
If we are still having this discussion could you link to a couple examples of the posts that you object to so much? I’m trying to figure out whether I missed something, or how similar my perceptions are to yours.
I can’t point to any specific examples.
I haven’t read the worst advocates. My negative reaction was based on reading material by average or possibly somewhat above average advocates.
I wonder what the common reaction to feminism is here. It’s got at least as wide a range as PUA.
I broadly agree with the feminist project and think they have done more good than harm. I also have the following criticisms
Feminists too often mistake the complex, dynamic and context-dependent way status/power actually works for an oversimplified “patriarchy” where men as a class oppress women as a class.
This means feminism is much more sensitive to sexism against women and will routinely miss or play down sexism against men. This wouldn’t be a problem except that feminism has sort of universalist aspirations; they’re often more like a special interest group.
Feminism sometimes advocates taking political roles that can be oppressive, in much the same way gender roles can. This is partly why the movement has had trouble embracing transgendered people, BDSM, porn stars, sex workers etc. (And why the views of so-called ‘radical’ feminists still can’t accept these groups)
Despite talking a lot about intersectionality, the core feminist institutions are more like a voice for Western, white, upper middle class women than for women as a whole. (A criticism I feel kind of like a dick making as I am all of those things+ a man, but it’s true).
The movement isn’t a good place for a young man to make his social home because as a woman’s movement the place for men in it is in the background and the primary way the movement relates to men is in their defense of women from men (which is fine, politically, it just is a terrible way for a young man to relate to himself).
The thing is, there isn’t a movement for gender equality. It seems to be very hard to motivate people to work on things without building in a group identity, and the group identity is us vs. them. Or have I spent too much time reading people who work that way, and there are alternatives I haven’t seen?
I’ve wondered whether people have a bias towards bad ideas. Simple good sense isn’t dramatic enough (or possibly doesn’t offer enough opportunities for power seeking) to get attention easily.
Still, there’s some good work being done, and I think of this as an effort to figure out how to live well with other people—something which is surprisingly difficult.
Well, humans seem to be wired that way, so anyone you’ve met who works differently has done so deliberately and is very strange.
That sounds like ‘radical feminism’, and it’s not so much a mistake of the ‘feminism’ as it is of the ‘radical’. Marx did the same thing with class.
Feminists actually have a lot of complex, dynamic, and context-dependent reasons for focusing on sexism against women, ranging from being a radical feminist, to thinking sexism against women is the bigger problem that needs to be dealt with, to thinking that’s what ‘feminism’ is about by definition and someone else should have the job of being sensitive to sexism against men. It’s one reason “women’s studies” programs in universities have been slowly converting themselves over to “gender studies”, to drop the female-centric nature as it’s no longer needed.
This has been internally considered a big problem for a long time, and now remains a problem only if you look at Western, white, upper middle class feminist institutions specifically.
Indeed. There are a lot of crazies out there. But I’d make the same case for just about any ‘movement’.
Well, my sense is that the simple view is (a) what the radicals hold and (b) what those who don’t get into the theory end up believing. It’s kind of like how the Catholic church itself doesn’t think God is necessary for morality but this view is common among evangelicals and unstudied Catholics.
Being a radical feminist isn’t really a reason for doing something, what are the reasons for being a radical feminist? Anyway, my understanding of the radfem position is that there is no such thing as sexism against men, so yes, they’re not going to be paying a lot of attention to sexism against men.
These reasons I’m pretty much fine with (and mostly agree with), which is why the problem isn’t that they aren’t good at noticing sexism against men but that they’re aren’t good at noticing sexism and take themselves to be giving a universal and unbiased perspective on gender issues. Feminism has problems being both the major vehicle for gender egalitarianism and the major vehicle for empowering women. The contradictions here were extremely minimal when feminism started out, but of course the more success feminism has the more this contradiction will come into play.
I agree that it has been a problem internally. And maybe I need to make this more clear: I basically have one foot in the camp and one foot outside it, so some (maybe even most) of my criticisms are things that feminists have said themselves. I’m not sure I know what you mean by “remains a problem only if you look at …”. I don’t think there are many feminist institutions that identify themselves as Western, white and upper middle class. If you mean the institutions that are made up of mostly Western, white and upper class women then I suppose I agree with you except that these are the best funded, most influential and, for the rest of the culture, defining institutions for feminism. My experience reading non-white, poor and non-Western women on this subject suggests they still perceive many of the same problems that spurred the initial intersectionality critique.
I think my original comment made it clear why I think feminism is particularly problematic in this regard but if it didn’t let me know and I’ll clarify.
Yes, I’d have to grant you that, and I think the rest follows.
I get the impression it’s moving in the opposite direction. The shrill radical sorts are being de-emphasized (not least since everyone noticed political correctness is silly), and as I noted “women’s studies” is slowly transforming into “gender studies”.
The major battlegrounds now, as I see them, are on exactly these sorts of questions. Is gender egalitarianism possible? Is it valuable? Are there factors which explain things like income disparity, and what, if anything, should we do about them?
But then, I haven’t really been following the literature for a couple of years.
I see what you mean here. I think it’s part of the same process. Equating gender egalitarianism with empowering women doesn’t make quite as much sense as it once did. And for this reason radical feminists are losing influence, their message doesn’t resonate like it used to. But at the same time aspects of the radical view haven been embedded in a lot of feminist 101 stuff (just think, for example, about the concept of the patriarchy) and mainstream/liberal feminism is having a really hard time getting away from that.
Sounds like we’re on roughly the same page.
Personally my general reaction to feminism is negative but it appears to encompass a sufficiently diverse range of viewpoints that I find myself agreeing with some subset of those viewpoints. My impression is that rationality is not a strong feature of feminist thought but I recognize that I have probably been mostly exposed to the worst advocates.
The most convincing advocate of feminist ideas I have encountered is Kerry Howley. I think I can probably stomach feminist ideas she espouses because they are sugar coated in a libertarian wrapper. I’m not even sure that she would self-describe as a feminist but I feel that what sympathy I have for feminist ideas can in large part be credited to her writing.
I like Kerry Howley too. She does self-describe as a feminist. She’s in the tradition of Voltairine de Cleyre.
I grew discouraged by feminism as represented by, say, the writers at feministe. There was a great deal of opposition to thinking the wrong thoughts. But you’re right, it’s an extraordinarily broad area, to the point of (almost) not being a useful term.
I think there is a parallel to the complaints about the PUA discussions here. I’ve often seen feminist ideas presented in a tone of hostility and misandry and embedded in a whole heap of background assumptions and beliefs that I do not share. I can read some of the same ideas from someone like Kerry Howley and appreciate that they are actually quite reasonable and compatible with my own views because I am not immediately on the defensive and looking for disagreement.
I also feel this way about criticisms of feminism. A lot of it comes from this entitled, resentful and misogynist place which aggravates me. I find that even among the most reasonable critics of feminism this attitude has a tendency to come out from time to time.
Is there anything in particular of Kerry Howley’s that you recommend?
This might be interesting—it’s an analysis of the similarities between feminist descriptions of the patriarchy and libertarian descriptions of the state, with the suggestion that libertarians and feminists could learn quite a bit from each other.
Here’s a few on libertarianism/feminism:
Libertarian Feminism versus Monarchist Anarchism
Feminism and Libertarianism Again
Does the Word Feminism Mean Anything
And on reproductive/sexual issues:
Notes on My Life Sentence of Buried Self-Negation
Trying Really Hard to Get Upset About Pornography
Might There Be a Connection Between Slut Shaming and Slut Jailing
The Myth of the Migrant
Thanks for the link, it’s an interesting article. I don’t find much to take issue with there—I generally agree with their analysis. Unfortunately I see little evidence of any progress towards reconciliation.
I find the focus on radicalism as a common trait interesting. I see parallels with coverage of the financial crisis where I basically agree with much of the analysis of people like Matt Taibbi or Simon Johnson and James Kwak on the root causes of the financial crisis but have a rather different idea of what needs to be done to fix the problem. The ideas of a feminist-libertarian alliance and a left-libertarian alliance have many commonalities.
Agreed. Still my point remains, to what extent should a group stop doing certain activities to accommodate hypothetical future members who might or might not join even if the group ceases doing said activities.
A fair question, though it’s worth noting that those particular activities were also annoying some current members.
Indeed—at the time, at least two of the site’s “top contributors” were specifically put off by it.
I actually don’t see why lurkers as lurkers should have a political constituency. They don’t contribute to the site by definition. Any given lurker is welcome to become a poster and then they will be part of their own political constituency.
I wasn’t saying that they should, just that they don’t.
Even so, it’s possible that they should have a constituency of sorts if you want the site to grow.
If that is the case, then it certainly is not because of a general “Everyone is entitled to discuss whatever they want here” principle, as such a principle does not exist. The site’s purpose is rationality, and anything that serves that goal is allowed, and anything that does not is suspect.
Did you even read the OP? He specifically mentioned the subject of mastering interpersonal relationships and I was answering to that.
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The thing is, that’s an odd response. Look at the flow here:
Roland sez: should we really give up discussing PUA just to make women feel more comfortable?
Kaiokan sez: I don’t expect that many women on the site in the first place, because of XYZ, where XYZ is a fairly ambitious claim that’s likely to be disputed in itself.
Without XYZ, I think most of us, men and women, could agree on the basic point you’re trying to make, that is, we expect more men than women on the site. So why bring up XYZ? It doesn’t actually have a function in your argument other than the fact that you like it and you found an excuse to bring it up. (I’m often guilty of this too, but I suspect it’s bad logical hygiene and I’m trying to get rid of those habits.)
As for the actual question… well, it depends if we can trust ourselves to handle it well. Apparently the convention around here is that we don’t bring up topics that totally overwhelm rationality, because we’re trying to practice rationality. But ultimately we do live in a world where hot-button subjects exist and we have to respond to them one way or another, and potentially not just by avoidance. For somebody from my environment, and it seems for many others, the topic of PUA is a challenge. Maybe a fun challenge. But possibly one we can’t handle well (yet).
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You need to back up that particular non-obvious statement with the reasons which are currently convincing you of that statement, yes. Your response to research suggesting that the factors you cite are nonpermanent would be appreciated.
Thank you for not wanting to sound intolerant. As a rule, though, if you don’t know how to say what you want to say without disclaiming it, you have a lot of work to do before saying it.
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That’s not what I meant—your disclaimer was a warning from yourself that you should not be confident that you have avoided saying something intolerant. In such a case, simple editing is rarely the solution; if you don’t understand the situation enough to be justly confident to start with, you don’t understand it well enough to confidently make edits.
In this case, you have repeated a number of strong claims about sex differences without acknowledging any of the evident cultural factors—it is these specific features of your comment which are likely to make you appear intolerant, and they are (ironically) more prominent after your edit.
I think you are being a little unfair. He stated two fairly well established psychological facts (greater variance in intelligence and differences on the empathizing–systemizing scale), a personality tendency with decent ev-psych support (lone-wolf) and a reasonable extrapolated hypothesis from these tendencies (male dominance of computing/math/engineering disciplines). He then made a clearly flagged personal prediction based on these observations that we are unlikely to ever see a high percentage of female commenters here given the subject matter.
Any interpretation of a nature/nurture assumption is coming from you. He merely noted the differences and did not express an opinion on the reason for them. We can do better than the Larry Summers Harvard debacle here. Address the evidence for the claims or the specific reasons why a different tone would be preferred rather than engaging in pre-emptive censorship.
Apologies for the delay—this is not a field in which i have particular knowledge, and so it took me some time to track down an appropriate reference (h/t Jezebel blogger Anna North): Janet S. Hyde and Janet E. Mertz, “Gender, culture, and mathematics performance”, PNAS, vol. 106 no. 22, June 2, 2009 8801-8807, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0901265106.
Thanks, this is the sort of specific evidence I was hoping for. I’ll take a look.
Intelligence is a vague, multi-faceted word. Whenever intelligence is mentioned in a comparative or quantitative way, care should be taken to indicate exactly which dimension of intelligence is being measured. Since the dimensions of intelligence probably aren’t well parametrized, it would be sufficient to indicate the particular test that was being used. Otherwise, the biases that sneak in are less traceable. In experimental science, it is a really good norm they’ve established to always include the detailed context and methodology of the experiment, so current researchers can estimate and predict biases and figure out ‘what went wrong’ when they get a different result under different conditions.
For example, if it was a standard IQ test that determined the variance in male intelligence, I have an understanding of the biases in those tests, and if it was comparing income, I have an understanding of the biases there. When it comes to experimental studies in social science and psychology, I always weight their result low compared to my own observations of a lifetime, because if I’ve observed anything, I’ve observed that things are complex, and I know we haven’t developed tools to handle this complexity.
Yes, the world is a complex place. Yes, any finding in the social sciences may not show what it purports to show due to biases and flaws in the methodology. We can do better here than simply ignoring all evidence on the basis that it might be wrong however. Remember that ‘belief’ in some idea is not a binary thing, 0 and 1 are not probabilities, all beliefs are open to future revision in either direction in light of new evidence. A rationalist should be trying to refine their degree of belief by asking questions and doing further research.
Greater variance in male performance is both a widely observed phenomenon in many domains and something that you would expect to see given the differing selection pressures on males and females. It need not be an emotionally laden observation since it is not inherently implying that either gender is ‘better’ than the other in some way, it is merely an observed regularity of our world.
So if you dispute the evidence for greater variance in male performance generally and in intelligence measures specifically please address your criticisms to specifics. What specifically are the biases in standard IQ tests or measures of income that you have an understanding of and how do they act to produce misleading results? What other data (experimental is preferable but anecdotal is admissible for consideration) do you have to offer on this issue? This is a perfect example of a question we can collectively apply our rationality to in order to improve the accuracy of our probability estimates.
Or don’t. Just say ‘I don’t believe any of this evidence should influence my beliefs because the world is complex and evidence can be wrong’ if you choose. But do not pretend that that is either a noble or rational stance to take on an issue.
I agree that we can do better.
I have a thought on these studies that give evidence for unequal intelligence between the sexes (or races.) They can have very scary, emotional connotations. They used to scare me. Then I thought about it a bit and asked “What am I scared of?” And I realized that I was scared that, if these genetic inequalities were real, I’d have to be a sexist or racist.
But think for a minute. Suppose the “worst-case scenario” were true. Suppose women really did have worse brains than men, for genetic reasons. What would be my logical response?
It occurred to me that the only responsible way to react to such news would be to treat it as a disease to be cured. And then start working on biology to fix it. I am not an anti-Semite because I’m aware that Tay-Sachs disease affects Ashkenazic Jews.
If there were genetic differences between sexes or races, I’d be less likely to favor affirmative action at the college or employment level, because it wouldn’t be effective. The injustice would be biological, not social, and it would be best fixed biologically.
The real reason people are scared of genetic differences is the naturalistic fallacy. Just because an inequality is natural doesn’t mean it’s good. If some people have the misfortune to have low IQ’s for genetic reasons, and if higher IQ would make their lives better, then shouldn’t we be working on fixing that?
(Note: this is not an argument that IQ differences exist or are meaningful. I’m just arguing that if they turn out to be real, there are non-sexist, non-racist ways to deal with that reality. I’m of the belief now that knowing what reality is like can never be intrinsically immoral.)
With the caveat that a biological injustice and a social injustice are not mutually exclusive—there may be genetic differences between sexes/races, but that would not eliminate the possibility of additional unnecessary social barriers to college or work.
ETA: I should also have remembered that ‘biological’ does not equal ‘genetic.’
Surely the injustice here, if any, is that different individuals are differently intelligent, not that the average varies across groups?
Mostly, yes.
Though there’s an added harm if the average varies across groups, especially groups where membership is easy to recognize. Because then, people (reasonably) make generalizations, and high-IQ members of a low-IQ group are harmed by negative opinions. Add in the fact that people have biases, and stereotyping is likely to go even beyond what’s reasonable, so the problem becomes even worse.
But yes, if some individuals have low IQ for genetic reasons (or other reasons beyond their control) I consider it a bad thing and we ought to see about fixing it. I think Eliezer made this point earlier.
The injustice is that each individual is not maximally intelligent. The variance in intelligence between individuals just means that this is more unjust for some people than others.
I agree that’s the main bad thing, but I’m not sure it would be properly called an “injustice”, and I have strong reservations about the “maximally”.
I’m not sure whether I’d want to be maximally intelligent. You could say the injustice is that individuals are less intelligent than would be optimal for their flourishing, or whatever.
One of the major concerns here are Gattaca-type scenarios, where when you’re looking for very smart people you’ll throw out all of the applications from females to maximize your odds of getting a very smart person. Obviously someone with the time to look at every application wouldn’t do that, as the smartest applicant could still be a female. But usually there are some factors that you use first to throw away some of the stack so you don’t have to look at them all.
That may be happening already. (Statistical discrimination is one model for employment discrimination, and as I recall it doesn’t hold up too badly; better than the Becker model, at least.) It’s not an intrinsically “Gattaca” idea.
Of course, in a world where there was a biological “fix” for low IQ, you’d have the issue of whether it should be voluntary (I’d say yes) and whether people who don’t opt for it should get preference from schools and employers (I’d say no, but tentatively) and what to do about access (it’s complicated.) But I’m fairly confident that if IQ matters for real life outcomes, then a world where it can be improved technologically is a better one.
Yeah, I think this is a common reaction and it’s not an entirely unreasonable reaction because sexism and racism are bad. But as you’ve realized it is better to know the truth if you want to influence the world in a direction consistent with your values.
Just to be clear though, the claim is not that men are ‘more intelligent’ than women. It is that men have greater variance. This means more geniuses and more morons. It only carries value connotations if you believe more variance is inherently ‘better’, not if you believe higher intelligence is better. If you look at the scandal over Larry Summers’ comments on this issue you will see that the vast majority of people who were offended by his comments did not understand this distinction.
Yes, this is the key. It is always better to know the truth if you wish to effectively influence the future. You still get to choose your own values though—if the way things are is not the way you think they should be then believing true things is your best bet for effectively resolving that discrepancy in a favourable way.
Yeah, I’m aware about the variance thing. The “geniuses” side of the graph stands out to me more, but probably only because of personal relevance. (I never took an IQ test but I’d guess I’m more likely top half than bottom half.) But you’re right, if there were higher variance among men, and if IQ mattered, then I’d believe we were also obligated to do something about low-IQ males.
Richard Whitmire (see http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/whyboysfail/) convinced me that there’s a serious educational problem among US and European boys. He examines the education system, not IQ, but if some of it turns out to be biological then we should be working on that too.
I think the problems with the education system in the US and Europe are more fundamental than just that it is failing boys. The real problem is that we have an educational system adapted for early 20th century industrial societies that for institutional reasons has been unable to adapt to a completely transformed economic and social landscape. The most obvious victims are certain groups of boys but the whole system is completely unsuited to the modern world and is structured in a way that makes it largely incapable of correctly diagnosing or doing anything to fix the problems.
You and everybody else
Yes, but usually, when a grad student in mathematics believes she has above median intelligence with respect to the general population, she will turn out to be right.
The question isn’t necessarily whether men in general are better than women in general. The active question seems to be whether it’s alright for women to get high status positions.
The active question in what context? Clearly the variance issue has no bearing on this question. Whether greater variance in intelligence is a real phenomenon potentially has bearing on questions regarding whether institutional sexism in certain academic disciplines is a real issue and on the appropriateness of quota systems or ‘positive discrimination’ but I don’t see how anyone who understood the issue could claim that it was not ‘alright’ for women to hold high status positions. I’m sure some people make that unrelated claim but people believe all sorts of crazy shit.
You read way too much into my comment!
The issue seems to be, in your misreading of my comment, that you expect I feel emotional about gender issues, and perhaps feel threatened indiscriminately by any statements about gender and intelligence. But I don’t. It happens that I’m not generally concerned about gender issues and am not on the look out to defend them. Personally, I don’t anticipate feeling threatened by any statements that might be true about gender.
On issues on which I am emotional (they exist), I feel much less threatened by statements if they are either clearly personal opinions/impressions or scientific statements that carry the specifics with them. I feel that if the specifics are there, I can trust that there is enough information to vet the statement, if needed, in the present or the future, and thus prevent inappropriate application. If the statement is a personal opinion/impression, we know the appropriate application of that.
So if the point is to discuss issues “rationally”, without stirring up emotions, then it would be a good norm to always signal clearly whether a statement is a personal opinion/impression OR a scientific claim. If the latter, it is the careful inclusion of the methodology/context that makes it scientific.
I apologize for jumping to conclusions. This is sort of why I think getting into specifics is important. If you just make a vague hand-wavey ‘this might not be true’ dismissal of a claim you leave your interlocutor with little choice but to try and guess what your true objection is and so read too much into your comment.
This isn’t what I did. My criticism was fairly focused, with a fairly specific solution:
The part that had you thinking I was dismissing the claim was probably this:
It probably would have been wise to omit this sentence, since it caused so much bias about my intentions. My idea is that researchers do try to tackle complex subjects, like intelligence, and will measure something or do some experiment and report the results, but the interpretation or relevance of the study is all ‘spin’ in the Abstract or heavily dependent upon the reader’s lifetime experience to understand the relevance.
For example, what is “intelligence”? This is something that a group of researchers have to define, and have to measure in some way, in order to do their study and get it published. Consider the Dreary study. They’ve measured something and called it general intelligence. This part is the spin. However, when you look at how they defined “general intelligence”—this is a scientific paper; they do tell us, and they’re specific—it is patent that they didn’t include social intelligence, emotional intelligence or “street smarts” in this conception of intelligence. Requiring this clarification isn’t dismissing the study results, it’s just emphasizing that the context and the specifics are important.
See the Deary study of practically the entire population of Scottish 11 year-olds, which found greater male variability. The introduction of the study also discusses the history of the greater male variability hypothesis, and some of the evidence for it.
There is a cross-cultural study which found that males have higher variance in most populations, but females do in others. (Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the difference is “cultural,” though it could.) I will try to dig it up. Even so, greater male variability is a robust finding.
This is the bit that I think is important when discussing results about intelligence:
However, I’m not saying you need to include this information in your comment because you already made the context specific: the Deary study. So a person can dig deeper and find these details if they want to.
Just to say, you didn’t actually support this. Unless it is supported in the Dreary study?
It’s supported at least by the combination of the Deary study, and the cross-cultural study I mentioned that I’ll have to look up when I get home. I believe the author was Feingold. Good question, though.
Oh, I see I parsed your sentence wrong anyway. I thought there were some unidentified number of studies that showed women had greater variability.
My bad… The Feingold study is a meta-analyses of studies, some that find greater male variability, and some that find greater female variability in various dimensions.
huh. Well, does this control for age? The population should be around age 20, when both genders are at peak mental capacity.
This does not seem like an apt reply to the above. This:
Is a particularly bad straw man. “I weight their result low” seems to be doing the sort of thing you advocate, as opposed to “no influence”.
Do you disagree with the general stance presented, that the methodology/context of an experimental study matters, and these things should be taken into consideration when evaluating their effects on our beliefs?
No, and I would welcome discussion of the specific issues that people are taking into account, as I said. I am open to the possibility that there is some major flaw that renders these results questionable that I have not previously encountered. What I am objecting to is precisely the lack of such specifics. It is not enough to say that things are complex and studies can be flawed or misleading. These are trivially true facts and to imply that your interlocutor is unaware of them on Less Wrong of all places is disingenuous.
There have been a few comments in this thread that are taking the same kind of approach—dismissing the claims on the basis of unspecified flaws in the supporting evidence but never offering specific rebuttals to any of the disputed claims.
Don’t worry, I also have a terrible style. Just continue practicing, it takes a lot of time to become a good writer. Eliezer has written some posts touching on this subject.
I’m not sure how this would come off as intolerant, though my detector for that stuff has been off the last couple of days.
Anyway, whether or not you’re right pretty much depends on what you mean by “substantial”. Off the top of my head I can think of five or six female regulars. That isn’t too shabby. There aren’t that many regulars, period. Considering this is (a) the internet, and (b) a place where a bunch of computer nerds talk about science and philosophy I think that’s actually quite good! It would be nice if the ratio is was a little better, but I don’t think anyone here actually thinks it would ever get past 1:4. And I think we’re okay with that. As long as it doesn’t become like 1:100.
I wonder if we should focus so much on the gender inequality. Nowadays everything seems to operate under the assumption that gender equality in numbers is a desideratum. I don’t know if we should operate under this assumption unless we want to signal that we are conforming to the Zeitgeist.
If the site’s purpose is rationality should it matter if there is a majority of males? I agree of course that females should be welcome and treated with respect, but the same applies to anybody. Midgets should also be welcome and treated with respect as should people who were born in airplanes over the Atlantic. And don’t forget the people with green eyes and black hair, they too deserve respect.
This was the issue. The way PUA was being discussed made some women here feel unwelcome and disrespected.
Of course not. No one expects there to ever be anything but a majority of males. But the community would be better off if the ratio wasn’t as skewed as it is. Some reasons:
Gender diversity means experience diversity and neuro-diversity, these things let us catch blind spots. The fact that we are men means there will be experiences we aren’t aware of and it is helpful to have people with those experiences around to fill in the gaps. This of course goes for all kinds of socially significant diversity.
Women, on average, appear to be less confrontational and aggressive in their discussions here (I don’t know if this is learned or innate). People with such demeanors are good to have around as the rest of us appear to get our egos caught up in arguments a lot.
One ostensible goal of this site is to help spread rationality. Alienating large segments of the the potential convert pool is a bad idea.
The general consensus appears to be that Less Wrong would be better if it were larger, it speeds up our hypothesis generation capabilities and decreases the chances of us missing things. Again, alienating large segments of the potential commenter pool is a bad idea.
Can we please move past this simplistic anti-political correctness attitude where we pretend deep social categories are equivalent to eye color?
What I don’t understand is why we’re having this meta-level discussion again. All these points have been made before and whatever has been said about a ban, it is quite clear that anyone can talk about PUA without negative consequences provided they do so in a respectful manner, take into account differences between women etc. Is it that important that our discussions about what women find attractive offend women?
---edit---
Huh? It’s not like anyone is advocating affirmative action or extra karma for women. Some of the women here (in addition to some of the men) objected to the exclusionary, objectifying language, overly broad generalizations and ethically ambiguous advice that went hand in hand with the way some people were discussing Pick-Up Artistry.
We want people with good ideas, no? Then if possible, let’s avoid alienating groups of people who may have good ideas, and perhaps just as importantly, different ideas. Diversity is how you catch blind spots.
Sometimes movements change after they get founded. Arguing from founders is like arguing that a word’s current meaning is the same as its derivation.
Why are you starting shit? We’ve had rather pleasant and informative discussions on pu and pu related topics this month.
I think this comment is at like +5 −8, unless someone is just changing their vote a lot. I’ve been trying to avoid asking about the occasional downvote, but this keeps fluctuating so I have to ask. I’m confused about what people dislike so much. I can’t imagine the downvotes are just about using profanity. I only commented because didn’t understand why we were diving into an inflammatory meta-conversation, complete with accusations of gender inequity, when the object-level conversations had been going fine.
I would guess that the profanity is enough to explain the low score. Aside from that, “Why are you starting shit” seems at least rude and also carries a host of connotations including a belligerent nature.
Jack, it wasn’t my intention to start “shit”(using your words). I’m writing on PU based on what I remember reading about this in the past on this website, and I’ve been a member here since the days where this was still overcomingbias.com. I wasn’t aware of the current discussion but even so I don’t think it invalidates my point if you bother to read what I wrote.
Evidence for any of these claims would be swell.
See my other replies in this thread.
Please don’t reopen the PUA argument.
I think you may overestimate the difficulty. There clearly was some set of near-evolutionarily-feasible priors combined with a pattern of observations which transported any hypothetical dissenter into a particular belief—it strikes me as implausible to assume that such a person could not eventually convince many of us if that person were right.
Given how many theists are regular contributors, I’m not yet convinced that this is a problem we need to be working on.
I think the example roland has in mind is the fact that he hasn’t been able to convince us 9/11 was an inside job.
Honestly, I’d rather not reopen that one either—but mostly because I find it incredibly frustrating, rather than because it is mind-killing.
Oops...
:-)
The importance of saying oops
Ar least you get credit for perspicacity. (-;
Hahahahahaha. Ok I’ll bite. Yes, I was thinking about 9/11 related posts. But the fact that I couldn’t convince anyone doesn’t bother me that much. What bothers me is that just pointing to evidence that contradicts the established view on 9/11 here is downvoted. See the following comment:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1r5v
If I can’t convince you that the earth is round would just be sad but if you downvote any evidence in support of my theory(edit: and that contradicts your theory) you are committing scientific fraud.
Btw, I’m calling Eliezer’s bluff, as of yet he didn’t answer my one request for clarification: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1t7r
Downvoting you isn’t committing scientific fraud. That sort of hyperbolic claim is why you are getting downvoted. You got downvoted repeatedly because you made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and your attempts to marshal evidence for your claims relied on very poor fact checking. Downvoting for such reasons isn’t “scientific fraud.”
Moreover, science isn’t the process of comments threads. Even in as an educated/intelligent group as the commentators on LessWrong, these are still blog comments threads. Science is not conducted in blog comments threads. We can update our probability estimates in threads and even discuss interesting or new ideas. But to call this science is to vastly overestimate the gravity of these discussion threads. Maybe lightening up might help matters slightly.
Sorry, but I didn’t say that.
You decided to go off on an ad hominem attack which I will simply ignore with the exception of remarking that the one comment of mine I mentioned above was very specific and didn’t contain a single word of mine but just a link which pointed directly to prima-facie evidence, edits were added later and marked as such.
Science is not what happens inside the lab. If you are suppressing evidence(and downvoting is a form of suppression) you are not being scientific. It’s as simple as that.
You’re not having a good day today.
And you’re getting even more off-topic—it doesn’t matter what you call it, you have to either make your case on an object level or shut up. Complaining that people aren’t listening to you doesn’t work.
Wikipedia lists several types of ad hominems among them is the Ad hominem abusive. “involve pointing out factual but ostensible character flaws or actions which are irrelevant to the opponent’s argument.”
In this sense I meant ad hominem attack. Edit: note that I didn’t write ad hominem argument.
Yes, but there’s no ad hominem in explaining to someone that historical comments were downvoted because of specific flaws. Incidentally, the ad hominem abusive is only a fallacy in the limited sense that there’s an implicit “and therefore the argument is wrong” attached to it. That’s more due to general human convention. Consider for example if one said to someone “you’re a drunk idiot who couldn’t factor a 2 digit integer given a caculator and your statement X is correct.” That would be an ad hominem abusive but wouldn’t in any way be an ad hominem in a logically rude fashion. So this seems to miss the point at two levels.
Sigh, I’ll have to quote myself again: “involve pointing out factual but ostensible character flaws or actions which are irrelevant to the opponent’s argument.”(emphasis mine)
It is ad hominem because it is completely irrelevant to my arguments. I might have been downvoted years ago by making wrong claims about Teddy Bear, so what? Why would you want to bring that up in a discussion?
How come you even knew about my other comments in the past? Is it because you are a long time member here and remember past discussions and remember what I wrote in them? Maybe this is what caused you to argue based on the past history, based on what you knew about me and my past comments instead of sticking to the present comment and facts stated therein. If you argued based on what you knew about me, e.g. past comments, other than the one that was specifically mentioned this constitutes an ad hominem in the latin sense (meaning directed towards the person). You didn’t manage to stick to what was written but brought in your personal judgment about me about other comments I have written in the past. And that is totally irrelevant to my point. I’ve never claimed that all my comments in the past were correct. So other comments of mine in the past, be they correct or wrong are totally irrelevant to the point in question. I was very careful in choosing one specific comment which doesn’t even contain a single word of mine. I said this 3 times at least now. I was making my point with this comment, why couldn’t you stick to that one? We are now writing a lot of words that have nothing to do with my argument.
Btw, to make it simpler imagine that the Roland of today is another person than the Roland who wrote the past comments, lets call him “RolandPast”. Now I’ll paraphrase you: “RolandPast got downvoted repeatedly because RolandPast made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and hist attempts to marshal evidence for his claims relied on very poor fact checking. Downvoting for such reasons isn’t “scientific fraud.”
I hope this makes things clearer. If not, I’ll paraphrase again this time using “X”:
“X got downvoted repeatedly because X made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and his attempts to marshal evidence for hist claims relied on very poor fact checking. Downvoting for such reasons isn’t “scientific fraud.”
No, on the contrary, read the wikipedia section.: “This tactic is logically fallacious because insults and even true negative facts about the opponent’s personal character have nothing to do with the logical merits of the opponent’s arguments or assertions.”
So it seems that you are the one who missed it in two levels at least.
The ad hominem abusive would be a problem if I were trying to explain why your comment as you’ve said it is wrong. That’s not what has been happening. What has happened is that I’ve explained that your comments were downvoted because they were wrong.
Right. And if Roland made a claim about why RolandPast got downvoted then giving an alternative explanation for why RolandPast gotdownvoted (essentially exactly what you said above) isn’t an ad hominem of any form.
I just finished writing a long reply were I address the ad hominem claim:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/218/what_is_missing_from_rationality/1xn4
I’m answering the comments, please stop reading if you consider it off-topic.
If you want people to believe your claims, you’re going about it the wrong way. Everyone would have believed the Wright brothers had built a successful heavier-than-air plane* if they just brought it to DC and buzzed the Mall, but that’s not what they did.
* No lie, I actually have this photograph as my desktop right now.
Is it possible that I’m not parsing what you’ve said correctly?
You wrote “if you downvote any evidence in support of my theory(edit: and that contradicts your theory) you are committing scientific fraud.” When I replied that edit was not yet present but it doesn’t actually add any information (since were on LessWrong I’m not going to bother dealing with the basic Bayesianism at work). So, can you explain how the statement ” “if you downvote any evidence in support of my theory you are committing scientific fraud.” is not a claim that downvoting you is committing scientific fraud?
I’m also curious where you think I engaged in an ad hominem attack. I don’t see it above.
I’m also curious as to how you classify downvoting as suppressing evidence. If I linked to a claimed set of pages about UFOs and psi that relied on personal evidence would downvoting that claim constitute “suppressing evidence”? If not, why not? If it would, is there any circumstance where you consider downvoting to be acceptable when the comment has non-spam content? If so, where do you draw the line and how?
You incidentally seem to be confusing science with rationality. They are not the same thing. Roughly speaking, science is a set of restricted methodologies that happens to include a lot of aspects of rationality. Rationality is what happens in that broader context. (Frankly, the “science is not what happens inside the lab” meme is annoying in that it oversimplifies a lot of very complicated stuff. Aside from the valid points it makes about how to reason, it ignores the fact that lots of even what is traditionally labeled science happens outside lab environments (this seems to be part of a general problem on LW of using physics as the representative for science as a whole.))
I would like to argue based on the specific comment of mine that I linked to in the comment above. As I said before this comment didn’t contain a single word of mine but just a video with eye-witness testimony. In my eyes, this is evidence. Not every comment of mine I regard as evidence, but this specific one, yes, and some others where evidence is linked(which might be scientific articles, pictures, videos, audios, etc...) Again, not every comment I write on LW is evidence but some are because they contain links to hard facts. If you downvote one of those, you are suppressing evidence. So I never made the point that downvoting me is fraud, but downvoting evidence is and some comments are or contain links to evidence, specifically the one I mentioned in my previous comment.
Regarding the ad hominem attack:
In my previous comment I had linked to one, exactly one comment that didn’t contain a single word of mine(except in the edits that were added later and clearly marked as such). Instead of basing your arguments on what I wrote you go onto a general attack where you accuse me of making shaky claims in my past comments. That I consider ad hominem. Please now don’t lets get started with a long enumeration of comments and pointing out supposed mistakes in each of them. I’m not bothering wasting time on it.
I think it is ok to downvote when the content of the comment is wrong because it breaks certain rules of rationality like ad hominem attacks or self-contradictory comments, etc… It becomes hard if the comment is just a link to some outside evidence, lets say an eye-witness testimony. What then? Should you downvote based on the supposition that the testimony is probably wrong or forged? It’s a tough call, I don’t know if I can give a fully general answer in one comment and I won’t even try to do so. I think this is one topic that deserves to be discussed in a top level post. Btw, I’m not planning to do so.
The history of flight is one of Eliezer’s preferred themes here, so imagine if LW was a community in Europe in the beginning of the 20th century and there is one post by Lord Kelvin claiming “No balloon and no aeroplane will ever be practically successful.”. One guy has the audacity to link to an eye-witness testimony in his comment: “I saw two bicycle mechanics in the USA flying in a self-made airplane.” Is this evidence or not? Would it be justified to downvote this comment into oblivion?
In 1906, skeptics in the European aviation community had converted the press to an anti-Wright brothers stance. European newspapers, especially in France, were openly derisive, calling them bluffeurs (bluffers).
What is science? This is a never ending discussion. I was thinking primarily in terms of belief update via evidence. I guess regardless of your definition of science you will agree that suppressing evidence is anti-scientific. Am I right?
Ok. There may be a minor miscomunication here. When I made my comment about why you were downvoted on some of your comments regarding 9/11 I was talking about the general history of comments not this specific comment. This made sense to me given that the context you seemed to be talking about was the general pattern of 9/11 comments you made being downvoted in the past.
Regarding eyewitness testimony, I believe that this has already been explained to you (although a click glance through doesn’t find the relevant comments) but eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable. This is especially the case in extreme situations. (I’m actually surprised there isn’t something in any of the sequences specifically devoted to this issue.) See This article for a short discussion of many of the issues in the context of criminal trials. Part of the point you seem to be possibly using a non-standard definition of suppression. Downvoting a comment doesn’t suppress anything in the sense that we normally use that term for (destroying evidence, refusing to publish results you don’t like etc.) . It simply sends a signal to the LessWrong readers that reading the statement is not likely to do anything useful and so that they will be less likely to click through to read the remarks. And given the unreliability of eye-witnesses testimony in crisis situations, most rationalists are going to give such evidence very low reliability. So in so far as this is a signal to the LW community, it is an accurate one.
To move to the flight example, flying didn’t occur during a crisis situation. People were not claiming that the Wright Brothers flew once briefly during an earthquake or a volcanic eruption or the middle of a pitched firefight. They demonstrated it repeatedly to different people. So such evidence is in fact the more reliable sort of eye witness evidence. The evidence is not by itself at all convincing of flight (magicians can do some pretty neat stuff and even there’s also the issue of the reliability of the witnesses), but it would make me stand up and take notice. That’s a very different claim then that a single or even a large group of eyewitnesses reported hearing something which isn’t even necessarily inconsistent with the standard hypothesis.
Edit: Also regarding the ad hominem issue. I think you should reread RobinZ linked remark about what an ad hominem is. Explaining to someone why their comments were historically downvoted isn’t an ad hominem. It may make one feel uncomfortable, it may come across as condescending or patronizing. It may be deeply damaging to one’s ego. But that’s not an ad hominem attack. In this particular case, the response was an attempt at explaining why your comments have been downvoted. Interpreting that as an ad hominem attack requires some degree of abuse of the term “ad hominem.”
No. I was very specific on purpose pinpointing exactly one comment.
Yeah, I’ve read articles about it. Btw, if you listened to the eye-witness testimony in question, the guy was trapped inside the building because the stairs were blown away and the electricity was turned off(so he couldn’t use the elevator). If you claim that his testimony is wrong you would have to explain why he was trapped inside the building and btw this happened before any of the main towers collapsed so you can’t say “he was in shock” or what not. Finally yes, eye-witness testimonies are unreliable but this doesn’t mean that you can discard them, that they are not evidence. So my point still stands.
Ohhhh, please, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suppressing here is a whole list of definitions. If a comment gets downvoted to −3 it no longer appears on the comment page(you have to specifically click to make it appear again). If that is not supression we are speaking a different language here.
Are you saying this justifies actively downvoting it into oblivion? I don’t buy your argument. The real reason why it was downvoted was because it contradicts the prevailing view here. You are just rationalizing it.
Here is a comment that contradicts the prevailing view here. Seriously, there are maybe one or two other posters here who are sympathetic to your conspiracy mongering but no one agrees with Alicorn about ethics. It was at +6 (though of course it is by a woman so that’s probably why people upvoted).
Here is why your comment was voted into oblivion:
You linked to evidence that wasn’t anywhere close to the magnitude it needed to be given the extreme unlikelihood of the proposition it was marshaled to support. It is rather like linking to a video of someone recounting a religious experience or an alien abduction. It was clear from the context that you took yourself to be offering powerful evidence in favor the proposition that the 9/11 attacks were a government plot. The downvoters were telling you this wasn’t good enough evidence to justify a link and to stop wasting their time with noise.
Your past forays into this topic and subsequent inability to update when people rebut your position left people with no patience for that crap.
It was off-topic and flame bait.
You kept drawing attention to it, making sure everyone on the site saw it ensuring even more downvotes.
(Incidentally, I never bothered to downvote that particular comment)
I wouldn’t say I agree with her exactly but I disagree with her less than I disagree with the utilitarians who seem to be so common around here. I’m not sure you’re justified in your confidence about the absoluteness of disagreement with her ethics.
It was a bit of hyperbole to make my point.
I’ll admit that I just read a few words but I guess it is about philosophy and I think that people are much more willing to admit dissenting views, unlike in the realm of politics.
Is this another ad hominem?
The proposition was “Explosives were planted in the WTC.” The probability that the proposition is true is fairly high given the fact that the buildings collapsed in a manner consistent with the use of explosives. There is of course much more evidence besides this one eye witness, but lets not start another 9/11 thread.
Well, I’d rather you evaluate the comment by its contents, regardless of what other things I might believe or not. The comment was just addressing the question of explosives. Interestingly a lot of people, you included, seem to conflate the two issues, explosives implying government involvement. Why is this the case, and does it have something to do with the fact that there is so much resistance towards this proposition?
I’ve yet to see a good rebuttal. Btw, I’ve read a lot about this subject so I think I know what I’m talking about.
Eliezer wrote:
And I brought up evidence against it.
Well, it’s certainly not my fault if people want to downvote evidence.
I still put a pretty low probability on 9/11 being some kind of conspiracy but I have to admit that seeing this linked to this recently did make my head spin a bit and raised my probability estimate a little.
Whats the connection?
There have been a lot of reports recently of manipulation in the gold and silver markets and of a large gap between the notional gold that exists in the forms of various paper claims on futures markets and in the form of various kinds of unallocated deposits and in the actual physical bullion backing these claims. Most of this is still unproven but there is a fair amount of evidence that something fishy is going on. The first article is an eyewitness report of Scotiabank’s bullion vault in Canada which appears to contain much less physical gold and silver than it should based on estimates of the outstanding claims supposedly backed by holdings in that vault.
So far this has nothing to do with 9/11. The 9/11 connection is that there has apparently been a long standing claim of 9/11 ‘truthers’ that a large amount of gold and silver that was stored in a vault underneath WTC 4 (one of the buildings that collapsed without being hit by a plane) appears to be unaccounted for based on discrepancies between news reports before and after the event. I had never heard of this until a commenter on an article about the recent Scotiabank story linked to it. The bit that made me do a double take is the fact that one of the largest depositors in the WTC 4 vault was… Scotiabank.
Up to $1 billion of missing gold and silver suddenly suggests plausible motives for a conspiracy of some kind where I hadn’t really seen one before.
Forgot to add, the reason why physical Gold is disappearing everywhere worldwide is because the central banks are involved in a scheme to artificially keep the price of Gold down, read more at:
http://www.gata.org/
Yes, this is the angle that led me to the 9/11 connection. I’ve followed the ongoing global fiat currency collapse for a while. I’m new to 9/11 conspiracies. GATA have a whiff of conspiracy theory about them but I think I put a > 50% probability on at least some of their claims being true.
Just a minor correction: WTC 4 didn’t collapse, it was damaged beyond repair and demolished. The only buildings that did collapse where the twin towers and WTC 7.
You gotta be kidding me. I think the physical gold missing is not directly related to 9/11, remember the same happened in Canada, the same is happening in the London bullion market, some claim that even the gold in Fort Knox is long gone.
But if you want plausible motives for 9/11 I’ll give you a short list:
Government needed a pretext to start a never-ending war on terror, to raise military spending(after the end of the cold war a new enemy had to be created) and to pass new legislation through congress(Patriot act, etc...)
Silverstein had just recently bought the WTC complex and AFAIK it was condemned, it would have to be demolished more sooner than later. How convenient that he also made an insurance against terrorist attacks, this guy made billions from 9/11.
Yes, how convenient that someone would have insurance against terrorist attacks when that person owned a set of buildings which had been subject to a terrorist attack in the past.
Point taken! Still you asked for plausible motives and there you have one, read more about Silverstein here:
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/silverstein.html
I still find it fairly implausible that the government would be directly involved in orchestrating the attack just because it has historically been quite difficult to keep something like that secret for a long period—the chances of someone involved or aware of what happened being sufficiently outraged to become a whistle-blower seems too high. I don’t rule it out but I think it fairly unlikely.
I do however find it quite plausible that the government would go to some length to cover up the disappearance of a large amount of gold and silver as they could justify it to themselves as necessary for preserving financial stability and so national security. That seems like sufficient reason for a cover-up from their point of view even without their direct involvement.
I’m coming at this from a different direction to you I think—an interest in the financial crisis and the place that gold and silver have in the unfolding fallout from that rather than any previous knowledge of or interest in 9/11 conspiracy theories.
This argument comes up again and again but there is so much wrong with it:
What would you expect from a whistle-blower? If tomorrow someone steps forward claiming to be an ex-CIA agent who knows what happened, how could he prove his point, who would take him seriously, why should he risk his life for nothing? Most whistle-blowers only come forward if they can be assured that they will be protected from prosecution, so who will blow the whistle against the state?
There are lots of books and websites that expose similar conspiracies, some are from or with the participation of ex-government people.
There are some actual whistle-blowers, one is dead the other has fled to Argentina, that are at least two I know of.
The argument has a degree of circularity: if the government did it there would be more whistle-blowers, therefore the government didn’t do it, therefore I can ignore all evidence in that direction and the few whistle-blowers that have come forward.
Regardless if there are whistle-blowers or not you can still evaluate all the evidence at hand and draw your own conclusions. The argument “there are not enough whistle-blowers” is not an excuse to discount all evidence for a government conspiracy.
Whistle-blowers are not taken seriously because what they write doesn’t appear on the mainstream press but rather on some web page or maybe a book.
If you really knew history you should know that there has been a lot of exposition of conspiracies going on, its just neither taken seriously nor is it part of the mainstream knowledge of what you learn in school.
Just some examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger
The fact that the WMD in Iraq claim was complete bogus and the people in charge Bush et. al knew it. Tony Blair has made Millions in deals with Oil companies in relation to Iraq.
Let’s try and get on the same page here. Putting aside the whole 9/11 question for a moment do you accept the existence of ‘conspiracy theories’ as a phenomenon? Do you accept that there is a class of ideas and explanations for historical events that includes such things as The Illuminati, Faked Moon Landings and Area 51 / government cover up of aliens amongst other things? If so do you recognize that certain common features of ‘conspiracy theories’ play to certain human psychological tendencies and epistemic biases? I assert that there is such a phenomenon and that it is rational to take that into account when weighing evidence provided to you by others.
Despite this I do acknowledge that some things that sound like conspiracy theories are nonetheless true. Here are some things that I believe have > 30% probability of being true that some people would dismiss as conspiracy theories (I don’t consider all of these equally likely):
The CIA funded their operations in Latin America by selling cocaine in the US.
Roosevelt had some advance knowledge of Pearl Harbor but chose not to intervene in order to persuade the rest of the US to support entry into WWII.
Hitler did not die in his bunker in Berlin but escaped to Argentina and lived there for some years after the war.
The bailouts during the financial crisis were deliberately designed to funnel money to certain favoured interests at the expense of other parties and not primarily to stabilize the financial system as claimed.
So I do believe conspiracies have existed and I do think some conspiracy theories are more likely than is generally accepted. I think it is certainly a possibility that 9/11 was a conspiracy that involved the US government but I think it is less likely than any of the theories I listed above. I think a government cover-up or a wider non US government conspiracy than the official story are both more likely explanations than a government conspiracy and move into the ‘plausible but unlikely’ category for me.
So the most effective tactic you could employ to raise my estimate that there was a conspiracy is to explain why you think this conspiracy theory is not like Faked Moon Landings and how it differs from the prototypical conspiracy theory. Your list of reasons whistle-blowers are unlikely in this case is the right sort of argument but doesn’t well address why this is not just another conspiracy theory.
Possibly related: xkcd
Downvoted for being an obvious link to a belabored point with no rhetorical value in this conversation and only a tenuous link to its parent.
Good comic, though.
I agree that there is such a phenomenon, as for weighing the evidence you have to be careful. What kind of evidence are you talking about? Should you weigh the evidence of an eye-witness who reported hearing explosions differently based on your assumption that you are dealing with a conspiracy theory?
Less likely, more likely, where did you get these estimates from? I have the impression you are arguing more based on a general feeling of certainty/uncertainty than from the actual facts and evidence.
I think the mistake you and others are making is to just complete a pattern: it seems to be just like a prototypical conspiracy theory so it probably is one. And you estimate the truth-value of the theory by how much it resembles other theories that belong to the set instead of focusing at the specific facts.
I’d rather approach it from a completely different angle. Forget for a moment that there is such a thing as conspiracy theories and just analyze the facts and evidence of the case at hand. At what conclusions do you arrive?
One way to make this easier which I was attempting to do is to break the problem down into smaller parts and to just address those, like the question “Where there explosives planted in the WTC?” A positive answer doesn’t have to imply that there was a government conspiracy. Yet a lot of people here seem to conflate these issues.
Remember Eliezer’s post about the bottom line? Reason forward from the evidence towards your conclusion. You seem to be going the other way, by starting with the bottom line “another conspiracy theory” and therefore discounting all evidence that supports it. You should go the other way: analyze the evidence first and then arrive at a conclusion namely if this is just another conspiracy theory or not.
The irony is nearly overwhelming. It’s these conspiracy websites you keep linking us to that do exactly the opposite of this. One bloke who says he heard an explosion amidst the chaos doesn’t even get noticed until you start looking for evidence of a conspiracy. But we have a series of innate biases that lead us to generate a conspiracy as a hypothesis automatically, regardless of the evidence. And once we do evidence starts turning up everywhere.
People conflate these issues for the same reason people conflate theism with Christianity: they’re both so unlikely as to be interchangeable in most circumstances and the people who advocate one are almost always advocating the other.
Here’s an example of what you can notice being shaped by the premises you start with. The relevant bit is about five minutes into the podcast.
Background: Cory Maye was living in a duplex. There was a drug dealer in the other half. A SWAT team made a wrong door raid on him, he assumed it was a robbery, and he shot and killed one of the police. He surrendered with bullets still in his gun. He was black, the cop was white, and Maye was convicted of capital murder—the deliberate killing of a police officer.
Radley Balko reported on this case as a gross injustice. When the crime reporter from the New York Times wrote up the state of the war on drugs in that county, he didn’t even notice that there was something fishy about the conviction. Until Radley pointed it out, the NYT reporter just wrote about how drugs were hurting the county, and the police needed to come down harder.
There is probably an analogy we could use in which the chief antagonists in one are not a counter-example in the other!
This would be a failure of rationality. It’s important when making observations and doing reasoning to remember that you’re running on corrupted hardware; always be aware that you are subject to particular, systemic cognitive biases and always be aware that you’re probably not doing enough to correct for them.
If you make visual observations through warped glass, and draw conclusions forgetting for the moment that the glass is warped, then your conclusions will be flawed.
Your analysis of your warps is also made through warped glass, so it’s reasonable (unless you have a very clean understanding of the warps [1]) to look at matters both ways.
[1] Knowing how far off your estimates of how long it takes to do things are because you’ve observed it a number of times would be a clean observation.
Since 9/11 was discussed the first time on OB I keep hearing this “the prior probability of a conspiracy is very low” or variations thereof. This is a totally meaningless statement, unless you can produce some actual numbers but no one made an effort to do so.
If you want to see something that can be backed up by numbers ask yourself: how many steel-frame buildings have collapsed due to fire previous to 9/11. According the official NIST report that investigated 9/11 the answer is ZERO. So what is the probability that 3 buildings collapsed in this manner in 9/11? But in spite of this people keep insisting that the prior for explosives is too low to take it into account.
Btw, again, explosives planted in the building doesn’t necessarily imply government conspiracy. Although, the fact that in the aftermath the government denied any explosives and even excluded this hypothesis from any investigation raises some interesting questions. The hypothesis was never falsified, I wonder why NIST refused to investigate it.
I’m generally sympathetic to the idea that the events behind 9/11 were insufficiently investigated, and that the full story is a bit more than the common narrative.
But I don’t see
As terribly relevant without the corresponding “how many steel-frame buildings were sprayed with massive amounts of aerosolized jet fuel and then ignited?”
Wow, posted a few minutes ago and already upvoted to 4?
WTC7 was not, yet it collapsed. It wasn’t hit by any plane. Why is this always conveniently not mentioned?
While your point here is superficially valid, the debris that hit WTC7 damaged 10-12 floors so badly that the gash was visible (according to the NIST report on WTC7). Large amounts of damage occurred to other floors. The fact that you more or less had large sections of another building dropped onto WTC7 massively damaged the structural stability such that the fires resulted in complete collapse. So for the Twin Towers you had less direct damage but lots of jet fuel, and for WTC7 you had large segments of a building fall onto it.
I’m also somewhat puzzled by how 9/11 Truthers like to point to the collapse of WTC7 so much. I would think that one would want to argue that the destruction of WTC7 was inadvertent. If not, you need to explain why the conspiracy bothered bringing down a much smaller, not very well-known building. Thus for example, the standard conspiratorial explanation of the government creating 9/11 fails massively to explain this. The only conspiracy explanation I’ve seen that remotely explain this tries to claim that the entire plot was designed to get rid of WTC7 since it had the SEC offices investigating Worldcom and ENRON. I don’t think I need to explain in detail why that seems unlikely.
There seems to be a problem going on here similar to the standard problem with creationists. They argue in the form “Anomaly → Evolution wrong → creationism.” There’s both a false dichotomy here and a general failure to properly apply Bayes’ theorem.
There were also fires in WTC7 that the Fire Department didn’t even attempt combat. They pretty much just let them burn for like six hours.
Also, the fire department knew building 7 was going to collapse. They pulled all their people away from building to protect them after they noticed signs of structural failure and there are a bunch of accounts from firefighters to this effect.
As usual, this is all accessible by google.
Incorrect. There were damages, but none to the central supporting columns. Even after accounting for the fires they were not enough to explain the free fall speed collapse.
Slow down here. I’m trying to work forwards from the evidence and for all that I know it points to controlled demolition as the only plausible explanation and falsifies the theory of collapse by fire and structural damage. You again are conflating two or more separate questions: how did it collapse and who did it and for what reason.
If you want more science about the subject here is a good link: http://www.journalof911studies.com/
I think you are falling victim to a subtle reasoning error here. Imagine a doctor is asked to examine a dead body and determine the cause of death. He observes almost certainly fatal injuries that are consistent with those caused by a bullet and reasonably concludes the man was shot.
If he is then informed that a grenade went off in the vicinity of the man and he fell to the ground shortly afterwards he will conclude that in fact the man was probably killed by shrapnel, even if the injury looks more like injuries he has previously observed from gunshots than from shrapnel.
I recognize that you are claiming the injuries look much more like the injuries you would expect from a bullet than they do the injuries you would expect from shrapnel but I think it is important for you to consider that the fact that the grenade is known to have gone off nearby just before the man fell to the ground is very relevant to the probabilities you assign to the two possible explanations. It is not appropriate merely to ‘work forwards from the evidence’ without acknowledging this fact.
Hahaha, I think it is funny that every comment against the 9/11 orthodoxy is voted down while every comment in favor of it is voted up, is it possible that the audience is a bit biased here?
But on to your point.
First I think the example is a bit misleading because in the reader’s mental model a grenade will cause death in a manner similar with the firing of bullets. Not so in the case of 9/11, for all that is known, a building sustaining some amount of structural damage and fire will not collapse the way WTC7 did, which is why from the start you should place a higher probability on explosives being involved.
But back to your example: A man is dead after a grenade exploded in his vicinity. His wounds are consistent with bullet wounds which usually look different that shrapnel wounds. Now, what killed the man, was it the grenade or bullets(he could have been fired at when the grenade went off). One way to distinguish the causes of death would be to examine the body for bullets or shrapnel. We might find one or the other or even both. If you only find shrapnel you falsify the hypothesis of death-by-gun, if on the other hand you only find bullets it’s the other hypothesis that is falsified.
I assume you accept that the buildings collapsed in a manner consistent with the use of explosives. This already nullifies one argument that was repeated several times here on LW, that the prior for explosives is too low to even be seriously considered. Now this is of course not enough to prove that it were explosives and here is where additional evidence has to come in like:
can structural damage(e.g. as happened in 9/11 to WTC7) and fire explain a collapse in almost free fall speed? No
were there eye-witness testimonies of explosions? Yes, lots of them.
is there evidence for explosives in the rubble/dust? Yes. As a side note, NIST didn’t even bother to look for this evidence:
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm
“12. Did the NIST investigation look for evidence of the WTC towers being brought down by controlled demolition? Was the steel tested for explosives or thermite residues? The combination of thermite and sulfur (called thermate) “slices through steel like a hot knife through butter.”
NIST did not test for the residue of these compounds in the steel.”
The fact that a grenade went off is part of the evidence.
Yes, to the extent of my limited knowledge of the issue. Part of my problem judging the evidence (and I think this affects many people) is that I feel like a doctor who has seen lots of gunshot wounds but no shrapnel wounds. I have seen many videos of buildings collapsing due to a controlled demolition and to the best of my layman’s ability to judge they look similar to the 9/11 footage. I have never seen any other footage of a building being hit by a large jet airliner with a full fuel load.
You are correct that there was likely not that much damage to the central columns. However, damage may have occurred and other damage to the south side may have contributed. See in particular pages L-34 and L-35 of the NIST progress report: http://wtc.nist.gov/progress_report_june_04/appendixl.pdf Moreover, claims of collapse at free fall speeds for both the WTC7 and the main towers are both false. In the case of the WTC7, the east penthouse started collapsing a full 6 seconds before the rest of the building.
As to your claim that I’m “conflating two or more separate questions” the questions are fundamentally interrelated. If you are trying to claim that WTC7 was brought down by controlled explosives, that claim becomes fundamentally less likely if you don’t have a plausible motive for that.
I’m going to have to make a comparison to the creationists again who love to make “peer reviewed journals” (there are I think in the US now at least 2 such entities). Constructing y journals does not make something science. Making journals of people who agree with a fringe belief and then claiming peer review doesn’t make that peer reviewed science. And the claim that they had to do so because the mean editors and reviewers at other journals wouldn’t let them play is textbook from the ID movement. Now, of course, making a claim that is similar in form to that made by someone else doesn’t mean they share the same truth value. But it should raise a red flag. The fact that all the editors are people who are convinced that the standard account must be false also should raise a red flag.
I actually think most people don’t understand how hard it is to bring down a building the size of WTC7 (much less the towers!) with demolition explosives. Any evidence put forward to show that it would be unlikely for the buildings to collapse due to fire and structural damage is also evidence for how hard it is to implode them with explosives. It’s not like the movies where the secret agent can go in with three detonators the size of baseballs that stick to the walls, we’re talking days, even weeks of preparation with a full crew drilling into support columns, loading them with dynamite, RDX, connecting blasting caps, and wiring the whole thing up.
Here’s an account of what it took to demolish a steel structure building 300 feet shorter than WTC7 (but 300,000 square feet larger in total floor space):
There are plenty of videos of the collapse, so I’ll let you watch and decide for yourself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv7BImVvEyk
Your video is missing the 6 seconds in question. Oranges?
More in this comment:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/218/what_is_missing_from_rationality/1y36
I think I missed your point before.
The east penthouse collapsed 6 seconds earlier. So what? The relevant question is how much time did the entire building take to collapse, the time the roofline took to hit the floor? The only way it could be so fast is if all the supporting columns were destroyed. I don’t see how the collapse of the penthouse is relevant to that. It would only be relevant if said collapse would destroy the supporting columns but then we would have seen that effect much earlier. What we see is the penthouse collapsing but the building still standing still.
Uhh.
JoshuaZ:
Roland:
Do you not see why the fact that your video doesn’t contain the penthouse collapse because of angle or timing problematic in this context? Putting aside the fast rate of collapse once the rest of the building is going down the fact that there is visible evidence of the structural integrity of the building failing before the whole thing comes down is very strong evidence against a controlled demolition.
Even in a controlled demolition explosive charges go off before the building comes down and already start doing structural damage, if you watched some videos(there are plenty on youtube) you will see for yourself.
Yes, there was some damage done to the building by falling debris and fire which of course was before the collapse and no one is denying this. But the key is: what kind of structural damage would be necessary for the whole building to collapse at approximately free-fall speed(counting from the moment the rooftop starts moving down)? For that to happen all supporting columns underneath would have to be destroyed. For this to happen in a random fashion through fires or whatever is highly unlikely. Btw, if you watch the NIST videos again you will see that their model is not convincing exactly because not all supporting columns are destroyed and you see the building folding instead of coming down vertically and yes, this is the case in both models of NIST.
The following video has both models: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuyZJl9YleY
So the natural conclusion from 3. is that at least the hypothesis of explosives being planted in the building should have been examined by NIST, why wasn’t it done?
Just to reiterate my point which I suspect was long lost in the discussion: I think the controlled demolition hypothesis is the most likely given the facts(regardless if there was a government conspiracy or not). Is it the only possible explanation? No. But I didn’t see any explanation that is consistent with the evidence and at the same time the use of explosives was never falsified, on the contrary NIST simply refused to even examine the rubble/dust for evidence thereof.
I think the model that includes the fire damage basically matches what I see in the video. It might not be perfect, but it is good enough for government work. As discussed before, I think the priors for controlled demolition are insanely low and that the the video evidence is consistent with NIST’s explanation. If some other commenter wants to arbitrate, that’d be fine (though please look at past exchanges on this topic, not just this thread), but otherwise I’m done. I think my position is clear and convincing to anyone reading this exchange (if such people disagree they’re welcome to ask me anything) and so much so that I’m comfortable leaving roland the last word…
You are right that that sort of collapse would require all the supporting columns to fail simultaneously, but that is not a surprising event. Large building collapses are not intuitive. Once a building starts to collapse, it introduces major vibrations and other forces that could, under the right circumstances, destroy all the supporting columns simultaneously, especially if they’d already been weakened by high temperatures.
Is this the Phlogiston theory of building collapse?
Sigh. I’m not going to bother reposting the entire thing so I’ll just link:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/is/fake_causality/1vy8
Phlogiston made specific testable predictions about mass and combustion. Phlogiston theory was thrown out not because it was useless but because it was wrong. In this respect, phlogiston was good science.
(The fact that what you said isn’t a substantive reply to jimrandomh’s remark is a separate issue)
1:09 in: ”...but by 5:20 p.m. most of the fires had been extinguished.”
Citation needed.
Less likely? I think the claim can be stated and proven independently of the motive. A motive certainly will give it more plausibility but not necessarily make it more likely in a Bayesian way. I’m trying to answer a question of how, whereas the motive would be relevant to a question of why, for what reason.
JFK was assassinated and it is certainly possible to reconstruct how it happened: how many bullets where fired, from which angles, etc… The next question would be, who did it, for what reason, etc...
Second, you seem to be operating under the assumption that if the plane attacks were executed by terrorists they couldn’t also have planted explosives?
On the contrary, motive is a perfectly relevant Bayesian modifier. I’m also not sure what you mean by saying that the motive can make something more plausible but not necessarily more likely. What is plausibility if not a metric of likelyhood given the evidence?
And they would have done so when exactly? Moreover, why bother? The entire success of using planes in this way is that you don’t need to bother with bombs in your target. The planes themselves do the work. Setting explosives makes the plan for more complicated with little gain.
Person X drops down dead with a perforation of his head. Claim: he was killed by a bullet. This can be examined independently of the question: Who had a motive to do so? Do you agree that it would be wrongheaded to start the investigation with: X was a well known and popular person and so no one would have a motive to kill X therefore the claim of death by bullet is extremely unlikely and we shouldn’t even bother investing much time in its investigation.
That’s a really bad analogy with multiple problems: First, stray bullets exist. Second, insane people shooting at random individuals exist. Third, the assumption that no would have a motivation to kill the person in question is an incredibly strong one. Moreover, even in that situation, if you did have a very high confidence that no one would deliberately shoot the individual, that would in fact reduce the confidence value that the person had been killed by a gunshot since it reduces the probability of certain gun-shot hypotheses being correct. You might think it doesn’t reduce it by enough to matter but it can’t no alter it if the presence of motivations would increase the probability. Conservation of evidence and all that.
Moreover, the notion you’ve constructed of not even bothering to investigate the hypothesis is a strawman. No one has said that alternate investigation might not have made sense at one point. But it simply isn’t a useful tool at this point. To extend your analogy, slightly differently, if the doctors all say that the person died from a random piece of shrapnel and have a lot of evidence for that claim (including videos of the shrapnel impact) then at a certain point it isn’t useful to spend resources investigating the bullet hypothesis. If you can’t construct a plausible motive for the shooter that becomes yet another reason to reduce confidence in the (already low) probability assigned to the bullet hypothesis.
Eliezer managed to write much more eloquently what I’m trying to say:
In the art of rationality there is a discipline of closeness-to-the-issue—trying to observe evidence that is as near to the original question as possible, so that it screens off as many other arguments as possible.
The question in this case is: “Were explosives planted in WTC7?”.
How much explosive charge would it take to cause the failure observed? Where would it have to be installed? How many hours would that take, and how many workers? How many people would have to be displaced so as not to witness the building being prepared to blow? Where did the explosives come from? Who paid for them? Who delivered them, and to whom, where? Why would the project be timed to go on September 11th? Why would the denotation of the explosives be delayed to seven hours after the debris struck the building? Why didn’t the fire interfere with the operation of the explosives? How much noise would the explosives make? How quickly would the building collapse after the explosion?
Even if you think the official story is not well supported, I have to say it stacks up positively magnificently compared to the building-implosion theory.
In the art of rationality there is a discipline of closeness-to-the-issue—trying to observe evidence that is as near to the original question as possible, so that it screens off as many other arguments as possible.
It seems you have ignored my queries. In the spirit of staying as close to the original question as possible, however, I shall withdraw “Why would the project be timed to go on September 11th?” and “Why would the denotation of the explosives be delayed to seven hours after the debris struck the building?”, and ask again:
How much explosive charge would it take to cause the failure observed?
Where would it have to be installed?
How many hours would that take, and how many workers?
How many people would have to be displaced so as not to witness the building being prepared to blow?
Where did the explosives come from?
Who paid for them?
Who delivered them, and to whom, where?
Why didn’t the fire interfere with the operation of the explosives?
How much noise would the explosives make?
How quickly would the building collapse after the explosion?
And how did They (whoever They are) get all of those presumably well-intentioned workers to keep quiet, before and after the operation?
Quoting myself again for the 3rd time:
Maybe I should have emphasized “screens off as many other arguments as possible”. You have a made a list of such arguments/questions. Mind you, they are all worth investigating but I’m screening them off the key question, namely: “Were explosives planted in WTC7?” or “What caused WTC7 to collapse”(hat tip to Morendil).
Look at the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79sJ1bMR6VQ
Do you agree that this was a controlled demolition? Do you agree that you can make this statement without having any of your listed questions answered? If yes, you can then proceed to ask your previous list of questions:
How much explosive charge would it take to cause the failure observed?
Where would it have to be installed?
How many hours would that take, and how many workers?
How many people would have to be displaced so as not to witness the building being prepared to blow?
Where did the explosives come from?
Who paid for them?
Who delivered them, and to whom, where?
Why didn’t the fire interfere with the operation of the explosives?
How much noise would the explosives make?
How quickly would the building collapse after the explosion?
That video was pretty awesome, actually—a superb job of imploding a thirty-story building (the Landmark Tower in Fort Worth, Texas, March 18, 2006). And did you hear the noise of those explosive charges, and see those bright flashes as they detonated—it was most distinct!
...wait.
Edit: Here’s another camera angle on the Landmark Tower, I believe.
Someone pointed this out a while ago and so the truthers decided that the buildings were brought down by thermite. Someone then pointed out that thermite can’t make horizontal cuts and that’s how the truthers figured out the government used nanothermite.
And so, small concession after small concession, nothing changes...
Roland, sorry to address you again after I disengaged. I don’t want to reenter the argument but I am curious: What do you believe was used to bring down the building? Presumably not thermite since you put all that effort into getting us to watch that video of the guy who heard an explosion…
No. Fool. They got hit by freaking planes. I saw it live on TV. You’re just WRONG and RIDICULOUSLY SO. It doesn’t matter which person you signal affiliation with. Or which works you link to. You’re still wrong.
Aside from the fact that ata is right and WTC7 was actually brought down from fires and structural damage caused by the falling tower, not the airplanes themselves, this strikes me as a reasonable response to persistent and uncorrectable wrongness. Do people disagree? If so, what is the appropriate response?
WTC7 was not one of the buildings that got hit by a plane.
(Lest anyone misinterpret my motives… I’m just correcting a statement of fact. I am absolutely not defending the claim that any of them were brought down by explosives, which I do not believe.)
Calculated time for the building to collapse by NIST models were similar in magnitude to observations.
Edit: Page 85 in the document, “Table 3-1.” Says “43″ as the page number in lower right corner.
I found the NIST wireframe model videos on youtube, with a comparison to the real collapse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuyZJl9YleY
EDIT: Interestingly the NIST models only show the initial phase of the collapse before ending abruptly but nevertheless there already are significant discrepancies with the actual collapse, and yes, they were the same way on NIST’s webpage were I first saw them a while ago but can no longer find them.
According to this video the model your video is comparing to the real collapse is is NISTs guess at what would have happened without the fire damage (poor scholarship which reflects on all the other truther claims) The second model in the clip I just linked to shows (according to the video) NIST’s model of the collapse+fire damage which approximately matches the actual fall. According to the model the supports buckle from the fire damage around the 7th floor and once that happens, yeah, 40 stories is going to fall pretty fast.
Did you actually watch the video I linked? It contains both NIST models.
Why does NIST’s model end right at the beginning of the collapse? Even in the first few seconds that the model portrays you can already see discrepancies in the way the building is folding in some parts.
I read it, the table is about collapse below the roofline, not total time of collapse unless I misunderstood something.
Btw, NIST took several years to make a post facto model that would explain the collapse without explosives. They kept tweaking their model(took them years) until they came up with something that would come somewhat near the visual evidence, yet even so didn’t quite manage to do it. There were videos on the NIST page of their simulations and to me there were significant differences between the videos and the way WTC7 actually collapsed. I can no longer find the videos, the link on NIST’s webpage is misleading now.
For a more thorough debunking of the NIST report:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFpbZ-aLDLY
There is certainly more material on the web.
And the hard question remains, why didn’t NIST falsify the explosives hypothesis by simply looking for residues in the dust/rubble?
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm
“12. Did the NIST investigation look for evidence of the WTC towers being brought down by controlled demolition? Was the steel tested for explosives or thermite residues? The combination of thermite and sulfur (called thermate) “slices through steel like a hot knife through butter.”
NIST did not test for the residue of these compounds in the steel.”
Two reasons:
The natural assumption is that the collapses are related. (Obligatory xkcd reference to amuse the lurkers.)
The iconic building collapses of 9/11 were the twin towers.
As for the point about buildings collapsing by fire, there were even at the time historical cases of fires damaging fireproofed structural members: in the One Meridian Plaza fire of 1991, significant but non-total damage to structural members was observed. That One Meridian Plaza did not collapse when 7 World Trade Center did reflects the differences in the designs and in the parts of the buildings affected.
3. I don’t know about you but I’m on Silverstein’s payroll.
I didn’t actually say anything about my prior probability. I just said I went from a ‘pretty low’ probability of some kind of conspiracy to a slightly higher probability based on this new information.
Nonetheless, I think you are wrong to say this is a meaningless statement. I think there is a real phenomenon of ‘conspiracy theories’ which share certain features and which in my opinion tend to lead people to place unduly high probabilities on certain types of explanations for events by playing into natural biases in human thought. Because I believe in this pattern of poorly calibrated estimates, when I see a theory that fits the pattern I apply a discount factor to the arguments of people proposing it.
It is also difficult to organize and maintain a conspiracy so even independent of the effect I describe above an explanation that involves an elaborate conspiracy has a lower prior than an explanation that does not, all else being equal. It is not necessary for this to be quantified for it to be meaningful, a qualitative use of priors is still a useful aid to reasoning.
One reason the new information I mentioned above raised my estimate is that it overcame one major problem I have with the conspiracy theory explanations which is lack of a motive that I could understand. Given my broader understanding of geo-politics the disappearance of a large quantity of physical gold seems like a strong motive for some kind of government cover-up and a clearer motive for co-conspirators (government or otherwise) in the attack.
I really am not inclined to argue about intended communication issues because that simply isn’t a productive (or even amusing use of time) so I’m going to only address this issue once. You wrote:
You used the phrase “9/11 related posts” and then made a generalization about posts with “evidence.” In standard discourse this would likely have been read as talking about a general problem and giving a specific example of that. This seems further supported by the fact that your previous comment had the remark that
There may be a communication issue here. Let me ask then, are you only arguing that this single post in question was downvoted when it should not have been?
I’m a bit confused by this claim. Trapped inside the building works perfectly well after the airplane crash without any explosion from a pre-planted device. Regarding your last remark, do you mean to imply that someone trapped without electricity in a burning building isn’t going to have any shock issues or issues contributing to reliability simply because the building hasn’t collapsed?
Well, it seems empirically that a lot of people click through on this thread (most obviously one can look at the karma scores within this subthread to verify that people are clicking through). We may in this case be speaking different languages in that I have trouble seeing how requiring an extra click constitutes suppression. The linked to dictionary seems to agree with me (with the usual caveats about dictionaries being descriptive not proscriptive objects).
The definitions listed are:
Doesn’t seem relevant.
2b could very weakly maybe apply if you stretched it (is requiring an extra click prohibiting publication? I’d think not).
Irrelevant. 4,5,6 are also irrelevant.
No it really doesn’t. You don’t seem to have actually responded to any of my points about why we have a downvoting system. If evidence is sufficiently weak (such as this evidence where it isn’t even obvious that it actually favors an alternative hypothesis over the currently judged as most likely hypothesis) then downgrading lets LW readers know that the comment is likely to not be useful for improving the correspondence between their map and the territory.
The remainder of your remark is contentless repetition of what you’ve already said.
No. I’m arguing that this is a general problem. However in order to make my point I chose one specific comment which hopefully portrays the problem very clearly. What could be better than a comment whose only content is a link to outside evidence? If the comment contained personal arguments I would have a much harder time defending it.
Ohhh, sorry, I think that I get your point now. The eye witness in question was trapped inside WTC 7 which was not hit by any plane(it is not one of the twin towers). All this happened before the collapse of either twin tower and according to the official version there was no damage to WTC7 before their collapse, only afterwards did WTC7 catch fire that lead to a later collapse of itself. I guess that was the origin of the confusion, I hope this makes it clearer. Btw, if that really was the origin of the confusion and you weren’t aware of the facts that I just cited shouldn’t this ring an alarm bell, that maybe you know less about this particular testimony than you thought you knew?
As for the definition of suppress: the original meaning was “to press down” and a synonym is “to check” which among other things means: “to restrain or diminish the action or force of ”. Other than that I don’t think it makes much sense to fight over definitions.
I’ve shortly addressed this in the following comment: http://lesswrong.com/lw/218/what_is_missing_from_rationality/1xnz
Sure, there are cases where downvoting is justified. But when isn’t it, and how do you distinguish between these cases? That’s the hard question. And if you are downvoting evidence as opposed to normal comments you better be very sure about what you are doing.
Ok. If you are arguing about a general problem, then my remarks clearly stand even if a single other comment was poorly voted on. But, I’ve already explained why even in that individual case the voting was reasonable.
You have a valid point. I saw this testimony a while ago and must not have remembered it as well as I thought. If the witnesses testimony is accurate it presents problems with the standard account of events. The notion however that someone in that situation would be keeping very good track of timelines and the like isn’t at all obvious(yes less traumatic than being in one of the two towers but that’s not saying that much). Also, structural damage to WTC 7 is not by itself fatal to the standard account nor for that matter is it terribly strong evidence for conspiracy. So this doesn’t change the situation a lot.
I don’t share your conviction that comments that claim to have evidence should somehow be privileged over comments that are more analytical. Moreover, even if I don’t have a perfect method for deciding when to downvote or upvote, that’s not an argument against any specific downvote or upvote. The general rule of thumb that comments with extremely weak evidentiary issues should be downvoted is not an unreasonable standard. Moreover, given how little this matters, the notion that I must “better be very sure” simply doesn’t hold. People can easily click through to read a comment if they want to. You seem to be taking the karma system much more seriously than necessary.
The PUA argument is closed? I didn’t get the memo. What was the final decision?
There wasn’t one. See my reply to roland.
It’s not my intention. But at the same time I wonder why you would be so opposed to it? That’s exactly the kind of problem we are discussing here: not following arguments that are disapproved by the majority for some reason. In another comment of yours below you don’t want to reopen the 9/11 thread either. Since there have been several top posts on this topic, all defending the orthodox viewpoint I think it would be more than fair to grant a chance for the dissenters. But don’t worry, I’m not planning to do this, for now.
The key here is eventually. Semmelweis proved that handwashing could diminish infections in clinics, yet it took over 20 years(and countless unnecessary deaths) for such a simple idea that could be easily tested to be finally accepted.
Because politics is the mind-killer and almost every single conversation about pickup artistry immediately becomes infested with politically-charged claims. It’s like that discussion about the correlation between race and intelligence that went to hell in a handbasket not long ago. If there be mines, don’t go for a walk.
I actually feel like the last time it came up the discussion was really constructive- what began as a near flame war ended up as a friendly and informative discussion (see, in particular, Hughristik’s comments).
In this case the initiator was pretty clearly either biased or unable to communicate his reasons. He also used unsavory tactics. But I thought the discussion outside that particular poster was quite good: fair-minded and rational.
As I said to NancyLebovitz:
These few insightful posts have been the exception—most comments on PUA here have been much more incendiary.
roland hasn’t shown any sign of being noninflammatory on the subject, much less insightful.
I think that depends on how you count. Most times PUA has been brought up, it has gone quietly, but the threads that have gone badly have generated a lot of comments.
I concede that I have performed no analysis of the distribution.
I don’t remember ever writing much on the subject of PU, except the meta-comments in this post. Prove me wrong please?
I didn’t say you had. But given that you’ve managed to inflame tempers with nothing but your meta-comments in this post, I think “inflammatory” is justified.
And btw, I wonder why you had to bring up my name here? You seem to have some personal issues.
There’s no shortage of names to be brought up on that score. I only mentioned yours because it was you specifically I was talking to at the time.
I thought that some progress actually got made. I got a better idea of the more benevolent end of the range of PUA, and PJ Elby and someone else stopped generalizing so much about women.
The “almost” in the “almost every”, and I was impressed when I saw it. I do not believe I exaggerate when I claim that ten times as many comments failed where pjeby’s succeeded. roland has not demonstrated the same kind of awareness—somewhat the opposite.
And it wasn’t just a formal “almost every”—there was a description of a sort of woman who’d been left out of the discussion. I’m willing to bet that his theory of typical and atypical women is still incomplete, but at least it includes a lot more of my experience.
And I forgot to mention that I got a better understanding of a lot of the men who go in for PUA.
OK—there’s that almost, but sooner or later, we have to work on being rational about difficult things.
As I recall, what went wrong with the race and intelligence discussion was someone who kept making assertions with no evidence. I wouldn’t be surprised if that person didn’t know the what evidence was.
It might have been a moderation problem. Banning people for utter cluelessness might have been the only solution.
On the other hand, I don’t think anyone tried to engage that person in a discussion of how they thought about evidence.
A good example is negotiation skills—I can’t (offhand) recall a post discussing those directly.
Negotiation is generally regarded as one of the “soft” skills, and so often disregarded by thinkers of a more analytical stripe—yet we live in a world where negotiating with others who may not be as rational as you are can be a very fruitful way of advancing your personal goals.
Schelling’s work is very directly concerned with both explicit and implicit negotiation.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/14a/thomas_c_schellings_strategy_of_conflict/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/24o/eight_short_studies_on_excuses/
and many comments.
I’m not sure I agree with this. In fact I’m not quite sure what it means altogether. (What would I believe if I did in fact disagree with it?)
Could you try and clarify the contrast you’re drawing here?
That society doesn’t get rewarded according to “the accuracy of beliefs and the efficacy of explicitly reasoned plans”.
For example, if there were a God that rewarded (with e.g. prosperity, security and ease of living for all) all and only societies that were compassionate towards their lowest and worst off members, then the statement would be false.
The reason is that in that case, the rewards (e.g. prosperity, security and ease of living for all) came without an explicitly reasoned out plan to get them, but nevertheless they are tied to what the society does.
I’m not sure what it means for society to be rewarded, or for society to benefit: I don’t think of “society” as a reward-seeking agent.
Societies persist, change, sometimes disappear. There is a class of beliefs and plans which have had large effects on societies—influencing their persistence, enacting large changes—and that is the class of scientific and technological beliefs.
Perhaps it would be more useful to say that scientific and technological beliefs have large effects on how societies fare, but smaller effects on how individuals fare. I’m not sure how true that is, but it sounds more testable.
I think that the point is that the creators of LW/OB implicitly take that stance, that there is such a thing as a “better” outcome for the whole human race or the whole country, and that we ought to have better institutions to achieve these outcomes. And if you do take that stance, you end up with planning-esque rationality, because “scientific and technological beliefs have large effects on how societies fare, but smaller effects on how individuals fare”
Thanks for this comment, Morendil, your rephrase makes the point very clearly:
Spending lots of time thinking about concepts like cryonics, the Great Filter, the self-indication assumption, omega, etc. does not lead directly to traditionally desirable life outcomes.
If we wanted to be more traditionally successful, we would have more posts on what could be termed “quotidian” rationality, topics like investing, career planning, fitness, fashion, relationships and so on. But there are many other sites/magazines/books about that stuff; it’s unclear how the rationalist viewpoint could help figure out a better (for example) diet system. Those topics also tend to degenerate into boring intangible regurgitations of common sense (“wear clothes that fit!” “try to see things from your partner’s viewpoint!”).
I tentatively disagree. I’m actually working on a post about this very issue, with examples of the type you cite.
Well, it’s a bit clearer if you remember that people are crazy and the world is mad. If everyone else is basing their diets on, say, the flow of moon spirits through their chakras, then I think rationality has something to offer.
Imagine a nutritionist. Now imagine they know how to form accurate beliefs, unlike most people. See the improvement?
Sure, but nutrition claims to be a science, and they don’t break obvious rules of rationality. It’s not like they’re developing diets based on the motions of the planets. Now, I don’t have any confidence in any of their conclusions, but to do better would require more than mere philosophical sophistication; one would have to go out and gather actual data.
For nutrition in particular, I actually think epistemic techniques would be useful. The whole diet/exercise/weight loss cluster is a bit Wild West. I’ve read commercial gurus (who tend to be unscientific) and peer-reviewed studies (which tend to show a lack of practical knowledge, typically in that the “test” diet or exercise is often nowhere near as intense as what actual fitness buffs do.) Being aware of cognitive biases and having some crackpot-detecting mechanisms would actually be useful.
Incidentally, since I realized that it can be hard to find suitable non-political examples for use here, nutrition might be a good substitute for climate change in examining how to look at “scientific consensus.”
There’s nothing wrong with basing your rationality on actual data, and I’d say it’s a useful practice.
As LW gets larger, we may want a split between general theory of rationality, longterm speculation, and practical application, just to give people more tools for finding what they’re interested in.
I don’t agree with your assessment. That is to say, I accept the ‘science’ part but not the ‘rationality’ part. Nutrition is based on politics, with the rational-rule breaking that politics entails.
There is quite a lot of evidence that they have been rather bad at updating based on the data that has been collected.
(Pointless nit-picking: “Dietitian” is the protected term internationally—“nutritionist” isn’t, in the U.S. or the U.K. Anyone can call themself a nutritionist.)
I definitely agree with this. A lot of my criticisms of the general kinds of things that get discussed around here (which I used to voice more often on OB) disappeared when I saw the sorts of problems they were being applied to. The “planning model of rationality” works remarkably well when applied to problems where you get to plan. My initial criticism of Bayesian methods for making decisions under uncertainty was that it doesn’t work very well for most of our decisions, things like “Which path should I take across the room to retrieve my beer?” People just can’t do the relevant math that quickly, and you run into Dennett’s frame problem right away. But when you’re deciding whether it would be a good idea to donate to Givewell, you can do the whole problem at a chalkboard over the course of a few days if you have to.
I think discussion of talent is generally lacking from rationality. Some clearly very irrational people are extremely successful. Sometimes it is due to luck, but even then it is usually the case that a large amount of talent was necessary to enter the lottery. With my particular combination of talents, no amount of learning the arts of rationality is going to turn me into a golfer like Tiger Woods or a media mogul like Rupert Murdoch.
The closest Roko’s list comes to this sort of thing is microeconomics, which includes comparative advantage. Taking proper advantage of that comes down to having something valuable to trade, asking others for help and negotiation skills, the last two of which Morendil and Johnicholas have already pointed out are not commonly discussed here.
Rational implementation is what we need more of. I wouldn’t say planning is the “wrong kind of thought process”. I’d say we have an abundance of planning tactics and a shortage of implementation tactics. Once you decide how to deal with your in-laws, how do you stay cool enough to actually do it?
The numerous posts on Akrasia are a big step in the implementation direction, though. We could use more vivid classifications of implementation problems like that, and techniques to deal with them.
To be sane with the usual limitation of a person is not enough. But to have a much saner civilization against some mad civilization, is a big advantage—per se. Guess who will likely win in a clash!
A sufficiently sane transhuman could deal with a mad civilization. The power is the sanity accumulated. Better, the rationality accumulated.
Typo in the second paragraph—cannon / canon.
The natural evolution of the ‘rationalist dojo’ martial arts metaphor. What rational agent would limit itself to the hand to hand combat it begins with when it realises the potential for long range siege weaponry?
Steve Perry
thanks
When reading the title my response was “Nothing, but there are all sorts of potential problems in the stuff that you are implicitly adding to it”. The use of the term here is as a symbol representing a bunch of cultural mores and attitudes that are distinct from what is contained in a definition of the world. If you must use ‘rationality’ to describe the problems you mention here then at least give it a capital ‘R’. Much like of the two most significant political parties in Australia the conservative of the two is the ‘Liberal’ party and ‘Freedom Fighters’ do all sorts of things not necessarily optimised for furthering freedom.
---edit---
Easy way to make people more rational: have all posts display if the poster,
Doesn’t believe in Cryonics
Believes and is signed up
or Believes and is cry-crastinating.
to develope social pressures against the latter.
I suppose I’m technically cryocrastinating, but I’d find helpful instructions more useful than social pressure. (I got as far as having Rudi Hoffman e-mail me forms to fill out, but then I decided I wanted to go with a cheaper insurance plan and the way he reacted when I told him that was such that I didn’t want to interact with him anymore.) It’s not a matter of signing up for an account on nowyouareacryonaut.com with six fields worth of information and then getting a necklace in the mail.
Rationality is not about where you are but how you got there. Social pressure is not among its mechanisms.
Isn’t rationality about winning?
Systematized winning.
Is a lottery winner rational to have bought a ticket?
No, but buying lottery tickets doesn’t maximise expected utility. Social Pressures to follow-up on ideas you’ve critically assented to, but haven’t executed yet because of arkrasia, might be.
Obviously, the example was a joke.
Then can we add some social pressure against Belief. Capital letters are the enemy of (epistemic) rationality!