I used to agree with this, and now strongly disagree; reading minds refers specifically to inferring structural, coherent, complex information—of the type typically encoded into language—directly from contents of someone’s brain, with low bias and low error rate. This is not possible without brain scanning technology or implants. I don’t think you’re claiming otherwise, of course—you’re using “mind reading” to refer to “inferring what someone is thinking by correlation from sidechannels in their behavior, as interpreted by models that picked up those sidechannel correlations from a variety of people, potentially including previous history with the person you’re observing”. While that’s a reasonable thing to claim to be able to do sometimes, it is much higher bias and error rate than real reading of private neural representation codes, and will often make catastrophically false inferences, especially about people who have unusual structural patterns in their concept-relational cognition, which does not get encoded into sidechannels significantly under most circumstances. Eg, even if you were in the room with me, I would be able to easily surprise you about what I choose to do next.
hmm, I’m not actually disagreeing with your empirical predictions about whether one can read sidechannels; I’m disagreeing that it’s relevant—Zack’s claim that sidechannel reading is insufficient to mindread Duncan does seem reasonable. And, in fact, duncan made a post expressing frustration about what appears to me issues with people failing to correctly infer his thinking, so I think Zack’s point is in fact well warranted—Duncan expressed he’s typically out-of-model for people who are surprised by this, so it makes sense that Zack would have issues interpreting his meaning from text. Duncan’s post expressing being out of model did request more assumption of uncertainty, and perhaps there’s a real disagreement in ideal approach here, but I don’t think failure to make mindreading guesses are why.
I think Duncan would be fine with people modelling him if those models were exceptionally discriminatory.
“It especially annoys me when racists are accused of ‘discrimination.’ The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one ‘race’ to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.” — Christopher Hitchens
So the advice should be to model more discriminately rather than to not model at all. More mindreading, not less.
I used to agree with this, and now strongly disagree; reading minds refers specifically to inferring structural, coherent, complex information—of the type typically encoded into language—directly from contents of someone’s brain, with low bias and low error rate. This is not possible without brain scanning technology or implants. I don’t think you’re claiming otherwise, of course—you’re using “mind reading” to refer to “inferring what someone is thinking by correlation from sidechannels in their behavior, as interpreted by models that picked up those sidechannel correlations from a variety of people, potentially including previous history with the person you’re observing”. While that’s a reasonable thing to claim to be able to do sometimes, it is much higher bias and error rate than real reading of private neural representation codes, and will often make catastrophically false inferences, especially about people who have unusual structural patterns in their concept-relational cognition, which does not get encoded into sidechannels significantly under most circumstances. Eg, even if you were in the room with me, I would be able to easily surprise you about what I choose to do next.
Once you know that I know I should make my beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences, what more do you want me to know?
hmm, I’m not actually disagreeing with your empirical predictions about whether one can read sidechannels; I’m disagreeing that it’s relevant—Zack’s claim that sidechannel reading is insufficient to mindread Duncan does seem reasonable. And, in fact, duncan made a post expressing frustration about what appears to me issues with people failing to correctly infer his thinking, so I think Zack’s point is in fact well warranted—Duncan expressed he’s typically out-of-model for people who are surprised by this, so it makes sense that Zack would have issues interpreting his meaning from text. Duncan’s post expressing being out of model did request more assumption of uncertainty, and perhaps there’s a real disagreement in ideal approach here, but I don’t think failure to make mindreading guesses are why.
I think Duncan would be fine with people modelling him if those models were exceptionally discriminatory.
“It especially annoys me when racists are accused of ‘discrimination.’ The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one ‘race’ to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.”
— Christopher Hitchens
So the advice should be to model more discriminately rather than to not model at all. More mindreading, not less.