The quoted text wasn’t an argument, it doesn’t make sense to pretend it was…?
It’s clearly an edit to add in my own personal opinion that I wasn’t seeking an argument about.
And frankly, probably no one fully read all of habyrka’s post, including you. So it wouldn’t make sense at all.
Edit: I just realized that does imply the downvoters are also being mildly deceptive, since they would know they didn’t read the full text. So ironically it reinforces the original point in a counterintuitive way, and if you squint at it, it might imply an argument on the meta level of multiple deceivers roaming around… but then pretty much everyone who commented or voted would fall under suspicion too, so that would be a real stretch.
Double Edit: It’s somewhat of a startling implication, could literally everyone who voted under this post be behaving mildly deceptively? I didn’t even consider the possibility when I wrote the original comment but now am leaning towards that being the case, if typical forum norms of reading the full text are taken literally. Thanks for raising the unsettling point. I’ll take a bit of karma loss for that.
This comment is utterly incompressible and full of baseless accusations. I will now downvote it. Am I behaving deceptively? How about if I had silently downvoted it? No.
How can your opinion even affect the probability of deception in the first place? It seems incapable of moving the needle in that way, so I don’t see the logical connection.
By definition, deception means that there might be some pretense/ulterior motives/deflection/tricks/etc… behind the face value reading of your comments.
May I ask what your motivation was when you wrote and published this post of yours?
Were you trying to learn something? Or were you trying to teach me something? Or were you just responding to the knee-jerk impulse to win a fight online?
My post above was an attempt to teach you something. I hope that this wording does not come off as condescending; it is not meant as such. I am here on LessWrong primarily to learn. As such, I appreciate it when someone genuinely tries to teach me something. I hope that you will take it in the same spirit.
I think your first post above had some flaws in terms of rationality. I think your follow-up is even less rational.
Am I making sense? I might not be. I can try to be clearer, but only if you truly want to know what I am trying to say.
The motivation, after the double edit, is clearly to express suprise after connecting the dots and to enumerate it…
I wrote it in the most straightforward and direct manner possible?
After re-reading it twice, I get that clearly implicates you too, so I get why you may be upset.
But even if it might have been better worded given more time… by definition all commentators under a post at least potentially voted. So I don’t see how the implication could have been avoided entirely while still getting the gist across.
The motivation, after the double edit, is clearly to express suprise after connecting the dots and to enumerate it…
Sure, but do you need to express all your emotions?
In my experience (as a rough guideline), when I do something, it is either because I want to achieve some goal, or because I am in the grip of some subconscious impulse. The latter is something I want to catch and notice as often as I can, in order to learn to be more conscious and more rational as much of the time as possible.
Since you read and post on LessWrong, I assume that you want to learn to be more rational. Am I right?
I may have been expressing myself too vaguely. What I have been trying to say is this: I think that when you write these posts, you are in the grip of subconscious urges—presumably an urge to defend yourself and “win fights” in order to secure your social status. I am trying to convince you that you can train and improve your own rationality by introspecting more about why you do the things you do.
I wrote it in the most straightforward and direct manner possible?
Is this a question? Or are you just defending yourself again?
not relevant to the larger discussion, but you wrote sentence i disagree with: “when I do something, it is either because I want to achieve some goal, or because I am in the grip of some subconscious impulse”
well, in my model, i act to achieve goal of from some impulse. the impulsive doesn’t have to be subconscious. I don’t think acting on impulses is always bad or oppose rationality, in the same way that emotions are not always irrational.
I don’t see acting on an urge itslef bad. moreover, there are circumstances when i try to act on my impulses more rather then less!
so… what is the problem on acting on impulses, exactly? i don’t need to express all my emotions, but all else equal, consider it good thing to do that. because i want to. things are not else equal, but you need tactfully say what is the problem. writing comments because i want to (under some constrains) seem to me like the right thing to do.
“Why do you do this? In order to achieve some goal?” my best answer to this is “because I want to”, but I mostly think it’s the wrong question. you are assuming that people do things to achieve goals, and I’m saying that achieving goals is not the only reason to do things, that “what goal it is achieving” is the wring level of meta to ask.
why do you think that the right sort of answers are in the forms of goals and not in the form of impulses?
there is a pattern when i want something, i experience urge or desire or want to do something or have something. then i act on that impulse/urge/desire. then i satisfied it, and i feel sated of happy or fulfilled. this is good!
the way i model such things, this is important part of what my non-existent Utility Function is. that is the first level. sometimes, acting on a urge does not fulfill it, or even anti-fulfill it. sometimes i want things that are actually to abstract of complicated to be described as urges i can act upon without planning in thinking. but this is the exception, not the rule.
as i see it, something like CEV work like that—do what i want, because i want that. encounter problems, or things that need planning. plan to solve the problems or plan to achieve goals.
but all the part of goals and planing is kicking on only as reaction to problems or wanting something in the form of result and not urge. having urge → acting on urge → being satisfied is the basic loop, the default that does not need explanation or justification.
while it’s look to me that you see having goal and act to achieve it as the basic loop that does not need explanation or justification.
so to try again answer to the question: “Why do you do this?” because this is my Utility function. the urges are, to first approximation, my utility function. they are obviously not a function, but the way i will have some utility function, if humankind survive, if i will get to live long enough, is by weaving together the different things that i want. and part of it is goal-shaped, part of it is in the form of “i want the world be in that state”. but a lot of it is in the form “i want to do x”.
there is important difference, in my ontology, between wants in the form “i want the world be in x state”, as in—i want the dished to be washed, i want the food be prepare, i want my home be clean, and “i want do x”. i want to play the video game, to read the post, to read the book, to eat the tasty food, to listen to music, to go to a walk.
you can translate that to goal-framing by saying that my goal is the experience of walking or the pleasant sensation, but i think that translation lose something important, and that it’s the wrong framing.
Can you please elaborate on what important thing you think is lost?
imagine i try to explain some proof in geometry to my hypothetical friend that think in feeling. I’m trying to explain her congruent triangles. and she replay to me—“so if there are three things that same you feel like it’s the same triangle, but you need to have at least one side, because angles doesn’t feel real enough to you?”
and, like, this is not wrong description, per se. she will be able to recognize congruent triangles. but I still notice that it doesn’t look like she understand the concept of proof at all!
I can describe the different predictions that I can make when i say something is a urge or a goal—when it’s urge i can’t fail to get it, i do the thing i want to do, and feel satisfied. while in goal i want to change the world state, and i can try to achieve the goal, and fail, and be unsatisfied. but this only can explain why i think there are two clusters here, and it’s not what I’m trying to do.
but what I’m actually trying to do is to connect personal experience with words. didn’t you ever feel the impulse to do something, and then did that, and then turned out the result is not what you wanted and was disappointed? didn’t you ever have the impulse to do something, and did that, and was satisfied, despite the result wasn’t what you ostensibly want?
those are the words that i use to describe this two experiences of mine.
I can describe the different predictions that I can make when i say something is a urge or a goal—when it’s urge i can’t fail to get it, i do the thing i want to do, and feel satisfied.
This is not my experience. When I act on an urge, I do not necessarily feel satisfied. There is generally some pleasure associated with the act, but it can be extremely fleeting and short-lived.
This fleeting pleasure is better than nothing, and I will often act on an urge in order to get this feeling. But after the feeling has passed, I do not feel satisfied.
I only feel satisfied after I have accomplished something that feels valuable—a goal.
Interesting! I wonder to what extend we are different physiologically, to what extend we use different words to describe same experiences, and to what extend our opinions on things shapes our experiences. alas, we don’t have a way to communicate our feelings directly, yet. and I honestly have no idea how to check.
Well, I am somewhat anhedoniac by nature. There are a lot of positive experiences which many (most?) people report and which I do not recognize. For example, the sunset does nothing for me. Sex has its moments but is overall disappointing and a far cry from its reputation. Live concerts are described by some as borderline religious experiences; for me they are cool and fun but nothing really exceptional.
Fortunately, my Buddhist-inspired meditation practice is helping me discover more joy in life.
I did actually read all of the post. it was interesting read. the claim that “probably no one fully read all of habyrka’s post” looks to me as example of Typical Mind Fallacy, and one that reflects poorly on you.
I also updated toward the possibility i made the same mistake, and i should stop assuming that 90%+ the commenters read the post. thank you for that.
Of course there could be people that fully read it and didn’t comment?
It clearly wasn’t meant to exclude every single possible reader on the internet that could have come across it. That would be a crazy interpretation.
At most, it can be read as calling out every single commentator underneath the post who did pretend to read all of it. And yes it’s clear not every commentator pretended that, so they wouldn’t fall into that category.
Trying to score points in such an obvious way is also pretty deceptive.
see, I actually assumed everyone obviously read it all before commenting, before I saw your comment. WHY you assume they didn’t? why you assume they/we pretending?
I say nothing about people who read and didn’t comment and have no idea from where this weird misunderstanding, and the accusation came from.
at this point I have the hypothesis you inclined to assume bad path where there are none, and then jump to accusations before checking if it even true. I saw zero evidence to people commented without reading, but you rise the hypothesis and then behave as if you encountered some evidence to it being true.
where is the part, when after thinking about it, you search for evidence?
Why would I reply on a public comment how exactly I detected this, assuming you do believe there is in fact some technique?
Asking me in a public comment to reveal techniques that would obviously help such pretenders evade better in the future is just nonsensical, at least put it in a DM.
And if you don’t believe there is any such technique, why pretend to ask in the first place?
See, my leading hypothesis is that you inclined to make negative interpretations, without noticing you are doing it or that there are alternative, and without checking what interpretation is more likely. I think this because i saw you doing it twice.
so saying that you did look on the alternative, that you considered both options and then chose one, is already giving new information. although, you didn’t actually said you did that.
I will say on my part that in Facebook I frequently have the experience of reading comments when it looks like they didn’t read the post they commented on, and I didn’t have this impression here.
and also that the “obviously help such pretenders evade better” is yet another example of the “making negative assumptions”. like… you do understand it’s not obvious, yes? that your negative assumptions look obviously wrong to me, and that you provide exactly zero evidence, and what is worse, that it doesn’t look like you understand that “providing evidence” is something you should do?
do you notice that negative interpretation step you are doing? because what I want is for you to stop doing it for short time, but… do you see there is a thing you are doing, and you can do something else instead?
because, it’s actually pretty hard to communicate when you jump to some wrong conclusions every comment, but it doesn’t look you can the jumps.
and going that “your comment assuming wrong negative interpretation” each time is not working. I say and you assume A-> B and then replay to B and if I try to replay instead of meta-replay, it would have looked like… “But I didn’t say B, or C, or D, and the options are not F or G, I actually think H, and also, you can’t claim B C D without any reason, and you didn’t react in any way to A, which is the thing I actually said”.
The quoted text wasn’t an argument, it doesn’t make sense to pretend it was…?
It’s clearly an edit to add in my own personal opinion that I wasn’t seeking an argument about.
And frankly, probably no one fully read all of habyrka’s post, including you. So it wouldn’t make sense at all.
Edit: I just realized that does imply the downvoters are also being mildly deceptive, since they would know they didn’t read the full text. So ironically it reinforces the original point in a counterintuitive way, and if you squint at it, it might imply an argument on the meta level of multiple deceivers roaming around… but then pretty much everyone who commented or voted would fall under suspicion too, so that would be a real stretch.
Double Edit: It’s somewhat of a startling implication, could literally everyone who voted under this post be behaving mildly deceptively? I didn’t even consider the possibility when I wrote the original comment but now am leaning towards that being the case, if typical forum norms of reading the full text are taken literally. Thanks for raising the unsettling point. I’ll take a bit of karma loss for that.
This comment is utterly incompressible and full of baseless accusations. I will now downvote it. Am I behaving deceptively? How about if I had silently downvoted it? No.
How can your opinion even affect the probability of deception in the first place? It seems incapable of moving the needle in that way, so I don’t see the logical connection.
By definition, deception means that there might be some pretense/ulterior motives/deflection/tricks/etc… behind the face value reading of your comments.
May I ask what your motivation was when you wrote and published this post of yours?
Were you trying to learn something? Or were you trying to teach me something? Or were you just responding to the knee-jerk impulse to win a fight online?
My post above was an attempt to teach you something. I hope that this wording does not come off as condescending; it is not meant as such. I am here on LessWrong primarily to learn. As such, I appreciate it when someone genuinely tries to teach me something. I hope that you will take it in the same spirit.
I think your first post above had some flaws in terms of rationality. I think your follow-up is even less rational.
Am I making sense? I might not be. I can try to be clearer, but only if you truly want to know what I am trying to say.
The motivation, after the double edit, is clearly to express suprise after connecting the dots and to enumerate it…
I wrote it in the most straightforward and direct manner possible?
After re-reading it twice, I get that clearly implicates you too, so I get why you may be upset.
But even if it might have been better worded given more time… by definition all commentators under a post at least potentially voted. So I don’t see how the implication could have been avoided entirely while still getting the gist across.
Sure, but do you need to express all your emotions?
In my experience (as a rough guideline), when I do something, it is either because I want to achieve some goal, or because I am in the grip of some subconscious impulse. The latter is something I want to catch and notice as often as I can, in order to learn to be more conscious and more rational as much of the time as possible.
Since you read and post on LessWrong, I assume that you want to learn to be more rational. Am I right?
I may have been expressing myself too vaguely. What I have been trying to say is this: I think that when you write these posts, you are in the grip of subconscious urges—presumably an urge to defend yourself and “win fights” in order to secure your social status. I am trying to convince you that you can train and improve your own rationality by introspecting more about why you do the things you do.
Is this a question? Or are you just defending yourself again?
not relevant to the larger discussion, but you wrote sentence i disagree with:
“when I do something, it is either because I want to achieve some goal, or because I am in the grip of some subconscious impulse”
well, in my model, i act to achieve goal of from some impulse. the impulsive doesn’t have to be subconscious. I don’t think acting on impulses is always bad or oppose rationality, in the same way that emotions are not always irrational.
I don’t see acting on an urge itslef bad. moreover, there are circumstances when i try to act on my impulses more rather then less!
so… what is the problem on acting on impulses, exactly? i don’t need to express all my emotions, but all else equal, consider it good thing to do that. because i want to. things are not else equal, but you need tactfully say what is the problem. writing comments because i want to (under some constrains) seem to me like the right thing to do.
(alas, my longer explanations on this are in Hebrew.
https://hadoveretharishona.wordpress.com/?p=7130 )
Fair point. It is possible to be conscious of an impulse and act on it even if it does not serve any particular goal. Let us rephrase:
When I do something, it is either because I want to achieve some goal, or because I am in the grip of some impulse.
Why do you do this? In order to achieve some goal?
“Why do you do this? In order to achieve some goal?”
my best answer to this is “because I want to”, but I mostly think it’s the wrong question. you are assuming that people do things to achieve goals, and I’m saying that achieving goals is not the only reason to do things, that “what goal it is achieving” is the wring level of meta to ask.
why do you think that the right sort of answers are in the forms of goals and not in the form of impulses?
there is a pattern when i want something, i experience urge or desire or want to do something or have something. then i act on that impulse/urge/desire. then i satisfied it, and i feel sated of happy or fulfilled. this is good!
the way i model such things, this is important part of what my non-existent Utility Function is. that is the first level. sometimes, acting on a urge does not fulfill it, or even anti-fulfill it. sometimes i want things that are actually to abstract of complicated to be described as urges i can act upon without planning in thinking. but this is the exception, not the rule.
as i see it, something like CEV work like that—do what i want, because i want that. encounter problems, or things that need planning. plan to solve the problems or plan to achieve goals.
but all the part of goals and planing is kicking on only as reaction to problems or wanting something in the form of result and not urge. having urge → acting on urge → being satisfied is the basic loop, the default that does not need explanation or justification.
while it’s look to me that you see having goal and act to achieve it as the basic loop that does not need explanation or justification.
so to try again answer to the question: “Why do you do this?”
because this is my Utility function. the urges are, to first approximation, my utility function. they are obviously not a function, but the way i will have some utility function, if humankind survive, if i will get to live long enough, is by weaving together the different things that i want. and part of it is goal-shaped, part of it is in the form of “i want the world be in that state”. but a lot of it is in the form “i want to do x”.
there is important difference, in my ontology, between wants in the form “i want the world be in x state”, as in—i want the dished to be washed, i want the food be prepare, i want my home be clean, and “i want do x”. i want to play the video game, to read the post, to read the book, to eat the tasty food, to listen to music, to go to a walk.
you can translate that to goal-framing by saying that my goal is the experience of walking or the pleasant sensation, but i think that translation lose something important, and that it’s the wrong framing.
What is CEV?
That is how I would explain it.
Can you please elaborate on what important thing you think is lost?
Coherent Extrapolated Volition
this look to me like failure in Noticing Frame Differences
imagine i try to explain some proof in geometry to my hypothetical friend that think in feeling. I’m trying to explain her congruent triangles. and she replay to me—“so if there are three things that same you feel like it’s the same triangle, but you need to have at least one side, because angles doesn’t feel real enough to you?”
and, like, this is not wrong description, per se. she will be able to recognize congruent triangles. but I still notice that it doesn’t look like she understand the concept of proof at all!
I can describe the different predictions that I can make when i say something is a urge or a goal—when it’s urge i can’t fail to get it, i do the thing i want to do, and feel satisfied. while in goal i want to change the world state, and i can try to achieve the goal, and fail, and be unsatisfied. but this only can explain why i think there are two clusters here, and it’s not what I’m trying to do.
but what I’m actually trying to do is to connect personal experience with words. didn’t you ever feel the impulse to do something, and then did that, and then turned out the result is not what you wanted and was disappointed? didn’t you ever have the impulse to do something, and did that, and was satisfied, despite the result wasn’t what you ostensibly want?
those are the words that i use to describe this two experiences of mine.
This is not my experience. When I act on an urge, I do not necessarily feel satisfied. There is generally some pleasure associated with the act, but it can be extremely fleeting and short-lived.
This fleeting pleasure is better than nothing, and I will often act on an urge in order to get this feeling. But after the feeling has passed, I do not feel satisfied.
I only feel satisfied after I have accomplished something that feels valuable—a goal.
Interesting! I wonder to what extend we are different physiologically, to what extend we use different words to describe same experiences, and to what extend our opinions on things shapes our experiences. alas, we don’t have a way to communicate our feelings directly, yet. and I honestly have no idea how to check.
Well, I am somewhat anhedoniac by nature. There are a lot of positive experiences which many (most?) people report and which I do not recognize. For example, the sunset does nothing for me. Sex has its moments but is overall disappointing and a far cry from its reputation. Live concerts are described by some as borderline religious experiences; for me they are cool and fun but nothing really exceptional.
Fortunately, my Buddhist-inspired meditation practice is helping me discover more joy in life.
This doesn’t make sense as a reply…
How is your opinion on perceived emotional expressiveness even relevant to the prior comment ?
Let me ask you just one question: Do you truly want to learn to be more rational?
Please give me a direct answer to this.
I did actually read all of the post. it was interesting read. the claim that “probably no one fully read all of habyrka’s post” looks to me as example of Typical Mind Fallacy, and one that reflects poorly on you.
I also updated toward the possibility i made the same mistake, and i should stop assuming that 90%+ the commenters read the post. thank you for that.
Of course there could be people that fully read it and didn’t comment?
It clearly wasn’t meant to exclude every single possible reader on the internet that could have come across it. That would be a crazy interpretation.
At most, it can be read as calling out every single commentator underneath the post who did pretend to read all of it. And yes it’s clear not every commentator pretended that, so they wouldn’t fall into that category.
Trying to score points in such an obvious way is also pretty deceptive.
see, I actually assumed everyone obviously read it all before commenting, before I saw your comment. WHY you assume they didn’t? why you assume they/we pretending?
I say nothing about people who read and didn’t comment and have no idea from where this weird misunderstanding, and the accusation came from.
at this point I have the hypothesis you inclined to assume bad path where there are none, and then jump to accusations before checking if it even true. I saw zero evidence to people commented without reading, but you rise the hypothesis and then behave as if you encountered some evidence to it being true.
where is the part, when after thinking about it, you search for evidence?
Why would I reply on a public comment how exactly I detected this, assuming you do believe there is in fact some technique?
Asking me in a public comment to reveal techniques that would obviously help such pretenders evade better in the future is just nonsensical, at least put it in a DM.
And if you don’t believe there is any such technique, why pretend to ask in the first place?
See, my leading hypothesis is that you inclined to make negative interpretations, without noticing you are doing it or that there are alternative, and without checking what interpretation is more likely. I think this because i saw you doing it twice.
so saying that you did look on the alternative, that you considered both options and then chose one, is already giving new information. although, you didn’t actually said you did that.
I will say on my part that in Facebook I frequently have the experience of reading comments when it looks like they didn’t read the post they commented on, and I didn’t have this impression here.
and also that the “obviously help such pretenders evade better” is yet another example of the “making negative assumptions”. like… you do understand it’s not obvious, yes? that your negative assumptions look obviously wrong to me, and that you provide exactly zero evidence, and what is worse, that it doesn’t look like you understand that “providing evidence” is something you should do?
do you notice that negative interpretation step you are doing? because what I want is for you to stop doing it for short time, but… do you see there is a thing you are doing, and you can do something else instead?
because, it’s actually pretty hard to communicate when you jump to some wrong conclusions every comment, but it doesn’t look you can the jumps.
and going that “your comment assuming wrong negative interpretation” each time is not working. I say and you assume A-> B and then replay to B and if I try to replay instead of meta-replay, it would have looked like… “But I didn’t say B, or C, or D, and the options are not F or G, I actually think H, and also, you can’t claim B C D without any reason, and you didn’t react in any way to A, which is the thing I actually said”.