One of the key concepts in Common Law is that of the reasonable man. Re-reading A.P. Herbert, it struck me how his famously insulting description of the reasonable man bears a deep resemblance to that of the ideal rationalist:
It is impossible to travel anywhere or to travel for long in that confusing forest of learned judgments which constitutes the Common Law of England without encountering the Reasonable Man. He is at every turn, an ever-present help in time of trouble, and his apparitions mark the road to equity and right. There has never been a problem, however difficult, which His Majesty’s judges have not in the end been able to resolve by asking themselves the simple question, ‘Was this or was it not the conduct of a reasonable man?’ and leaving that question to be answered by the jury.
This noble creature stands in singular contrast to his kinsman the Economic Man, whose every action is prompted by the single spur of selfish advantage and directed to the single end of monetary gain. The Reasonable Man is always thinking of others; prudence is his guide, and ‘Safety First’, if I may borrow a contemporary catchword, is his rule of life. All solid virtues are his, save only that peculiar quality by which the affection of other men is won. For it will not be pretended that socially he is much less objectionable than the Economic Man.
Though any given example of his behaviour must command our admiration, when taken in the mass his acts create a very different set of impressions. He is one who invariably looks where he is going, and is careful to examine the immediate foreground before he executes a leap or bound; who neither star-gazes nor is lost in meditation when approaching trap-doors or the margin of a dock; who records in every case upon the counterfoils of cheques such ample details as are desirable, scrupulously substitutes the word ‘Order’ for the word ‘Bearer’, crosses the instrument ‘a/c Payee only’, and registers the package in which it is despatched; who never mounts a moving omnibus, and does not alight from any car while the train is in motion; who investigates exhaustively the bona fides of every mendicant before distributing alms, and will inform himself of the history and habits of a dog before administering a caress; who believes no gossip, nor repeats it, without firm basis for believing it to be true; who never drives his ball till those in front of him have definitely vacated the putting-green which is his own objective; who never from one year’s end to another makes an excessive demand upon his wife, his neighbours, his servants, his ox, or his ass; who in the way of business looks only for that narrow margin of profit which twelve men such as himself would reckon to be ‘fair’, contemplates his fellow-merchants, their agents, and their goods, with that degree of suspicion and distrust which the law deems admirable; who never swears, gambles, or loses his temper; who uses nothing except in moderation, and even while he flogs his child is meditating only on the golden mean.
Devoid, in short, of any human weakness, with not one single saving vice, sans prejudice, procrastination, ill-nature, avarice, and absence of mind, as careful for his own safety as he is for that of others, this excellent but odious character stands like a monument in our Courts of Justice, vainly appealing to his fellow-citizens to order their lives after his own example.
I imagine that something of a similar sentiment animates much of popular hostility to LessWrong-style rationalism.
I’m not convinced. I know a few folks who know about LW and actively dislike it; when I try to find out what it is they dislike about it, I’ve heard things like —
LW people are personally cold, or idealize being unemotional and criticize others for having emotional or aesthetic responses;
LW teaches people to rationalize more effectively their existing prejudices — similar to Eliezer’s remarks in Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People;
LW-folk are overly defensive of LW-ideas, hold unreasonably high standards of evidence for disagreement with them, and dismiss any disagreement that can’t meet those standards as a sign of irrationality;
LW has an undercurrent of manipulation, or seems to be trying to trick people into supporting something sinister (although this person could not say what that hidden goal was, which implies that it’s something less overt than “build Friendly AI and take over — er, optimize — the world”);
LW is a support network for Eliezer’s approaches to superhuman AI / the Singularity, and Eliezer is personally not trustworthy as a leader of that project;
LW-folk excessively revere intelligence over other positive traits of humans, and subscribe to the notion that more intelligent people should dominate others; or that people who don’t fit a narrow definition of high intelligence are unworthy, possibly even unworthy of life;
LW-folk seem to believe that if you buy into Bayesian epistemology, you must buy into the rest of the LW memeplex, or that all the other ideas of LW are “Bayesian”;
LW tolerates weird censorship that appears to be motivated by magical thinking;
LW-folk just aren’t very nice or pleasant to be around;
LW openly contemplates proposals that good people consider obviously wrong and morally repulsive, and that is undesirable to be around. (This person described observing LW-folk discussing under what circumstances genocide might be moral. I don’t know where that discussion took place, whether it was on this site, another site, or in person.)
Yeesh. These people shouldn’t let feelings or appearances influence their opinions of EY’s trustworthiness—or “morally repulsive” ideas like justifications for genocide. That’s why I feel it’s perfectly rational to dismiss their criticisms—that and the fact that there’s no evidence backing up their claims. How can there be? After all, as I explain here, Bayesian epistemology is central to LW-style rationality and related ideas like Friendly AI and effective altruism. Frankly, with the kind of muddle-headed thinking those haters display, they don’t really deserve the insights that LW provides.
There, that’s 8 out of 10 bullet points. I couldn’t get the “manipulation” one in because “something sinister” is underspecified; as to the “censorship” one, well, I didn’t want to mention the… thing… (ooh, meta! Gonna give myself partial credit for that one.)
Ab, V qba’g npghnyyl ubyq gur ivrjf V rkcerffrq nobir; vg’f whfg n wbxr.
That was pretty subtle, actually. You had my blood boiling at the end of the first paragraph and I was about to downvote. Luckily I decided to read the rest.
That makes me more curious; I have the feeling there’s quite a bit of anti-geek/nerd sentiment among geeks/nerds, not just non-nerds.
(Not sure how to write the above sentence in a way that doesn’t sound like an implicit demand for more information! I recognize you might be unable or unwilling to elaborate on this.)
Your theory may have some value. But let’s note that I don’t know what it means to cross an instrument ‘a/c Payee only’, and I’ll wager most other people don’t know. Do you think most UK citizens did in 1935?
The use of the word “instrument” makes the phrase more obscure than it needs to be, but it refers to the word “cheque” earlier in the sentence. I suspect most modern British people probably don’t know what it means, but most will have noticed that all the cheques in a chequebook have “A/C Payee only” written vertically across the middle—or at least those old enough to have used cheques will! But people in 1935 would have most likely known what it meant, because 1) in those days cheques were extremely widespread (no credit or debit cards) and 2) unlike today, cheques were frequently written by hand on a standard piece of paper (although chequebooks did exist). The very fact that the phrase was used by a popular author writing for a mass audience (the cases were originally published in Punch and The Evening Standard) should incline you in that direction anyway.
Note incidentally that Herbert’s most famous case is most likely The Negotiable Cow.
I don’t know for sure, but judging from context I’d say it’s probably instructions as to the disposition of a check—like endorsing one and writing “For deposit only” on the back before depositing it into the bank, as a guarantee against fraud.
Granted, in these days of automatic scanning and electronic funds transfer that’s starting to look a little cobwebby itself.
One of the key concepts in Common Law is that of the reasonable man. Re-reading A.P. Herbert, it struck me how his famously insulting description of the reasonable man bears a deep resemblance to that of the ideal rationalist:
A.P. Herbert, [Uncommon Law].(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncommon_Law). Emphasis mine.
I imagine that something of a similar sentiment animates much of popular hostility to LessWrong-style rationalism.
I’m not convinced. I know a few folks who know about LW and actively dislike it; when I try to find out what it is they dislike about it, I’ve heard things like —
LW people are personally cold, or idealize being unemotional and criticize others for having emotional or aesthetic responses;
LW teaches people to rationalize more effectively their existing prejudices — similar to Eliezer’s remarks in Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People;
LW-folk are overly defensive of LW-ideas, hold unreasonably high standards of evidence for disagreement with them, and dismiss any disagreement that can’t meet those standards as a sign of irrationality;
LW has an undercurrent of manipulation, or seems to be trying to trick people into supporting something sinister (although this person could not say what that hidden goal was, which implies that it’s something less overt than “build Friendly AI and take over — er, optimize — the world”);
LW is a support network for Eliezer’s approaches to superhuman AI / the Singularity, and Eliezer is personally not trustworthy as a leader of that project;
LW-folk excessively revere intelligence over other positive traits of humans, and subscribe to the notion that more intelligent people should dominate others; or that people who don’t fit a narrow definition of high intelligence are unworthy, possibly even unworthy of life;
LW-folk seem to believe that if you buy into Bayesian epistemology, you must buy into the rest of the LW memeplex, or that all the other ideas of LW are “Bayesian”;
LW tolerates weird censorship that appears to be motivated by magical thinking;
LW-folk just aren’t very nice or pleasant to be around;
LW openly contemplates proposals that good people consider obviously wrong and morally repulsive, and that is undesirable to be around. (This person described observing LW-folk discussing under what circumstances genocide might be moral. I don’t know where that discussion took place, whether it was on this site, another site, or in person.)
I wonder how these people who dislike LW feel about geeks/nerds in general.
Most of them are geeks/nerds in general, or at least have seen themselves as such at some point in their lives.
Yeesh. These people shouldn’t let feelings or appearances influence their opinions of EY’s trustworthiness—or “morally repulsive” ideas like justifications for genocide. That’s why I feel it’s perfectly rational to dismiss their criticisms—that and the fact that there’s no evidence backing up their claims. How can there be? After all, as I explain here, Bayesian epistemology is central to LW-style rationality and related ideas like Friendly AI and effective altruism. Frankly, with the kind of muddle-headed thinking those haters display, they don’t really deserve the insights that LW provides.
There, that’s 8 out of 10 bullet points. I couldn’t get the “manipulation” one in because “something sinister” is underspecified; as to the “censorship” one, well, I didn’t want to mention the… thing… (ooh, meta! Gonna give myself partial credit for that one.)
Ab, V qba’g npghnyyl ubyq gur ivrjf V rkcerffrq nobir; vg’f whfg n wbxr.
That was pretty subtle, actually. You had my blood boiling at the end of the first paragraph and I was about to downvote. Luckily I decided to read the rest.
That makes me more curious; I have the feeling there’s quite a bit of anti-geek/nerd sentiment among geeks/nerds, not just non-nerds.
(Not sure how to write the above sentence in a way that doesn’t sound like an implicit demand for more information! I recognize you might be unable or unwilling to elaborate on this.)
Your theory may have some value. But let’s note that I don’t know what it means to cross an instrument ‘a/c Payee only’, and I’ll wager most other people don’t know. Do you think most UK citizens did in 1935?
The use of the word “instrument” makes the phrase more obscure than it needs to be, but it refers to the word “cheque” earlier in the sentence. I suspect most modern British people probably don’t know what it means, but most will have noticed that all the cheques in a chequebook have “A/C Payee only” written vertically across the middle—or at least those old enough to have used cheques will! But people in 1935 would have most likely known what it meant, because 1) in those days cheques were extremely widespread (no credit or debit cards) and 2) unlike today, cheques were frequently written by hand on a standard piece of paper (although chequebooks did exist). The very fact that the phrase was used by a popular author writing for a mass audience (the cases were originally published in Punch and The Evening Standard) should incline you in that direction anyway.
Note incidentally that Herbert’s most famous case is most likely The Negotiable Cow.
Just fyi, my checks don’t say anything like that, and the closest I can find on Google Images just says, “Account Payee.”
I don’t know for sure, but judging from context I’d say it’s probably instructions as to the disposition of a check—like endorsing one and writing “For deposit only” on the back before depositing it into the bank, as a guarantee against fraud.
Granted, in these days of automatic scanning and electronic funds transfer that’s starting to look a little cobwebby itself.