As a female, I wonder what it means that I don’t react to behaviors like competing for status, class signaling and spending beyond ones means by being attracted—instead, I have the same feeling I get when people are being immature and stupid. Lol. I have thought about this a lot. I am just not attracted to the ordinary symbols of male power—though I seem to have a few triggers. Height doesn’t matter, muscles don’t do a thing and money has no effect. The demonstrations of power I do enjoy are when they’re able to hold up their end of a debate with me (I keep wishing for someone to win against me), or when they’re doing something really, really intellectually difficult. Those things, I do respond to. Fluff? No.
I have to wonder if other women who are as intellectual as I am are the same.
As [...] I wonder what it means that I don’t [...].
Generally, when someone says that majority of A do X, but you are A and don’t do X, here are some possible explanations:
the statistics is simply wrong;
the statistics is correct about the majority, but you as an individual are an exception, and possibly so are some of your friends (this similarity could have contributed to you being friends);
the statistics is correct about the majority, but within it a minority is an exception, and you belong to this minority, and possibly so do some of your friends;
you are wrong, you are actually doing X, but you rationalize that it’s something else.
Also from the outside, if someone else is saying this, don’t forget:
publication bias—people who don’t fit the statistics are more like to write about it then those who fit are likely to write “me too” (in communities that value independence).
Specifically for this topic, think also about the difference between maximizers and satisficers. If you read that “females value X”, you may automatically translate it as “females are X-maximizers”, and then observe that you are not. But even then you could still be an X-satisficer; you could have a treshold of “status + class + spending”, where people below this treshold just don’t catch your attention, and from the pool above this treshold you select using different criteria. Thus it may seem that “status + class + spending” are not part of your criteria, but they simply make your first filter, and then you consciously focus on your personal second filter.
(Simple example: You are consciously selecting for funny guys, not rich ones. However, you would never give a homeless guy an opportunity to show you how funny he is. Therefore you are effectively selecting for funny and non-homeless guys; you just don’t think about the second part too much. For less obvious example, replace “homeless” with “not having (signals of) university education” or “not living in an expensive city”.)
Thanks for seeing that there are multiple options for interpretation. I hate it when people interpret my behavior into a false dichotomy of options, which happens to me frequently, so I am finding this refreshing.
I have a functionality threshold, but I see that as different from a class threshold. For instance, I had a boyfriend that had recently graduated from school. He was unemployed at that point, of course. It took him a very long time to get a job due to the recession. That didn’t deter me from liking him. Why not? I had no reason to think he was dysfunctional, I figured he would get a job eventually.
On the other hand, if I meet someone who reeks of alcohol and obviously hasn’t showered in a week, I’m going to be assuming they’re dysfunctional—that even if their situation could be temporary, they’re probably exacerbating it.
That’s not about class. That’s about wanting only functional, healthy relationships in my life. It’s not a healthy relationship if you have to pay for a person’s food and shelter because they’re not able to get those things for themselves.
If I meet someone who seems functional (has showered, does not reek of alcohol, etc.) and they strike up intelligent conversation (funny is nice but intelligent conversation is more my thing) but happen to be homeless, I will judge them based on how functional they are. I would not invest much until they get back on their feet, because I know better than to think that seeming functional and actually being functional are the same thing, but I wouldn’t refuse to talk to them if they seemed interesting and functional.
Why invest in a guy who just graduated but not the homeless guy? Well let’s ask this: what did the recent graduate do wrong? Nothing. Nothing is out of the ordinary if a recent grad is looking for work. That’s normal. That’s not a red flag. The homeless person, though may have done something to cause their situation. That is an abnormal situation, a red flag. I won’t be sure they are capable of supporting themselves until I see it. On the other hand, the recent grad has just spent several years doing hard work—they’ve demonstrated that they’re functional enough to be capable of supporting themselves.
That’s what’s important for me—whether people are able to support themselves, maintain stability, and be functional in general.
I don’t react to behaviors like competing for status, class signaling and spending beyond ones means
The demonstrations of power I do enjoy are when they’re able to hold up their end of a debate with me (I keep wishing for someone to win against me), or when they’re doing something really, really intellectually difficult. Those things, I do respond to.
That is class signalling (of a particular class) and winning debates is competing for status.
Fluff? No.
You have your own sexual preferences and the traits that you are not attracted to appear less intrinsically worthy. Another woman may say she isn’t attracted to “Fluff” like intellectual displays and rhetorical flair and instead is only attracted to the ‘things that really matter’ like social alliances, security and physical health.
I have to wonder if other women like me are the same.
Lol thank you Wedrifid, that was refreshing, and you were pretty good.
I disagree with you, but you’re welcome to continue the disagreement with me. (:
Just because other people use those as signals that a person is in a particular place in a hierarchy does not mean that:
A. I believe in social hierarchies or that social hierarchies even exist. (I see them as an illusion).
B. The specific reason I am attracted to these qualities is due to an attraction to people in a certain position in the social hierarchy.
The reasons I want someone who is able to defeat me in a debate are:
It gets extremely tedious to disagree with people who can’t. I end up teaching them things endlessly in order to get us to a point of agreement, while learning too little.
I might get careless if nobody knocks me down for a long time. It’s not good for me.
It is rather uncomfortable and awkward in a relationship or even a friendship if one person is always right and the other always loses debates. That feels wrong.
“Fluff, no.” vs “You have your own preferences and other people see your preference as fluff.”
If I said I had a million dollars, but really, I was a million dollars in debt, would that be an empty claim? Yes. If a person is spending beyond their means in order to signal that they have money, they’re being dishonest. So that’s fluff.
If social hierarchies don’t actually exist, and a person signals that they’re in one, is that real, or is it a fantasy? if they don’t exist, it’s fluff.
“This seems tautologically likely.”
Okay, this was an embarrassing failure to use clear wording on my part. Although you’re not actually disagreeing with me, you got me good, lol.
That was fun. Feel free to disagree with me from now on.
I believe in social hierarchies or that social hierarchies even exist. (I see them as an illusion).
Can you clarify what you mean by this?
B. The specific reason I am attracted to these qualities is due to an attraction to people in a certain position in the social hierarchy.
The reasons I want someone who is able to defeat me in a debate are:
1.It gets extremely tedious to disagree with people who can’t. I end up teaching them things endlessly in order to get us to a point of agreement, while learning too little.
2.I might get careless if nobody knocks me down for a long time. It’s not good for me.
3.It is rather uncomfortable and awkward in a relationship or even a friendship if one person is always right and the other always loses debates. That feels wrong.
These are decent reasons to intentionally seek out someone who can out debate you, however as far as actual attraction goes they make just as much, if not more sense as post-hoc rationalizations as real reasons. As Yvain has explained all introspection of the type you are engaging is prone to this error mode and while reasons your reasons 1 & 3 aren’t completely inconsistent with our knowledge of human attraction they don’t fit as well as the hypothesis that you are attracted to behaviors that signal high IQ and/or status while side-steping your issues with the most common ways of displaying those traits (this is largely based on what I’ve been told in various psychology classes, I don’t have the original studies that my professors based their conclusions on on hand).
-edit if anyone knows how to make blockquote play nice with the original formatting let me know, I think this works for now.
On introspection biases: For minor things, I wouldn’t be surprised if I make errors in judging why I do them, because it can take a bit of rigor to do this well. But if something is important, I can use meta-cognition and ask myself a series of questions (carefully worded—this is a skill I have practiced), seeing how I feel after each, to determine why I am doing something. I carefully word them to prevent myself from taking them as suggestions. Instead, I make sure I interpret them as yes or no questions. For instance: “Does class make me feel attracted?” instead of “Should I feel attracted to class?”—it’s an important distinction to make, especially for certain topics like fears. “Am I afraid of spiders because I assume they’re poisonous?” will get a totally different reaction (assuming I am not afraid of them) than “Would I be afraid of spiders if I thought they are all poisonous?”
It takes a little concentration to get it right during introspection.
So we’ll start with class for example. I ask myself “Do I find class attractive?” and I can ask myself things like “Imagine a guy with lots of money asks me out. How do I feel?” and “Imagine a guy who has things in common with me asks me out, how do I feel?” If you ask enough questions for compare and contrast, you can get pretty good answers this way.
To make sure I’m not just having random reactions based on how I want to feel, I come up with real examples from my recent past. In the last year or so, I have been asked out by or dated a lot of different people with varying amounts of income. There were a lot of guys who are making 6 figures—this is because I tend to attract well paid IT guys. I liked some of them but didn’t like all of them. Some of the guys making 6 figures didn’t attract me whatsoever. So income doesn’t make me like a guy all by itself.
I can ask “Does having a high income make me like them more?”
The two top attractions of all time, for me, were to an underpaid writer and a college student.
I can ask “Does availability of men with lots of money have anything to do with it?”
After dating something like five or ten guys who make around 6 figures over the last year and someodd, the one I liked best actually makes a moderate income. There is another guy that does make a large income that I liked quite a bit. But if the fact that guys who make 6 figures are available was going to interfere, it wouldn’t make sense that I’d have liked the guy with a moderate income so much.
So, there are ways to determine what your real motivations are—but it takes skill, and requires more rigor that the quick answers these people are giving in the studies, for sure.
Believing oneself to be an exceptional case was a common failure mode among the subjects of studies summarized in Yvain’s article. When confronted with the experimental results showing how their behavior was influenced in ways unknown to them, they would either deny it outright or admit that it is a very interesting phenomenon that surely affected other people but they happened to be the lone exception to the rule.
That doesn’t really preclude your introspective skills (I actually believe such skills can be developed to an extent) but it should make you suspicious.
Have you done any reading on cognitive restructuring (psychotherapy)? It’s interesting that people on this forum believe this is impossible when a method exists as a type of psychotherapy. Have you guys refuted cognitive restructuring or are you just unaware of it?
I’m aware of cognitive restructuring. Note that I haven’t said that introspection is completely useless or even that the specific type of introspection you describe is totally impossible, just that you are very confident about it and there’s a common pattern of extreme overconfidence.
So we’ll start with class for example. I ask myself “Do I find class attractive?” and I can ask myself things like “Imagine a guy with lots of money asks me out. How do I feel?” and “Imagine a guy who has things in common with me asks me out, how do I feel?” If you ask enough questions for compare and contrast, you can get pretty good answers this way.
This type of hypothetical questioning is notoriously unreliable, people ofter come up with answers that don’t reflect their actual reactions, If you read closely Yvain’s article already gives several examples. It’s also one of the methodologies that my psychology teachers highlighted as sounding good, but being largely unreliable.
To make sure I’m not just having random reactions based on how I want to feel, I come up with real examples from my recent past. In the last year or so, I have been asked out by or dated a lot of different people with varying amounts of income. There were a lot of guys who are making 6 figures—this is because I tend to attract well paid IT guys. I liked some of them but didn’t like all of them. Some of the guys making 6 figures didn’t attract me whatsoever. So income doesn’t make me like a guy all by itself.
This is better, but between the general unreliabilityof memory and the number other factors that would need to be controlled for its still not that great. Particularly since you do feel attracted to men who are more dominate as debaters.
It occurs to me that since this debate is about me and my subjective experiences, there’s really no way for either of us to win. Even if we got a whole bunch of people with different incomes and did an experiment on me to see which ones I was more attracted to, the result of the experiment would be subjective and there would be no way for anyone to know I wasn’t pretending.
I still think that there are ways to know what’s going on inside you with relatively good certainty. Part of the reason I believe this is because I’m able to change myself, meaning that I am able to decide to feel a different way and accomplish that. I don’t mean to say I can decide to experience pleasure instead of pain if I bang my toe, but that I am able to dig around in the belief system behind my feelings, figure out what ideas are in there, improve the ideas, and translate that change over to the emotional part of me so that I react to the new ideas emotionally. If I was wrong about my motivations, this would not work, so the fact that I can do this supports the idea that I’m able to figure out what I’m thinking with a pretty high degree of accuracy. I would like to write an article about how I do this at some point because it’s been a really useful skill for me, and I want to share. But right now I’ve got a lot on my plate. I think it’s best for us to discontinue this debate about whether or not my subjective experiences match my perceptions or your expectations, and if you want to tear apart my writings on how I change myself later, you can.
Your links are bookmarked, so if your purpose was to make sure I was aware of them, I’ve got them. Thanks.
This type of hypothetical questioning is notoriously unreliable
A. If you ask the right questions and juxtapose things so that you’re getting a more well-rounded view it is not the same thing as just asking yourself one question. You can use strategy with it, which is what I was trying to show in my example, but I guess you missed it.
B. I followed it up with “to make sure I’m not having random reactions”. You are seeming to argue against a piece of a technique as if it was the whole thing. That’s not getting anywhere.
Particularly since you do feel attracted to men who are more dominate as debaters.
No, that is your perception of what I said. I did not say “I want someone who can defeat everyone else in debate.” I said “I want someone who can defeat ME in debate.”
Do you see now how you took what I said and applied a pattern to it? I am getting tired of trying to show you this.
A. I didn’t miss it the problem is that the questions don’t give you accurate information to begin with.
B. No I’m pointing out that part of the technique adds little to nothing and that the remainder, while not as flawed, isn’t enough for the level of confidence you seem to exhibit.
I have a lot more I could say on this but won’t.
No, that is your perception of what I said. I did not say “I want someone who can defeat everyone else in debate.” I said “I want someone who can defeat ME in debate.”
Do you see now how you took what I said and applied a pattern to it? I am getting tired of trying to show you this.
These are also serious misunderstandings of my points, but that brings me around to my final conclusion.
I may be misunderstanding you ( I’m almost certain you’ve been misunderstand me), which makes me feel even more confident when I say that I see no benefit in engaging you further, at least on this topic . Since you raised points A&B before this notification I decided to post the short version of my reply to them anyways, but I was already doubting the wisdom of bothering with this post’s grandparent. Your subsequent posts, here and in other threads have made up my mind.
edit-your parallel post has reduced my disinfest in talking to you generally, but still leaves me thinking that this particular conversation is a dead end.
These are also serious misunderstandings of my points
Hmm. Perhaps I will understand the nature of these misunderstandings at some point in the future.
I may be misunderstanding you
This is common for me, unfortunately. I’m not sure what to do about it, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot.
your parallel post has reduced my disinfest in talking to you generally
Okay. Well thanks for not deeming me useless to talk to.
I have bookmarked the list of biases you gave me. On first glance it looks like I’m familiar with these but I will review them further at some point to see if I am unaware of or have forgotten any. Here is a link for you, too: cognitive restructuring—it’s a psychotherapy technique very much like what we’ve been discussing. I hope I have opened your mind a little bit to the possibility that a person (perhaps you) might be able to gain access to their inner thoughts and feelings and re-write themselves. I believe there is also a method that helps one get closer to enlightenment which is taught by Buddhists, but I can’t remember what that’s called. I do not feel our discussion a complete waste of time, but, as I mentioned, I agree that continuing to disagree would not be useful.
Imagine a picture of a bunch of people. As you’re looking at it, a ring jumps out at you. Your brain is recognizing a pattern, in a sea of heads. So, you take a crayon and you draw a circle over the picture, connecting all the little heads like little dots—in a circle. You say “It’s a social circle.” In fact, the people in the picture do not know each other at all. The circle is irrelevant.
That’s how I see social hierarchy. I’ll explain more specifically:
Nearby, there’s a gigantic technology company, (well, Seattle has several of them), tens of thousands of employees each, a lot of them making 6 figures. These guys are near the top of the social hierarchy, right?
Well, not too far away, I bet there are a bunch of poor people who pick food for a living. They’re barely getting paid. Who has the power?
The IT workers can buy whatever they want. But they need the poor workers to survive.
The poor people can’t buy whatever they want, but they don’t need the IT workers to survive.
If all of the IT workers decided to quit, what would happen to the poor workers? They’d still pick food, and they’d be fine.
If all the poor workers stopped picking food, what would happen? It will spoil, and the IT people won’t eat.
Another example:
You’re in France, it’s 1789, you’re rich and privileged, you’re part of the bourgeois. Well the rest of the population decides they’re not having it. Goodbye!
Who had the power?
The rich and privileged thought THEY had the power, but the people had it all along.
So, first of all, this view that the rich people are somehow at the top of a structure is inaccurate. The structure is really more of a system, there is no top or bottom.
Another problem, two examples: Random person wins the lottery. They are upper class now, no? Not too long after, the money is gone. (This is common, from what I have read.) What class are they? A greedy woman finds herself a rich man and marries him. She has his credit cards, she can spend what she wants to. Is she upper class now, or is she just a prostitute? If class and status are not inherent to the person, it’s improper to attribute these qualities to people as if they were.
Choosing based on class is a hasty generalization that probably makes you somewhat more likely to choose somebody who is going to survive and be able to help pay for offspring, somewhat more likely to choose somebody functional over somebody dysfunctional, but it isn’t rational. The qualities that determine whether somebody is going to survive, be functional and help with offspring are a lot more complicated than that.
It would really make more sense to assess the overall situation when choosing a mate, not use some oversimplified model of a system that’s far more complicated than the word “hierarchy” implies. That’s why I’m seeing this as irrelevant pattern recognition—we’re seeing triangles in noise, thinking we’re seeing something useful.
Um, I wouldn’t call any of this arguing for the nonexistence of social hierarchies. More like arguing that hierarchies are unstable, context-dependent and, well, social.
If all of the IT workers decided to quit, what would happen to the poor workers? They’d still pick food, and they’d be fine.
Ah, but once the IT workers invent food-picking robots, poor people are screwed.
If all the poor workers stopped picking food, what would happen? It will spoil, and the IT people won’t eat.
They can always eat whatever the striking food-pickers eat (and will win the competition to get it, if there’s a scarcity problem). As a side-question, what does a food-picking job actually entail? (I’m not a native speaker)
The IT-workers vs food-pickers example doesn’t really hold up very well and even if it did it wouldn’t be an argument for the nonexistence of social hierarchies except under very narrow and artificial definitions of the word ‘hierarchy’.
Different people are treated differently. Some are deferred to more than others. Some are regarded with suspicion more than others. Those differences tend to be stable over time within a given group. That’s your social hierarchy. That those relations are different in different groups, that they can change rapidly in unusual circumstances and that ultimately they are determined by the contents of human minds doesn’t mean they aren’t a real phenomenon.
Um, I wouldn’t call any of this arguing for the nonexistence of social hierarchies. More like arguing that hierarchies are unstable, context-dependent and, well, social.
If I showed you a scribble and told you it was a circle, would you feel it was a good argument if I said “This type of circle is unstable and context-dependent, and, well, it is this type of circle”.
I think your argument would be “You need to choose something other than a circle to model this amount of complexity. The circle’s not working”.
That’s what I am saying.
Ah, but once the IT workers invent food-picking robots, poor people are screwed.
And if the survival of poor people is threatened enough, they’ll kill all the rich people and take all their stuff. They do outnumber them.
They can always eat whatever the striking food-pickers eat (and will win the competition to get it, if there’s a scarcity problem).
The following is meant in a neutral sense like “those who do it for a living are likely to be better at it” / practice makes perfect NOT in the sense that “nerds are weak” / hasty generalization. I am a nerd, and I know that some of us do work out, know martial arts or just don’t fit the weak, scrawny stereotype:
A bunch of computer nerds who sit at their desk all day are going to beat up people who exercise for a living?
It is assumptions like the ones you just made that keep highlighting for me how illusory social hierarchy is. People act as if upper class people are always going to win, as if they’re better in every way—this is ridiculous. I chalk this up to looking for a false sense of security—and finding it.
“Different people are treated differently. Some are deferred to more than others. Some are regarded with suspicion more than others. Those differences tend to be stable over time within a given group. That’s your social hierarchy.”
If the debate was about whether people ACT like there’s a social hierarchy, you’d have won. However, the point I made was that social hierarchy is an illusion, not that people don’t believe in the illusion.
That depends on the type of martial art. As far as I know, jiujitsu mostly focuses on grappling and throwing and is practiced in pairs where people alternate between performing a technique and having it performed on them by their partner. This should be far more difficult to screw up than a striking art in which you can create the illusion of learning by having people strike at the air repeatedly.
How to tell a martial art (e.g. art used for making war in the old days) from a “martial” art (e.g. a version of soccer one drives the kids to two times a week): it doesn’t award belts.
It would be a good point except that you may be implying the opposite generalization—that poor people don’t also know martial arts. And even if more nerds do know martial arts, if they’re sedentary while their opponents exercise for a living, does that not give them a disadvantage?
And even if more nerds do know martial arts, if they’re sedentary while their opponents exercise for a living, does that not give them a disadvantage?
Certainly, if they are, in fact, sedentary. The assumption that after “sitting at a desk all day” they go home and sit on the couch all evening is part of the stereotyping that Alicorn may reject. The training required to get a black belt in jijitsu is rather intensive and also the kind of thing nerds seem more likely to engage in. “Nerds” vs “People who exercise a lot” is just rather useless as a dichotomy—especially once highschool is over.
I’m a self-described nerd with a sedentary IT job that exercises, myself, and I know a lot of us get exercise. Here’s my point: do you know a single nerd who exercises 40 hours a week? I don’t. That’d be over half your free time. If you’re a low-paid worker picking food all day, you might be forced to exercise more than 40 hours a week in order to make ends meet. But there’s a huge difference between intentionally getting exercise a few times a week because you know you’re otherwise sedentary versus exercising all day long, just the same way that there’s often a huge difference in skill level between people who do something for a hobby and people who do it for a living.
(You are currently pursuing the question of fighting capability of nerds. What valuable lessons does this help anyone to learn? Alicorn’s comment that triggered this thread contained a general point (“be less free with generalizations”), but such points don’t seem to be present in the consequent discussion.)
You are currently pursuing the question of fighting capability of nerds. What valuable lessons does this help anyone to learn?
I’m interested. The subject is the impact of lifestyle choices on physical fitness and the associated combat potential. It’s probably more practically useful than the majority of conversations. The initial generalization was legitimately offensive but discussing the topic at all is perfectly legitimate. You aren’t obliged to participate but suggesting the conversation is in some way unacceptable for any reason beyond your personal preference is ill founded and unwelcome.
I’m not suggesting that it’s “unacceptable” (I’m not sure what that means; it seems to indicate way more emphasis than I’m applying). I personally somewhat dislike discussions like this being present on LW, of which this one is not special in any way, and normally act on that with my single vote; on this occasion also with an argument that elucidates the distinction relevant for my dislike.
The distinction is between object level discussions for their own sake and discussions used as testing ground for epistemic tools. These often flow into each other for no better reason than free association.
I’m sorry you feel offended, Wedrifid. I am still not sure why I should see my statement that people who are sedentary at work are less likely to win a fight as people who exercise for a living as inherently offensive, since I meant it in the spirit of “those who do something professionally tend to be better at it than those who do it as a hobby” not “nerds are weak compared to everybody else (even compared with other people who don’t exercise for a living).” Maybe part of the offense is that you knew that the type of exercise that food pickers get isn’t as optimal as what a nerd who exercises as a hobby would get. I hope you can see that my intent was more “those who do it for a living are likely to be better at it” / practice makes perfect not “nerds are weak” / hasty generalization. I updated my post. hoping it is fixed
Note the difference between feeling personally offended and acknowledging that I would not consider it unreasonable for another to claim offense in a circumstance. I was trying to convey the latter. In a context where Vladimir was attempting to deprecate the conversation I was was expressing disapproval of and opposition to his move but chose to concede that one comment in particular as something I did not wish to defend. I don’t know, for instance, whether or not Alicorn personally felt offended but social norms do grant that she would have the right to claim offense given the personal affiliations she mentions.
since I meant it in the spirit of “those who do something professionally tend to be better at it than those who do it as a hobby” not “nerds are weak compared to everybody else (even compared with other people who don’t exercise for a living).”
It is applicability of this in particular that I disagree with. It is true that people who do something professionally tend to be better than those who do it for a hobby but having a job that happens to involve some physical activity is not remotely like being a professional exerciser and is far closer to the ‘hobbyist’ end of the spectrum. In fact, I argued that someone who exercises as a hobby (I specified the an approximate level of dedication, using your thrice weekly baseline) will be more physically capable than someone who has some exercise as a side effect of their occupation.
For what it is worth my expectation is that the greatest difference in physical combat ability between various social classes (and excluding anyone qualifying for a disability) will be greater variability in the higher classes than in the lower ones. From what I understand those who actually exercise professionally (athletes, body builders, etc), high level amateur ‘exercisers’ and those with a serious exercise hobby are more likely to be in classes higher than those represented by the ‘fruit picker’ and manual laborer. Yet, as you point out, professionals are also able to be completely sedentary and still highly successful.
(It also occurs to me that class distinctions, trends and roles may be entirely different where you live than where I live. For instance, “Jock” is a concept I understand from watching teen movies but not something representative of what I ever saw at school. The relationship between physical activity, status and role just isn’t the same.)
You’re right, this discussion is not getting anywhere. I think we’re just practicing our debate skills or enjoying disagreement. There are plenty of better topics to debate on.
I remember once we had a big Open Thread argument about Pirates Vs Ninjas. IIRC it involved dozens of posts and when somebody pointed out that it had gone on too long, and how silly it had become, somebody else argued that it was, in fact, a useful rationality exercise.
Perhaps this [edit: cutting the conversation short] is a sign that the community has matured in some way.
Here’s my point: do you know a single nerd who exercises 40 hours a week? I don’t.
Me. I’m training for a marathon that I’m running in a matter of weeks and I’m not willing to give up my weight training in the mean time. The thing is, if I wanted to be in optimal combat condition I would exercise less.
If you’re a low-paid worker picking food all day, you might be forced to exercise more than 40 hours a week in order to make ends meet. But there’s a huge difference between intentionally getting exercise a few times a week because you know you’re otherwise sedentary versus exercising all day long
There is… but you seem to be suggesting that the difference is in favor of the light exercise all day long implied by fruit picking. That is a terrible form of exercise. On the other hand consider exercising actively and deliberately three times a week because you want to be fit. Off the top of my head, say, 45 minutes of weights followed by interval training. When I’m not doing endurance training that’s approximately the program I use as a default and it is the kind of training that gives significant fitness benefits and if you are going to actual train at all then all spending your day doing manual labor is going to achieve is make you too tired to train properly and put you more at risk of overtraining if you do.
The thing is, if I wanted to be in optimal combat condition I would exercise less.
I did not think of that.
There is… but you seem to be suggesting that the difference is in favor of the light exercise all day long implied by fruit picking. That is a terrible form of exercise.
Hauling around baskets of apples and climbing trees might not be light exercise. But it might be a terrible form of exercise.
I think you’re right that doing exercise designed to train for combat would be better than arbitrary food picking exercises for 40 hours a week. After all, if food picking was the best kind of exercise, there should be some way to optimize even that. I honestly don’t know whether the type of exercise the average nerd actually gets would lead to better combat advantages than the type of exercise that food pickers get, but you did think of a way to corner me.
That is making me happy.
Normally, in this circumstance it would be my turn and I’d go see if there were any figures for these, but since they’re more likely to support your point than mine, and you might enjoy nailing me with them, I will leave the opportunity open.
I honestly don’t know whether the type of exercise the average nerd actually gets would lead to better combat advantages than the type of exercise that food pickers get
On type of exercise I am confident but I am not at all sure about prevalence. If we, say, ranked all computer programmers and all fruit pickers in order of combat prowess and took the median of each I would tentatively bet on the fruit picker if given even odds when we place them in an unarmed fight to the death.
I did some research to see whether this might be right, here it is:
“America has become a nation of spectators. The latest statistics from the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tell the tale: 29% of adults are entirely sedentary and another 46% don’t get enough physical activity. That means only a quarter of all Americans get the exercise they need.
The real situation may be even worse. Most people who say they exercise report walking as their only regular physical activity, but when researchers from the CDC evaluated more than 1,500 people who said they were walkers, they found that only 6% walked often enough, far enough, or briskly enough to meet the current standards for health. Even people who report intense activity often overstate their efforts. Scientists from the University of Florida asked people to keep a log of their physical activities for a full week while they were hooked up to ambulatory heart monitors. Some 47% of the subjects reported that they had engaged in moderate activity, but only 15% actually boosted their heart rates enough to sustain moderate activity. The gap was just as great for more intense exercise: 11% reported hard activity, but only 1.5% boosted their heart rates to that level. Nobody achieved a heart rate consistent with very hard activity, though 1.5% made that claim.
“Spectator” is a kind word for it; in fact, we are a nation of couch potatoes.”
It looks like I won here, but I thought of some reasons why I may still have lost:
Females can be as big as males, and I’m sure that some have the muscle building bonuses comparable to the average male, but from what I’ve read and observed, males are more likely to have these benefits than females. Females can have the aggressive tendencies associated with testosterone, but do not get them as frequently as males do. Females can be nerds but most nerds are male. Food pickers may have a higher percentage of females than nerds do. Therefore the food pickers might be at a disadvantage in unarmed combat. (Though adding guns would change that completely.)
Nerds may exercise more than the average person in order to compensate for the stereotype that nerds are weak. I didn’t see any research specific to how much exercise nerds do or what type they use, but it is possible that this group is more fit than average.
Having a nerdy personality may make them more likely to research the best way of exercising, and measure their progress, making exercise more effective for them.
Do you see more factors that we haven’t taken into account?
My apologies, I must forgotten all about my ultimate goal of nailing you and got all caught up in just saying things because they happen to represent an accurate model of the world as I see it. Where are my priorities?
Naturally one of the most basic skills of debate is to only attack the soldiers of the enemy while smoothly steering the conversation away from any potential weaknesses in one’s own position. Even the simple process of filtering evidence and only mentioning that which favours one’s own bottom line can go a long way toward both winning a debate and making the discussion utterly useless as anything other than a status transaction or political platform.
As someone who enjoys being ‘beaten’ in discussions I’m curious whether you draw a distinction between ‘losing’ to a barrage of clever debate tactics exploiting the know human vulnerabilities and ‘losing’ in the sense that your opponent knew something that you did not and was able to communicate that new information to you effectively and clearly in a form that prompted you to learn. It is the latter form of ‘losing’ that I prize heavily while the former tends to just invoke my ire and contempt.
My apologies, I must forgotten all about my ultimate goal of nailing you and got all caught up in just saying things because they happen to represent an accurate model of the world as I see it. Where are my priorities?
I know better than to think I know what your motives are. I did hope that you wanted to kick my ass, though. I was merely expressing my disappointment, not an expectation.
Even the simple process of filtering evidence and only mentioning that which favours one’s own bottom line can go a long way toward both winning a debate and making the discussion utterly useless as anything other than a status transaction or political platform.
If I know information that could mean that my position is wrong, it will not be my position, or I won’t start a debate. I would instead begin with “I don’t know whether A or B is true. For A, I have this info. For B, this info.” and so would never attempt to convince anybody of A or B in that case, but just hope we worked it out.
The times when I actually decide to debate with somebody, there’s a reason for it—there is potential harm in them not realizing something. The way you just did with me when you thought I was making a generalization about nerds.
I suppose the reason I don’t lose often enough is because I “choose my battles” very effectively. Perhaps when people point out my flaws I am quick enough to accept them that it doesn’t turn into a debate.
I’m not interested in empty wins. I am interested in convincing people of important things when they don’t get them. Most people are tiring to debate with, for me, although that’s because people who haven’t spent a comparable amount of time on self-improvement tend to give me such a logical fallacy ridden pile of spaghetti code that it’s simply not fun to untangle. I don’t believe that I am using unethical tactics to win. There are times when I know my opponent does not want the full volume of information I have—like in my IT job, my non-IT boss does not want every detail, so I intentionally give him a simplification—but all the relevant stuff that I know he will care about is included. He likes simple explanations better and complains if I give him the technical details. That’s all that I can think of right now, but your question will have me watching out for a while.
But shouldn’t I be confused enough, somewhere, that it’s necessary to untangle me through debate? Or shouldn’t I know someone who makes my mind look like a mess of logical fallacy ridden spaghetti code? That seems to be the experience that I miss—that sense that there’s somebody out there who can see all of this better than I do. There is an imbalance in this that I do not like.
Wanting to lose is about this inequality. I want to see minds that look well-orchestrated. I am tired of what it does to me to anticipate spaghetti code.
Imagine you have 100 instances where you do a bunch of research, with the intention of having an unbiased view of the situation. Then you tell somebody about the result and they don’t agree. But they don’t support their points well. So you share the information you found and point out that their points were unsupported. They fail to produce any new information or points that actually add to the conversation. You may not have been trying to win, but if they’re unable to support their points or supply new information and yet believe themselves to be right, when you destroy that illusion, the feeling of “oh I guess I was right” is a natural result.
Imagine that during the same period of time, this happens to you zero times. Nobody finds a logical fallacy or poorly supported point. This is not because you are perfect—you aren’t. It is probably due to hanging out with the wrong people—people who are not dedicated to reasoning well. Knowing I am not perfect is not reducing the cockiness that is starting to result from this, for me. It is making me nervous instead—this knowledge that I am not perfect has become a vague intellectual acknowledgement, not a genuine sense of awareness. The sense that I have flawed ideas and could be wrong at any time no longer feels real.
Now that I am in a much bigger pond, I am hoping to experience a really good ass kicking. I want to wake up from this dream of feeling like I’m right all the time.
The reason I want to lose is because I agree with you that I shouldn’t see these debates as thing for me to win. I am tired of the experience of being right. I am tired of the nervousness that is knowing I am imperfect, that there are flaws I’m unaware of, but not having the sense that somebody will point them out.
Your comments are consistent with wanting to be proved wrong. No one experiences “being wrong”—from the inside, it feels exactly like “being right”. We do experience “realizing we were wrong”, which is hopefully followed by updating so that we once again believe ourselves to be right. Have you never changed your mind about something? Realized on your own that you were mistaken? Because you don’t need to “lose” or to have other people “beat you” to experience that.
And if you go around challenging other people about miscellaneous points in the hopes that they will prove you wrong, this will annoy the other people and is unlikely to give you the experience you hoped for.
I also think that your definition of “being wrong” might be skewed. If you try to make comments which you think will be well-received, then every comment that has been heavily downvoted is an instance in which you were wrong about the community reaction. You apparently thought most people were concerned about an Eternal September; you’ve already realized that this belief was wrong. I’m not sure why being wrong about these does not have the same impact on you as being wrong about the relative fighting skills of programmers and fruit-pickers, but it probably should have a bigger impact, since it’s a more important question.
No one experiences “being wrong”—from the inside, it feels exactly like “being right”.
That’s insightful. And I realize now that my statement wasn’t clearly worded. What I should have said was more like:
“I need to experience other people being right sometimes.”
and I can explain why, in a re-framed way, because of your example:
I don’t experience being double checked if I am the one who figures it out. I know I am flawed, and I know I can’t see all of my own flaws. If people aren’t finding holes in my ideas (they find plenty of spelling errors and social mistakes, but rarely find a problem in my ideas) I’m not being double checked at all. This makes me nervous because if I don’t see flaws with my ideas, and nobody else does either, then my most important flaws are invisible.
I feel cocky toward disagreements with people. Like “Oh, it doesn’t matter how badly they disagree with me in the beginning. After we talk, they won’t anymore.” I keep having experiences that confirm this for me. I posted a risk on a different site that provoked normalcy bias and caused a whole bunch of people to jump all over me with every (bad) reason under the sun that I was wrong. I blew down all the invalid refutations of my point and ignored the ad hominem attacks. A few days later, one of the people who had refuted me did some research, changed her mind and told her friends, then a bunch of the people jumping all over me were converted to my perspective. Everyone stopped arguing.
This is useful in the cases where I have important information.
It is unhealthy from a human perspective, though. When you think that you can convince other people of things, it feels a little creepy. It’s like I have too much power over them. Even if I am right, and the way that I wield this gift is 100% ethical, (and I may not be, and nobody’s double checking me) there’s still something that feels wrong. I want checks and balances. I want other people with this power do the same to me.
I want them to double check me. To remind me that I am not “the most powerful”. I am a perfectionist with ethics. If there is a flaw, I want to know.
And I don’t go around challenging people about miscellaneous points hoping for a debate. I’m a little insulted by that insinuation. I disagree frequently, but that’s because I feel it’s important to present the alternate perspective.
I am frequently misunderstood, that is true. I try to guess how people will react to my ideas, but I know my guesses are only a hypothesis. I try my best to present them well, but I am still learning.
Even if I am not received well at first, it doesn’t mean people won’t agree with me in the end.
It’s more important to have good ideas than to be received well, especially considering that people normally accept good ideas in the end. Though, I would like both.
If I showed you a scribble and told you it was a circle, would you feel it was a good argument if I said “This type of circle is unstable and context-dependent, and, well, it is this type of circle”.
I would consider it a horrible argument and I consider this to be a pretty bad analogy.
This looks like a definitional dispute. Like you’re not denying that there’s something out there but you’re denying that it can be called a ‘hierarchy’.
If the debate was about whether people ACT like there’s a social hierarchy, you’d have won. However, the point I made was that social hierarchy is an illusion, not that people don’t believe in the illusion.
And here it seems to be a disagreement over what it means to ‘exist’. I agree that social status isn’t in any way intrinsic to people and that it’s important and healthy to keep that in mind but calling it an illusion seems too strong. If people act like there’s a social hierarchy then having a notion of social hierarchy in your model of the world will allow you to predict those people better. I interpreted you as saying that the concept of social hierarchy is a free-floating belief completely disconnected from reality.
And now for something far less serious:
And if the survival of poor people is threatened enough, they’ll kill all the rich people and take all their stuff. They do outnumber them.
Remember, in this scenario the rich people have ROBOTS.
A bunch of computer nerds who sit at their desk all day are going to beat up people who exercise for a living?
I was thinking more about outbidding them at the food market. The scenario under consideration is that food-pickers went on strike, not total disorder and dissolution of society which the idea of violently competing for food implies.
Like you’re not denying that there’s something out there but you’re denying that it can be called a ‘hierarchy’.
Okay, define the “something” that supports the hierarchical view. I don’t believe in it, so I can’t define it for you, and if you want to convince me over to your side, you have to support the idea that a real hierarchy pattern exists that is not just a perception.
And here it seems to be a disagreement over what it means to ‘exist’.
If you do not mean to argue that the popular perception of something equates to that thing actually existing, then we are, in fact, in agreement about what existing means. Don’t you think?
If people act like there’s a social hierarchy then having a notion of social hierarchy in your model of the world will allow you to predict those people better.
I agree with this, but that’s not the context in which I originally stated that I don’t believe in social hierarchy, and it doesn’t confront my original statement that seeing a hierarchy in our social patterns is an illusion.
And if the survival of poor people is threatened enough, they’ll kill all the rich people and take all their stuff. They do outnumber them.
Remember, in this scenario the rich people have ROBOTS.
Okay. Poor people can steal those, too.
I was thinking more about outbidding them at the food market.
Because a bunch of starving people are definitely going to wait in line patiently at the food market.
The scenario under consideration is that food-pickers went on strike, not total disorder and dissolution of society which the idea of violently competing for food implies.
Okay. All the food pickers go on strike. We’ve only got so much time till the food rots. Now what? If they don’t get back to picking food soon, there won’t be any food. If there is no food, society will dissolve. That was my point.
Okay. How did farmers survive before the industrial revolution? Your point that they’re better off does nothing to hurt my point that poor people don’t need IT workers to survive.
It might not undermine the strict, literal interpretation of your words (and that is questionable; you did say ‘They’d still pick food, and they’d be fine’ which is different from merely saying that they’d survive, somehow.) But it does undermine the more general point that poor people are less dependent on the rich people than the converse.
Seeing as the statement ‘societies can survive without IT’ is trivially true but not very interesting, it was reasonable for Konkvistador to guess some interesting generalization of what you actually, argue against it and expect that it will bear on your opinion. If he failed you could have ignored him or explained why it didn’t work which would also provide everyone with more information about your picture of the world.
Pointing out that Konkvistador didn’t address your literal point isn’t very helpful. It is an illustration of what happens when you treat discussion as a game in which points are scored by saying anything that contradicts the literal meaning of your opponent’s statements while avoiding classical logical fallacies. You’re going to say a lot of boring things because they’re technically true and you can’t have your opponents scoring points against you, right? There are no points. There are no winners. No one is playing that game with you. (They might be playing a different game—one of fighting for social approval. But around here, being enthusiastic about adversarial debate is a sure way to loose at that.)
There’s a limit to the power you can have that people can’t take away from you (I believe one of the Name of the Wind books had a nice quote about that). If you want more power than a self-sufficient farmer, you have to rely on other people for that power.
For that matter, a lot of the things the IT guys want, the poor workers don’t have. If something happens to those workers, the IT guys might drop down a few rungs on the hierarchy, say to just about where the poor workers are, or maybe still a bit higher. They’re still no worse off than they would’ve been if they tried not to depend on anyone.
It’s an infationary use of “illusory”. “Social constructs” describe certain regularities in the real world, maybe not very useful regularities often presented in a confusing manner, but something real nonetheless. “Illusory” usually refers to a falsity, so its use in this case doesn’t seem appropriate. Furthermore, being a bad fit, this word shouldn’t be used in explaining/clarifying your actual point, otherwise you risk its connotations leaking in where they don’t follow from your argument.
The demonstrations of power I do enjoy are when they’re able to hold up their end of a debate with me (I keep wishing for someone to win against me)
How do you define winning? From my observation of your comments here, you refuse to concede even when your arguments no longer make sense. Maybe they just get tired and pretend to yield, or look for a girl with less ego.
Being wrong and not making sense to somebody isn’t the same thing. If you want to really nail somebody at debate, you generally have to corner them really good by highlighting a flaw in a key point or points that destroy the supports for their belief. If you see the way that Wedrifid undermines my points, those are some examples of the types of attacks that might corner me into a defeat.
You’re right to be concerned that my ego might be too big—I am concerned that I may become careless, and think that I’m going to win and then fail because I was overconfident. So far, I haven’t had a big problem with that, but if this goes on long enough, I could start doing that.
Which is why I keep asking for it. I’ve added a request for honest critiques into a few of my discussions now, hoping that people will eventually feel comfortable with debating with me, if they’re not now.
As for specifically why somebody might not make sense and yet not be wrong… well that could range anywhere from a common misunderstanding, to being bad at explaining your ideas (I admit that when trying to explain a new idea I am frequently misunderstood—there’s a pattern to my problem which is really difficult to explain and even more difficult to compensate for, so I’m not going to get into that here). It is also possible that the audience was not ready for the message, didn’t know a concept that was required to understand it or something, didn’t get enough sleep, really there are so many reasons why stuff can fail to make sense, yet not be wrong.
And then there’s the problem of getting the person to realize they’ve lost. Not all failures to realize you’ve lost are due to ego. We all want to protect ourselves against bad ideas, and nobody knows where the next bad idea is coming from. You often have to go over a lot of pieces of information with them until they get it, and sometimes it’s hard to get at their true rejection. Sometimes you think you’re right and the other person just isn’t listening to you, but really they happen to be right. There is so much confusion in the world. It takes a pretty good amount of skill to convince someone they’ve lost.
This approach to debating strikes me as exemplifying everything bad that I learned in high school policy debate. Specifically, it seems to me like debate distilled down to a status competition, with arguments as soldiers and the goal being for your side to win. For status competitions, signaling of intellectual ability, and demonstrating your blue or green allegiance, this works well. What it does not sound like, to me, is someone who is seeking the truth for herself. If you engaged in a debate with someone of lesser rhetorical skill, but who was also correct on an issue where you were incorrect (perhaps not even the main subject of the debate, but a small portion), would you notice? Would you give their argument proper attention, attempt to fix your opponent’s arguments, and learn from the result? Or would you simply be happy that you had out-debated them, supported all your soldiers, killed the enemy soldiers, and “won” the debate? Beware the prodigy of refutation.
Adversarial debates are not without their usefulness, such as in legal and political processes. It’s true that they are generally suboptimal as far as deliberative truth-seeking goes, but sometimes we really do care about refuting incorrect positions and arguments (“killing soldiers”) as clearly as possible.
I agree. I think it’s really important to be able to support a point when you really do have one. That some people were able to win debates—which takes a lot of skill—was required for humanity to progress. How else would we have left behind our superstitions? The problem isn’t trying to win the opponent over to the truth, the problem is trying to win the opponent over for other reasons. If a person was very good at debate, how would you make the distinction? Especially if everyone else is trying to win for the sake of ego? It’s not easy to tell the difference between a person who wins because they have more of the truth or are clever in the way they defending it, versus a person who wins because they’re more tenacious than their competitor.
A person who does have the most complete understanding of the truth can be attacked to the point of tedium with logical fallacies until they get bored and wander away. A group of people who are all debating for the sake of ego will not only be likely to insist that the debaters who are best at defending truth are wrong, but they will project their own motives onto that person and insist that they, too, are debating for the sake of ego. Add to that the fact that nobody believes something that they think is wrong, which leads to everybody thinking that they’re right, and it can get to be a pretty big mess.
I think that if someone defeated me in a debate, I would realize it—and that would be fine, because I’d develop an improved perspective afterward and that would be fun. This is why I’m itching for an ass-kicking.
I think you’re confusing “I am sick and tired of winning debates” for “I think all debates should be won.” I don’t know how this happened as the message I intended is very different from the one that you took.
I want to learn more during disagreements but I’m not because I keep winning.
I cannot wait until someone really kicks my ass.
If I meet someone who is not very good at rhetoric but has a great point, I am not sure what I would do. That’s a really good question, and an important thing to be aware of. I will think about that for a while. I’ll try harder to detect good points in bad wording.
I want to learn more during disagreements but I’m not because I keep winning.
I cannot wait until someone really kicks my ass.
Actually, you (you personally, not some general “you”) often don’t notice when you lose on this forum, because people give up on you and disengage, some explicitly, some silently. You might be misinterpreting this as winning, but, given that neither you nor they changed their minds, and since neither is better off, both parties lost.
You like metrics, so here is one. If you look back through your exchanges here, what is the ratio of the number of threads where people are convinced by your logic (or you are convinced by theirs) to the number of threads where people simply stopped replying or tapped out?
I regarded our exchange the exact same way. Unfortunately, that doesn’t give us any insight into the subject.
To your credit, you had a good point and I realized that there was an additional factor that supported your point that you may not know about, so I tossed it in:
Food: Now that you’ve said “a few hundred calories makes a difference”, I see that this could be a potential setback for them. That was a good point. I don’t know whether they eat a bit more or less, though I know that they can experience reactive hypoglycemia if they don’t space and balance their meals properly to avoid blood sugar crashes.
To my credit, you asserted that a person claiming an estimated IQ of 220 must be lying or from the future but completely failed to acknowledge my point when I said we have used IQ tests in recent decades that did give scores like those due to miscalibration, so people who can honesty claim an IQ score that high are not, by default, lying. You reacted as if I was assuming a perfectly accurate method was used and this guy’s true IQ was 220. However, I had stated that I was arguing that your assertion that the person must be “lying or from the future” was incorrect.
This is why I got irritated with you and wanted to write you off.
What we need to be asking here is not “Who irritates the most people during debates?”—people can be irritated by the difficulty of being made to grapple with good reasoning skills just as easily as the annoyance of tolerating poor reasoning skills. The question should not even be “Who gives up on their debates most frequently?” because if your opponent is just shooting logical fallacy silly string, it’s justified to end it—so you don’t always lose a precious learning opportunity when you cut it short. What I think we should be asking is “When we get frustrated in a debate, how can we tell where the problem is?”
You know, I think I’ve rested enough from our debate now that if you wanted to take me up on my open invitation to administer ass kickings to my ideas, I’d be up for another bout with you.
You know, I think I’ve rested enough from our debate now that if you wanted to take me up on my open invitation to administer ass kickings to my ideas, I’d be up for another bout with you.
Regardless of the merit of intellectual masochism it may be politically expedient for you to ease up on using this language to describe your interactions. If you already find it infuriating that shminux is able to quote you for the purpose of doing reputation damage then shame on you if he fools you twice. Be more careful with your words in order to not make yourself an easy target.
To put it another way, talking about how much you like ass kickings and inviting ‘bouts’ is not the optimal way for you to provoke the kind of quality intellectual challenge you desire.
Alright, I see that you probably have a good point Wedrifid. I would like your advice if you have some. Also, did you get the two emails I sent around 20 hours ago?
Actually, you (you personally, not some general “you”) often don’t notice when you lose on this forum, because people give up on you and disengage.
But how does anybody know who was ultimately right? In order to make a statement like this, you must first assume that you know who was right. If there was a debate about it, then it’s likely to have been the sort of topic where there’s some kind of ambiguity—either obvious ambiguity or some hidden pitfall that one person or the other is trying to point out—so what’s the chance you’re right about who won? If the debate was never finished, then there are points that haven’t been heard yet. Sometimes a good point very far into a debate can change the whole outcome. It seems to me that often the entire reason for a disagreement is that one or both people were missing some information that changes their perspective. As you’re aware, reality is very complex—there are a lot of different specializations that people can learn and it can take years to learn enough to have a good understanding. Sometimes applying the information or concepts from one specialization to a discussion with someone outside that specialization radically changes the outcome of the discussion. There can be a LOT of information to compare during a debate—and although it would be nice to know which pieces are missing from the other person’s perspective immediately, and although we can all make guesses, often this is not apparent until the topic has been discussed in depth. I bring specializations to this group that are different from the main specializations the group has. For example, I know a lot about psychology. Being a nerd, there are a lot of things I’ve researched and learned about that may be different—and here I am exchanging information with others who have all researched things that may be different from what’s common to the group. There is going to be a lot of information to exchange before it’s clear what perspective is best, and before an agreement is possible.
You might be misinterpreting this as winning, but, given that neither you nor they changed their minds, and since neither is better off, both parties lost.
I agree that it’s best if people agree after the debate. Coming to a point where people have exchanged enough information where they can actually agree can be very difficult. If people are giving up before the process is complete, I’m not sure what I can do about it. I have started to see a pattern where there are certain sets of information that I have which seem to be root causes for a large ratio of disagreements, so I have begun writing posts about them. Unfortunately nobody can unload all their relevant information in any small amount of time, and the fact that we have different information will cause disagreements until then. I am calibrating with you guys by reading the sequences and beginning to write some articles to bridge these gaps. It will take me some time.
If I’m wrong about something, I hope I’ll figure it out eventually. If you, or anybody else wants to be persistent with me, or recommend a specific article that you think will fill an ignorant patch in my head, I’d be happy to try to get further.
You ignored both my points: the definition of winning in a discussion (at least on this forum) as updating and a specific way of measuring it. We both lost. Tapping out.
An unusual fact: I think you are one of the few Lesswrongers to use ‘debate’ to refer to something other than formal debates. More specifically, I think that you are using the string ‘debate’ to refer to what most on this forum would call arguments or discussions or disagreements.
This is unfair to me, Shminux. I joined on August 12. That a lot of my debates are unfinished is probably due to the fact that debates can take time to reach a conclusion. It’s annoying that you and 13 voters seem to think that anything can be gleaned from taking an inventory of them at this time. That’s like giving a person a test that takes an hour and scoring them after five minutes.
It didn’t dawn on me that you might actually be serious about wanting me to go count up all my debates and see how many were unfinished until today—because that would be so ridiculously inconclusive.
Secondly, that you quoted me out of context is making me look like an ass. Having “I want to learn more during disagreements but I’m not because I keep winning.” floating there is probably going to be interpreted as “I keep winning on this forum” when, in reality, I’ve only been here for a few weeks—I hadn’t had any wins or losses at that point—and a key reason I joined is because I was hoping to get my ass kicked.
You want to know the real situation? I’m not getting enough intellectual stimulation in real life. I’m in too small a pond. That’s the context in which I am saying “I keep winning.” I was really looking forward to losing some debates HERE for that reason. It looks to be a bigger pond.
You’re making me look like an ass, and there’s no good reason for it.
You want to talk about why you (and perhaps some of your friends) and I are frustrating one another? Let’s talk about it. But don’t lets mix up this frustration with a bunch of other things or go creating metrics that won’t accurately measure diddly and wouldn’t support your point (that a bunch of unfinished debates means I’m losing a bunch of debates) anyway.
Let’s focus on the frustration and see if we can figure out why it happens.
Actually, you (you personally, not some general “you”) often don’t notice when you lose on this forum, because people give up on you and disengage.
But how does anybody know who was ultimately right?
Outside view!
You’re a smart person on Less Wrong. So are your opponents. My prior for you being on the right side of the debate is < 50%, by symmetry. (I assign a nontrivial probability that both participants are wrong.)
I can know that something is happening statistically without being able to point to a single definite instance of it.
You should pay more attention to epistemic tools at this point and not particular points of debate. Disagreement should be parsed as being about the general reasoning tools you use, not the subject matter that triggered the problem. It doesn’t matter whether you win a debate, you might learn or fail to learn something useful about general reasoning tools in both cases, so a focus on winning/losing debates is wrong if you are trying to fix that particular problem. If you don’t pay enough attention to general reasoning methods, you may end up continuing to accept occasional defeats and celebrate frequent triumphs without getting significantly better at not generating new flawed arguments (that your opponents, given the general incompetence, won’t be pointing out to you).
My point is that you’re busy talking about winning and losing debates, as if they were some sort of contest. That view is quite different than viewing debates as an opportunity to seek truth. It places incentives on things like protecting arguments you’ve made, even when they’re wrong, and attacking your opponent’s arguments, even when they’re right. It lets you declare victory when you find a major flaw in your opponent’s argument, even if they were right and you were wrong.
Would you notice if your opponent had a sound piece of logic, but didn’t have the rhetoric to support it? Would you be able to extract that subset of their argument, and change your mind based on it, even if their conclusion was wrong? What if they evidence and argument they presented was enough to show that your position was subtly wrong, but you failed to notice because you were focused on the fact that their position was even wronger?
Would you notice if their logic and conclusion was flawed, but they had some evidence you hadn’t looked at before, which made your position more tenuous? Would you stop to properly reevaluate your whole position, and reduce your certainty in it? Or would it just be one more argument against an army? Or would you not even get that far, because you attacked the obvious flaw, without looking at the whole argument—because that one flaw was severe enough that it was the only thing you had to worry about to win?
I still maintain that winning and losing debates is about status, not truth-seeking. (Note that it’s not a zero-sum game for the participants; a well-fought contest will be positive-sum, a poorly-fought one negative sum, even if one participant comes out better in either one.) And you know what? That’s fine, and likely appropriate for getting what you want, in many contexts. But, if you’re here, I’m hoping it’s not all you want in every context. And I suspect that taking different approaches in different contexts will be epistemically hazardous; we don’t compartmentalize nearly as well as we’d like, sometimes.
I wouldn’t say it is either but it is true that “discussing things to find out the truth” is actively advocated as a norm over “arguing to win”. That makes a big difference. Enough that I only take breaks from lesswrong in disgust every couple of years whereas on, say, the MENSA discussion boards I have frequented my tolerance wears thin far more quickly. With ‘debating as sparring’ as the human default having active pressure against that tendency at least helps reduce the phenomenon to more tolerable levels without eliminating it.
On Less Wrong, people mostly seem to prefer “discussing things to find out the truth” instead of “arguing to win.”
I’m not sure that’s actually true.
The fact that so many LWers disengaged from Epiphany that she thinks she has never lost an argument strongly suggest that it is true (ETA: at least in some contexts), and also that the norm has a downside of making some newcomers highly overconfident. (I can’t resist pointing out that a feature suggestion of mine probably would have helped here.)
Go on? It seems to be the most approved of/most encouraged way to discuss things, and there seems to be a lot less arguing to win than on other forums.
As a female, I wonder what it means that I don’t react to behaviors like competing for status, class signaling and spending beyond ones means by being attracted
It means that the narratives surrounding pop-distillations of evolutionary psychological accounts of human sexuality shouldn’t be given too much weight when evaluating actual human beings, mostly.
instead, I have the same feeling I get when people are being immature and stupid.
It means that the narratives surrounding pop-distillations of evolutionary psychological accounts of human sexuality shouldn’t be given too much weight when evaluating actual human beings, mostly.
Your description of being attracted to intellect in men gave me the urge to find a way to debate you. Since this would probably count as competing for status, do you think you would find it attractive in person (assuming I actually could keep up with you)?
EDIT: I’m in a relationship and not seeking another: I’m just curious about your response to men trying to attract you with intellectual signalling.
As a female, I wonder what it means that I don’t react to behaviors like competing for status, class signaling and spending beyond ones means by being attracted—instead, I have the same feeling I get when people are being immature and stupid. Lol. I have thought about this a lot. I am just not attracted to the ordinary symbols of male power—though I seem to have a few triggers. Height doesn’t matter, muscles don’t do a thing and money has no effect. The demonstrations of power I do enjoy are when they’re able to hold up their end of a debate with me (I keep wishing for someone to win against me), or when they’re doing something really, really intellectually difficult. Those things, I do respond to. Fluff? No.
I have to wonder if other women who are as intellectual as I am are the same.
Generally, when someone says that majority of A do X, but you are A and don’t do X, here are some possible explanations:
the statistics is simply wrong;
the statistics is correct about the majority, but you as an individual are an exception, and possibly so are some of your friends (this similarity could have contributed to you being friends);
the statistics is correct about the majority, but within it a minority is an exception, and you belong to this minority, and possibly so do some of your friends;
you are wrong, you are actually doing X, but you rationalize that it’s something else.
Also from the outside, if someone else is saying this, don’t forget:
publication bias—people who don’t fit the statistics are more like to write about it then those who fit are likely to write “me too” (in communities that value independence).
Specifically for this topic, think also about the difference between maximizers and satisficers. If you read that “females value X”, you may automatically translate it as “females are X-maximizers”, and then observe that you are not. But even then you could still be an X-satisficer; you could have a treshold of “status + class + spending”, where people below this treshold just don’t catch your attention, and from the pool above this treshold you select using different criteria. Thus it may seem that “status + class + spending” are not part of your criteria, but they simply make your first filter, and then you consciously focus on your personal second filter.
(Simple example: You are consciously selecting for funny guys, not rich ones. However, you would never give a homeless guy an opportunity to show you how funny he is. Therefore you are effectively selecting for funny and non-homeless guys; you just don’t think about the second part too much. For less obvious example, replace “homeless” with “not having (signals of) university education” or “not living in an expensive city”.)
What’s the difference between the second and the third bullet?
Thanks for seeing that there are multiple options for interpretation. I hate it when people interpret my behavior into a false dichotomy of options, which happens to me frequently, so I am finding this refreshing.
I have a functionality threshold, but I see that as different from a class threshold. For instance, I had a boyfriend that had recently graduated from school. He was unemployed at that point, of course. It took him a very long time to get a job due to the recession. That didn’t deter me from liking him. Why not? I had no reason to think he was dysfunctional, I figured he would get a job eventually.
On the other hand, if I meet someone who reeks of alcohol and obviously hasn’t showered in a week, I’m going to be assuming they’re dysfunctional—that even if their situation could be temporary, they’re probably exacerbating it.
That’s not about class. That’s about wanting only functional, healthy relationships in my life. It’s not a healthy relationship if you have to pay for a person’s food and shelter because they’re not able to get those things for themselves.
If I meet someone who seems functional (has showered, does not reek of alcohol, etc.) and they strike up intelligent conversation (funny is nice but intelligent conversation is more my thing) but happen to be homeless, I will judge them based on how functional they are. I would not invest much until they get back on their feet, because I know better than to think that seeming functional and actually being functional are the same thing, but I wouldn’t refuse to talk to them if they seemed interesting and functional.
Why invest in a guy who just graduated but not the homeless guy? Well let’s ask this: what did the recent graduate do wrong? Nothing. Nothing is out of the ordinary if a recent grad is looking for work. That’s normal. That’s not a red flag. The homeless person, though may have done something to cause their situation. That is an abnormal situation, a red flag. I won’t be sure they are capable of supporting themselves until I see it. On the other hand, the recent grad has just spent several years doing hard work—they’ve demonstrated that they’re functional enough to be capable of supporting themselves.
That’s what’s important for me—whether people are able to support themselves, maintain stability, and be functional in general.
That is class signalling (of a particular class) and winning debates is competing for status.
You have your own sexual preferences and the traits that you are not attracted to appear less intrinsically worthy. Another woman may say she isn’t attracted to “Fluff” like intellectual displays and rhetorical flair and instead is only attracted to the ‘things that really matter’ like social alliances, security and physical health.
This seems tautologically likely.
Lol thank you Wedrifid, that was refreshing, and you were pretty good.
I disagree with you, but you’re welcome to continue the disagreement with me. (:
Just because other people use those as signals that a person is in a particular place in a hierarchy does not mean that:
A. I believe in social hierarchies or that social hierarchies even exist. (I see them as an illusion).
B. The specific reason I am attracted to these qualities is due to an attraction to people in a certain position in the social hierarchy.
The reasons I want someone who is able to defeat me in a debate are:
It gets extremely tedious to disagree with people who can’t. I end up teaching them things endlessly in order to get us to a point of agreement, while learning too little.
I might get careless if nobody knocks me down for a long time. It’s not good for me.
It is rather uncomfortable and awkward in a relationship or even a friendship if one person is always right and the other always loses debates. That feels wrong.
“Fluff, no.” vs “You have your own preferences and other people see your preference as fluff.”
If I said I had a million dollars, but really, I was a million dollars in debt, would that be an empty claim? Yes. If a person is spending beyond their means in order to signal that they have money, they’re being dishonest. So that’s fluff.
If social hierarchies don’t actually exist, and a person signals that they’re in one, is that real, or is it a fantasy? if they don’t exist, it’s fluff.
“This seems tautologically likely.”
Okay, this was an embarrassing failure to use clear wording on my part. Although you’re not actually disagreeing with me, you got me good, lol.
That was fun. Feel free to disagree with me from now on.
Can you clarify what you mean by this?
These are decent reasons to intentionally seek out someone who can out debate you, however as far as actual attraction goes they make just as much, if not more sense as post-hoc rationalizations as real reasons. As Yvain has explained all introspection of the type you are engaging is prone to this error mode and while reasons your reasons 1 & 3 aren’t completely inconsistent with our knowledge of human attraction they don’t fit as well as the hypothesis that you are attracted to behaviors that signal high IQ and/or status while side-steping your issues with the most common ways of displaying those traits (this is largely based on what I’ve been told in various psychology classes, I don’t have the original studies that my professors based their conclusions on on hand).
-edit if anyone knows how to make blockquote play nice with the original formatting let me know, I think this works for now.
On introspection biases: For minor things, I wouldn’t be surprised if I make errors in judging why I do them, because it can take a bit of rigor to do this well. But if something is important, I can use meta-cognition and ask myself a series of questions (carefully worded—this is a skill I have practiced), seeing how I feel after each, to determine why I am doing something. I carefully word them to prevent myself from taking them as suggestions. Instead, I make sure I interpret them as yes or no questions. For instance: “Does class make me feel attracted?” instead of “Should I feel attracted to class?”—it’s an important distinction to make, especially for certain topics like fears. “Am I afraid of spiders because I assume they’re poisonous?” will get a totally different reaction (assuming I am not afraid of them) than “Would I be afraid of spiders if I thought they are all poisonous?”
It takes a little concentration to get it right during introspection.
So we’ll start with class for example. I ask myself “Do I find class attractive?” and I can ask myself things like “Imagine a guy with lots of money asks me out. How do I feel?” and “Imagine a guy who has things in common with me asks me out, how do I feel?” If you ask enough questions for compare and contrast, you can get pretty good answers this way.
To make sure I’m not just having random reactions based on how I want to feel, I come up with real examples from my recent past. In the last year or so, I have been asked out by or dated a lot of different people with varying amounts of income. There were a lot of guys who are making 6 figures—this is because I tend to attract well paid IT guys. I liked some of them but didn’t like all of them. Some of the guys making 6 figures didn’t attract me whatsoever. So income doesn’t make me like a guy all by itself.
I can ask “Does having a high income make me like them more?”
The two top attractions of all time, for me, were to an underpaid writer and a college student.
I can ask “Does availability of men with lots of money have anything to do with it?”
After dating something like five or ten guys who make around 6 figures over the last year and someodd, the one I liked best actually makes a moderate income. There is another guy that does make a large income that I liked quite a bit. But if the fact that guys who make 6 figures are available was going to interfere, it wouldn’t make sense that I’d have liked the guy with a moderate income so much.
So, there are ways to determine what your real motivations are—but it takes skill, and requires more rigor that the quick answers these people are giving in the studies, for sure.
Believing oneself to be an exceptional case was a common failure mode among the subjects of studies summarized in Yvain’s article. When confronted with the experimental results showing how their behavior was influenced in ways unknown to them, they would either deny it outright or admit that it is a very interesting phenomenon that surely affected other people but they happened to be the lone exception to the rule.
That doesn’t really preclude your introspective skills (I actually believe such skills can be developed to an extent) but it should make you suspicious.
Have you done any reading on cognitive restructuring (psychotherapy)? It’s interesting that people on this forum believe this is impossible when a method exists as a type of psychotherapy. Have you guys refuted cognitive restructuring or are you just unaware of it?
I’m aware of cognitive restructuring. Note that I haven’t said that introspection is completely useless or even that the specific type of introspection you describe is totally impossible, just that you are very confident about it and there’s a common pattern of extreme overconfidence.
This type of hypothetical questioning is notoriously unreliable, people ofter come up with answers that don’t reflect their actual reactions, If you read closely Yvain’s article already gives several examples. It’s also one of the methodologies that my psychology teachers highlighted as sounding good, but being largely unreliable.
This is better, but between the general unreliability of memory and the number other factors that would need to be controlled for its still not that great. Particularly since you do feel attracted to men who are more dominate as debaters.
It occurs to me that since this debate is about me and my subjective experiences, there’s really no way for either of us to win. Even if we got a whole bunch of people with different incomes and did an experiment on me to see which ones I was more attracted to, the result of the experiment would be subjective and there would be no way for anyone to know I wasn’t pretending.
I still think that there are ways to know what’s going on inside you with relatively good certainty. Part of the reason I believe this is because I’m able to change myself, meaning that I am able to decide to feel a different way and accomplish that. I don’t mean to say I can decide to experience pleasure instead of pain if I bang my toe, but that I am able to dig around in the belief system behind my feelings, figure out what ideas are in there, improve the ideas, and translate that change over to the emotional part of me so that I react to the new ideas emotionally. If I was wrong about my motivations, this would not work, so the fact that I can do this supports the idea that I’m able to figure out what I’m thinking with a pretty high degree of accuracy. I would like to write an article about how I do this at some point because it’s been a really useful skill for me, and I want to share. But right now I’ve got a lot on my plate. I think it’s best for us to discontinue this debate about whether or not my subjective experiences match my perceptions or your expectations, and if you want to tear apart my writings on how I change myself later, you can.
Your links are bookmarked, so if your purpose was to make sure I was aware of them, I’ve got them. Thanks.
Thanks for those links by the way, they are interesting.
A. If you ask the right questions and juxtapose things so that you’re getting a more well-rounded view it is not the same thing as just asking yourself one question. You can use strategy with it, which is what I was trying to show in my example, but I guess you missed it.
B. I followed it up with “to make sure I’m not having random reactions”. You are seeming to argue against a piece of a technique as if it was the whole thing. That’s not getting anywhere.
No, that is your perception of what I said. I did not say “I want someone who can defeat everyone else in debate.” I said “I want someone who can defeat ME in debate.”
Do you see now how you took what I said and applied a pattern to it? I am getting tired of trying to show you this.
A. I didn’t miss it the problem is that the questions don’t give you accurate information to begin with. B. No I’m pointing out that part of the technique adds little to nothing and that the remainder, while not as flawed, isn’t enough for the level of confidence you seem to exhibit. I have a lot more I could say on this but won’t.
These are also serious misunderstandings of my points, but that brings me around to my final conclusion. I may be misunderstanding you ( I’m almost certain you’ve been misunderstand me), which makes me feel even more confident when I say that I see no benefit in engaging you further, at least on this topic . Since you raised points A&B before this notification I decided to post the short version of my reply to them anyways, but I was already doubting the wisdom of bothering with this post’s grandparent. Your subsequent posts, here and in other threads have made up my mind. edit-your parallel post has reduced my disinfest in talking to you generally, but still leaves me thinking that this particular conversation is a dead end.
Hmm. Perhaps I will understand the nature of these misunderstandings at some point in the future.
This is common for me, unfortunately. I’m not sure what to do about it, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot.
Okay. Well thanks for not deeming me useless to talk to.
I have bookmarked the list of biases you gave me. On first glance it looks like I’m familiar with these but I will review them further at some point to see if I am unaware of or have forgotten any. Here is a link for you, too: cognitive restructuring—it’s a psychotherapy technique very much like what we’ve been discussing. I hope I have opened your mind a little bit to the possibility that a person (perhaps you) might be able to gain access to their inner thoughts and feelings and re-write themselves. I believe there is also a method that helps one get closer to enlightenment which is taught by Buddhists, but I can’t remember what that’s called. I do not feel our discussion a complete waste of time, but, as I mentioned, I agree that continuing to disagree would not be useful.
My social hierarchy view:
Imagine a picture of a bunch of people. As you’re looking at it, a ring jumps out at you. Your brain is recognizing a pattern, in a sea of heads. So, you take a crayon and you draw a circle over the picture, connecting all the little heads like little dots—in a circle. You say “It’s a social circle.” In fact, the people in the picture do not know each other at all. The circle is irrelevant.
That’s how I see social hierarchy. I’ll explain more specifically:
Nearby, there’s a gigantic technology company, (well, Seattle has several of them), tens of thousands of employees each, a lot of them making 6 figures. These guys are near the top of the social hierarchy, right?
Well, not too far away, I bet there are a bunch of poor people who pick food for a living. They’re barely getting paid. Who has the power?
The IT workers can buy whatever they want. But they need the poor workers to survive.
The poor people can’t buy whatever they want, but they don’t need the IT workers to survive.
If all of the IT workers decided to quit, what would happen to the poor workers? They’d still pick food, and they’d be fine.
If all the poor workers stopped picking food, what would happen? It will spoil, and the IT people won’t eat.
Another example:
You’re in France, it’s 1789, you’re rich and privileged, you’re part of the bourgeois. Well the rest of the population decides they’re not having it. Goodbye!
Who had the power?
The rich and privileged thought THEY had the power, but the people had it all along.
So, first of all, this view that the rich people are somehow at the top of a structure is inaccurate. The structure is really more of a system, there is no top or bottom.
Another problem, two examples: Random person wins the lottery. They are upper class now, no? Not too long after, the money is gone. (This is common, from what I have read.) What class are they? A greedy woman finds herself a rich man and marries him. She has his credit cards, she can spend what she wants to. Is she upper class now, or is she just a prostitute? If class and status are not inherent to the person, it’s improper to attribute these qualities to people as if they were.
Choosing based on class is a hasty generalization that probably makes you somewhat more likely to choose somebody who is going to survive and be able to help pay for offspring, somewhat more likely to choose somebody functional over somebody dysfunctional, but it isn’t rational. The qualities that determine whether somebody is going to survive, be functional and help with offspring are a lot more complicated than that.
It would really make more sense to assess the overall situation when choosing a mate, not use some oversimplified model of a system that’s far more complicated than the word “hierarchy” implies. That’s why I’m seeing this as irrelevant pattern recognition—we’re seeing triangles in noise, thinking we’re seeing something useful.
Um, I wouldn’t call any of this arguing for the nonexistence of social hierarchies. More like arguing that hierarchies are unstable, context-dependent and, well, social.
Ah, but once the IT workers invent food-picking robots, poor people are screwed.
They can always eat whatever the striking food-pickers eat (and will win the competition to get it, if there’s a scarcity problem). As a side-question, what does a food-picking job actually entail? (I’m not a native speaker)
The IT-workers vs food-pickers example doesn’t really hold up very well and even if it did it wouldn’t be an argument for the nonexistence of social hierarchies except under very narrow and artificial definitions of the word ‘hierarchy’.
Different people are treated differently. Some are deferred to more than others. Some are regarded with suspicion more than others. Those differences tend to be stable over time within a given group. That’s your social hierarchy. That those relations are different in different groups, that they can change rapidly in unusual circumstances and that ultimately they are determined by the contents of human minds doesn’t mean they aren’t a real phenomenon.
If I showed you a scribble and told you it was a circle, would you feel it was a good argument if I said “This type of circle is unstable and context-dependent, and, well, it is this type of circle”.
I think your argument would be “You need to choose something other than a circle to model this amount of complexity. The circle’s not working”.
That’s what I am saying.
And if the survival of poor people is threatened enough, they’ll kill all the rich people and take all their stuff. They do outnumber them.
The following is meant in a neutral sense like “those who do it for a living are likely to be better at it” / practice makes perfect NOT in the sense that “nerds are weak” / hasty generalization. I am a nerd, and I know that some of us do work out, know martial arts or just don’t fit the weak, scrawny stereotype:
A bunch of computer nerds who sit at their desk all day are going to beat up people who exercise for a living?
It is assumptions like the ones you just made that keep highlighting for me how illusory social hierarchy is. People act as if upper class people are always going to win, as if they’re better in every way—this is ridiculous. I chalk this up to looking for a false sense of security—and finding it.
If the debate was about whether people ACT like there’s a social hierarchy, you’d have won. However, the point I made was that social hierarchy is an illusion, not that people don’t believe in the illusion.
My dad is a computer nerd who sits at his desk all day. Also, he has a black belt in jiujitsu.
Be less free with generalizations.
As martial artists have pointed out for a long time, holding a black belt is a fairly weak predictor of success in a true fight.
That depends on the type of martial art. As far as I know, jiujitsu mostly focuses on grappling and throwing and is practiced in pairs where people alternate between performing a technique and having it performed on them by their partner. This should be far more difficult to screw up than a striking art in which you can create the illusion of learning by having people strike at the air repeatedly.
How to tell a martial art (e.g. art used for making war in the old days) from a “martial” art (e.g. a version of soccer one drives the kids to two times a week): it doesn’t award belts.
It would be a good point except that you may be implying the opposite generalization—that poor people don’t also know martial arts. And even if more nerds do know martial arts, if they’re sedentary while their opponents exercise for a living, does that not give them a disadvantage?
Certainly, if they are, in fact, sedentary. The assumption that after “sitting at a desk all day” they go home and sit on the couch all evening is part of the stereotyping that Alicorn may reject. The training required to get a black belt in jijitsu is rather intensive and also the kind of thing nerds seem more likely to engage in. “Nerds” vs “People who exercise a lot” is just rather useless as a dichotomy—especially once highschool is over.
I’m a self-described nerd with a sedentary IT job that exercises, myself, and I know a lot of us get exercise. Here’s my point: do you know a single nerd who exercises 40 hours a week? I don’t. That’d be over half your free time. If you’re a low-paid worker picking food all day, you might be forced to exercise more than 40 hours a week in order to make ends meet. But there’s a huge difference between intentionally getting exercise a few times a week because you know you’re otherwise sedentary versus exercising all day long, just the same way that there’s often a huge difference in skill level between people who do something for a hobby and people who do it for a living.
(You are currently pursuing the question of fighting capability of nerds. What valuable lessons does this help anyone to learn? Alicorn’s comment that triggered this thread contained a general point (“be less free with generalizations”), but such points don’t seem to be present in the consequent discussion.)
I’m interested. The subject is the impact of lifestyle choices on physical fitness and the associated combat potential. It’s probably more practically useful than the majority of conversations. The initial generalization was legitimately offensive but discussing the topic at all is perfectly legitimate. You aren’t obliged to participate but suggesting the conversation is in some way unacceptable for any reason beyond your personal preference is ill founded and unwelcome.
I’m not suggesting that it’s “unacceptable” (I’m not sure what that means; it seems to indicate way more emphasis than I’m applying). I personally somewhat dislike discussions like this being present on LW, of which this one is not special in any way, and normally act on that with my single vote; on this occasion also with an argument that elucidates the distinction relevant for my dislike.
The distinction is between object level discussions for their own sake and discussions used as testing ground for epistemic tools. These often flow into each other for no better reason than free association.
I’m sorry you feel offended, Wedrifid. I am still not sure why I should see my statement that people who are sedentary at work are less likely to win a fight as people who exercise for a living as inherently offensive, since I meant it in the spirit of “those who do something professionally tend to be better at it than those who do it as a hobby” not “nerds are weak compared to everybody else (even compared with other people who don’t exercise for a living).” Maybe part of the offense is that you knew that the type of exercise that food pickers get isn’t as optimal as what a nerd who exercises as a hobby would get. I hope you can see that my intent was more “those who do it for a living are likely to be better at it” / practice makes perfect not “nerds are weak” / hasty generalization. I updated my post. hoping it is fixed
Note the difference between feeling personally offended and acknowledging that I would not consider it unreasonable for another to claim offense in a circumstance. I was trying to convey the latter. In a context where Vladimir was attempting to deprecate the conversation I was was expressing disapproval of and opposition to his move but chose to concede that one comment in particular as something I did not wish to defend. I don’t know, for instance, whether or not Alicorn personally felt offended but social norms do grant that she would have the right to claim offense given the personal affiliations she mentions.
It is applicability of this in particular that I disagree with. It is true that people who do something professionally tend to be better than those who do it for a hobby but having a job that happens to involve some physical activity is not remotely like being a professional exerciser and is far closer to the ‘hobbyist’ end of the spectrum. In fact, I argued that someone who exercises as a hobby (I specified the an approximate level of dedication, using your thrice weekly baseline) will be more physically capable than someone who has some exercise as a side effect of their occupation.
For what it is worth my expectation is that the greatest difference in physical combat ability between various social classes (and excluding anyone qualifying for a disability) will be greater variability in the higher classes than in the lower ones. From what I understand those who actually exercise professionally (athletes, body builders, etc), high level amateur ‘exercisers’ and those with a serious exercise hobby are more likely to be in classes higher than those represented by the ‘fruit picker’ and manual laborer. Yet, as you point out, professionals are also able to be completely sedentary and still highly successful.
(It also occurs to me that class distinctions, trends and roles may be entirely different where you live than where I live. For instance, “Jock” is a concept I understand from watching teen movies but not something representative of what I ever saw at school. The relationship between physical activity, status and role just isn’t the same.)
You’re right, this discussion is not getting anywhere. I think we’re just practicing our debate skills or enjoying disagreement. There are plenty of better topics to debate on.
I remember once we had a big Open Thread argument about Pirates Vs Ninjas. IIRC it involved dozens of posts and when somebody pointed out that it had gone on too long, and how silly it had become, somebody else argued that it was, in fact, a useful rationality exercise.
Perhaps this [edit: cutting the conversation short] is a sign that the community has matured in some way.
Me. I’m training for a marathon that I’m running in a matter of weeks and I’m not willing to give up my weight training in the mean time. The thing is, if I wanted to be in optimal combat condition I would exercise less.
There is… but you seem to be suggesting that the difference is in favor of the light exercise all day long implied by fruit picking. That is a terrible form of exercise. On the other hand consider exercising actively and deliberately three times a week because you want to be fit. Off the top of my head, say, 45 minutes of weights followed by interval training. When I’m not doing endurance training that’s approximately the program I use as a default and it is the kind of training that gives significant fitness benefits and if you are going to actual train at all then all spending your day doing manual labor is going to achieve is make you too tired to train properly and put you more at risk of overtraining if you do.
I did not think of that.
Hauling around baskets of apples and climbing trees might not be light exercise. But it might be a terrible form of exercise.
I think you’re right that doing exercise designed to train for combat would be better than arbitrary food picking exercises for 40 hours a week. After all, if food picking was the best kind of exercise, there should be some way to optimize even that. I honestly don’t know whether the type of exercise the average nerd actually gets would lead to better combat advantages than the type of exercise that food pickers get, but you did think of a way to corner me.
That is making me happy.
Normally, in this circumstance it would be my turn and I’d go see if there were any figures for these, but since they’re more likely to support your point than mine, and you might enjoy nailing me with them, I will leave the opportunity open.
On type of exercise I am confident but I am not at all sure about prevalence. If we, say, ranked all computer programmers and all fruit pickers in order of combat prowess and took the median of each I would tentatively bet on the fruit picker if given even odds when we place them in an unarmed fight to the death.
Aww. You didn’t nail me.
I did some research to see whether this might be right, here it is:
Harvard Men’s Health Watch, May 2004 issue
It looks like I won here, but I thought of some reasons why I may still have lost:
Females can be as big as males, and I’m sure that some have the muscle building bonuses comparable to the average male, but from what I’ve read and observed, males are more likely to have these benefits than females. Females can have the aggressive tendencies associated with testosterone, but do not get them as frequently as males do. Females can be nerds but most nerds are male. Food pickers may have a higher percentage of females than nerds do. Therefore the food pickers might be at a disadvantage in unarmed combat. (Though adding guns would change that completely.)
Nerds may exercise more than the average person in order to compensate for the stereotype that nerds are weak. I didn’t see any research specific to how much exercise nerds do or what type they use, but it is possible that this group is more fit than average.
Having a nerdy personality may make them more likely to research the best way of exercising, and measure their progress, making exercise more effective for them.
Do you see more factors that we haven’t taken into account?
My apologies, I must forgotten all about my ultimate goal of nailing you and got all caught up in just saying things because they happen to represent an accurate model of the world as I see it. Where are my priorities?
Naturally one of the most basic skills of debate is to only attack the soldiers of the enemy while smoothly steering the conversation away from any potential weaknesses in one’s own position. Even the simple process of filtering evidence and only mentioning that which favours one’s own bottom line can go a long way toward both winning a debate and making the discussion utterly useless as anything other than a status transaction or political platform.
As someone who enjoys being ‘beaten’ in discussions I’m curious whether you draw a distinction between ‘losing’ to a barrage of clever debate tactics exploiting the know human vulnerabilities and ‘losing’ in the sense that your opponent knew something that you did not and was able to communicate that new information to you effectively and clearly in a form that prompted you to learn. It is the latter form of ‘losing’ that I prize heavily while the former tends to just invoke my ire and contempt.
I know better than to think I know what your motives are. I did hope that you wanted to kick my ass, though. I was merely expressing my disappointment, not an expectation.
If I know information that could mean that my position is wrong, it will not be my position, or I won’t start a debate. I would instead begin with “I don’t know whether A or B is true. For A, I have this info. For B, this info.” and so would never attempt to convince anybody of A or B in that case, but just hope we worked it out.
The times when I actually decide to debate with somebody, there’s a reason for it—there is potential harm in them not realizing something. The way you just did with me when you thought I was making a generalization about nerds.
I suppose the reason I don’t lose often enough is because I “choose my battles” very effectively. Perhaps when people point out my flaws I am quick enough to accept them that it doesn’t turn into a debate.
I’m not interested in empty wins. I am interested in convincing people of important things when they don’t get them. Most people are tiring to debate with, for me, although that’s because people who haven’t spent a comparable amount of time on self-improvement tend to give me such a logical fallacy ridden pile of spaghetti code that it’s simply not fun to untangle. I don’t believe that I am using unethical tactics to win. There are times when I know my opponent does not want the full volume of information I have—like in my IT job, my non-IT boss does not want every detail, so I intentionally give him a simplification—but all the relevant stuff that I know he will care about is included. He likes simple explanations better and complains if I give him the technical details. That’s all that I can think of right now, but your question will have me watching out for a while.
But shouldn’t I be confused enough, somewhere, that it’s necessary to untangle me through debate? Or shouldn’t I know someone who makes my mind look like a mess of logical fallacy ridden spaghetti code? That seems to be the experience that I miss—that sense that there’s somebody out there who can see all of this better than I do. There is an imbalance in this that I do not like.
Wanting to lose is about this inequality. I want to see minds that look well-orchestrated. I am tired of what it does to me to anticipate spaghetti code.
You should stop thinking about discussions in these terms.
Imagine you have 100 instances where you do a bunch of research, with the intention of having an unbiased view of the situation. Then you tell somebody about the result and they don’t agree. But they don’t support their points well. So you share the information you found and point out that their points were unsupported. They fail to produce any new information or points that actually add to the conversation. You may not have been trying to win, but if they’re unable to support their points or supply new information and yet believe themselves to be right, when you destroy that illusion, the feeling of “oh I guess I was right” is a natural result.
Imagine that during the same period of time, this happens to you zero times. Nobody finds a logical fallacy or poorly supported point. This is not because you are perfect—you aren’t. It is probably due to hanging out with the wrong people—people who are not dedicated to reasoning well. Knowing I am not perfect is not reducing the cockiness that is starting to result from this, for me. It is making me nervous instead—this knowledge that I am not perfect has become a vague intellectual acknowledgement, not a genuine sense of awareness. The sense that I have flawed ideas and could be wrong at any time no longer feels real.
Now that I am in a much bigger pond, I am hoping to experience a really good ass kicking. I want to wake up from this dream of feeling like I’m right all the time.
The reason I want to lose is because I agree with you that I shouldn’t see these debates as thing for me to win. I am tired of the experience of being right. I am tired of the nervousness that is knowing I am imperfect, that there are flaws I’m unaware of, but not having the sense that somebody will point them out.
I just want to experience being wrong sometimes.
Your comments are consistent with wanting to be proved wrong. No one experiences “being wrong”—from the inside, it feels exactly like “being right”. We do experience “realizing we were wrong”, which is hopefully followed by updating so that we once again believe ourselves to be right. Have you never changed your mind about something? Realized on your own that you were mistaken? Because you don’t need to “lose” or to have other people “beat you” to experience that.
And if you go around challenging other people about miscellaneous points in the hopes that they will prove you wrong, this will annoy the other people and is unlikely to give you the experience you hoped for.
I also think that your definition of “being wrong” might be skewed. If you try to make comments which you think will be well-received, then every comment that has been heavily downvoted is an instance in which you were wrong about the community reaction. You apparently thought most people were concerned about an Eternal September; you’ve already realized that this belief was wrong. I’m not sure why being wrong about these does not have the same impact on you as being wrong about the relative fighting skills of programmers and fruit-pickers, but it probably should have a bigger impact, since it’s a more important question.
That’s insightful. And I realize now that my statement wasn’t clearly worded. What I should have said was more like:
“I need to experience other people being right sometimes.”
and I can explain why, in a re-framed way, because of your example:
I don’t experience being double checked if I am the one who figures it out. I know I am flawed, and I know I can’t see all of my own flaws. If people aren’t finding holes in my ideas (they find plenty of spelling errors and social mistakes, but rarely find a problem in my ideas) I’m not being double checked at all. This makes me nervous because if I don’t see flaws with my ideas, and nobody else does either, then my most important flaws are invisible.
I feel cocky toward disagreements with people. Like “Oh, it doesn’t matter how badly they disagree with me in the beginning. After we talk, they won’t anymore.” I keep having experiences that confirm this for me. I posted a risk on a different site that provoked normalcy bias and caused a whole bunch of people to jump all over me with every (bad) reason under the sun that I was wrong. I blew down all the invalid refutations of my point and ignored the ad hominem attacks. A few days later, one of the people who had refuted me did some research, changed her mind and told her friends, then a bunch of the people jumping all over me were converted to my perspective. Everyone stopped arguing.
This is useful in the cases where I have important information.
It is unhealthy from a human perspective, though. When you think that you can convince other people of things, it feels a little creepy. It’s like I have too much power over them. Even if I am right, and the way that I wield this gift is 100% ethical, (and I may not be, and nobody’s double checking me) there’s still something that feels wrong. I want checks and balances. I want other people with this power do the same to me.
I want them to double check me. To remind me that I am not “the most powerful”. I am a perfectionist with ethics. If there is a flaw, I want to know.
And I don’t go around challenging people about miscellaneous points hoping for a debate. I’m a little insulted by that insinuation. I disagree frequently, but that’s because I feel it’s important to present the alternate perspective.
I am frequently misunderstood, that is true. I try to guess how people will react to my ideas, but I know my guesses are only a hypothesis. I try my best to present them well, but I am still learning.
Even if I am not received well at first, it doesn’t mean people won’t agree with me in the end.
It’s more important to have good ideas than to be received well, especially considering that people normally accept good ideas in the end. Though, I would like both.
Robots can fix that too!
I would consider it a horrible argument and I consider this to be a pretty bad analogy.
This looks like a definitional dispute. Like you’re not denying that there’s something out there but you’re denying that it can be called a ‘hierarchy’.
And here it seems to be a disagreement over what it means to ‘exist’. I agree that social status isn’t in any way intrinsic to people and that it’s important and healthy to keep that in mind but calling it an illusion seems too strong. If people act like there’s a social hierarchy then having a notion of social hierarchy in your model of the world will allow you to predict those people better. I interpreted you as saying that the concept of social hierarchy is a free-floating belief completely disconnected from reality.
And now for something far less serious:
Remember, in this scenario the rich people have ROBOTS.
I was thinking more about outbidding them at the food market. The scenario under consideration is that food-pickers went on strike, not total disorder and dissolution of society which the idea of violently competing for food implies.
Okay, define the “something” that supports the hierarchical view. I don’t believe in it, so I can’t define it for you, and if you want to convince me over to your side, you have to support the idea that a real hierarchy pattern exists that is not just a perception.
If you do not mean to argue that the popular perception of something equates to that thing actually existing, then we are, in fact, in agreement about what existing means. Don’t you think?
I agree with this, but that’s not the context in which I originally stated that I don’t believe in social hierarchy, and it doesn’t confront my original statement that seeing a hierarchy in our social patterns is an illusion.
Okay. Poor people can steal those, too.
Because a bunch of starving people are definitely going to wait in line patiently at the food market.
Okay. All the food pickers go on strike. We’ve only got so much time till the food rots. Now what? If they don’t get back to picking food soon, there won’t be any food. If there is no food, society will dissolve. That was my point.
Actually I’m pretty sure farmers across the world are better off with IT workers existing than not.
Okay. How did farmers survive before the industrial revolution? Your point that they’re better off does nothing to hurt my point that poor people don’t need IT workers to survive.
It might not undermine the strict, literal interpretation of your words (and that is questionable; you did say ‘They’d still pick food, and they’d be fine’ which is different from merely saying that they’d survive, somehow.) But it does undermine the more general point that poor people are less dependent on the rich people than the converse.
Seeing as the statement ‘societies can survive without IT’ is trivially true but not very interesting, it was reasonable for Konkvistador to guess some interesting generalization of what you actually, argue against it and expect that it will bear on your opinion. If he failed you could have ignored him or explained why it didn’t work which would also provide everyone with more information about your picture of the world.
Pointing out that Konkvistador didn’t address your literal point isn’t very helpful. It is an illustration of what happens when you treat discussion as a game in which points are scored by saying anything that contradicts the literal meaning of your opponent’s statements while avoiding classical logical fallacies. You’re going to say a lot of boring things because they’re technically true and you can’t have your opponents scoring points against you, right? There are no points. There are no winners. No one is playing that game with you. (They might be playing a different game—one of fighting for social approval. But around here, being enthusiastic about adversarial debate is a sure way to loose at that.)
I don’t think we had ~7 billion farmers before the industrial revolution.
There’s a limit to the power you can have that people can’t take away from you (I believe one of the Name of the Wind books had a nice quote about that). If you want more power than a self-sufficient farmer, you have to rely on other people for that power.
For that matter, a lot of the things the IT guys want, the poor workers don’t have. If something happens to those workers, the IT guys might drop down a few rungs on the hierarchy, say to just about where the poor workers are, or maybe still a bit higher. They’re still no worse off than they would’ve been if they tried not to depend on anyone.
Could you elaborate? Do you see all social constructs as being illusory?
Sure, I clarified that here
It’s an infationary use of “illusory”. “Social constructs” describe certain regularities in the real world, maybe not very useful regularities often presented in a confusing manner, but something real nonetheless. “Illusory” usually refers to a falsity, so its use in this case doesn’t seem appropriate. Furthermore, being a bad fit, this word shouldn’t be used in explaining/clarifying your actual point, otherwise you risk its connotations leaking in where they don’t follow from your argument.
How do you define winning? From my observation of your comments here, you refuse to concede even when your arguments no longer make sense. Maybe they just get tired and pretend to yield, or look for a girl with less ego.
Being wrong and not making sense to somebody isn’t the same thing. If you want to really nail somebody at debate, you generally have to corner them really good by highlighting a flaw in a key point or points that destroy the supports for their belief. If you see the way that Wedrifid undermines my points, those are some examples of the types of attacks that might corner me into a defeat.
You’re right to be concerned that my ego might be too big—I am concerned that I may become careless, and think that I’m going to win and then fail because I was overconfident. So far, I haven’t had a big problem with that, but if this goes on long enough, I could start doing that.
Which is why I keep asking for it. I’ve added a request for honest critiques into a few of my discussions now, hoping that people will eventually feel comfortable with debating with me, if they’re not now.
As for specifically why somebody might not make sense and yet not be wrong… well that could range anywhere from a common misunderstanding, to being bad at explaining your ideas (I admit that when trying to explain a new idea I am frequently misunderstood—there’s a pattern to my problem which is really difficult to explain and even more difficult to compensate for, so I’m not going to get into that here). It is also possible that the audience was not ready for the message, didn’t know a concept that was required to understand it or something, didn’t get enough sleep, really there are so many reasons why stuff can fail to make sense, yet not be wrong.
And then there’s the problem of getting the person to realize they’ve lost. Not all failures to realize you’ve lost are due to ego. We all want to protect ourselves against bad ideas, and nobody knows where the next bad idea is coming from. You often have to go over a lot of pieces of information with them until they get it, and sometimes it’s hard to get at their true rejection. Sometimes you think you’re right and the other person just isn’t listening to you, but really they happen to be right. There is so much confusion in the world. It takes a pretty good amount of skill to convince someone they’ve lost.
This approach to debating strikes me as exemplifying everything bad that I learned in high school policy debate. Specifically, it seems to me like debate distilled down to a status competition, with arguments as soldiers and the goal being for your side to win. For status competitions, signaling of intellectual ability, and demonstrating your blue or green allegiance, this works well. What it does not sound like, to me, is someone who is seeking the truth for herself. If you engaged in a debate with someone of lesser rhetorical skill, but who was also correct on an issue where you were incorrect (perhaps not even the main subject of the debate, but a small portion), would you notice? Would you give their argument proper attention, attempt to fix your opponent’s arguments, and learn from the result? Or would you simply be happy that you had out-debated them, supported all your soldiers, killed the enemy soldiers, and “won” the debate? Beware the prodigy of refutation.
Adversarial debates are not without their usefulness, such as in legal and political processes. It’s true that they are generally suboptimal as far as deliberative truth-seeking goes, but sometimes we really do care about refuting incorrect positions and arguments (“killing soldiers”) as clearly as possible.
I agree. I think it’s really important to be able to support a point when you really do have one. That some people were able to win debates—which takes a lot of skill—was required for humanity to progress. How else would we have left behind our superstitions? The problem isn’t trying to win the opponent over to the truth, the problem is trying to win the opponent over for other reasons. If a person was very good at debate, how would you make the distinction? Especially if everyone else is trying to win for the sake of ego? It’s not easy to tell the difference between a person who wins because they have more of the truth or are clever in the way they defending it, versus a person who wins because they’re more tenacious than their competitor.
A person who does have the most complete understanding of the truth can be attacked to the point of tedium with logical fallacies until they get bored and wander away. A group of people who are all debating for the sake of ego will not only be likely to insist that the debaters who are best at defending truth are wrong, but they will project their own motives onto that person and insist that they, too, are debating for the sake of ego. Add to that the fact that nobody believes something that they think is wrong, which leads to everybody thinking that they’re right, and it can get to be a pretty big mess.
This gets very confusing.
I frequently make improvements when people point out flaws and admit to my mistakes.
Here is one
a much funnier one
I think that if someone defeated me in a debate, I would realize it—and that would be fine, because I’d develop an improved perspective afterward and that would be fun. This is why I’m itching for an ass-kicking.
I think you’re confusing “I am sick and tired of winning debates” for “I think all debates should be won.” I don’t know how this happened as the message I intended is very different from the one that you took.
I want to learn more during disagreements but I’m not because I keep winning.
I cannot wait until someone really kicks my ass.
If I meet someone who is not very good at rhetoric but has a great point, I am not sure what I would do. That’s a really good question, and an important thing to be aware of. I will think about that for a while. I’ll try harder to detect good points in bad wording.
Actually, you (you personally, not some general “you”) often don’t notice when you lose on this forum, because people give up on you and disengage, some explicitly, some silently. You might be misinterpreting this as winning, but, given that neither you nor they changed their minds, and since neither is better off, both parties lost.
You like metrics, so here is one. If you look back through your exchanges here, what is the ratio of the number of threads where people are convinced by your logic (or you are convinced by theirs) to the number of threads where people simply stopped replying or tapped out?
I regarded my exchange with Epiphany on intelligence & the gifted as an example of this.
I regarded our exchange the exact same way. Unfortunately, that doesn’t give us any insight into the subject.
To your credit, you had a good point and I realized that there was an additional factor that supported your point that you may not know about, so I tossed it in:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kk/why_are_individual_iq_differences_ok/77vs
To my credit, you asserted that a person claiming an estimated IQ of 220 must be lying or from the future but completely failed to acknowledge my point when I said we have used IQ tests in recent decades that did give scores like those due to miscalibration, so people who can honesty claim an IQ score that high are not, by default, lying. You reacted as if I was assuming a perfectly accurate method was used and this guy’s true IQ was 220. However, I had stated that I was arguing that your assertion that the person must be “lying or from the future” was incorrect.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kk/why_are_individual_iq_differences_ok/77f5
This is why I got irritated with you and wanted to write you off.
What we need to be asking here is not “Who irritates the most people during debates?”—people can be irritated by the difficulty of being made to grapple with good reasoning skills just as easily as the annoyance of tolerating poor reasoning skills. The question should not even be “Who gives up on their debates most frequently?” because if your opponent is just shooting logical fallacy silly string, it’s justified to end it—so you don’t always lose a precious learning opportunity when you cut it short. What I think we should be asking is “When we get frustrated in a debate, how can we tell where the problem is?”
You know, I think I’ve rested enough from our debate now that if you wanted to take me up on my open invitation to administer ass kickings to my ideas, I’d be up for another bout with you.
Regardless of the merit of intellectual masochism it may be politically expedient for you to ease up on using this language to describe your interactions. If you already find it infuriating that shminux is able to quote you for the purpose of doing reputation damage then shame on you if he fools you twice. Be more careful with your words in order to not make yourself an easy target.
To put it another way, talking about how much you like ass kickings and inviting ‘bouts’ is not the optimal way for you to provoke the kind of quality intellectual challenge you desire.
Alright, I see that you probably have a good point Wedrifid. I would like your advice if you have some. Also, did you get the two emails I sent around 20 hours ago?
But how does anybody know who was ultimately right? In order to make a statement like this, you must first assume that you know who was right. If there was a debate about it, then it’s likely to have been the sort of topic where there’s some kind of ambiguity—either obvious ambiguity or some hidden pitfall that one person or the other is trying to point out—so what’s the chance you’re right about who won? If the debate was never finished, then there are points that haven’t been heard yet. Sometimes a good point very far into a debate can change the whole outcome. It seems to me that often the entire reason for a disagreement is that one or both people were missing some information that changes their perspective. As you’re aware, reality is very complex—there are a lot of different specializations that people can learn and it can take years to learn enough to have a good understanding. Sometimes applying the information or concepts from one specialization to a discussion with someone outside that specialization radically changes the outcome of the discussion. There can be a LOT of information to compare during a debate—and although it would be nice to know which pieces are missing from the other person’s perspective immediately, and although we can all make guesses, often this is not apparent until the topic has been discussed in depth. I bring specializations to this group that are different from the main specializations the group has. For example, I know a lot about psychology. Being a nerd, there are a lot of things I’ve researched and learned about that may be different—and here I am exchanging information with others who have all researched things that may be different from what’s common to the group. There is going to be a lot of information to exchange before it’s clear what perspective is best, and before an agreement is possible.
I agree that it’s best if people agree after the debate. Coming to a point where people have exchanged enough information where they can actually agree can be very difficult. If people are giving up before the process is complete, I’m not sure what I can do about it. I have started to see a pattern where there are certain sets of information that I have which seem to be root causes for a large ratio of disagreements, so I have begun writing posts about them. Unfortunately nobody can unload all their relevant information in any small amount of time, and the fact that we have different information will cause disagreements until then. I am calibrating with you guys by reading the sequences and beginning to write some articles to bridge these gaps. It will take me some time.
If I’m wrong about something, I hope I’ll figure it out eventually. If you, or anybody else wants to be persistent with me, or recommend a specific article that you think will fill an ignorant patch in my head, I’d be happy to try to get further.
You ignored both my points: the definition of winning in a discussion (at least on this forum) as updating and a specific way of measuring it. We both lost. Tapping out.
That’s all right here: I agree that it’s best if people agree after the debate.
An unusual fact: I think you are one of the few Lesswrongers to use ‘debate’ to refer to something other than formal debates. More specifically, I think that you are using the string ‘debate’ to refer to what most on this forum would call arguments or discussions or disagreements.
This is unfair to me, Shminux. I joined on August 12. That a lot of my debates are unfinished is probably due to the fact that debates can take time to reach a conclusion. It’s annoying that you and 13 voters seem to think that anything can be gleaned from taking an inventory of them at this time. That’s like giving a person a test that takes an hour and scoring them after five minutes.
It didn’t dawn on me that you might actually be serious about wanting me to go count up all my debates and see how many were unfinished until today—because that would be so ridiculously inconclusive.
Secondly, that you quoted me out of context is making me look like an ass. Having “I want to learn more during disagreements but I’m not because I keep winning.” floating there is probably going to be interpreted as “I keep winning on this forum” when, in reality, I’ve only been here for a few weeks—I hadn’t had any wins or losses at that point—and a key reason I joined is because I was hoping to get my ass kicked.
You want to know the real situation? I’m not getting enough intellectual stimulation in real life. I’m in too small a pond. That’s the context in which I am saying “I keep winning.” I was really looking forward to losing some debates HERE for that reason. It looks to be a bigger pond.
You’re making me look like an ass, and there’s no good reason for it.
You want to talk about why you (and perhaps some of your friends) and I are frustrating one another? Let’s talk about it. But don’t lets mix up this frustration with a bunch of other things or go creating metrics that won’t accurately measure diddly and wouldn’t support your point (that a bunch of unfinished debates means I’m losing a bunch of debates) anyway.
Let’s focus on the frustration and see if we can figure out why it happens.
Outside view!
You’re a smart person on Less Wrong. So are your opponents. My prior for you being on the right side of the debate is < 50%, by symmetry. (I assign a nontrivial probability that both participants are wrong.)
I can know that something is happening statistically without being able to point to a single definite instance of it.
Thanks, now we’ll see whether anything worthwhile results from this.
You should pay more attention to epistemic tools at this point and not particular points of debate. Disagreement should be parsed as being about the general reasoning tools you use, not the subject matter that triggered the problem. It doesn’t matter whether you win a debate, you might learn or fail to learn something useful about general reasoning tools in both cases, so a focus on winning/losing debates is wrong if you are trying to fix that particular problem. If you don’t pay enough attention to general reasoning methods, you may end up continuing to accept occasional defeats and celebrate frequent triumphs without getting significantly better at not generating new flawed arguments (that your opponents, given the general incompetence, won’t be pointing out to you).
(You may learn something useful from the sequence on words. See also this post and its dependencies: A Rational Argument.)
My point is that you’re busy talking about winning and losing debates, as if they were some sort of contest. That view is quite different than viewing debates as an opportunity to seek truth. It places incentives on things like protecting arguments you’ve made, even when they’re wrong, and attacking your opponent’s arguments, even when they’re right. It lets you declare victory when you find a major flaw in your opponent’s argument, even if they were right and you were wrong.
Would you notice if your opponent had a sound piece of logic, but didn’t have the rhetoric to support it? Would you be able to extract that subset of their argument, and change your mind based on it, even if their conclusion was wrong? What if they evidence and argument they presented was enough to show that your position was subtly wrong, but you failed to notice because you were focused on the fact that their position was even wronger?
Would you notice if their logic and conclusion was flawed, but they had some evidence you hadn’t looked at before, which made your position more tenuous? Would you stop to properly reevaluate your whole position, and reduce your certainty in it? Or would it just be one more argument against an army? Or would you not even get that far, because you attacked the obvious flaw, without looking at the whole argument—because that one flaw was severe enough that it was the only thing you had to worry about to win?
I still maintain that winning and losing debates is about status, not truth-seeking. (Note that it’s not a zero-sum game for the participants; a well-fought contest will be positive-sum, a poorly-fought one negative sum, even if one participant comes out better in either one.) And you know what? That’s fine, and likely appropriate for getting what you want, in many contexts. But, if you’re here, I’m hoping it’s not all you want in every context. And I suspect that taking different approaches in different contexts will be epistemically hazardous; we don’t compartmentalize nearly as well as we’d like, sometimes.
On Less Wrong, people mostly seem to prefer “discussing things to find out the truth” instead of “arguing to win.” See this post here:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ecz/whats_your_rationalist_arguing_origin_story/#comments.
My impression is that people will be more willing to discuss things with you, if you use the discussion style that’s mostly used on this site.
I’m not sure that’s actually true.
I wouldn’t say it is either but it is true that “discussing things to find out the truth” is actively advocated as a norm over “arguing to win”. That makes a big difference. Enough that I only take breaks from lesswrong in disgust every couple of years whereas on, say, the MENSA discussion boards I have frequented my tolerance wears thin far more quickly. With ‘debating as sparring’ as the human default having active pressure against that tendency at least helps reduce the phenomenon to more tolerable levels without eliminating it.
The fact that so many LWers disengaged from Epiphany that she thinks she has never lost an argument strongly suggest that it is true (ETA: at least in some contexts), and also that the norm has a downside of making some newcomers highly overconfident. (I can’t resist pointing out that a feature suggestion of mine probably would have helped here.)
Go on? It seems to be the most approved of/most encouraged way to discuss things, and there seems to be a lot less arguing to win than on other forums.
It means that the narratives surrounding pop-distillations of evolutionary psychological accounts of human sexuality shouldn’t be given too much weight when evaluating actual human beings, mostly.
Same here; I tend to find it actively repellent.
Hahahaha! Love it.
(: This makes me want to take a survey.
Your description of being attracted to intellect in men gave me the urge to find a way to debate you. Since this would probably count as competing for status, do you think you would find it attractive in person (assuming I actually could keep up with you)?
EDIT: I’m in a relationship and not seeking another: I’m just curious about your response to men trying to attract you with intellectual signalling.
Clearly you are not