I suppose that makes sense if that’s the way you view things. I happen to enjoy small talk, now that I’m good at it. I really value the ability to have conversations with people I disagree with, because the last thing I want to do at this point in my life is shut off my opinions to change. (This might have to do with my age: I am neither old enough, nor smart or experienced enough to be right all the time, or even most of the time, and I know that.)
And yeah, if I think the other person is wrong, I want them to change their mind...but being amenable to changing my own mind in response to their arguments (if valid) works better than upfront confrontation. (I try not to make this true of myself...I don’t want to miss out learning about someone else’s worldview just because they’re more confrontational than I am.)
If I’d been super polite they might have pretended to have a civil discussion with me for longer while having rather irrational thoughts going through their hide.
Agreed. I guess a lot of the time, I want to have a civil conversation for longer because a) I enjoy civil conversation for its own sake, and b) eventually I’ll notice that they’re having irrational thoughts and emotional reactions, and if I want to I can ease that into the conversation without necessarily provoking a confrontation. (I am fairly good at this face-to-face, but the subtle emotional cues don’t carry through to online posting so much, which might be why “discussion can go wrong for unstated reasons.” Face-to-face, the unstated reason would still be noticeably, if you’re looking for it, long before the actual confrontation.
I’m not saying there’s necessarily anything wrong with your way of doing things...just that it wouldn’t work for me, because I hate confrontation and I would regard being flamed as a disaster...I have this annoying tendency to care about anything that anyone says to or about me.
I happen to enjoy small talk, now that I’m good at it.
A cultural bias.
Well, sort of. It’s genuinely useful for accessing some things our culture restricts access to. Like friends, good conversations (often people won’t talk to you seriously, in person, at first, until they feel more comfortable with you. internet forums often do a good job of circumventing this though) or sex. It’s a lot easier to get sex if you are good at small talk. And if you genuinely enjoy it, that helps even more. People like genuine conformists because they do a better job of conforming! (Usually. Faking it is so much harder, and takes way more skill.)
I really value the ability to have conversations with people I disagree with, because the last thing I want to do at this point in my life is shut off my opinions to change.
I’m not trying to filter by disagreement. I like to find people who agree because I could use more of those, and I do have enough access to people who disagree (it’s no trouble at all to come here, or many other forums, and find people to disagree with me).
Talking to people I disagree with isn’t so hard. I spend a lot of time debating with people who don’t agree with me. And I can even be non-confrontational if I want to. Sometimes I go to new groups and just listen for a while to see what they are like without being disturbed. But I’ve been familiar with Less Wrong culture since before the Less Wrong website existed, so I’m not missing anything but interfering with the normal culture here (besides, if I want to know the normal culture, I can just go read the Sequences and other static content. or just stop posting and lurk on new threads.)
I want to I can ease that into the conversation without necessarily provoking a confrontation
Too much work to help one person, who probably doesn’t want your help, and won’t appreciate it, IMO.
I am fairly good at this face-to-face, but the subtle emotional cues don’t carry through to online posting so much
I’m actually better at picking them up in text than IRL. It’s a different skill. I practice it in text a lot. I’ve been known to, when I get bored with low quality content from people, start replying with little but psychological analysis of their posting. They’ll usually reply a few times before they stop speaking to me, and I can get good feedback about how much of my initial guesses were correct.
I hate confrontation
You could change this. It’s not human nature. It’s not your genes. It’s a cultural bias. A very common one. And it’s important because criticism is the main tool by which we learn. When all criticism has to be made subtle, indirect, formal, filled with equivocation about whether the person stating it really means it, or various other things, then it slows down learning a lot.
I have this annoying tendency to care about anything that anyone says to or about me.
You know, Feynman had this problem. He got over it. Maybe reading his books would help you. One of them is titled like “What do you care what other people think?”
Not caring isn’t just his advice. The title is something his first wife often said to him, because he had a problem with it. She kept reminding him. He got better at it eventually. It wasn’t easy but he did it.
but being amenable to changing my own mind in response to their arguments (if valid) works better than upfront confrontation.
I am open. One thing is you’re seeing is me after 10 straight years of online debate. It’s gotten to the point that I rarely am told any argument I don’t already know by a stranger. Early on I changed my mind a ton. It got gradually less frequent. I like to be wrong, I like to concede debates. I enjoy conceding. I’m tired of not losing debates; it’s dull and I learn less. It’s so much fun to be like, “Oh I get it now! That’s even better than what I used to think!” But, well, there’s no easy solution to getting more of that.
I like to find people who agree because I could use more of those.
What is it about your beliefs that so many people disagree with? I haven’t seen anything particularly extreme so far.
I’m tired of not losing debates; it’s dull and I learn less. It’s so much fun to be like, “Oh I get it now! That’s even better than what I used to think!” But, well, there’s no easy solution to getting more of that.
I have many years to go before I run up against this problem...and I probably never will entirely, since I suspect much of the LW community is genuinely smarter than me. I agree that the feeling of suddenly grasping a new solution is awesome and it sucks not to have it, but I can’t suggest anything other than reading a ton of books on stuff you don’t know yet...which might be hard to find if your general knowledge is already at a high level.
You could change this. It’s not human nature. It’s not your genes. It’s a cultural bias.
Considering that I was raised in pretty much the same environment as my brother and sister, I think there’s got to be somegenetic influence on why my personality is so drastically different. On the Big Five standardized personality test, I score high on Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and low on Extroversion (whether or not that means anything is another question...) and I doubt I can change that.
In a lot of ways I’m a non-conformist; I stick to my own routine even if it makes me stand out from the crowd of people my age. For example: I don’t wear makeup, I don’t shave my armpits, I buy my clothes at Value Village, etc. People do make comments about these things, and I really and honestly don’t care what they think. I do care if I hurt people’s feelings. Considering that I’m studying to be a nurse, a field where empathy is essential, I don’t want to change that. Another thing I know about myself is that I have trouble acting differently in different circumstances, partly out of a stubborn belief that I shouldn’t have to. I don’t want to train myself to be less sensitive only to find that I treat my patients insensitively. And I don’t have problems online anyway...I do frequently disagree with people, and my agreeableness instinct just kicks in and helps me phrase it in a way that isn’t going to antagonize the person before they even get to my point. I really hope there are people on LW who are mature enough to look past the way something is phrased, but I don’t know so I don’t take the risk.
I’m actually better at picking them up in text than IRL. It’s a different skill. I practice it in text a lot. I’ve been known to, when I get bored with low quality content from people, start replying with little but psychological analysis of their posting.
What’s your psychological analysis of my comments??? I’m serious, I’m actually really curious. This is valuable knowledge about myself that I want. And yeah, I can see that 10 years of online debate would make you really good at seeing through to the emotions behind the text.
What is it about your beliefs that so many people disagree with? I haven’t seen anything particularly extreme so far.
Oh there’s various things, but the main issue is people just plain don’t already know stuff (like Popper’s philosophy) and learning a lot of material is a big challenge most people won’t approach. Not knowing stuff leads to many disagreements with all the ideas they don’t.
It’s not exactly their fault not to already know a lot. I don’t usually expect to find people who already do (though someone who had already read, say, all of Popper’s books would certainly be possible to run into). The key issue for me is their attitude to changing this. Learning a lot is a big project. One has to have patience and tolerance for disagreeing. For example, one has to react rationally to new ideas that he misunderstands or misreads rather badly. He needs to get the misunderstanding sorted out instead of get offended. If he doesn’t, he’s going to misread something sooner or later and give up.
One thing I’ve noticed is a lot of people refuse to ask questions. They don’t know what I mean, and they won’t ask, they just argue with a (pretty silly) misconception of what I mean (usually based on what many people in our culture would mean, and ignoring that there’s a few contradictions between what I literally said and their interpretation). Conversations without questions usually don’t go anywhere good.
On the other hand, a lot of people react badly to questions. I’ll often not know quite what someone meant, or think there is some ambiguity, and ask them to clarify, or say more. Lots of people don’t like that and won’t give good answers—like, often they will just start talking but not directly engage with specifically what question you asked. Another common reaction, once conversations have been going a while, is “i already answered that” with no quote or link. Some people think my questions are hair splitting and won’t answer—they don’t have an attitude of wanting to improve one small step at a time (Popperian piecemeal, gradual improvement). Another common result of asking questions is people are in the mindset of arguing (not explaining) and so they will keep trying to argue with me. And since I’m asking questions, not expressing a position, they will have to make rather wild guesses and assumptions about what my position is and argue with that...
When people don’t agree with me on issues like the right attitude to questions, and in general what a rational discussion consists of, and how much time and effort one should put into learning over a long period, and what are good criteria for giving up on someone and losing patience, then it’s hard.
What’s your psychological analysis of my comments?
You seem pretty culturally normal so far, except without saying anything ridiculously dumb in the first 5 minutes (which is perhaps more common. so, maybe you’re better than average. for the self-selected group of non-lurkers on public internet discussion places. and the non-lurker group is already better than average, i think). Nothing much jumped out at me.
I could say something like you have good empathy skills since you were thinking about what I was saying and why, which most people here haven’t really done. Maybe that would sound like convincing psychological analysis. But I don’t really know if it’s true. The same behavior could be explained by good rationality skills. Or by getting lucky—maybe you have a bunch of buttons to push but happened not to read my comments that would have annoyed you.
My psychological knowledge is more focussed on what I actually use: noticing stuff relevant to some argument. It’s not exactly personality analysis in the way those personality tests do it. You seem pretty calm so far, no big danger signs, though it’s hard to tell if you’ll continue replying much. It’s hard to explain why I have some doubt there. A lot of agreeable people don’t like to push issues into too much depth to the point of bringing out disagreements and then discussing them.
Just checked your karma though. With that much you must discuss a fair amount, unless you’re account is really old or you’re good at writing popular top level posts that get 10 points per vote. That’s something I have less experience with. Usually it’s the confrontational people who get in arguments and post a ton.
One of my least favorite things about most of my friends is they don’t reply very much to stuff they agree with. If you post something dumb most of them can argue with it. They can talk with idiots quite well. But post something high quality and many usually don’t discuss in any way at all. I figure they should have options. Too advanced for them? Ask a question. Too simple? Post a further implication I left out. Exactly on their level? Elaborate on a tangent, or explain it in their own words to get a better grasp on it. When I try explaining this issue itself, I get few to no replies.
Do you know anything about that issue?
There was your comment:
suspect much of the LW community is genuinely smarter than me
This kind of humility can be a virtue. But, if this and your other comments about wanting to learn and be open minded are representative, it easily puts you in the top 20%, especially counting lurkers. Maybe far higher.
There’s some dangers here. I think it’s literally a false statement (though it could be the case that you have less math knowledge than the average person here, or something. But less pre-existing knowledge is different than being less smart which is more about attitudes to learning and some non-subject-specific stuff.) When people say false things, it can be revealing. Do they want to believe it? Are they under pressure to believe it? Maybe you think that kind of statement makes you a good person. Maybe you have the common psychological attitude where people think “I’m no one special. Not very important. My arguments can be sloppy since I’m no expert and not expected to be. I won’t and don’t have to meet world class standards. I won’t pursue a project of trying to get to the top since that’s not me.” I’m not especially suggesting this is accurate. I don’t see enough evidence to rule out other possibilities. With a lot of people guessing very culturally normal flaws is really reliable. But since you’re reacting to me somewhat better than most people, so far, and haven’t said a bunch of false stuff, I’m less inclined to assume a bunch of flaws.
Considering that I was raised in pretty much the same environment as my brother and sister, I think there’s got to be some genetic influence on why my personality is so drastically different.
This is not a precise statement. You were not raised in “pretty much the same environment”. You were raised in an environment sharing some common features at a high level. There were also many, many subtle differences. As William Godwin pointed out, if you go to a meadow with your sibling, you’ll be standing in different places and thus get different visual input. Another factor is that parents in our culture often have different attitudes to first children vs later children.
You may be making an assumption like, “small differences in environment probably don’t matter much”. But they can snowball if they start at a very young age. There can be feedback loops. A small difference in environment creates a small difference in you. That small difference in you inspires a small difference in your parent’s parenting behavior. That small difference in parenting behavior causes another small difference in you. Which causes another small change in parenting behavior. And so on.
I doubt I can change that
I think this kind of thing (combined with your attitude to genetic traits) is a common attitude here. But having investigated the field, basically none of the science for it is correct. Most is blatantly irrelevant: not capable of reaching the conclusions it purports to reach based on the evidence it purports to be using. Would you be interested in discussing that? If so I would suggest either you post what you think is a good argument (be it a cite of a study, or something else). Or if you prefer, you read and comment on this: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html
For example: I don’t wear makeup
Oh you’re a girl? I hadn’t noticed lol (I was reading your comment partially out of order and just got here). I wonder if there was any evidence in your previous discussion with me that should have tipped me off. Girls in our culture are under pressure to be less ambitious and not too smart, and more non-confrontational. And to have more empathy. Maybe I should have taken those as evidence, but they’re all pretty common with men too.
I really hope there are people on LW who are mature enough to look past the way something is phrased, but I don’t know so I don’t take the risk.
I tested that some. Results not promising. But anyway this reminds me of an important issue. Most conformists conform more than necessary. If you really want to get to the very top of a social hierarchy, over achieving can be good. But if you want to do enough to fit in, but would also like the maximum risk-free freedom, then it’s important. The reason they do more than necessary is they never test where the borderline is. If they found it’s 200 units away, then maybe they could go 100 units closer with plenty of margin for error. You have to sometimes offend people to find out where the limits are (or watch someone else test it).
Oh there’s various things, but the main issue is people just plain don’t already know stuff (like Popper’s philosophy) and learning a lot of material is a big challenge most people won’t approach. Not knowing stuff leads to many disagreements with all the ideas they don’t.
Have you considered writing posts about it? So far most of your posts have been about why Popper’s philosophy is great, not about exactly what it is. A good introduction to Popperian philosophy would be less controversial and more useful.
I am afraid it wouldn’t work, at least for me. First because I am probably already biased against curi and perhaps even against Popper due to the style of the recent debates, and second because I don’t believe that curi represents Popper’s philosophy accurately. Still, I would like to read a post written by someone who understands Popper explaining what his Critical Rationalism is in detail. If curi wants to write it, he’d better wait some time until emotions evaporate and create a new account for that opportunity and completely change his attitude to discussion. This is not likely to happen, too, at least if curi’s statement about his being rude on purpose to filter out people he “can’t use” is to be taken seriously.
But someone knowledgeable of Popper should definitely write about it to settle this thing for good.
Is lukeprog familiar with Popper? I think he’s the most likely here to have the background for it, but expect that whatever plans he’s already got lined up are more productive.
Oh there’s various things, but the main issue is people just plain don’t already know stuff (like Popper’s philosophy) and learning a lot of material is a big challenge most people won’t approach.
Guilty as charged. I couldn’t tell you a single fact about Popperian philosophy, other than it being a controversy on LessWrong. In general, I find philosophy dense and difficult to understand (maybe because I think more concretely than abstractly) but if you could recommend a book or webpage that presents the ideas clearly with some concrete examples, I would love to check that out.
I think this kind of thing (combined with your attitude to genetic traits) is a common attitude here. But having investigated the field, basically none of the science for it is correct. Most is blatantly irrelevant: not capable of reaching the conclusions it purports to reach based on the evidence it purports to be using. Would you be interested in discussing that?
I would love to discuss that once I’ve had time to do the research...I’m at work right now and my break only lasts another 5 minutes, so I’ll get back to you sometime tomorrow or the next day. This isn’t a good week, I have 3 exams and a paper due, but I’ll find time.
But, if this and your other comments about wanting to learn and be open minded are representative, it easily puts you in the top 20%, especially counting lurkers.
Open-mindedness and curiosity are one thing. Raw native intelligence is something different. I might be above average on the first two, but I expect I have less of the second that the average LWer. For example, I would love to understand the math of quantum mechanics, but it’s hard for me and really learning it, if I decided to, would likely be a multi-year endevour. Same with computer programming...I would love to actually be able to do it, but it doesn’t come super easily.
Got to go I have to go teach first aid to 13-year-olds! I’ll reply to the rest of your comment later.
(This summary book on Popper is only 115 pages. The easiest to read book option.)
Open-mindedness and curiosity are one thing. Raw native intelligence is something different. I might be above average on the first two, but I expect I have less of the second that the average LWer. For example, I would love to understand the math of quantum mechanics, but it’s hard for me and really learning it, if I decided to, would likely be a multi-year endevour. Same with computer programming...I would love to actually be able to do it, but it doesn’t come super easily.
I think you’re mistaking subject specific skills for raw native intelligence. Being good at math and programming isn’t what intelligence is about. They are specific skills.
BTW I believe most educational material is quite bad and makes stuff far harder and more confusing than necessary. And for quantum physics in particular the situation is pretty terrible (if you want to learn it in depth; there’s OK popular science books for a lower level of detail). The situation with programming is better: there’s way more self taught programmers and more non-academic efforts to try to create material to help people learn programming, which I think are often more successful than the stuff schools put out.
I would equate intelligence with basically how good one is at learning in general, without giving priority to some fields. I think open mindedness and curiosity are crucial traits for that. A lot of people aren’t much good at learning in general, but have a specific field or two where they do OK. They can be impressive because in the area where they are rational they gain a lot of expertise and detailed knowledge. But I don’t regard them as more intelligent than more broad people.
You find math hard to learn. But most mathematicians find various things hard to learn too, such as (commonly) social skills. Most people are more impressed by math knowledge than social knowledge because it’s more common. Most people learn social skills, it’s nothing special. Yet that doesn’t really imply math is harder. More people try hard to learn social skills. And more people are alienated from learning math, at a young age, by their teachers (especially females).
Whatever topics one is bad at learning, I don’t think it’s normally caused by intelligence itself. I think raw native intelligence is itself a misconception and that the hardware capabilities of people’s brains don’t vary a lot and the variance doesn’t have much practical consequence. Rather, I think what people call “intelligence” is actually a matter of their philosophical theories and rationality, especially either general purpose ideas (which allow one to be good at many things) or ideas in specific fields people are impressed by (e.g. math).
What I think causes people to have trouble with math, or social skills, or other things, besides the inherent difficulty of the subjects, is irrationalities, caused largely by external pressure and cruelty. Those people who have trouble learning social skills were teased as children, or had trouble finding friends, or something. They did not try to learn to interact with others in an environment where everyone was nice to them, and they could fail a bunch of times with no harm coming to them, and keep trying new things until they got it. With math, people are forced to do things they don’t want to like unpleasant math homework and math tests. They don’t get to learn at their own pace for their own intrinsic motivations. This commonly alienates people from the subject. Causes like these are cultural.
Rather, I think what people call “intelligence” is actually a matter of their philosophical theories and rationality, especially either general purpose ideas (which allow one to be good at many things) or ideas in specific fields people are impressed by (e.g. math).
Have you looked at the evidence that this is false? Or is your belief not falsifiable? :)
It is primarily a philosophical belief. It can be falsified by criticism. It could in theory be falsified using scientific tests about how brains work, but technology isn’t there yet. It could also in theory be falsified if, say, people were dramatically different than they are. But I’m not relying on any special evidence in that regard, just basic facts of the world around us we’re all aware of. (For example, people commonly hold conversations with each other and partially understand each other. And then learn new languages. And children learn a first language. And so on. These things contradict some views of the mind, but they also allow for many including mine.)
BTW Popper never said all ideas should be (empirically) falsifiable. That’s a myth (which you didn’t say, but perhaps hinted at, so worth mentioning). He said that if they can’t be then they aren’t science, but he did not intend that as an insult, and he himself engaged in a lot of non-science.
In some special cases, saying something is non-science is a good criticism. Those cases are when something claimed to be science as part of its argument for why its right, and part of its way of presenting itself. If it claims to be science, but isn’t, that’s a problem. Popper’s favorite examples of this were ideas of Marx, Freud and Adler, which made specious claims to scientific status.
You’re right—I was only teasing, except that I think there is plenty of suggestive evidence for a meaningful innate G (even though it’s a sum of various types of health, and not only genetic, much less the sum of just a few SNPs). I was thinking of falsifiability because it seems to me that you’d say in response to any study that seems to segregate people by G and measure their outcomes later, you’d just say “they were already on the path toward having a sane+rational set of beliefs+practices”.
I’ve held a tentative version of your view (that nearly anyone could in principle learn to be smart) in the past. I’ve moved away from it as I’ve read more, but I still think there’s a great deal of difference in ability to observe or judge truth, at equal native mental talent, between someone with a workable set of beliefs and skills, and someone who’s tied to enough screwed-up beliefs and practices. (probably everyone sees this)
Your unusual behavior at first made me underestimate your competence. My heuristics usually save me a great deal of time, so I won’t apologize for them, but it was diverting having them tested.
I’ve read a single book of Popper’s (something like Open Society + its Enemies) and took away from it that he was smart and disliked Plato. So I don’t think I understand what it is you like about him, or why it would be useful for me to know more of what he wrote.
I would also say that measuring outcomes is a hard issue—e.g. you have to decide what is a good outcome. And all sorts of stuff interferes. Some people are too smart—in a sense—which can lead to boredom and alienation because they are different from their peers. There may be a sweet spot a little above average but not too far. Sometimes really exceptional people have exceptional outcomes, but sometimes not. I wouldn’t predict in advance that the smartest people will have the most successful outcomes, by many normal measures of good outcomes.
There’s a saying: The B students work for the C students. The A students teach.
The first thing I’d want to know about any potential study is basically: what are you going to do and why will it work? They need philosophical sophistication to avoid all kinds of mistakes. Which is just what the Conjunction Fallacy papers lack, as well as, e.g., many heritability papers.
I’ve read a single book of Popper’s (something like Open Society + its Enemies) and took away from it that he was smart and disliked Plato.
That must have been volume 1 only. Volume 2 criticizes Marx and Hegel.
Popper’s biggest strength is his epistemology. He solved the problem of induction, identified and criticized the justificationist tradition (which most people have been unconsciously taking for granted since Aristotle), and presented a fallibilist and objective epistemology, which is neither authoritarian nor skeptical, and which works both in theory and practice. His epistemology also integrates well with other fields—there are interesting connections to physics, evolution, and computation (as discussed in Deutsch’s book The Fabric of Reality), and also to politics, education, human relationships (in the broadest sense; ways people interact, cooperate, communicate, etc) and morality.
A good place to start reading Popper is his book Conjectures and Refutations. It is a collection of essays, the first of which of which is long and covers a lot of epistemology.
Another good place to start is Bryan Magee’s short book on Popper. And another is David Deutsch’s books which explain epistemology and many other things.
My heuristics usually save me a great deal of time, so I won’t apologize for them
Yes I know what you mean. I’m sure I dismiss some people who are worthwhile (though I use rather different heuristics than you, and I also tend to give people a lot of chances. One result of giving lots of chances is I can silently judge people but then see if my judgment was wrong on the second or third chance). I think the important things are that you have some ability to recognize when they may not be working well, and that after they fail in some respect you look for a way to change them so they don’t make the same mistake again. Changing them not to repeat a mistake, while still saving lots of time, can be hard, but it’s also important.
One thing about G is that it’s extremely difficult to disentangle parenting factors. When you intelligence test people at age 8, or 12, or 20, they’ve already had years and years of exposure to parenting, and often some school too. That stuff changes people, for better or worse. So how are you to know what was innate, and what wasn’t? This is a hard problem. I don’t think any experimental social scientists have solved it. I do think philosophy can address a lot of it, but not every detail.
One thing about G is that it’s extremely difficult to disentangle parenting factors
Right. Thus the obsession with twin studies.
As for your complaint about lack of (philosophical) rigor on the part of psychologists and other scientists, I’m often shocked at the conclusions drawn (by motivated paper authors and hurried readers) from the data. In theory I can just update slightly on the actual evidence while not grasping the associated unproven stories, but in practice I’m not sure I’ve built a faithful voting body of facts in my brain.
But they do not solve the problem. The only seem to at low precision, without much rigor. They are simplistic.
For example, they basically just gloss over and ignore the entire issue of gene-meme interactions, even though, in a technical and very literal sense, most stuff falls under that heading.
What basically happens—my view—is genes code for simple traits and parents in our culture react to those different traits. The children react to those reactions. The parents react to that new behavior. The children react to that. The parents react to that. And so on. Genetic traits—and also trivial and, for all intents and purposes, random details—set these things off. And culture does the rest. And twin studies do not rule this out, yet reach other conclusions. They don’t rule out my view with evidence, nor argument, yet somehow conclude something else. It’s silly.
Sometimes one gets the impression they’ve decided that if proper science is too hard, they are justified in doing improper science. They have a right to do research in the field! Or something.
Disagree? Try explaining how they work, and how you think they rule out the various possibilities other than genetic control over traits straight through to adulthood and independent of culture.
I would equate intelligence with basically how good one is at learning in general, without giving priority to some fields. I think open mindedness and curiosity are crucial traits for that.
Maybe I was above average in, say, my high school graduating class, but I doubt that is true of the Less Wrong community. People wouldn’t be here if they lacked that degree of open-mindedness and curiosity.
They don’t get to learn at their own pace for their own intrinsic motivations. This commonly alienates people from the subject. Causes like these are cultural.
Would you like to comment on how non-Western cultures view math differently? Or offer a suggestion as to why I was the only white girl in my high school calculus and vectors class? (I like math a lot...it’s just that most people who like math like it because they’re good at it, so the only people who want to talk to me about math and how awesome/fascinating it is are usually massively better at it than I am, which may be why I perceive myself as not being good at it.)
I do have stubbornness, which can be an advantage to learning new things (I spent 8 years teaching myself to sing, and went from complete tone-deafness to composing my own piano and vocal pieces and performing moderately difficult solos.) I am also stubbornly loyal to prior commitments, which basically means that once I start doing something I never stop...after awhile this limits my ability to start new things. (I can’t teach myself quantum mechanics while I’m working 2 jobs, singing in a church choir, and going to school full-time.)
And for quantum physics in particular the situation is pretty terrible (if you want to learn it in depth; there’s OK popular science books for a lower level of detail).
Agreed! I ran into exactly this problem; I’ve read enough pop science books that I no longer learn anything new from them, but when I took a textbook out of the university library, I took one look at the first page and was lost. Eliezer’s intro to quantum mechanics would probably help, if I made the commitment to go through it entirely and practice all the math, but again, not something I can do very easily on my breaks at work.
People wouldn’t be here if they lacked that degree of open-mindedness and curiosity.
Some might. Joining might make them feel good about themselves, and help them feel open minded.
Would you like to comment on how non-Western cultures view math differently?
I don’t know a lot. Asian cultures value school highly, and value math and science highly, and pressure children a lot. Well, actually I only know much about Japan, South Korea and China. The school pressure on children in Japan itself is much worse than the well known pressure on asian children in the US, btw.
Or offer a suggestion as to why I was the only white girl in my high school calculus and vectors class?
Culture. Beyond that, I don’t know exactly.
it’s just that most people who like math like it because they’re good at it
I think cause and effect goes the other way. Initially, some people are more interested in math (sometimes due to parental encouragement or pressure). Consequently, they learn more of it and get a lead on their peers. This can snowball: they do well at it relative to their peers, so they like it more. And the teacher aims the material at the 20th percentile student, or something (not 50th percentile because then it’s too hard for too many people). Result: math class is pretty hard for people in percentiles 5-90, who might not be very far apart in skill. And they don’t like it. A few fail and hate it. And the ones with the early lead never have the experience, at least until college, of math being hard.
I do have stubbornness, which can be an advantage to learning new things (I spent 8 years teaching myself to sing, and went from complete tone-deafness to composing my own piano and vocal pieces and performing moderately difficult solos.)
Perhaps this persistence and patience is a way in which you are smarter than many Less Wrongers.
I am also stubbornly loyal to prior commitments
Be careful with this. I’m not entirely sure what you mean by a commitment, but for example I think it’s important to be willing to stop reading a book in the middle if you don’t like it. If it’s not working, and there’s no particular reason you need to know the contents of this book, just move on! Some people have trouble with that. There’s also the sunk cost fallacy that some people have trouble with.
I’ve read enough pop science books that I no longer learn anything new from them
David Deutsch says there is no very good way to learn quantum mechanics, currently. Also that it’s one of the simpler and more important areas of physics, when presented correctly.
I believe the best serious physics books are Feynman’s lectures (that’s physics in general. I think there’s quantum stuff towards the end which I haven’t read yet.). But they are hard and will require supplementary material. If one finds them too hard then they’re probably not best for that person.
For pop science books, you might take a look at Deutsch’s books because I believe they offer some unique ideas about physics not found in other popular science books. By focussing on the Many Worlds Interpretation, he’s already different than many books, and then he goes further by offering his unique perspective on it, including concepts like fungibility. And he relates the ideas to philosophy in very interesting ways, as well as explaining Popperian philosophy too (he is the best living Popperian).
I like Feynman’s pop science books a lot too, and he does go into quantum physics in some. I don’t know how unique those are, though.
I glanced at Eliezer’s physics posts. Looks strongly pro-Many Worlds Interpretation which is a good sign.
I tried reading the Uncertainty Principle essay. It looks confusing and not very helpful to me. Which is a bad sign since I already know stuff about that topic in advance, so it should be easier for me to follow. It appears to be going into a bunch of details when there’s a simpler way to both explain and prove it. Maybe he’s following in the (bad) tradition of some physics book he read about it.
It’s hard to tell because it kind of meanders around a bunch, and certainly some specific statements are correct, but I don’t think Eliezer understands the uncertainty principle very well. e.g. he wants to rename it:
Heisenberg Certainty Principle
But that doesn’t make sense to me. It’s a logical deduction from the laws of physics about how when some observables are sharp, others must not be sharp (math proves this). Sharp means “the same in all universes”.
Here’s a quote from The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, terminology section:
Uncertainty principle: The (badly misnamed) implication of quantum theory that for any fungible collection of instances of a physical object, some of their attributes must be diverse.
This is hard to understand out of context, but it basically means if you consider all the versions of something in different universes, say a cup of coffee, and you consider the observable attributes of them (like temperature of the coffee), some observables are different in different universes. They can’t all be the same in all universes.
How you get from there to a certainty principle I don’t know.
Eliezer uses difficult language like “Amplitude distributions in configuration space evolve over time” which I don’t think is necessary. For one thing, in my understanding, the wave function is a function over configuration space and that’s the Schrödinger picture. But it’s easier to understand quantum physics using the Heisenberg Picture instead which focusses on observables.
You seem pretty calm so far, no big danger signs, though it’s hard to tell if you’ll continue replying much. It’s hard to explain why I have some doubt there. A lot of agreeable people don’t like to push issues into too much depth to the point of bringing out disagreements and then discussing them.
I would like to continue this conversation. It’s awfully nice to be discussing with someone and have them post a comment the length of a short story full of points that, while I might not agree with them, are well-thought-out. And nothing you said has really annoyed me. Some of the things you say I wouldn’t say, because a) that’s just not my attitude to life, and b) I have no particular reason (yet) to try to filter who I talk to. However, I think I understand why you take that attitude, and it doesn’t seem to have any negative consequences for your emotions, assuming you don’t care that people comment on your reputation. (Wish I could cite that comment but I don’t think I can find it again...)
Just checked your karma though. With that much you must discuss a fair amount, unless you’re account is really old or you’re good at writing popular top level posts that get 10 points per vote.
My account is about 3 months old. I would need to add it up properly, but for sure more than 3⁄4 of my karma comes from my top-level posts. I have a few (Being a Teacher and Ability to React, neither of them very controversial) that were upvoted more than I think they deserved (46 and 68 upvotes respectively, or around that) and the rest are between 10 and 20. My post Positive Thinking probably has the most comments of anything I’ve written...it’s about the benefits of religious communities, which makes it fairly controversial here. I’m not good at writing controversial stuff (or writing non-fiction at all, really) but it’s a nice feeling when you’re 19 and feel kind of powerless in the world-at-large to see people replying to and discussing your ideas.
I suppose that makes sense if that’s the way you view things. I happen to enjoy small talk, now that I’m good at it. I really value the ability to have conversations with people I disagree with, because the last thing I want to do at this point in my life is shut off my opinions to change. (This might have to do with my age: I am neither old enough, nor smart or experienced enough to be right all the time, or even most of the time, and I know that.)
And yeah, if I think the other person is wrong, I want them to change their mind...but being amenable to changing my own mind in response to their arguments (if valid) works better than upfront confrontation. (I try not to make this true of myself...I don’t want to miss out learning about someone else’s worldview just because they’re more confrontational than I am.)
Agreed. I guess a lot of the time, I want to have a civil conversation for longer because a) I enjoy civil conversation for its own sake, and b) eventually I’ll notice that they’re having irrational thoughts and emotional reactions, and if I want to I can ease that into the conversation without necessarily provoking a confrontation. (I am fairly good at this face-to-face, but the subtle emotional cues don’t carry through to online posting so much, which might be why “discussion can go wrong for unstated reasons.” Face-to-face, the unstated reason would still be noticeably, if you’re looking for it, long before the actual confrontation.
I’m not saying there’s necessarily anything wrong with your way of doing things...just that it wouldn’t work for me, because I hate confrontation and I would regard being flamed as a disaster...I have this annoying tendency to care about anything that anyone says to or about me.
A cultural bias.
Well, sort of. It’s genuinely useful for accessing some things our culture restricts access to. Like friends, good conversations (often people won’t talk to you seriously, in person, at first, until they feel more comfortable with you. internet forums often do a good job of circumventing this though) or sex. It’s a lot easier to get sex if you are good at small talk. And if you genuinely enjoy it, that helps even more. People like genuine conformists because they do a better job of conforming! (Usually. Faking it is so much harder, and takes way more skill.)
I’m not trying to filter by disagreement. I like to find people who agree because I could use more of those, and I do have enough access to people who disagree (it’s no trouble at all to come here, or many other forums, and find people to disagree with me).
Talking to people I disagree with isn’t so hard. I spend a lot of time debating with people who don’t agree with me. And I can even be non-confrontational if I want to. Sometimes I go to new groups and just listen for a while to see what they are like without being disturbed. But I’ve been familiar with Less Wrong culture since before the Less Wrong website existed, so I’m not missing anything but interfering with the normal culture here (besides, if I want to know the normal culture, I can just go read the Sequences and other static content. or just stop posting and lurk on new threads.)
Too much work to help one person, who probably doesn’t want your help, and won’t appreciate it, IMO.
I’m actually better at picking them up in text than IRL. It’s a different skill. I practice it in text a lot. I’ve been known to, when I get bored with low quality content from people, start replying with little but psychological analysis of their posting. They’ll usually reply a few times before they stop speaking to me, and I can get good feedback about how much of my initial guesses were correct.
You could change this. It’s not human nature. It’s not your genes. It’s a cultural bias. A very common one. And it’s important because criticism is the main tool by which we learn. When all criticism has to be made subtle, indirect, formal, filled with equivocation about whether the person stating it really means it, or various other things, then it slows down learning a lot.
You know, Feynman had this problem. He got over it. Maybe reading his books would help you. One of them is titled like “What do you care what other people think?”
Not caring isn’t just his advice. The title is something his first wife often said to him, because he had a problem with it. She kept reminding him. He got better at it eventually. It wasn’t easy but he did it.
I am open. One thing is you’re seeing is me after 10 straight years of online debate. It’s gotten to the point that I rarely am told any argument I don’t already know by a stranger. Early on I changed my mind a ton. It got gradually less frequent. I like to be wrong, I like to concede debates. I enjoy conceding. I’m tired of not losing debates; it’s dull and I learn less. It’s so much fun to be like, “Oh I get it now! That’s even better than what I used to think!” But, well, there’s no easy solution to getting more of that.
What is it about your beliefs that so many people disagree with? I haven’t seen anything particularly extreme so far.
I have many years to go before I run up against this problem...and I probably never will entirely, since I suspect much of the LW community is genuinely smarter than me. I agree that the feeling of suddenly grasping a new solution is awesome and it sucks not to have it, but I can’t suggest anything other than reading a ton of books on stuff you don’t know yet...which might be hard to find if your general knowledge is already at a high level.
Considering that I was raised in pretty much the same environment as my brother and sister, I think there’s got to be some genetic influence on why my personality is so drastically different. On the Big Five standardized personality test, I score high on Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and low on Extroversion (whether or not that means anything is another question...) and I doubt I can change that.
In a lot of ways I’m a non-conformist; I stick to my own routine even if it makes me stand out from the crowd of people my age. For example: I don’t wear makeup, I don’t shave my armpits, I buy my clothes at Value Village, etc. People do make comments about these things, and I really and honestly don’t care what they think. I do care if I hurt people’s feelings. Considering that I’m studying to be a nurse, a field where empathy is essential, I don’t want to change that. Another thing I know about myself is that I have trouble acting differently in different circumstances, partly out of a stubborn belief that I shouldn’t have to. I don’t want to train myself to be less sensitive only to find that I treat my patients insensitively. And I don’t have problems online anyway...I do frequently disagree with people, and my agreeableness instinct just kicks in and helps me phrase it in a way that isn’t going to antagonize the person before they even get to my point. I really hope there are people on LW who are mature enough to look past the way something is phrased, but I don’t know so I don’t take the risk.
What’s your psychological analysis of my comments??? I’m serious, I’m actually really curious. This is valuable knowledge about myself that I want. And yeah, I can see that 10 years of online debate would make you really good at seeing through to the emotions behind the text.
Oh there’s various things, but the main issue is people just plain don’t already know stuff (like Popper’s philosophy) and learning a lot of material is a big challenge most people won’t approach. Not knowing stuff leads to many disagreements with all the ideas they don’t.
It’s not exactly their fault not to already know a lot. I don’t usually expect to find people who already do (though someone who had already read, say, all of Popper’s books would certainly be possible to run into). The key issue for me is their attitude to changing this. Learning a lot is a big project. One has to have patience and tolerance for disagreeing. For example, one has to react rationally to new ideas that he misunderstands or misreads rather badly. He needs to get the misunderstanding sorted out instead of get offended. If he doesn’t, he’s going to misread something sooner or later and give up.
One thing I’ve noticed is a lot of people refuse to ask questions. They don’t know what I mean, and they won’t ask, they just argue with a (pretty silly) misconception of what I mean (usually based on what many people in our culture would mean, and ignoring that there’s a few contradictions between what I literally said and their interpretation). Conversations without questions usually don’t go anywhere good.
On the other hand, a lot of people react badly to questions. I’ll often not know quite what someone meant, or think there is some ambiguity, and ask them to clarify, or say more. Lots of people don’t like that and won’t give good answers—like, often they will just start talking but not directly engage with specifically what question you asked. Another common reaction, once conversations have been going a while, is “i already answered that” with no quote or link. Some people think my questions are hair splitting and won’t answer—they don’t have an attitude of wanting to improve one small step at a time (Popperian piecemeal, gradual improvement). Another common result of asking questions is people are in the mindset of arguing (not explaining) and so they will keep trying to argue with me. And since I’m asking questions, not expressing a position, they will have to make rather wild guesses and assumptions about what my position is and argue with that...
When people don’t agree with me on issues like the right attitude to questions, and in general what a rational discussion consists of, and how much time and effort one should put into learning over a long period, and what are good criteria for giving up on someone and losing patience, then it’s hard.
You seem pretty culturally normal so far, except without saying anything ridiculously dumb in the first 5 minutes (which is perhaps more common. so, maybe you’re better than average. for the self-selected group of non-lurkers on public internet discussion places. and the non-lurker group is already better than average, i think). Nothing much jumped out at me.
I could say something like you have good empathy skills since you were thinking about what I was saying and why, which most people here haven’t really done. Maybe that would sound like convincing psychological analysis. But I don’t really know if it’s true. The same behavior could be explained by good rationality skills. Or by getting lucky—maybe you have a bunch of buttons to push but happened not to read my comments that would have annoyed you.
My psychological knowledge is more focussed on what I actually use: noticing stuff relevant to some argument. It’s not exactly personality analysis in the way those personality tests do it. You seem pretty calm so far, no big danger signs, though it’s hard to tell if you’ll continue replying much. It’s hard to explain why I have some doubt there. A lot of agreeable people don’t like to push issues into too much depth to the point of bringing out disagreements and then discussing them.
Just checked your karma though. With that much you must discuss a fair amount, unless you’re account is really old or you’re good at writing popular top level posts that get 10 points per vote. That’s something I have less experience with. Usually it’s the confrontational people who get in arguments and post a ton.
One of my least favorite things about most of my friends is they don’t reply very much to stuff they agree with. If you post something dumb most of them can argue with it. They can talk with idiots quite well. But post something high quality and many usually don’t discuss in any way at all. I figure they should have options. Too advanced for them? Ask a question. Too simple? Post a further implication I left out. Exactly on their level? Elaborate on a tangent, or explain it in their own words to get a better grasp on it. When I try explaining this issue itself, I get few to no replies.
Do you know anything about that issue?
There was your comment:
This kind of humility can be a virtue. But, if this and your other comments about wanting to learn and be open minded are representative, it easily puts you in the top 20%, especially counting lurkers. Maybe far higher.
There’s some dangers here. I think it’s literally a false statement (though it could be the case that you have less math knowledge than the average person here, or something. But less pre-existing knowledge is different than being less smart which is more about attitudes to learning and some non-subject-specific stuff.) When people say false things, it can be revealing. Do they want to believe it? Are they under pressure to believe it? Maybe you think that kind of statement makes you a good person. Maybe you have the common psychological attitude where people think “I’m no one special. Not very important. My arguments can be sloppy since I’m no expert and not expected to be. I won’t and don’t have to meet world class standards. I won’t pursue a project of trying to get to the top since that’s not me.” I’m not especially suggesting this is accurate. I don’t see enough evidence to rule out other possibilities. With a lot of people guessing very culturally normal flaws is really reliable. But since you’re reacting to me somewhat better than most people, so far, and haven’t said a bunch of false stuff, I’m less inclined to assume a bunch of flaws.
This is not a precise statement. You were not raised in “pretty much the same environment”. You were raised in an environment sharing some common features at a high level. There were also many, many subtle differences. As William Godwin pointed out, if you go to a meadow with your sibling, you’ll be standing in different places and thus get different visual input. Another factor is that parents in our culture often have different attitudes to first children vs later children.
You may be making an assumption like, “small differences in environment probably don’t matter much”. But they can snowball if they start at a very young age. There can be feedback loops. A small difference in environment creates a small difference in you. That small difference in you inspires a small difference in your parent’s parenting behavior. That small difference in parenting behavior causes another small difference in you. Which causes another small change in parenting behavior. And so on.
I think this kind of thing (combined with your attitude to genetic traits) is a common attitude here. But having investigated the field, basically none of the science for it is correct. Most is blatantly irrelevant: not capable of reaching the conclusions it purports to reach based on the evidence it purports to be using. Would you be interested in discussing that? If so I would suggest either you post what you think is a good argument (be it a cite of a study, or something else). Or if you prefer, you read and comment on this: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html
Oh you’re a girl? I hadn’t noticed lol (I was reading your comment partially out of order and just got here). I wonder if there was any evidence in your previous discussion with me that should have tipped me off. Girls in our culture are under pressure to be less ambitious and not too smart, and more non-confrontational. And to have more empathy. Maybe I should have taken those as evidence, but they’re all pretty common with men too.
I tested that some. Results not promising. But anyway this reminds me of an important issue. Most conformists conform more than necessary. If you really want to get to the very top of a social hierarchy, over achieving can be good. But if you want to do enough to fit in, but would also like the maximum risk-free freedom, then it’s important. The reason they do more than necessary is they never test where the borderline is. If they found it’s 200 units away, then maybe they could go 100 units closer with plenty of margin for error. You have to sometimes offend people to find out where the limits are (or watch someone else test it).
Have you considered writing posts about it? So far most of your posts have been about why Popper’s philosophy is great, not about exactly what it is. A good introduction to Popperian philosophy would be less controversial and more useful.
I am afraid it wouldn’t work, at least for me. First because I am probably already biased against curi and perhaps even against Popper due to the style of the recent debates, and second because I don’t believe that curi represents Popper’s philosophy accurately. Still, I would like to read a post written by someone who understands Popper explaining what his Critical Rationalism is in detail. If curi wants to write it, he’d better wait some time until emotions evaporate and create a new account for that opportunity and completely change his attitude to discussion. This is not likely to happen, too, at least if curi’s statement about his being rude on purpose to filter out people he “can’t use” is to be taken seriously.
But someone knowledgeable of Popper should definitely write about it to settle this thing for good.
Is lukeprog familiar with Popper? I think he’s the most likely here to have the background for it, but expect that whatever plans he’s already got lined up are more productive.
See:
http://fallibleideas.com/
Popper’s books.
Bryan Magee’s short introductory book on Popper.
David Deutsch’s books.
My blog: http://curi.us/
Of course I’ve considered writing more things. I plan to.
Guilty as charged. I couldn’t tell you a single fact about Popperian philosophy, other than it being a controversy on LessWrong. In general, I find philosophy dense and difficult to understand (maybe because I think more concretely than abstractly) but if you could recommend a book or webpage that presents the ideas clearly with some concrete examples, I would love to check that out.
I would love to discuss that once I’ve had time to do the research...I’m at work right now and my break only lasts another 5 minutes, so I’ll get back to you sometime tomorrow or the next day. This isn’t a good week, I have 3 exams and a paper due, but I’ll find time.
Open-mindedness and curiosity are one thing. Raw native intelligence is something different. I might be above average on the first two, but I expect I have less of the second that the average LWer. For example, I would love to understand the math of quantum mechanics, but it’s hard for me and really learning it, if I decided to, would likely be a multi-year endevour. Same with computer programming...I would love to actually be able to do it, but it doesn’t come super easily.
Got to go I have to go teach first aid to 13-year-olds! I’ll reply to the rest of your comment later.
In that case I’d suggest starting with:
http://fallibleideas.com/
(try it and see if the style/approach appeals to you, if not no worries) or
http://www.amazon.com/Popper-Modern-masters-Bryan-Magee/dp/0670019674
(This summary book on Popper is only 115 pages. The easiest to read book option.)
I think you’re mistaking subject specific skills for raw native intelligence. Being good at math and programming isn’t what intelligence is about. They are specific skills.
BTW I believe most educational material is quite bad and makes stuff far harder and more confusing than necessary. And for quantum physics in particular the situation is pretty terrible (if you want to learn it in depth; there’s OK popular science books for a lower level of detail). The situation with programming is better: there’s way more self taught programmers and more non-academic efforts to try to create material to help people learn programming, which I think are often more successful than the stuff schools put out.
I would equate intelligence with basically how good one is at learning in general, without giving priority to some fields. I think open mindedness and curiosity are crucial traits for that. A lot of people aren’t much good at learning in general, but have a specific field or two where they do OK. They can be impressive because in the area where they are rational they gain a lot of expertise and detailed knowledge. But I don’t regard them as more intelligent than more broad people.
You find math hard to learn. But most mathematicians find various things hard to learn too, such as (commonly) social skills. Most people are more impressed by math knowledge than social knowledge because it’s more common. Most people learn social skills, it’s nothing special. Yet that doesn’t really imply math is harder. More people try hard to learn social skills. And more people are alienated from learning math, at a young age, by their teachers (especially females).
Whatever topics one is bad at learning, I don’t think it’s normally caused by intelligence itself. I think raw native intelligence is itself a misconception and that the hardware capabilities of people’s brains don’t vary a lot and the variance doesn’t have much practical consequence. Rather, I think what people call “intelligence” is actually a matter of their philosophical theories and rationality, especially either general purpose ideas (which allow one to be good at many things) or ideas in specific fields people are impressed by (e.g. math).
What I think causes people to have trouble with math, or social skills, or other things, besides the inherent difficulty of the subjects, is irrationalities, caused largely by external pressure and cruelty. Those people who have trouble learning social skills were teased as children, or had trouble finding friends, or something. They did not try to learn to interact with others in an environment where everyone was nice to them, and they could fail a bunch of times with no harm coming to them, and keep trying new things until they got it. With math, people are forced to do things they don’t want to like unpleasant math homework and math tests. They don’t get to learn at their own pace for their own intrinsic motivations. This commonly alienates people from the subject. Causes like these are cultural.
Have you looked at the evidence that this is false? Or is your belief not falsifiable? :)
It is primarily a philosophical belief. It can be falsified by criticism. It could in theory be falsified using scientific tests about how brains work, but technology isn’t there yet. It could also in theory be falsified if, say, people were dramatically different than they are. But I’m not relying on any special evidence in that regard, just basic facts of the world around us we’re all aware of. (For example, people commonly hold conversations with each other and partially understand each other. And then learn new languages. And children learn a first language. And so on. These things contradict some views of the mind, but they also allow for many including mine.)
BTW Popper never said all ideas should be (empirically) falsifiable. That’s a myth (which you didn’t say, but perhaps hinted at, so worth mentioning). He said that if they can’t be then they aren’t science, but he did not intend that as an insult, and he himself engaged in a lot of non-science.
In some special cases, saying something is non-science is a good criticism. Those cases are when something claimed to be science as part of its argument for why its right, and part of its way of presenting itself. If it claims to be science, but isn’t, that’s a problem. Popper’s favorite examples of this were ideas of Marx, Freud and Adler, which made specious claims to scientific status.
You’re right—I was only teasing, except that I think there is plenty of suggestive evidence for a meaningful innate G (even though it’s a sum of various types of health, and not only genetic, much less the sum of just a few SNPs). I was thinking of falsifiability because it seems to me that you’d say in response to any study that seems to segregate people by G and measure their outcomes later, you’d just say “they were already on the path toward having a sane+rational set of beliefs+practices”.
I’ve held a tentative version of your view (that nearly anyone could in principle learn to be smart) in the past. I’ve moved away from it as I’ve read more, but I still think there’s a great deal of difference in ability to observe or judge truth, at equal native mental talent, between someone with a workable set of beliefs and skills, and someone who’s tied to enough screwed-up beliefs and practices. (probably everyone sees this)
Your unusual behavior at first made me underestimate your competence. My heuristics usually save me a great deal of time, so I won’t apologize for them, but it was diverting having them tested.
I’ve read a single book of Popper’s (something like Open Society + its Enemies) and took away from it that he was smart and disliked Plato. So I don’t think I understand what it is you like about him, or why it would be useful for me to know more of what he wrote.
I would also say that measuring outcomes is a hard issue—e.g. you have to decide what is a good outcome. And all sorts of stuff interferes. Some people are too smart—in a sense—which can lead to boredom and alienation because they are different from their peers. There may be a sweet spot a little above average but not too far. Sometimes really exceptional people have exceptional outcomes, but sometimes not. I wouldn’t predict in advance that the smartest people will have the most successful outcomes, by many normal measures of good outcomes.
There’s a saying: The B students work for the C students. The A students teach.
The first thing I’d want to know about any potential study is basically: what are you going to do and why will it work? They need philosophical sophistication to avoid all kinds of mistakes. Which is just what the Conjunction Fallacy papers lack, as well as, e.g., many heritability papers.
That must have been volume 1 only. Volume 2 criticizes Marx and Hegel.
Popper’s biggest strength is his epistemology. He solved the problem of induction, identified and criticized the justificationist tradition (which most people have been unconsciously taking for granted since Aristotle), and presented a fallibilist and objective epistemology, which is neither authoritarian nor skeptical, and which works both in theory and practice. His epistemology also integrates well with other fields—there are interesting connections to physics, evolution, and computation (as discussed in Deutsch’s book The Fabric of Reality), and also to politics, education, human relationships (in the broadest sense; ways people interact, cooperate, communicate, etc) and morality.
A good place to start reading Popper is his book Conjectures and Refutations. It is a collection of essays, the first of which of which is long and covers a lot of epistemology.
Another good place to start is Bryan Magee’s short book on Popper. And another is David Deutsch’s books which explain epistemology and many other things.
Yes I know what you mean. I’m sure I dismiss some people who are worthwhile (though I use rather different heuristics than you, and I also tend to give people a lot of chances. One result of giving lots of chances is I can silently judge people but then see if my judgment was wrong on the second or third chance). I think the important things are that you have some ability to recognize when they may not be working well, and that after they fail in some respect you look for a way to change them so they don’t make the same mistake again. Changing them not to repeat a mistake, while still saving lots of time, can be hard, but it’s also important.
One thing about G is that it’s extremely difficult to disentangle parenting factors. When you intelligence test people at age 8, or 12, or 20, they’ve already had years and years of exposure to parenting, and often some school too. That stuff changes people, for better or worse. So how are you to know what was innate, and what wasn’t? This is a hard problem. I don’t think any experimental social scientists have solved it. I do think philosophy can address a lot of it, but not every detail.
Right. Thus the obsession with twin studies.
As for your complaint about lack of (philosophical) rigor on the part of psychologists and other scientists, I’m often shocked at the conclusions drawn (by motivated paper authors and hurried readers) from the data. In theory I can just update slightly on the actual evidence while not grasping the associated unproven stories, but in practice I’m not sure I’ve built a faithful voting body of facts in my brain.
Thanks for the Popper+Deutsch recommendations.
But they do not solve the problem. The only seem to at low precision, without much rigor. They are simplistic.
For example, they basically just gloss over and ignore the entire issue of gene-meme interactions, even though, in a technical and very literal sense, most stuff falls under that heading.
What basically happens—my view—is genes code for simple traits and parents in our culture react to those different traits. The children react to those reactions. The parents react to that new behavior. The children react to that. The parents react to that. And so on. Genetic traits—and also trivial and, for all intents and purposes, random details—set these things off. And culture does the rest. And twin studies do not rule this out, yet reach other conclusions. They don’t rule out my view with evidence, nor argument, yet somehow conclude something else. It’s silly.
Sometimes one gets the impression they’ve decided that if proper science is too hard, they are justified in doing improper science. They have a right to do research in the field! Or something.
Disagree? Try explaining how they work, and how you think they rule out the various possibilities other than genetic control over traits straight through to adulthood and independent of culture.
There’s other severe methodological errors too. You can read some here: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html
Maybe I was above average in, say, my high school graduating class, but I doubt that is true of the Less Wrong community. People wouldn’t be here if they lacked that degree of open-mindedness and curiosity.
Would you like to comment on how non-Western cultures view math differently? Or offer a suggestion as to why I was the only white girl in my high school calculus and vectors class? (I like math a lot...it’s just that most people who like math like it because they’re good at it, so the only people who want to talk to me about math and how awesome/fascinating it is are usually massively better at it than I am, which may be why I perceive myself as not being good at it.)
I do have stubbornness, which can be an advantage to learning new things (I spent 8 years teaching myself to sing, and went from complete tone-deafness to composing my own piano and vocal pieces and performing moderately difficult solos.) I am also stubbornly loyal to prior commitments, which basically means that once I start doing something I never stop...after awhile this limits my ability to start new things. (I can’t teach myself quantum mechanics while I’m working 2 jobs, singing in a church choir, and going to school full-time.)
Agreed! I ran into exactly this problem; I’ve read enough pop science books that I no longer learn anything new from them, but when I took a textbook out of the university library, I took one look at the first page and was lost. Eliezer’s intro to quantum mechanics would probably help, if I made the commitment to go through it entirely and practice all the math, but again, not something I can do very easily on my breaks at work.
Some might. Joining might make them feel good about themselves, and help them feel open minded.
I don’t know a lot. Asian cultures value school highly, and value math and science highly, and pressure children a lot. Well, actually I only know much about Japan, South Korea and China. The school pressure on children in Japan itself is much worse than the well known pressure on asian children in the US, btw.
Culture. Beyond that, I don’t know exactly.
I think cause and effect goes the other way. Initially, some people are more interested in math (sometimes due to parental encouragement or pressure). Consequently, they learn more of it and get a lead on their peers. This can snowball: they do well at it relative to their peers, so they like it more. And the teacher aims the material at the 20th percentile student, or something (not 50th percentile because then it’s too hard for too many people). Result: math class is pretty hard for people in percentiles 5-90, who might not be very far apart in skill. And they don’t like it. A few fail and hate it. And the ones with the early lead never have the experience, at least until college, of math being hard.
Perhaps this persistence and patience is a way in which you are smarter than many Less Wrongers.
Be careful with this. I’m not entirely sure what you mean by a commitment, but for example I think it’s important to be willing to stop reading a book in the middle if you don’t like it. If it’s not working, and there’s no particular reason you need to know the contents of this book, just move on! Some people have trouble with that. There’s also the sunk cost fallacy that some people have trouble with.
David Deutsch says there is no very good way to learn quantum mechanics, currently. Also that it’s one of the simpler and more important areas of physics, when presented correctly.
I believe the best serious physics books are Feynman’s lectures (that’s physics in general. I think there’s quantum stuff towards the end which I haven’t read yet.). But they are hard and will require supplementary material. If one finds them too hard then they’re probably not best for that person.
For pop science books, you might take a look at Deutsch’s books because I believe they offer some unique ideas about physics not found in other popular science books. By focussing on the Many Worlds Interpretation, he’s already different than many books, and then he goes further by offering his unique perspective on it, including concepts like fungibility. And he relates the ideas to philosophy in very interesting ways, as well as explaining Popperian philosophy too (he is the best living Popperian).
I like Feynman’s pop science books a lot too, and he does go into quantum physics in some. I don’t know how unique those are, though.
I glanced at Eliezer’s physics posts. Looks strongly pro-Many Worlds Interpretation which is a good sign.
I tried reading the Uncertainty Principle essay. It looks confusing and not very helpful to me. Which is a bad sign since I already know stuff about that topic in advance, so it should be easier for me to follow. It appears to be going into a bunch of details when there’s a simpler way to both explain and prove it. Maybe he’s following in the (bad) tradition of some physics book he read about it.
It’s hard to tell because it kind of meanders around a bunch, and certainly some specific statements are correct, but I don’t think Eliezer understands the uncertainty principle very well. e.g. he wants to rename it:
But that doesn’t make sense to me. It’s a logical deduction from the laws of physics about how when some observables are sharp, others must not be sharp (math proves this). Sharp means “the same in all universes”.
Here’s a quote from The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, terminology section:
This is hard to understand out of context, but it basically means if you consider all the versions of something in different universes, say a cup of coffee, and you consider the observable attributes of them (like temperature of the coffee), some observables are different in different universes. They can’t all be the same in all universes.
How you get from there to a certainty principle I don’t know.
Eliezer uses difficult language like “Amplitude distributions in configuration space evolve over time” which I don’t think is necessary. For one thing, in my understanding, the wave function is a function over configuration space and that’s the Schrödinger picture. But it’s easier to understand quantum physics using the Heisenberg Picture instead which focusses on observables.
There’s no hurry. I might stop checking this website, but I’ll be happy to continue the discussion any time if you email me curi@curi.us
It would be fine if you were busy and delayed for a month, or whatever. No big deal.
I would like to continue this conversation. It’s awfully nice to be discussing with someone and have them post a comment the length of a short story full of points that, while I might not agree with them, are well-thought-out. And nothing you said has really annoyed me. Some of the things you say I wouldn’t say, because a) that’s just not my attitude to life, and b) I have no particular reason (yet) to try to filter who I talk to. However, I think I understand why you take that attitude, and it doesn’t seem to have any negative consequences for your emotions, assuming you don’t care that people comment on your reputation. (Wish I could cite that comment but I don’t think I can find it again...)
My account is about 3 months old. I would need to add it up properly, but for sure more than 3⁄4 of my karma comes from my top-level posts. I have a few (Being a Teacher and Ability to React, neither of them very controversial) that were upvoted more than I think they deserved (46 and 68 upvotes respectively, or around that) and the rest are between 10 and 20. My post Positive Thinking probably has the most comments of anything I’ve written...it’s about the benefits of religious communities, which makes it fairly controversial here. I’m not good at writing controversial stuff (or writing non-fiction at all, really) but it’s a nice feeling when you’re 19 and feel kind of powerless in the world-at-large to see people replying to and discussing your ideas.
I saw several comments like that. I vaguely recall replying to one asking what my reputation is, since he hadn’t specified.