B.A. in Philosophy by University of Sao Paulo (USP), Brazil, and technical analyst at a Brazilian railway lab.
alexgieg
Karma: 511
Done.
The English work “meek” is a problematic translation of the original Greek “praus”. Praus refers to a wild animal who’s been tamed, the connotation being that such a person hasn’t lost the virtue of strength of their wild nature, but added to it the virtue of civilized interaction, similar to how a tamed animal learns to do things their wild counterparts would never do.
This links to several other similar notions spread through the New Testament. For example, when Jesus:
a) Tells his disciples to be “harmless as doves” but “wise as serpents”;
b) When he orders them to first go around and learn to preach without carrying weapons, thus having to resort to fleeing when threatened, and then, after they managed to do that, instructs them to arm themselves with swords, the implication being that now they have the experience needed to know when violence can be dispensed with, and when it cannot;
c) Or when he teaches them to give the other face, which also is quite misunderstood modernly. Back then when a person of higher social standing wanted to deeply offend someone from a lower social standing, they slapped them with the back of their hands. By showing such a person “the other face” they couldn’t use that movement, and were forced to slap you with the palm of their hand, a gesture reserved to challenging someone of their same social standing, which most wouldn’t dare do.
In short, such expressions have a connotation of deliberately restraining one’s own savagery, but not letting it go, so that others may know that, while you’re fine and good and helpful, you aren’t weak, and aren’t to be trifled with. A connotation that more often than not is lost in translation.
Minor curiosity: originally, back in old printing days, quotations marks went neither before nor after punctuation marks, but above these, after all, it’s a half-height symbol with empty space below it, and another half-height symbol with empty space above it, so both merged well into a single combined glyph, saving space.
When movable types entered the picture almost no types set had unified quotation+punctuation types, so both were physically distinct symbols that needed a sequence when placed on the printing board. Over time the US mostly settled with punctuation-then-quotation, while most other countries went mostly with quotation-then-punctuation—which on further analysis (and then with programming languages) proved more sensible.
Nowadays with modern Unicode ligatures we could easily go back to quotation-over-punctuation for display purposes, while allowing the writing to be either way, but I suppose after 200 years of printing these glyphs separately no one has much interest in that.
I would indeed be interested in your mention of this sort of thing having “changed in a bad way”.
Well, in my case it came due to robbery. Until my late teens / early adulthood I was robbed four times, which wasn’t uncommon in the region of Brazil I lived at the time (crime rates have diminished a lot in the intervening decades). From those, three were by black thieves, blacks being a very discriminated-against group here, even if not as much as in the US. The third time has caused in me what I suppose I could describe as a “micro-PTSD”, because from that day my System 1 began making me acutely aware, in a fight-or-flight manner, of the presence of unknown black people around me, something that didn’t happen before.
This is extremely annoying, to say the least. No matter how much I want to turn off this trigger, it remains “there”, unconsciously activating whenever I’m distracted from actively suppressing it at the System 2 level. That said, over time I’ve managed to learn to suppress it very quickly, but I always worry on occasion it may be not be quick enough, that the person at whom it triggered will notice that split-second spark of irrational fear in my eyes before I can consciously force it off.
On the not quite bright side, gaining this trigger made me understand how racial biases develop and perpetuate. But I still would have very much preferred to never have gained it to begin with.
Let me chime in briefly. The way EY handles this issue tends to be bad as a rule. This is a blind spot in his otherwise brilliant, well, everything.
A recent example: a few months ago a bunch of members of the official Less Wrong group on Facebook were banished and blocked from viewing it without receiving a single warning. Several among them, myself included, had one thing in common: participation in threads about the Slate article.
I myself didn’t care much about it. Participation in that group wasn’t a huge part of my Facebook life, although admittedly it was informative. The point is just that doing things like these, and continuing to do things like these, accrete a bad reputation around EY.
It really amazes me he has so much difficulty calibrating for the Streisand Effect.
“Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they’d get from ambitious peers”
This, I think, is one of the roots of smart people getting into weird stuff. Contrarians, contra-cultural types, conspiracy theorists (the inventors, not the believers) and the like are usually very smart, they just don’t optimize their smarts in a good direction, so a newly minted smart person will feel attracted to them. The end result are very suboptimal communities of smart individuals going in all kinds of weird directions.
That’s my case, mind. Finding the rationalist community has helped me put breaks on some of my weirdest aspects, but by no means on all of them. Which might or not be smart of me, no idea yet at this point.
I see one potential use for this: anonymity. There are models able to fingerprint writing styles which can then be used to pinpoint a specific unknown individual as the author behind a set of unrelated texts, and then deanonymize them if they wrote something out there under their real identity. This tool, or a similar one, could therefore change one’s style into a somewhat generic one that would be much harder, maybe even impossible, for style fingerprinting to work, specially if the weights used could be randomized for every sentence to make it essentially unfeasible to reverse the process in order to obtain the original.
About this:
People reproduce at an exponential rate. The amount of food we can create is finite. Population growth will eventually outstrip production. Humanity will starve unless population control is implemented by governments.
The calculation and the predictions were correct until the 1960′s, including very gloomy views that wars around food would begin happening by the 1980′s. What changed things was the Green Revolution. Weren’t for this technological breakthrough no one could actually have predicted, and right now we might be looking back at 40 years of wars, plenty more dictatorships and authoritarian regimes all around, some going for multiple wars against their neighbors, others with long running one child policies of their own.
So, in addition to the points you made, I’d add that many times uncertainty comes from “unknown unknowns” such as not knowing what technologies will be developed, while at other times it comes from hoping certain technologies will be developed, betting on them, but then those failing to materialize.
Is it worth acting when you’re comparing a 0.051% chance of doing good to a 0.049% chance of doing harm?
I’d say Chesterton’s Fence provides a reasonable heuristics for such cases.
I personally think quotation-over-punctuation would solve this nicely. Here’s an example from someone who managed to have his TeX documents do exactly that:
I have the impression you’re confounding the terms “freedom” and “democracy”, themselves quite broad. The contents of your post suggest what you’re seeking is to live in a country that are representative liberal democracies, and whose electoral process results in specific representativeness quotients, as well as in other specific features. But that doesn’t exactly overlap with any specific notion of “freedom”, such as that of “true freedom”, unless you also were to provide a specific definition of both.
I imagine you’re going to find a better response if you were to taboo the words “democracy”, “freedom”, and “true freedom”, so as to restate what you’re seeking in more objective, concrete terms.
I don’t know about the majority, but I can say for at least a few, when they say “I don’t see people in terms of race”, they’re being literal, not metaphoric. I was like this until my late teen years, when it changed, in a bad way—which I can detail if there’s interest. But the point is, until that moment I really couldn’t see race, at all. I evidently noticed people had different skin colors, hair types, and eye shapes, but this didn’t register with me as significant in any way, shape or form, concrete or abstract.
And one comment about the AMAB and AFAB acronyms. A study I read years ago showed that about 1 in 20,000 newborns are transgendered. This means that 99.995% of the time the gender assigned at birth is indeed the gender the person will have. Now, the usual, in contexts in which one has a 99.995% likelihood of making a correct guess, is to simply say “x is y”. Evidently, for the 0.005% of cases in which the that guess was incorrect, it makes sense to say they were “incorrectly AM/FAB”, but outside of these exceptional cases of misassignment, using these expressions gives the impression the assignation is incorrectly made way more often than it in fact is.
The difference between someone with an IQ of 115 and someone with an IQ of 175 is four standard deviations. Four standard deviations is huge. It is equal to the difference between a PhD in science and someone hovering on the edge of an intellectual disability.
I’d be careful with this kind of comparison. IQ numbers and SDs may look like cardinal measurements, but they’re actually an ordinal hierarchical system. What one can say is that someone with IQ n+1 is “smarter than” someone with IQ n, who in turn is “smarter than” someone with IQ n-1. But there’s no way, for now, to convert that in a cardinality.
Hence, in an absolute sense of literal, actual intelligence, the difference in between an IQ 175 and an IQ 115 may be either greater or smaller than the difference in intelligence between an IQ 115 and an IQ 55. My personal hunch is that it’s much smaller, although, evidently, I have no way to back that up.
I’d like to suggest adding three more bits of information for every answer:
The year(s) every conflict happened;
What percentage of global population those numbers represented at the time;
The rate of deaths caused by the conflict as deaths per 100k people per year.
This would make the ranking feel more relevant and informative.
Because if I do not follow a universal standard of ethics then my entire ethical system will be founded on nothing more than transient fashions.
Alas, you won’t find that in mysticism, as mystics’ ethics isn’t universal either.
What I observed reading and listening to many mystics over the years is that, while their ethics did indeed change in a more or less similar way due to their mystical experiences, it didn’t do so in a “big G” way, but rather only in a “little g” way. Basically, their experiences change their utility function in a very specific way: they end up believing that achieving those experiences is a value unto itself, that everyone should have them, and so they propose changes and tweaks to their pre-existing, culturally conditioned moral framework that, if applied at large, result in facilitating and encouraging more people to achieve mystical experiences.
Now, this isn’t to say that having those experiences doesn’t provide objective benefits. It seems to do, as it’s been shown that people who’ve had them are in general calmer, more focused, less anxious etc. But that’s a far cry from “understanding the universe”. Mystical experiences don’t provide for that, for if they did, mystics wouldn’t all keep disagreeing with each other about how the universe works, which they definitely do, on most of everything.
Also, depending on how those tweaks to pre-existing moral norms are done, the end result sometimes can be worse than the original. For a remarkable example check Kelley L. Ross’s article Zen and the Art of Divebombing, or The Dark Side of the Tao, which shows how incredibly wrong things can go in that area.
I think the OP is referring to the fact that, while mystical experiences are usually thought by non-practitioners as being random bouts of subjective insight with no objectivity at all, hence fundamentally little more than noise, that isn’t actually the case. Mystical experiences follow structured patterns, which is why schools of mysticism develop over time with a well established progression system so that more advanced practitioners can evaluate and teach less advanced practitioners. Basically then, while all of those practitioners are having strictly subjective experiences, those experiences are similar enough they can be objectively discussed by, and worked upon, by those others who also have had close or similar enough ones, including those from outside that particular school.
This means those experiences are neither purely subjective, as is the case with someone suffering from schizophrenia or other mental illness, nor purely objective, in the sense of someone who knows nothing about electricity being able to use electric devices thus extrinsically validating the physics on which electrical engineering is based. Rather, they’re in a category of their own, which for lack of a better term some call “subjectively objective”.
The field of subjectively objective experiences is scarcely studied by modern science, which focus heavily on the other two. There are some initial efforts in that direction, with brain scans of mystics during deep meditation, that kind of thing, but those still focus much more heavily on the strictly objective side of things (what’s physically going on in the brain) than on the specifics of the experiences. This happens, I think, because there aren’t well developed and agreed upon hard scientific methodologies for dealing with problems that are impossible to study via double, much less triple, blindness. Rather, this category of problems isn’t evaluable even via single blindness. To study it researchers would have to go “zero blind”, becoming practitioners themselves and examining it from within, which so far is a huge no-no for anything evidence-based.
So, to go back to the OP, when he says mysticism can observe ethics in absolute terms, I infer they mean ethics itself is neither objective, nor subjective, but rather a subjectively objective field, hence why it can be evaluated only by means of mystical practices, which for now are still the only ones directly addressing this third category of problems.
It’s strange to have this as my first comment on LW but I’d like to mention that the fanfic’s author is currently being targeted by Internet trolls due to her transhumanist stories, among which this one, to the point of receiving death threats. See this blog post of hers for details.
When this person goes to post the answer to the alignment problem to LessWrong, they will have low enough accumulated karma that the post will be poorly received.
I don’t think this is accurate, it depends more on how it’s presented.
In my experience, if someone posts something that’s controversial to the general LW consensus, but argues carefully and in details, addressing the likely conflicts and recognizing where their position differs from the consensus, how, why, etc., in short, if they do the hard work of properly presenting it, it’s well received. It may earn an agreement downvote, which is natural and expected, but it also earns a karma upvote for the effort put into exposing the point, plus those who disagreed engaging with the person explaining their points of disagreement.
Your point would be valid on most online forums, as people who aren’t as careful about arguments as LWers tend to conflate disliking with disagreeing, which results in a downvote is a downvote is a downvote. Most LWers, in contrast, tend to be well skilled at treating the two axes as orthogonal, and it shows.
Which texts is Hegel responding too? Is it ultimately rooted in Aristotle/Plato/Socretes? How much work does one have to do to get up to speed?
I’m not well versed in Hegel’s philosophy, but I know he does three things (and probably more).
First, he builds upon Kant, who himself is moving against all philosophy that came before him and refunding the entire thing so as to be compatible with modern scientific inquiry.
Second, he changes the concept of truth, from static to dynamic, not in the sense that what we think is true may be wrong and so we fix our knowledge until it becomes actually true, but in the sense that the very notion of “truth” itself changes over time, and hence a knowledge that was true once becomes false not because it was incorrect, but because it’s aligned with a notion of truth that isn’t valid anymore. This comes on the heels of a new analysis methodology he invented for this purpose, and that you need to master before seeing it in use.
Third, he tries to integrate notions of justice, rights etc. that are still grounded on pre-Kantian notion with all the above.
That paragraph quoted touches on all of the above, so it takes a knowledge of classic metaphysics, plus Kantian anti-metaphysics, plus classic political philosophy, plus Hegel’s own take on words such as “truth”, “rights” etc. actually refer to.
It’s an extremely ambitious project, and on top of that he has to deal with the potential censorship of rulers and church, so even in parts in which he could be clearer he has to deliberately obfuscate things so that censors don’t catch up with what he’s actually trying to say (this was a usual procedure for many philosophers, and continues being among some).
(...) when I read Bostrom, Parfait, or Focault or listen to Amanda Askill or Agnes Callard or Amia Srinivasan I don’t get the sense that they’re necessarily trying to bring fundamentally new objects into our ontology or metaphysics, but rather that they’re trying to clarify and tease apart distinctions and think through implications;
I don’t know the last three, but the first two basically go in the opposite direction. They take all these complex novel notions of the genius philosophers and distillate them down into useable bits by applying them to specific problems, with some small insights of theirs sprinkled here and there. Foucault in particular also did some of the “big insight” thing, but on a more limited fashion and with a narrower focus, so it isn’t as earth-shattering as what the major philosophers did.
Besides, there are movements among professional academic philosophers that propose developing philosophy in small bits, one tiny problem at a time worked to exhaustion. Much of what they do is in fact this. But how that’s seen varies. When I was majoring in Philosophy in the 2000′s, for example, there was an opinion shared by all professors and teachers in the Philosophy Department that from all of them who worked there since it was founded in the 1930′s until that date, only one single professor has been seen as a real philosopher. Everyone else were historians of philosophy, which indeed was how they described what we were learning how to do. :-)
is that a project that tends to lend itself to a really different, “clearer” way of using language?
Yes, undoubtedly. On the flip side, it doesn’t lend itself to noticing large scale structural issues. For instance, from working tiny problem by tiny problem, one after the other, one would never do as Hegel did, stop, look at things from a distance, and perceive the very concept of truth everyone was using is itself full of assumptions that need unpacking and criticizing, in particular the assumption of the atemporality of truth. Rather, they will all tend to keep working from within that very concept of truth, assumed wholesale, doing their 9-to-5 job, accumulating their quotations so as to get a higher pay, and not really looking outside any of it.
A rule of thumb is that major philosophers make you feel ill. They destroy your certainties by showing what you used to consider solid ground were mirages. Minor philosophers and professional philosophers, in contrast, feel safe. At most a little inconvenient here and there, but still safe, since with them the ground is still the same, and still mostly as firm as before.
I wish the LW team would prioritize thinking about how to enable such discussions to happen more safely on LW
One way to do this would be to create a tag for socially risky topics, and make posts marked as such visible only when logged in, to accounts that have existed for more than ‘t’ time with at least ‘k’ of karma. The original poster would be able to add the tag to their own post, but not remove it unless they themselves meet the minimum ‘tk’ threshold. Others would be able to add or remove it only if they themselves have those same stats. And comments made under a topic thus marked would by default inherit the same tag and properties. This would make it possible to have such conversations with little risk, with further improvements possible.
I’ve taken the survey.
By the way, nice game at the end. I didn’t do the math but it seemed evident that defecting was the logical choice (and by reading the comments below I was right). I cooperated anyway, it just felt right. So, defectors, I probably just made one of you a few hundredths of a cent richer! Lucky you! ;-)