A critical thinking class in which nothing was sacred and everything was suspect. We spent a semester uncovering the fallacies, lies, and manipulative rhetorical devices in advertisements, television and movies, government propaganda (related to sex, drugs, the military, etc.), journalistic publications, academic papers, wisdom our parents taught us, and much else.
anonym
I agree that rationalist has baggage in the minds of most people, and it evokes rationalization and related antithetical concepts for many.
If Less Wrong expands the community and shapes future discussions on rationalist topics in the way that I expect it to, this might just be the last good time to coin a new term.
I nominate righters and truthers, in that order.
The class was at college (in the USA). And I ended up reading philosophy (I assume you meant your question in the British sense of read), which I partly regret. It would have been better to do math at school and philosophy on the side, rather than the reverse.
What is your dialect? In my dialect (Californian American), neither word has much of a connotation at all. They both have a vague feel of something I might read in a modern science fiction book talking about different factions of posthumans, or something in that vein, but I don’t think most people where I live (in the SF bay area) would think they have any connotation. I was intentionally trying to think of a new word without any pre-existing baggage.
Interesting. I’ve heard right-winger, but never righter alone. I hadn’t heard of 9-11 truther, but that definitely rules out truther for sure. I am familiar with truthiness, but it didn’t come to mind for me in thinking about truther. It’s interesting how idiosyncratic language is, especially when it comes to connotation.
It would be clear from context which was intended. English has many homophones, and they don’t seem to cause much difficulty. Is that not your experience with the many existing homophones?
There are no genuine mysteries, only things that I am ignorant or confused about.
The most frequently useful thing I’ve learned is to be much more distrustful of my motives, my reasoning, my judgments, and my capacity for self-understanding and being aware of what is going on in my head (and why).
A friendly, concise overview of some of the most important techniques for improving thought, such as identifying cached thoughts and tabooing your words, holding off on proposing solutions, recognizing fake justification, leaving a line of retreat, righting wrong questions, identifying true sources of disagreement, etc.
This presupposes some motivating discussion of cognitive biases and why it is so unnatural to think rationally.
We are getting a bit off-topic, so this is my last post in this thread.
I’d argue that this constitutes many (note the restrictions too, which result in excluded entries).
With regard to how noticeable homophones are, it feels to me like there is a priming effect due to the context, which results in the sense that was intended being obvious and coming to mind effortlessly. For example, cents and sense sound the same in some dialects, but I doubt many would even consider interpreting the sound in question as cents if they heard the previous sentence spoken. I think most homophones are like that, most of the time, and that it usually takes effort to even notice them, as when trying to think of a pun. I will grant you though that righter and writer are more alike in terms of their meaning, and thus easier to confuse, but I just wouldn’t consider that sufficient reason to not even consider it as an option.
This is probably too much of a hassle to implement. It would mean that you’d have to have a separate class of account (with this one instance for now) where the password may not be changed, past posts may not be edited or deleted, preferences are restricted, the account cannot be deleted, etc. If it were a normal account, trolls would render it unusable immediately.
An alternative is to just allow commenting without being logged in or anonymously while logged in, but I assume they have specific reasons for setting things up the way they did.
It would be nice to be able to post things from time to time without having to worry about it being an unpopular viewpoint that the agree/disagree-bots will vote down as much as they can. I like the slashdot system, where anonymous posting is allowed, with anonymous posts starting with a lower moderation value, and users being able to assign a positive or negative karma modifier for anonymous posts.
My first thought exactly. It reminds me of the story from the Chuang Tzu regarding the hideously gnarled tree that survives to a ripe old age due to its ‘flaws’.
Likewise, many employees feign incompetence with respect to certain kinds of tasks—e.g., programmers feigning incompetence with regard to anything managerial.
The indication of the (kind of) evidence for a statement is known as evidentiality in linguistics.
The wikipedia article referenced above gives the example of Eastern Pomo, in which a verb takes one of 4 evidential suffixes, corresponding to the type of evidence: nonvisual sensory, inferential, hearsay, or direct knowledge (probably visual).
Perhaps LW could randomly hide scores of some articles for a while after they’re posted. If this were done with enough articles that the sample included a wide range of article types and qualities, we could easily see just how significant an effect there is from having scores visible.
Great idea. One potential problem though for these sorts of experiments is that knowledge (or reasonable suspicion) of the experiments would alter users’ behavior.
The half-point idea is an interesting one. I find it hard to think of genuinely good reasons for wanting to know how positive a score is before deciding whether to vote up or not, and I haven’t heard any good explanations from anybody else yet either. That’s to be contrasted with the multitude of bad reasons for wanting to know the score beforehand, which exploit common cognitive biases that we are all at least partially subject to. I do find the idea a bit heavy-handed, but I think it would make the community slightly less herd-like and a bit more rational.
Of course, you’d also have to change the code base so that once an initial blind vote has been made, any further changes would only register at the lower value.
As to whether it’s unfair, you could explain it as getting an EXTRA half point for your willingness to make a small sacrifice for the betterment of the community at large. You could even make it 1 point versus 1.5 points.
This is really great. Thanks for making it available.
My only suggestion is to hide the “Turn kibitzing On/Off” icon after a few seconds and only show it when the user hovers over that area.
The reason I make this suggestion is that while I slowly scroll down the page while reading, the icon jumps all over the place in the upper right corner as it repositions itself 10 times a second.
Even if it didn’t jump around, I’d still rather have it hidden except when needed. IMHO, it stands out against the dark background and mars the otherwise very nice LW aesthetic.
I think the dynamic at work here is System 1 versus System 2 thinking. System 2 is at work while you write this post and consider things from a distance. It accepts and believes that there are no ghosts.
Once you’re in the “haunted house” itself though, System 1 comes in to play much more. System 1 is what makes you jump before you’ve consciously recognized that there was a sound or sight to react to. Depending on many factors, you may or may not be able to recover and override System 1 with System 2. If you were able to stay even though you felt like running, and if you did this enough, eventually System 1 would react differently. This is the basis of what is known as exposure in cognitive behavioral therapy, wherein you gradually expose yourself to (e.g.) phobias in order to acclimatize yourself to the phenomenon, realize that the phobia is unjustified, and change your automatic (System 1) reactions.
I’d still prefer it be hidden altogether after a few seconds until I hover in that area, but this is a big improvement. Thanks.
If you want to learn from your experience most effectively and efficiently, and to stop making the same kinds of mistakes, with subtle variations, again and again, it is necessary to engage in reflection about the erroneous thoughts that caused the bug/problem and the thoughts and mental processes that were absent but could have prevented the problem. It depends how much one cares about improving, and how quickly, but for anybody who seeks mastery, I don’t see how you can avoid thinking about thinking.