I no longer try to steelman BETA-MEALR [Ban Everything That Anyone Might Experience And Later Regret] arguments as utilitarian. When I do, I just end up yelling at my interlocutor, asking how she could possibly get her calculations so wrong, only for her to reasonably protest that she wasn’t make any calculations and what am I even talking about?
Apprentice
The thing I don’t get is why LessWrong defines itself as a “community blog” but then—unlike every other blog I have ever read—presents visitors with a (basically) static page when they go to lesswrong.com. If this is a consular ship, then where is the ambassador? To get to the actual blog you’re supposed to click Main, which is just weird. If lesswrong.com/promoted is the ‘main’ thing then why isn’t it the thing I first see when I visit lesswrong.com?
Let me have a go at this.
Fellow effective altruists! It is your moral duty to familiarize yourselves with biological realities, many of which are relevant to deciding the morally optimal course of action. For example, “findings from twin studies yield heritability estimates of 0.50 for prosocial behaviours like empathy, cooperativeness and altruism”. (source) Please take this into account when deciding whether to have children.
Fellow HBDers! It is your moral duty to take up the white man’s burden and donate to GiveWell today. If giving money directly to poor people in Kenya doesn’t seem paternalistic enough then go for the deworming options.
Have I successfully alienated everyone yet?
I think this is a bit too black and white. There is not a well-defined group of ideologically homogeneous reactionaries which you could just get rid off. Rather, a significant number of LW contributors are sympathetic, to various degrees, to a variety of reactionary positions. I’m not a monarchist and I’m not a fan of Moldbug (why doesn’t he just say what his claims are and then offer what he sees as the supporting evidence for them? why the wearisomely verbose exercises in smugness?). On the other hand, I am interested in HBD issues and I am sympathetic to some ethno-nationalist causes (e.g. the desires of the current majority population of Israel to remain the majority population of Israel). Perhaps more to the point, Yvain has spent a lot of time criticizing reactionary philosophy but he has also made it clear that he agrees with significant parts of it. Indeed, a person being upset by his posts is what triggered the current thread.
How about that good old Solzhenitsyn quote:
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
We live in a world where it has become “politically correct” to avoid absolutes. Many want all religions to be given the same honor, and all gods regarded as equally true and equally fictitious. But take these same people, who want fuzzy, all-inclusive thinking in spiritual matters, and put them on an airplane. You will find they insist on a very dogmatic, intolerant pilot who will stay on the “straight and narrow” glidepath so their life will not come to a violent end short of the runway. They want no fuzzy thinking here!
- 3 Sep 2011 22:59 UTC; 7 points) 's comment on Science Doesn’t Trust Your Rationality by (
This thing, I suppose.
Well, I’m a linguist, and yes, we do have that. Actually, it works a lot like the philosophy of religion thing. Researchers within the subdiscipline that deals with X believe X is really important. But outside that subdiscipline/clique are a lot of people who have concluded that X is not important and/or doesn’t really exist. Naturally, the people who believe in X publish a lot more about X than the people who think X is a stinking pile of dwagon crap. This can lead to outsiders getting the impression that the field has a consensus position about X=awesome.
The best example I know is the debate about linguistic universals. Chomskyan universalists think that all human languages are fundamentally alike, that there is a genetically determined “universal grammar” which shapes their structure. The Chomskyans are a very strong and impressive clique and a lot of non-linguists get the impression that what they say is what every serious linguist believes. But this is not so. A lot of us think the “universal grammar” stuff is vacuous non-sense which we can’t be bothered with.
Starting a big fight with the Chomskyans has not been a good career move for the past half-century but this may be changing. In 2009, a couple of linguists started a shitstorm with the article The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. The abstract starts like this:
Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective.
Suddenly a lot of people are willing to die on this hill, so you can find a very ample supply of recent articles on both sides of this.
The problem of not realizing the existence of vast numbers of people “whose views you would find even more repugnant” seems to be very general. Progressive activists tend to see elected Democratic leaders as hopelessly timid, watered-down centrist sellouts while they see elected Republicans as ruthlessly efficient hard-right zealots, beholden to the most extreme elements of their party. And conservative activists have a very similar view of their own leaders as centrist sellouts while they see Democratic leaders as hard-left fanatics.
I’m not sure why this is so but part of the reason probably is the general tendency to have a more nuanced understanding of stuff which is close to oneself. So the difference between various flavors of your own ideology are salient to you while the differences between various flavors of the evil opposing ideology are not. In the same mundane way that the differences between Florida and Ohio may be more salient to you than the differences between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Upon his death man must leave everything behind … and depart forever from the world he has known. He must of necessity go to that foul land of death, a fact which makes death the most sorrowful of all events. … Some foreign doctrines, however, teach that death should not be regarded as profoundly sorrowful. … These are all gross deceptions contrary to human sentiment and fundamental truths. Not to be happy over happy events, not to be saddened by sorrowful events, not to show surprise at astonishing events, in a word, to consider it proper not to be moved by whatever happens, are all foreign types of deception and falsehood. They are contrary to human nature and extremely repugnant to me.
-- Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) - quoted from Blocker, Japanese Philosophy, p. 109
Motoori was as far as you can get from being a rationalist but this quote was so Yudkowskian that I felt it belonged here.
I was following a thread from August on Yvain’s site. The author of the blog post we are discussing added a comment there on January 4 and Yvain replied. I should have included this link in my original write-up. And since I’ve started criticizing myself, I should have left out my half-baked musings on racism and spent more effort on summarizing the post I was linking to. For example, it might have been a good idea to quote the following:
If you prefer to not have any truck with the word ‘privilege’, substitute ‘the less likelihood of having to anticipate culturally-permissible threats to their personhood they have lived with’, since that’s the specific manifestation of privilege I mean. Sadly, that is a long and unwieldy phrase.
This shows that the author is able to taboo words in order to improve readers’ understanding. A communication skill justifiably prized on LessWrong.
It’s worth explicitly noting that both liberal and conservative activists are right about their own leaders being centrist sellouts, just barely worth voting for. This is the natural order of things, as admirably explained by Chris in his post. The part they are wrong about is in not seeing the difference between the opposing side’s elected leaders and their base.
I think controlling Earth’s destiny is only modestly harder than understanding a sentence in English—in the same sense that I think Einstein was only modestly smarter than George W. Bush. EY makes a similar point.
You sound to me like someone saying, sixty years ago: “Maybe some day a computer will be able to play a legal game of chess—but simultaneously defeating multiple grandmasters, that strains credibility, I’m afraid.” But it only took a few decades to get from point A to point B. I doubt that going from “understanding English” to “controlling the Earth” will take that long.
A while back the “Steveosphere” had a list of items for which “the masses display more common sense than the smarties do”. These suggest that they think they have located Yvain-clusters of the following type:
Troglodyte position.
Liberal position.
Troglodyte position held for sophisticated reasons.
I think the ‘alien parasite’ metaphor is a very interesting and potentially productive way to think about (rationalist) human consciousness.
Some related points are made by this blog post on ethics. Peter Singer fails to live up to his ethical theories because the alien parasite that writes Singer’s books doesn’t have full control over Singer’s actions. If it did then Singer would be inhuman to us.
The blogger makes the point that those who have managed to suppress their ‘natural’ moral sense in favor of the dictates of an ideological system don’t have a good track record. This ties into a lot of LessWrong themes. An alien parasite that is in full control of its host is potentially a very powerful thing—and something we might reasonably be afraid of. With a human you can always count on certain things, with an alien you never can tell. Maybe it just wants to manufacture paperclips...
Great questions. I would say that a majority of linguists probably accept the fast-childhood-acquisition argument for the innateness of language but a lot depends on how the question is phrased. I would agree that language is innate to humans in the weak and banal sense that humans in any sort of natural environment will in short order develop a complex system of communication. But I don’t think it follows that we have a specialized language module—we may be using some more generic part of our cognitive capacity. I’m not sure if we really have the data to settle this yet.
The whole thing is tricky. How fast is fast? If humans definitely had no language model and had to learn language using a more generic cognitive ability, how fast would we expect them to do it? Five years? Ten years? Fifty years? Never? I don’t know of any convincing argument ruling out that the answer would be “pretty much the speed at which they are actually observed to learn it”.
And what qualifies as language, anyway? Deaf children can learn complex sign languages. Is that just as innate as spoken language or are they using a more generic cognitive ability? My one-year-old is a whiz on the iPad. Is he using the language module or a more generic cognitive ability? Is it a language module or a symbolic processing module? Or an abstract-thinking module?
I’m personally very skeptical that the brain has any sort of neatly defined language module—is that really Azathoth’s style? There is a lot more to say about this, maybe there’d be enough interest for a top-level post.
Virtually everything in science is ultimately circular, so the main thing is just to make the circles as big as possible.
Richard D. Janda and Brian D. Joseph, 2003, The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, p. 111.
If I close my mind in fear, please pry it open.
-- Metallica
It’s of course possible that this Bock guy knows what he’s doing on the hiring front. But in these interviews he has no incentive to give Google’s competitors coherent helpful information on how to hire people—and every incentive to send out obfuscated messages which might flatter the preconceptions of NYT readers.
My guess is that Bond’s thesis overestimates how much mileage fandom gets from defending the relevant works against outside criticism—maybe his theory represents an outsider’s view?
The only true fandom I’ve spent a lot of time inside was not at all dedicated to defending its object of focus. The segment of Harry Potter fandom I knew consisted of people (>90% women) writing slash about Harry Potter characters. In meetups people would usually spend more time discussing derivative works (and obsessing over ‘pairings’) than the original work. To the extent that the original work was discussed it was often to poke fun of its glaring flaws. Most people I knew did not think the Harry Potter books were actually great books. Some thought they were pretty good, some thought they were downright awful—that wasn’t the point. The quality of the books wasn’t the reason why they were in the fandom.
The only time this fandom would be visible to outsiders was when we did things like dress up as Harry Potter characters and go to a new Harry Potter movie. I’m sure people who saw that thought, “My, these people sure must like the Harry Potter films”. In a way, of course, we did—but not in the way the typical cinema-goer liked them. The main object was to mine the new material for suggestions of sexual tension between the male characters.
Maybe this is atypical, I’d be curious to know the inner workings of fandoms that are not sex-based.
It’s not that people hate your ex and want to downvote all sympathy for her. Rather, this is just one of many manifestations of our ongoing culture war. Roughly speaking, we have two teams:
Team Blue is on board with romantic love and feminism and emphasizes personal autonomy. On this view, a successful love relationship is about finding a person you click with, which could mean any number of quirky things. The problem with your marriage is that your wife was never that into you—which sucked for her. Now that she’s found a person she clicks with, the seeds have been sown for more future happiness for all. No-one is really at fault, especially since you have both done your best to minimize disruption for the children.
Team Red is sympathetic to “red pill” advice (Athol Kay etc.), emphasizes biology and is less individualistic. A successful relationship is not primarily about a unique connection between unique individuals—rather it is about acting in accordance with an already existing model of what human males and females desire in each other. A particular necessity is that the male should, where appropriate, display confident and assertive behavior. On this view, our modern society has fallen into a trap (we have some harmful memes floating around, or whatever) where many males become doormats—which makes them unattractive to their wives or potential wives. What ruined your marriage is not that you were somehow inherently the wrong man for your wife—but that society failed to teach you to be assertive when appropriate. (She thought she could bring her lover into your home and you would just conveniently scurry away. This is how little she thought of you.)
You totally could express sympathy to your ex within a Team Red perspective but it would go something like this: “I feel for your wife. She couldn’t control her biology and feel attracted to a man who was not displaying sufficient alpha traits.” In practice, Team Red views do sometimes come with a certain regrettable bitterness towards women—especially wives who leave their husbands. So a Red-ist may tend to read sympathy to such a woman, if not explicitly framed as Red-ist, as Blue-ist propaganda.
Anyway, the point is that Team Red and Team Blue are locked in a low-grade war on LessWrong. Comments on the relevant issues will often have downvotes as well as upvotes. The comment by shminux is currently at +9, 76% positive, while the comment by Viliam Búr is at +9, 68% positive.
If you are a partisan of this, it is hard not to downvote the opposing team because you feel that they are directly harming people with their counterproductive advice and toxic memes. I don’t know if we can work out a downvote ceasefire.