I’ve recently started my blog about music. So far I’ve updated once a week, all posts being several hundred words in length or longer, with the exception of this week. I intend to keep up this frequency when I return to college next month. I started this blog at the suggestion of my college lecturer; I am using it to practice my writing skills (both academically and journalistically), and to promote my own music. I’m also hoping to use it as a forum to thrash out some ideas for my upcoming college thesis on the works of György Ligeti. (On this topic, I’d be curious to know if there are any contributors on LW who are musicologists or composers.)
I’m learning the bass guitar—I got one in January but didn’t get to put a lot of time into it until the summer. It’s coming along well. I took up bass because though I was already able to play piano and clarinet, my goal was to play popular music with my friends, and there weren’t many bassists in my group, so bass seemed liked a good choice. I also love the instrument. My long-term goals are to reach a level of technical ability and flexibility where I can play proficiently in a range of different musical styles; my short-term goals are to sort out some minor technical issues, increase my picking speed, and learn to comfortably play with a plectrum.
I have a list of pieces I intend to write over the coming months, with deadlines. A planned revision of an old piece was discarded today due to the old piece being terrible. Instead, I’m working out ideas for a piece for percussion ensemble, and spent some time this afternoon working on polyrhythms specifically; I’ve just about cracked how to beat 3:4. I wrote up this list of pieces and set deadlines because I am entering my final college year, and need to increase my compositional output.
Bill_McGrath
Yes, that’s the one. I keep making that mistake, somehow!
Edited, and cheers for pointing it out.
I have been wondering recently about how to rationally approach topics that are naturally subjective. Specifically, this came up in conversation about history and historiography. Historic events are objective of course, but a lot of historical scholarship concerns itself with not just describing events, but speculating as to their causes and results. This is naturally going to be influenced by the historian’s own cultural context and existing biases.
How can rationalists engage with this inherently subjective topic, and apply rationality techniques? We can try to take account of the historian’s biases, but in many cases that will require us to do some historical research—it is probably not possible to get an accurate, objective account.
This applies to a certain extent to other fields I am sure, but history and historiography are perhaps the most scholarly ones I can bring to mind.
Hmm. I was a little tired and rushed when I wrote this. There are a few thoughts I’d like to add concerning historiography.
As I said above, history, because of its subjective nature, is always influenced by the historian’s bias. Historiography could maybe be called the study of these biases, but is in itself subject to the same flaws.
No historian’s viewpoint on a historical event will be fully objective. But just because no approach can be perfect, does not mean that all approaches can be equally imperfect. My question isn’t so much about how to be a rational historian, but more: is there a rational way to evaluate the relative worths of different historical viewpoints?
I just thought that was what Galton had found. A quick Google gives me this. I haven’t read it thoroughly enough to verify the figures are there, but it certainly appears to be the correct topic.
I was terrified of Hell when I was younger, so it was a while before I was able to admit my doubts to myself, and my deconversion was a gradual process; but it wasn’t particularly dramatic. I felt a bit sad a few times, and a bit guilty, but by the age of 17 I was an atheist and not too worried about it.
So it may be publication bias, yes, but that’s only two examples. I post quite regularly on an atheism & agnosticism forum, I might put a poll asking this question.
Oh, as an aside: The proposition that “The mainstream LDS church is not true, but the truth is had by one of the handful of splinter groups that split off from the LDS church and still believe in the Book of Mormon” does in fact fall under possibility a, though considering the legal troubles surrounding some of these groups, this seems rather unlikely to me. After all, Joseph Smith published this as one of our thirteen Articles of Faith: “We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates; in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.”
I don’t understand this—why would legal troubles make their beliefs any more or less likely to be true? Seems like an entirely irrelevant issue.
Cheers. I understand what he means now, but it still seems like a particularly peculiar belief.
Or, as Arnold Schoenberg once remarked (probably in German), “What the Chinese philosopher says is more important than that he speaks Chinese”. Only high-status people like philosophers get this kind of treatment!
Google has let me down in finding this quote, both in English and in roughly-translated German. Where is this from?
My college librarian set me up with an account on a platform called Athens so I can access journals at home. This may not be possible everywhere, but it’s certainly worth exploring. Athens seems to link together several resources, but JSTOR and Oxford Music Online are all I’ve used. I only have access to certain fields on JSTOR (music and Irish studies, mainly), but I would assume this is because that’s what my college teaches; other institutions may provide different accesses.
Eugenics; that ought to be a fun one as well.
Are you denying that there is a statistically significant difference in intelligence (as measured by IQ) between blacks and whites?
I think the point is, such a statement is not useful, considering the huge number of different groups that can be classed as “black” and “white.”
So you are saying that special rules need to apply when discussing race and intelligence?
Well when reporting findings, its important to do so in a way which conveys the meaning correctly to the intended audience. And Sarokae did originally say
are being very misleading if they report it using that wording, considering the biases of the general public.
I reckon the principle applies in general—there’s too much diversity within the classification “black” for it to be particularly useful, I reckon. Perhaps if it was geographically specific, it might be more useful.
It applies to all biological groupings that are sufficiently broad.
I see your point but I’m not sure I agree. Perhaps I’m just reluctant to think in those terms, but I don’t think that’s it. I’m not thinking of this in terms of PC, just in terms of usefulness.
I’m having trouble thinking up an analogy to explain my point; I’ll think about it and see if I can. If not, guess I need to start over.
EDIT: Actually, if we replace “intelligence” with a less loaded or emotive quality, say “height”, I think I’d still be inclined not to consider it useful. But as I say, I’ll have a think about this.
I agree with you here; I don’t think I’m getting wound up for emotional reasons, I just don’t think the category is necessarily a partiuclarly useful one, but for reasons I can’t really articulate. (I am not knowledgeable about statistics and the relevant terminology.)
But yes, there’s no reason to adopt new rules for reason on any topic—that wasn’t what I was arguing, and it’s clearly counter-rational.
Excuse delay getting back to this.
Okay, I think I can explain. Let’s say that we have 5 ethnic groups under the umbrella “black.” All of approximately equal size. Groups A and B are found to, in general, be slightly above average intelligence, C and D are about equal, and E are significantly below. The average intelligence for “blacks” is now below average, and this is mathematically correct, while in reality, 4 out 5 black people you meet will tend to be of average or higher intelligence.
Perhaps this is a common statistical fallacy, but this is what I mean about the classification being too broad to be useful; with such a broad area to work from, with no internal distinctions being made in a hugely diverse category, the data isn’t all that interesting or enlightening.
Ah; so I’m misunderstanding what brazil84 means by average?
Well, I don’t neccessarily think it does fit this pattern, I’m just saying it’s a possibility, and there’s no particular reason to consider it an unlikely possibility. On the other hand, seeing as the argument linking race to intelligence seems to be based on genetics, I feel that there is too much of a broad genetic sample within “black” for race to be a reliable indicator of intelligence, as I outline above.
I agree, but you’re strawmanning me here. I never said that IQ discriminated any particular direction, I was arguing that black is too large a group, contaning too much diversity, to give useful results one way or the other. I just happened to choose that specific example.
I’ve made it pretty clear it’s not about what I want to think.
Hello, Less Wrong!
I’m Bill McGrath. I’m 22 years old, Irish, and I found my way here, as with many others, from TVTropes and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
I’m a composer and musician, currently entering the final year of my undergrad degree. I have a strong interest in many other fields—friends of mine who study maths and physics often get grilled for information on their topics! I was a good maths student in school, I still enjoy using maths to solve problems in my other work or just for pleasure, and I still remember most of what I learned. Probablity is the main exception here—it wasn’t my strongest area, and I’ve forgotten a lot of the vocabulary, but it’s the next topic I intend to study when I get a chance. This is proving problematic in my understanding of the Bayesian approach, but I’m getting there.
I’ve been working my way through the core sequences, along with some scattered reading elsewhere on the site. So far, a lot of what I’ve encountered has been ideas that are familiar to me, and that I try to use when debating or discussing ideas anyway. I’ve held for a while now that you have to be ready to admit your mistakes, not be afraid of being wrong sometimes, and take a neutral approach to evidence—allowing any of these to cloud your judgement means you won’t get reliable data. That said, I’ve still learned quite a bit from LW, most importantly how to express these ideas about rationality to other people.
I’m not sure I could pinpoint what moment brought me to this mindset, but it was possibly the moment I understood why the scientific method was about trying to disprove, rather than prove, your hypothesis; or perhaps when I realized that the empiricisist’s obligation to admit when they are wrong was makes them strong. Other things that have helped me along the way—the author Neal Stephenson, the comedian Tim Minchin, and Richard Fenyman.
My other interests, most of which I have no formal training in but I have read about in my own time or have learned about through conversation with friends, include:
-politics—I consider myself to be socially liberal but economically ignorant
-languages (I speak a little German and less Irish, have taken brief courses in other languages), linguistic relativism
-writing, and the correct use of language
-quantum physics (in an interested layman way—I am aware of a lot of the concepts, but I’m by no means knowledgeable)
-psychology
as well as many other things which are less LW-relevant!
Thank you to the founders and contributors to the site who have made it such an interesting collection of thoughts and ideas, as well as a welcoming forum for people to come and learn. I think I’ll learn a lot from it, and hopefully some day I’ll be able to repay the favour!
-Bill