buybuydandavis

Karma: 8,810

buybuydandavis 4 Sep 2011 3:52 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Ronny Fernandez’s comment on: Probability is in the Mind
Jayne’s book shows how frequencies are estimated in his system, and somewhere, maybe his book, he compares and contrasts his ideas with frequentists and Kolmogorov. In fact, he expends great effort in contrasting his views to those of frequentists.

buybuydandavis 21 Sep 2011 9:07 UTC
7 points
in reply to: LG’s comment on: Professing and Cheering
There are some people who revel in the gibberish of others, and think if a statement is nonsensical but spoken with pride and self confidence, it must be profound. Call them Mysterion Masochists. If I don’t get your gibberish, you must be profound.

This woman seems like a Mysterion Sadist. If you don’t get my gibberish, I must be profound. I don’t think it’s anymore complicated than that.

Her attitude is just what I would expect from a self confident Mysterion when faced with a large number of rationalists. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a self confident Rationalist have a similar exaggerated presentation and prideful tone when facing a large number of Mysterions.

buybuydandavis 21 Sep 2011 9:43 UTC
4 points
in reply to: MoreOn’s comment on: Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)

But why do beliefs need to pay rent in anticipated experiences? Why can’t they pay rent in utility?

I think you’ve hit on one of the conceptual weaknesses of many Rationalists. Beliefs can pay rent in many ways, but Rationalists tend to only value the predictive utility of beliefs, and pooh pooh other other utilities of belief. Comfort utility—it makes me feel good to believe it. Social utility—people will like me for believing it. Efficacy utility—I can be more effective if I believe it.

Predictive Truth is a means to value, and even if a value in itself, it’s surely not the only value. Instead of pooh poohing other types of utility, to convince people you need to use that predictive utility to analyze how the other utilities can best be fulfilled.

buybuydandavis 21 Sep 2011 10:04 UTC
1 point
on: Belief as Attire
The biases of Rationalists are showing in this article.

It’s peculiar to have a sequence on Korzybski’s “The Map is Not the Territory” followed shortly thereafter by a post making a purely intensional distinction between “proper” and “improper” beliefs.

What’s “improper” about achieving in group identification? It’s often quite handy. Casting intensional aspersions on all values we might derive from our beliefs but the predictive utility does not strike me as rational.

buybuydandavis 22 Sep 2011 9:19 UTC
2 points
on: Semantic Stopsigns
I don’t think Stop Sign is the best metaphor here.

People like God as an answer because they dislike uncertainty and thinking. It’s useful precisely because it predicts nothing, but explains everything. “God did it” acts as a Finish Line more than a Stop Sign. It says the race is done, and grants license to stop running.

Am I the only one who thinks of those Family Circus cartoons with the ghostly “Not Me” and “I Dunno” anytime someone says that “God did it”?

buybuydandavis 22 Sep 2011 9:33 UTC
6 points
on: Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

Your hand is just… stuff… and for some reason it moves under your direction. Is this not magic?

Yeah, I think it is. The one model we start with is the model of ourselves. Our hand moves because we will it to do so. If that were the only model I had, that’s how I’d interpret the universe—every event was the result of the will of some being.

And stopping at “The Wizard Did It” makes perfect sense. We experience our own decisions as sufficient causes for our own actions.

I wonder how long it took for the concept of mechanism to take hold.

buybuydandavis 22 Sep 2011 9:46 UTC
4 points
on: Say Not “Complexity”

we would say “magic”—as in, “X magically does Y”

That’s a nice bit of semantic hygiene. I hope to remember it.

buybuydandavis 22 Sep 2011 10:00 UTC
28 points
on: Two More Things to Unlearn from School
In school, There are right answers. Copying from a reference work with known solutions is forbidden. Copying from someone else is forbidden. Asking someone who knows is forbidden. Working with others is often forbidden. Testing out the answer against reality is forbidden or impractical. You are expected to find the right answer by rooting around in your own head.

It would be difficult to find more crippling and maladaptive habits to instill in a mind that wanted to deal with reality.

buybuydandavis 22 Sep 2011 10:58 UTC
0 points
on: Making History Available

The inverse error is to treat history as mere story, process it with the same part of your mind that handles the novels you read.

For good and bad, I think we’re stuck with that error. We don’t have separate imagining and experiencing systems for fictional and historical stories.

It has the potential to be liberating and empowering, by finding stories that empower and move you. But another way to describe such stories is historical porn, always more action packed, meaningful, and moving than real life, so that real life no longer motivates. I had recently been excited by the possibilities of fiction to change a life for the better, and now I’m seeing something of the other side of the pancake.

buybuydandavis 22 Sep 2011 11:06 UTC
1 point
on: Explain/Worship/Ignore?
Ignore is a perfectly fine option. Although “bookmark” might be a better option.

But either way, thinking and understanding can be as much of a obsessive compulsive, maladaptive behavior as anything else. It’s certainly one of my maladies, and I doubt I am alone on that score around here.

buybuydandavis 22 Sep 2011 11:23 UTC
0 points
on: “Science” as Curiosity-Stopper

Why should your curiosity be diminished because someone else, not you, knows how the light bulb works? Is this not spite?

Why should it be more appealing to the 1st to climb a mountain, instead of the 43528672nd? Once you’ve discovered that someone else has already solved the problem, you’ve solved it for yourself as well. When you feel the need to know, you can ask.

The bias seems to be think, think, and think again. Obsessive compulsive thinking isn’t really all that preferable to obsessive compulsive vacuuming. Probably more useful if brought under control, but more debilitating if not.

buybuydandavis 22 Sep 2011 11:31 UTC
−1 points
on: Applause Lights
“Let’s do everything right.”

Yep. Standard political speech.

buybuydandavis 22 Sep 2011 21:57 UTC
2 points
on: Generalizing From One Example
What strikes me is the complete lack of reference to studies with falsifiable measurements in the bazillion responses. I would have thought that with all the compulsive analyzers on the list, someone would know about more serious studies. Is it possible that such studies really haven’t been done?

Galton asked people what they saw, but reading the paper briefly, it seemed that he relied on self reported descriptions of scenes, but didn’t require any evidence that the descriptions were true. Experiments would seem straightforward enough. Show a picture. Test recall at varying level of detail, and varying level of delay.

This kind of testing could be used for training as well. Visual. Auditory. Gustatory. Olfactory. Acceleration. Touch. Time. It would be very interesting to know the distribution of capabilities of mental imaging in all sense modalities. Has this work really not been done?

It looks like some work has been done. The following paper refers to some: Mental Imagery and Creative Thought—David G. Pearson http://www.proc.britac.ac.uk/tfiles//147p187.pdf

And I remember some books by Michael Gelb on thinking like DaVinci, and someone else’s book on thinking like Einstein, advocating similar training and practice in mental imagery.

buybuydandavis 22 Sep 2011 22:06 UTC
0 points
on: Generalizing From One Example
And I thought this was going to be an article on “fine tuning” arguments.

buybuydandavis 22 Sep 2011 22:21 UTC
2 points
on: Extensions and Intensions
S.I. Hayakawa is mentioned in this article instead of Alfred Korzybski, but the Intensional vs. Extensional distinction was one of the fundamental distinctions of AK, along with The Map is Not the Territory, The Word is not the Thing, etc.

buybuydandavis 22 Sep 2011 22:42 UTC
2 points
on: What is wrong with mathematics education?
I wouldn’t say statistics as much as data analysis. Statistics too often means conventional hypothesis testing, which I doubt the Bayesian Conspiracy is too hot on.

I remember one very clever fellow who designed speaker systems shared an anecdote about the company he worked in. Apparently, they had a computer program that would generate the frequency and spatial response of speaker systems. With enough use, people would develop an intuition about system design that went far beyond the usual state of design. They had a feel for the right answers that went beyond knowing how to set up the calculations.

What people largely lack is any feel for data distributions. So much of statistics are analytic methods for dealing with data that can be completed more straightforwardly with non parametric methods. Let the computers do the data crunching, and teach people to make decent estimates based on data. That’s so much more useful for life, and would provide the added benefit of teaching students that the real world has better and worse answers, not right answers.

buybuydandavis 26 Sep 2011 6:42 UTC
0 points
on: Feel the Meaning
Korzybski is particularly good on The Word is Not the Thing and Consciousness of Abstracting, which resolves these kinds of issues immediately.

buybuydandavis 26 Sep 2011 7:11 UTC
0 points
on: Universal Fire
It seems like people are working pretty hard to save that fictional world from contradiction, but isn’t the simplest “explanation” for why a match doesn’t work in a magic world “A Wizard did it”?

buybuydandavis 26 Sep 2011 7:39 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ata’s comment on: Dissolving the Question
My favourite method is holding my nose and seeing if I can still breathe through it.

“Do you think that’s air you’re breathing now?”
- Morpheus

buybuydandavis 26 Sep 2011 8:31 UTC
2 points
on: Dissolving the Question
I’ve been going through the sequences, and this is probably the post I disagree with most.

Philosophy may lead you to reject the concept, but rejecting a concept is not the same as understanding the cognitive algorithms behind it.

More importantly, rejecting a concept doesn’t solve the problem the concept is used for. The question to ask isn’t what the precise definition of free will is, or whether the concept is coherent. Ask instead “What problems am I trying to solve with this concept?”

Because we do use the concept to solve problems. People take actions, and those actions have effects on us. When do I retaliate against a harmful action, and when do I reward a beneficial action? How do I update my evaluation of the actor, in terms of the likelihood that they will repeat this kind of beneficial or harmful behavior?

It’s nonsense to say that free will doesn’t exist—because the problem the concept is used to solve does exist, and if you say free will doesn’t exist, you’ll still end up creating a concept just like it to solve this problem. And for the most part, people are already effectively using the concept to reward and punish appropriately. They are effectively solving a problem. By and large, they use the concept of free will to both accurately predict future behavior (epsitemic rationality) and effectively take action (instrumental rationality). Isn’t that what rationality is all about?

Now both sides haven’t effectively made that concept coherent with their knowledge of physics, one side thinking the concept is nonsense, and the other side thinking they’re not bound by the laws of physics. Both sides are making a mistake. The concept isn’t nonsense, because it solves real problems, and we are bound by the laws of physics.

See compatibilism for details. Problem solved. A Rationalist solves problems.