My first reaction as well.
But that is easy. What I haven’t figured out yet is how to get them to read it.
My first reaction as well.
But that is easy. What I haven’t figured out yet is how to get them to read it.
Opportunity costs?
I would say it should be the one with best expected returns. But I guess Taleb thinks the possibility of a very bad black swan overrides everything else—or at least that’s what I gathered from his recent crusade against GMOs.
(I haven’t read the book)
The way I usually come in contact with something like this is afterwards, when Elinor and her tribe are talking about those irrational greens, and how it’s better to not even engage with them. They’re just dumb/evil, you know, not like us.
Even without that part, this avoids opportunities for clearing up misunderstandings.
(anecdotally: some time ago a friend was telling me about discussions that are “just not worth having”, and gave as an example “that time when we were talking about abortion and you said that X, I knew there was just no point in going any further”. Turns out she had misunderstood me completely, and I actually had meant Y, with which she agrees. Glad we could clear that out—more than a year later, completely by accident. Which makes me wonder how many more of those misunderstandings are out there)
At last. Wouldn’t miss it.
“Algorithms” feels more related to the Sequences, but may not be the strategic choice. I don’t expect non-math/CS types to go “yay, a book about algorithms!”.
Also, here’s Yvain applying this reasoning to this exact question.
The entire domains of boys toys and girls toys diverge. Previously often one set of toys was sold for and used by boys and girls alike. The play differentiated along roles but still overlapped. But ot any longer. I wondered: Why is that?
I think I’m seeing the opposite (in Brazil). I see a lot of for-girls versions of toys that used to be made for boys when I was a child. Like RC Barbie racing cars, or pink Nerf guns with matching fashion accessories. Traditional girl toys also look more varied than they used to be (e.g. horror-themed dolls).
My source were his tweets. Sorry if I can’t give anything concrete right now, but “Taleb GMO” apparently gets a lot of hits on google. I didn’t really dive into it, but as I understood it he takes the precautionary principle (the burden of proof of safety is on GMOs, not of danger on opponents) and adds that nobody can ever really know the risks, so the burden of proof hasn’t and can’t be met.
“They’re arrogant fools” seems to be Taleb’s charming way of saying “they don’t agree with me”.
I like him too. I loved The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness back when I read them. But I realized I didn’t quite grok his epistemology a while back, when I found him debating religion with Dennett, Harris and Hitchens. Or rather, debating against them, for religion, as a Christian, as far as I can tell based on a version of “science can’t know everything”. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hnqo4_X7PE)
I’ve been meaning to ask Less Wrong about Taleb for a while, because this just seems kookish to me, but it’s entirely possible that I just don’t get something.
Can anyone recommend good sources on the social dynamics of witch-hunts?
Not necessarily about witches, of course. I’m interested in the hand of Moloch in these situations: social incentives to go along, status rewards for being more morally outraged than your fellow citizen, self-protection by avoiding looking insufficiently outraged, the not necessarily intended but still unescapable prosecutorial traps, the social impossibility of denying the actual existence of the outrageous facts...
To the extent that there really are no perceivable differences, it looks like essentialist thinking. But I wouldn’t call a desire irrational (or rather, I wouldn’t call it especially irrational), even a desire for a perceived essence.
A similar example would be two identical watches, one of which was given to you by your grandfather. Or the loss of value when you discover that the autographed picture you bought on e-bay is a forgery.
(maybe it’s because I’m primed by a discussion on the stupid questions thread, or because I perceived hints that the third part would be controversial, but the example I had in mind as I read the post was of a heterossexual man rejecting trans women)
Oh, that’s quite close to my experience as well. Any disagreement about policies is actually a smokescreen—people only oppose leftist policies because they benefit from the status quo, you see, but they will invent anything to avoid admitting that (including, I gather, the entire field of Economics).
What I can’t figure out is why some noticeable proportion of heterosexual men hate prostitutes.
My bet is that they process it as a purity/sacredness violation.
Are they really not communicating, though? They seem to be signalling to each other their willingness to cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma.
I’d be very surprised if judges and regulators failed to classify this as a cartel.
Hello again...
I am this guy. For some reason one year ago I thought that translating the name “Less Wrong” into Portuguese would be enough differentiation, but I’m not comfortable with it anymore. It’s a wonderful name, but it’s not mine.
So I figured I’d just post under my actual (first) name.
I’m still in love with this place, by the way.
(The people producing those videos say he’s “producer and co-writer”. Cynical-me suspects that “Gamergate fans” think he must be the real driving force because Anita Sarkeesian is a girl and therefore not to be taken seriously. I do hope cynical-me is wrong. Not-so-cynical me thinks Sarkeesian is more likely to be the real driving force because, other things being equal, a woman is more likely to feel strongly about this stuff than a man.)
Since it’s been brought up...
As far as I can tell the best evidence they have for this is a widely circulated video (from before FemFreq) in which she says she’s “not a fan of videogames”.
And Mcintosh clearly “feels strongly about this”, as much as any woman I’ve seen. The Gamergate people created a whole hashtag to display his tweets (#FullMcintosh), which also became, incidentally, what they use to indicate that they think someone has gone particularly far down the SJ rabbit hole.
Personally, I think the conclusion Viliam mentions doesn’t rest in very solid evidence, but it’s not far-fetched either. (meanwhile, the “because she’s a girl” hypothesis looks very unlikely to me)
What, by the way, makes you think that Anita Sarkeesian doesn’t truly believe in her cause? I’ve only seen a small quantity of her stuff, but what I’ve seen looks sincere (and fairly plausible) to me.
I’m not sure how familiar you are with videogames, or which of her videos you’ve seen. But I can’t imagine how some of the ones I’ve seen could possibly have been made without outright dishonesty.
?
No, I mean people sometimes accuse leftists of holding positions motivated by hate. It’s more common for this accusation to be made against right-wing positions (which is what the grandparent was talking about), but I don’t think the reverse is all that rare.
It’s not that rare.
Consider accusations of hate against: Israel/Jews; straight cis white men; Christians; America; Freedom; rich people...
I like this.
(thank you for helping me try to understand him on this point, by the way)
This seems coherent. But, to be honest, weak (which could mean I still don’t get it).
We also seem to have gotten back to the beginning, and the quote. Leaving aside for now the motivated stopping regarding religion, we have a combination of the Precautionary Principle, the logic of Chesterton’s Fence, and the difficulty of assessing risks on account of Black Swans.
… which would prescribe inaction in any question I can think of. It looks as if we’re not even allowed to calculate the probability of outcomes, because no matter how much information we think we have, there can always be black swans just outside our models.
Should we have ever started mass vaccination campaigns? Smallpox was costly, but it was a known, bounded cost that we had been living with for thousands of years, and, although for all we knew the risks looked obviously worth it, relying on all we know to make decisions is a manifestation of hubris. I have no reason to expect being violenty assaulted when I go out tonight, but of course I can’t possibly have taken all factors in consideration, so I should stay home, as it will be safer if I’m wrong. There’s no reason to think pursuing GMOs will be dangerous, but that’s only considering all we know, which can’t be enough to meet the burden of proof under the strong precautionary principle. There’s not close to enough evidence to even locate Christianity in hypothesis space, but that’s just intellectual reasoning… We see no reason not to bring down laws and customs against homosexuality, but how can we know there isn’t a catastrophic black swan hiding behind that Fence?
Yes, but my point is that this is also true for, say, leaving the house to have fun.