By that time everyone knew it was time to leave, they had seen the lights repeatedly dimmed, but they were comfortable in the hall, and as long as no individual could be blamed for the antisocial act of staying, they would do so. Nevertheless their discomfort level was rising. Your action precipitated the decision, like seeding a supersaturated solution precipitates crystallisation. It’s another example of an unstable group equilibrium just waiting to be disturbed, like the lonely dissenter in a group where the majority have private doubts. If the lights hadn’t previously been repeatedly dimmed, the group might well not have followed you.
Chris
I’ve always wondered, since I was very small, why ‘The Emperor’s New Cloths’ as commonly told doesn’t include the scene where the Emperor has the Imperial Guard clear the street with a sabre charge.
Scott Adams’ jokes about pointy headed bosses are ‘release of tension’ jokes : the tension that arises from having to live with the species. You could call it, being constrained to live in absurdity. In that sense, some say they serve rather to avoid the phb becoming a hated enemy. You can’t hate someone while laughing at his foibles. I guess that is the distinction, we’re laughing at the phb’s absurdity, not at his discomfiture. There is no such tension with a co-worker, hence no joke.
To the following phrase : “You can’t hate someone while laughing at his foibles” I should of course have added that you may, however, get a sense of reclaiming the human high ground in what might otherwise be situational inferiority.
Politicians are the Hated Enemy today ?
:-) Maths is the product of the same abstracting mechanisms that create all our visions of the world. As such, maths has no more or less validity than any other of our self-consistent constructs of reality, and it is no accident that our maths has applications in our real world models. They’re the products of the same mental systems. What is depressing is when a mathematical model which represents 5% of the available data is worshipped because it has internal coherence. As in Aumann’s model. Tara.
‘This may come as some surprise’ to Asch & Aumann, but rationality is not the design point of the human brain (otherwise this blog would have no reason to exist), getting by in the real world is. And getting by in the real world involved, for our ancestors through tens of millenia, group belonging, hence group conformity. See J. Harris, ‘No Two Alike’, Chaps. 8 & 9 for a discussion which references the Asch work. This does not mean of course that group conformity was the only adaptation factor. Being right and being ‘in’ both had (and have...) fitness value, and it’s pefectly natural that both tendencies exist, in tension.
It’s illuminating to see this post next to the one on procrastination. I doubt Musashi would insist on delaying your sword stroke until you were absolutely sure you would cut at the same time as parry. His perfectionism concerns the initial state of mind, not the outcome. Raising the prior, in other words.
Robin : “For example, “ostracizing anyone who dared contradict her” would seemingly apply to a great many, perhaps the majority, of ordinary human organizations.” : Yes, but there is a difference between ostracizing = damning to the nethermost pits of hell with no hope of salvation and ostracizing = delaying your next pay increase by a couple of months. i.e., the cult-dom-ness is contingent on the existential nature of the ostracization.
It’s amusing to see ‘criterion of goodness’ as a simile for ‘criterion of correctness’. The Inquisition believed they were both ‘correct’ and ‘good’. In torturing you, they were saving your soul, which was, for them, the ultimate in Utility. So, in calculating utility, beware of your assumptions.
mtc, you could make a few volumes of Dilbert your required reading, to inform your faith in the ‘sane corporation’. In fact, in such high powered company, I’m surprised to see non-qualified discussion of the intentionality of any organisation. Organisations don’t have intentionality, individuals do (perhaps… if we don’t let the Evolutionary Psychology crowd take it away from us..). As all Eliezer’s anecdotes illustrate, these get lost in the wash of large numbers and multiple levels, networks, and gridlocks, so we are left with the dross of the latest organisational mantra which everyone gives lip service to and no-one believes. It is trivial to observe that the dominant intentionalities will be those of the most powerful individuals, but these also are destined to be diluted and lost. However, my personal believe is that inadequate individuation (accepting cultural norms of need and intentionality) is a far bigger problem than such intentionality as we have getting lost. Let’s first work out who we are and what we have to say before worrying about our voice getting lost.
Not sure why EY redefined the debate in terms of cultishness. Was anyone under the illusion they were being asked to pack their things for Guyana ?
Doubts about the objectives of the SI arise more from the seeming contradiction between the professed rationality of its members (Bayesian rationality, weighing the risks, putting all the ‘Friendly’ safeguards in place etc.) and the passion with which in their writings they seem to hail the Singularity and radical life extension like the Second Coming. Which leads one to fear a certain bias. Fear only, mind you. My slovenly and inadequate heuristics don’t push me into a superhuman effort to get involved.
BTW, the very abuse of the term Bayesian, except humouristically, is in itself worrying. It’s only a statistical method for Chrissake. Very useful in well defined scientific investigation, of no use at all in areas where the priors are (a) innumerable (b) inestimable, like, in all areas in the ‘humanities’.
BBTW : The word ‘Singularitarianism’. Any word ending in ‘-arianism’ denotes a belief system, no ? So using that word does indicate that its users have gone beyond the domain of ideas and are in the domain of beliefs.
There’s a lot of confusion here. 1) Don’t confuse respect for religion (unreasonable) with respect for people who have deep religious beliefs, however daft. In some abuse of religion I sense a lot of contempt for religious people. I try to fight my contemptuous side, knowing how strong it is. 2) Don’t confuse ‘the harm done by religion’ with harm done by people, who would have done it anyway , who find in religion a convenient cloak. 3) This is not the place for a post on the human need for religion or the rag-bag of needs it subsumes (social, political, historical, personal identity definition, ethical, the love of the marvellous, transcendental etc.). However, I strongly suspect that some of those same needs might not be a million miles away from the motivations that attach people so strongly to the aims of a certain Institute..… Saul/Paul was not the first nor the last human to have radically changed his beliefs while maintaining the underlying personality structure which drove him to give himself so totally to the first set, then to the second. And to found his own personal religion, but that’s another story.
Nick, sure, heroically not doing something will never grab the attention in the way that doing something does. Today, approximately 1,000,000 cars in Paris were not burned. So what makes the headlines ?
Eliezar, something of a ‘rant’ ? ‘the people who invented the Old Testament stories could make up pretty much anything they liked’.… overlooking that we’re talking about oral traditions committed to writing centuries later. Of course the domain covered by the books of the old testament covers law, social customs, and a whole bunch of stuff which is now the domain of other institutions. Of course ideas have moved on in most of those domains. I’d be more interested in reading your ideas about why the fears, insecurities, and identitiy issues so many of us face in an age of increasing change and complexity are leading to a ‘back to the 17thC’, ‘back to the womb’ type increase in clinging to both ‘believing’ and ‘believing in’ this particular dragon in the garage. This is not just a US phenomenon, we’re seeing it in the UK also. Derision won’t help, nor, most certainly, will logical argument.
Between the post and the comments we have a slippage from : a) the human tendency to sort ourselves into ‘us’ vs ‘them’, presumably for reasons which had selective advantage (group solidarity and heightened stimulation levels) b) our capacity to keep the positive aspects of a diluted form of this tendency, without having to pay the price of all out warfare, by choosing (deservedly highly paid) sports teams to be our ‘champions’ (in the sense of the word where a ‘champion’ was designated to represent a warring group in single combat) in facing ‘them’ c) the transfer of this ‘champion’ role from sports teams to elected politicians, typified by the Blues & the Greens d) the confusion between the ‘champion’ role and the ‘delegate’ role, to which I could add the ‘mandated’ role, in our actual political systems. e) then all the usual mutterings about politicians.
OK so we’re tribal, and IMO we’re confused in what we want from our politicians. So what ? Where do we go from here ?
Eliezer suggests a further development in the theory of democratic government, that of considering our elected representatives as ‘employees’. I disagree. The role of employer supposes an autonomously chosen set of strategies which it is imposed on the employee to execute. How do you get to set the strategic agenda without first being a politician (or, better, a politician’s ‘éminence grise’. Or spouse) ?
Between the post and the comments we have a slippage from : a) the human tendency to sort ourselves into ‘us’ vs ‘them’, presumably for reasons which had selective advantage (group solidarity and heightened stimulation levels) b) our capacity to keep the positive aspects of a diluted form of this tendency, without having to pay the price of all out warfare, by choosing (deservedly highly paid) sports teams to be our ‘champions’ (in the sense of the word where a ‘champion’ was designated to represent a warring group in single combat) in facing ‘them’ c) the transfer of this ‘champion’ role from sports teams to elected politicians, typified by the Blues & the Greens d) the confusion between the ‘champion’ role and the ‘delegate’ role, to which I could add the ‘mandated’ role, in our actual political systems. e) then all the usual mutterings about politicians.
OK so we’re tribal, and IMO we’re confused in what we want from our politicians. So what ? Where do we go from here ?
Eliezer suggests a further development in the theory of democratic government, that of considering our elected representatives as ‘employees’. I disagree. The role of employer supposes an autonomously chosen set of strategies which it is imposed on the employee to execute. How do you get to set the strategic agenda without first being a politician (or, better, a politician’s ‘éminence grise’. Or spouse) ?
Q : Why is everyone linking together cryonicism, life-extensionism, trans-humanism, and the singularity ? In addition to Caledonian’s irritability, I would add : A : Because the two main posters here seem to subscribe to the extreme desirability of all three, (counting trans-humanism and the singularity for one item translating as Self-Improving AI), in a nexus centred on the Singularity Institute.
personal take : a) Cryonics : couldn’t care less b) Radical life extension : playing with fire c) Self-improving AI : burning the house down.
Just read ‘The Reversal Test’. A good, honest, decent paper, but does little to address the issue. It only considers modifications in one parameter. I’d like to see a reversal test for modifying one parameter out of 100, when the 100 parameters are in some sort of equilibrium, potentially unstable, and the equilibrium is one which you don’t understand too well. Even given that the status quo equilibrium is by all accounts pretty lousy.
BTW, significant data was withheld in the examples given : a) how many dips do you get at the jellybeans ? Do the red ones taste better ? What is their market value with the current weak dollar ? b) 10,000 people overall or 10,000 infected people ? Degree of infectiousness of the disease ? But that’s what the affect heuristic is for : taking decisions in situations of incomplete data. 150 people is a single bounded set, 98% of x people sounds as though it just might be a replicable set. Go for it.