I think it’s important to keep in mind the reasons why Robin DiAngelo became a multimillionare. The value of her seminars is that they shift the burden of responsibility for “systemic” racism away from employers and onto employees as individuals. That is, diversity seminars are seen as an effective defense against discrimination lawsuits. But in exchange for protection against legal accountability for patterns of discrimination, an environment of paranoia and scapegoating is fostered, where individual employees are singled out for discipline or firing for perpetuating systemic racism through their personal interactions.
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My experience has been that the usual reason these threads are unproductive, when they are, is simply because the author doesn’t have a sensible answer. Unpleasant as it may be for the rest of us, Said is doing us a great service by revealing this fact.
Business “jargon” and “buzzwords” are unfairly maligned by people who aren’t used to corporate culture.… People respond really well to fluency.
I think it’s completely fair to malign corporate culture for prioritizing fluency over clarity or accuracy.
And remember that CDC is an organization with legal constraints that make them unable to do some of the things you think are good ideas, and that they have been operating under a huge staff shortage due to years of a hiring freeze and budget cuts.
These sound like reasons to trust the CDC even less, is that what you meant?
[Question] What societies have ever had legal or accepted blackmail?
I’ve added a GreaterWrong view of the new forum: https://ea.greaterwrong.com/. There are probably still a few bugs, let me know if you have any problems with it.
I do think there are things in this general topic area that are worth understanding, but the original post and most of the comments have been pretty useless to anyone trying to understand who doesn’t already. Some could even be seen as taunting people over their lack of understanding, which be perfectly frank, I find obnoxious. So I’ll try to give a quick overview of how I understand this while hopefully avoiding those pitfalls.
Take something like learning to wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow at a time, or whistle. These can’t be explained in words, but words and other stimuli can make it more likely that you’ll stumble onto the correct action. Innate aptitude is probably a factor, too.
If you think of your current level of happiness or euphoria (to pick a simple example) as the output of a function with various inputs, some of these inputs can be changed through voluntarily mental actions that similarly can’t be directly explained in words and aren’t obvious. Things like meditating long enough with correct technique can cause people to stumble across the way to do this. Some of the inputs can be changed about as easily as wiggling your ears, while others can be much more difficult or apparently impossible, maybe analogous to re-learning motor functions after a stroke.
My guess as to what’s being referred to as “Looking” amounts to having enough experience with this sort of activity that the mental state you happen to be in right now—even though it still colors everything you think and experience to more-or-less the same extent as ever—having directly confirmed that it can be voluntarily changed given the appropriate effort, stops seeming as particularly special, or magical, or all-encompassing as it used to, and that’s the source of the “looking up from the screen” and “getting out of the car” metaphors.
(I mean “mental state” in an expansive way, including everything from your current mood to your beliefs about the nature of the universe to whether or not you’re currently hallucinating.)
As for impressive feats, or the “cake,” I’m pretty sure they aren’t really all that impressive. There’s low-hanging fruit that can be personally fulfilling but not particularly outwardly impressive, and the high-hanging fruit mostly amounts to an odd form of wireheading that leaves you outwardly functional but without a sense of self or of caring about anything.
What would be an example of energy not being conserved in a closed system?
If a spinning overbalanced wheel without additional energy input spun faster and faster instead of slowing down and stopping.
Does the law of thermodynamics even mean anything?
The laws of thermodynamics don’t seem to have the same problem of vagueness. It’s easy to tell whether a given situation would violate them or not.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, so it would probably be better to just state your point plainly.
I’m trying to figure out what you mean when you talk about EMH.
Like anything else, the EMH is useful insofar as it generates testable predictions about the world. One of the most useful predictions, as johnswentworth puts it: ‘you shouldn’t expect to make money trading stocks’.
Obviously some people have made money trading stocks. Does the EMH simply mean that less than 50% of people who trade stocks make money? That doesn’t seem to support the grandiose conclusions that are usually made on the basis of the EMH. The same would be true of a poker game, for instance, or simply a bet between 3 people where only one of them can be right.
It seems to me that the whole circularity issue was answered by Eliezer in Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom. What’s your disagreement with that post?
If this kind of behavior is entirely consistent with EMH, does EMH even mean anything?
I think to the extent that the Petrov Day game is training anything, it’s training the opposite of what we should want. In the game, all the social pressure is unanimously and strongly opposed to pressing the button (sometimes to the extent of ostracizing people and threatening their careers). But in real life, if everyone were unanimously opposed to pressing the button, the button would never have been constructed in the first place. The real Petrov was not rewarded for his actions but demoted and sidelined. In the real situation that’s supposedly being trained for, the social pressure will be ambivalent at best, but more likely telling you that you should press the button, and only your own moral compass and fear of death would be telling you not to.
Yes, I have the same concern. In the future I’d like to set up OAuth to avoid any need to trust me with your credentials at all, but for now I decided not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I certainly understand anyone who prefers to avoid logging in until then.
To be clear, I don’t interpret a lack of any response as anything other than a sign that the author has a busy life. What I take as strong evidence of the author being incapable of giving a proper response is when there’s a back-and-forth in which the author never directly responds to the original question.
It’s relatively easy to be a master ninja of philosophy relative to anyone in 1710, because you’ve had a chance to crib from the work of all the smartest people who’ve lived since then.
The part of you that’s generating your thoughts is the unquestioned core. It’s too late to pick the unquestioned core, you already are the unquestioned core.
I think the causality runs the other way though; people who are crazy and grandiose are likely to come up with spurious theories to justify actions they wanted to take anyway. Experience and imitation shows us that non-crazy people successfully use theories to do non-crazy things all the time, so much so that you probably take it for granted.
After carefully considering your arguments, I’ve decided that you are right. Therefore, I won’t update my current belief that I should sometimes update my beliefs.