common_law

Karma: −17

common_law 2 Sep 2012 4:07 UTC
22 points
in reply to: Pentashagon’s comment on: Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio

Reading troll comments has negative utility. Replying to a troll means causing that loss of utility to each reader who wants to read the reply (times the probability that they read the troll when reading the reply)

That’s exactly the kind of consideration that should lead people to downvote responses to “trolls.” If you think someone is stupidly “feeding trolls,” you should downvote them.

It seems that E.Y. is miffed that readers aren’t punishing troll feeders enough and that he’s personally limited to a single downvote. As an end-run around this sad limitation, he seeks to multiply his downvote by 6 by instituting an automatic penalty for this class of downvotable comment.

Nothing is so outrageously bad about troll feeding that it can’t be controlled by the normal means of karma allocation. The bottom line is that readers simply don’t mind troll feeding as much as E.Y. minds it; otherwise they’d penalize it more by downvotes. E.Y. is trying to become more of an autocrat.
What links here?
- common_law's comment on Meta: What do you think of a karma vote checklist? by NancyLebovitz (3 Sep 2012 20:45 UTC; -1 points)

common_law 7 Sep 2012 21:10 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Jayson_Virissimo’s comment on: Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK?

If IQ tests are ‘culturally biased’, then we would expect the highest scoring group to share the same culture as the test writers.

This assumes that if a test is culture biased, it must be biased in favor of the culture as a whole. A test can be culture biased by hyper-valuing a set of skills prominent in one culture, even if that skill set is stronger in some other culture. If IQ is biased, say, toward “academic culture,” even though this is a feature of “white U.S. culture” it may be even more a part of East Asian culture.

What I think your argument shows is that the tests aren’t intentionally biased in favor of one culture specifically. In fact, the studies of early IQ testing shows there was intentional bias (not so much today), but rather than being in favor of the dominant culture, it was against the cultures of particular immigrants. (I’m speaking of the Army Alpha tests.)

common_law 4 Oct 2012 0:19 UTC
10 points
on: The Useful Idea of Truth
Two quibbles that could turn out to be more than quibbles.
1. The concept of truth you intend to defend isn’t a correspondence theory—rather it’s a deflationary theory, one in which truth has a purely metalinguistic role. It doesn’t provide any account of the nature of any correspondence relationship that might exist between beliefs and reality. A correspondence theory, properly termed, uses a strong notion of reference to provide a philosophical account of how language ties to reality.
2. You write:
Some pundits have panicked over the point that any judgment of truth—any comparison of belief to reality—takes place inside some particular person’s mind; and indeed seems to just compare someone else’s belief to your belief.

I’m inclined to think this is a straw man. (And if they’re mere “pundits” and not philosophers why the concern with their silly opinion?) I think you should cite to the most respectable of these pundits or reconsider whether any pundits worth speaking of said this. The notion that reality—not just belief—determines experiments, might be useful to mention, but it doesn’t answer any known argument, whether by philosopher or pundit.

common_law 2 Sep 2013 23:12 UTC
9 points
in reply to: JonahS’s comment on: How valuable is it to learn math deeply?

that’s not how the subject is taught

Hope this isn’t too off-topic, but I wonder if you have any ideas about why that is.

The main impediment to many far-mode thinkers learning hard (post-calculus) math is the drill and drudgery involved. If you’re going to learn hard math, it seems you should, by all means, learn it deeply. That’s not the obstacle. The obstacle is that to learn math deeply, you must first learn a lot of it rotely—at least the way it’s taught.

In the far-distant past, when I was in school, learning elementary calculus meant rote drilling on techniques of solving integrals. Is this still the case? Is it inevitable, or is it the result of methods of education?

The main reason “smart people” avoid math isn’t that they want to avoid depth; rather, what is, at least for some of them, drudgery. Math, more than any subject I know of, seems to require a very high level of sheer diligence to get to the point where you can start thinking about it deeply. Is this inevitable?

common_law 20 Sep 2012 23:00 UTC
8 points
in reply to: V_V’s comment on: A Mathematical Explanation of Why Charity Donations Shouldn’t Be Diversified

Why would charities behave any differently than profit-making assets? Do you think that charities have less uncertainties?

The confusion concerns whose risk is relevant. When you invest in stocks, you want to minimize the risk to your assets. So, you will diversify your holdings.

When you contribute to charities, if rational you should (with the caveats others have mentioned) minimize the risk that a failing charity will prove crucial, not the risk that your individual contribution will be wasted. If you take a broad, utilitarian overview, you incorporate the need for diversified charities in your utility judgment. If charity a and b are equally likely to pay off but charity a is a lot smaller and should receive more contributions to avoid risk to whatever cause, then you take that into account at the time of deciding on a and b, leading you to contribute everything to a for the sake of diversification. (It’s this dialectical twist that confuses people.)

If your contribution is large enough relative to the distinctions between charities, then diversification makes sense but only because your contribution is sufficient to tip the objective balance concerning the desirable total contributions to the charities.

common_law 29 Sep 2012 20:37 UTC
7 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Mandatory Secret Identities

It’s the most appropriate answer to a question that constitutes a rhetorical demand that the reader must generalize from fictional evidence. (Last four words hyperlinked.)

There was no demand to “generalize” from fictional evidence, except to recognize the theoretical possibility a sociopathic character who is indifferent to status concerns.

The intended question is whether such characters can exist and if so what’s their diagnosis. Your response “fictional” would be reasonable if you went on to say, “that’s a fiction; such a pathology doesn’t exist in the real world.” Or at least, “It’s atypical” or “it’s rare″; “sociopaths usually go for status.” Or, to go with your revised approach, “psychopaths go for status as they perceive it, but it doesn’t necessarily conform to what other people consider status.” (This approach risks depriving “status” of any meaning beyond “narcissistic gratification.”)

The answer, anyway, is that psychopaths have an exaggerated need to feel superior. When they fail at traditional status seeking, they shift their criteria away from what other people think. They have a sense of grandiosity, but this can have little to do with ordinary social status. Psychopaths are apt to be at both ends of the distribution with regard to seeking the ordinary markers of status.

Objectionable personal psychological interpretation removed at 2:38 p.m.

common_law 10 Jul 2014 20:16 UTC
5 points
on: Confound it! Correlation is (usually) not causation! But why not?

“how else could this correlation happen if there’s no causal connection between A & B‽”

The main way to correct for this bias toward seeing causation where there is only correlation follows from this introspection: be more imaginative about how it could happen (other than by direct causation).

[The causation bias (does it have a name?) seems to express the availability bias. So, the corrective is to increase the availability of the other possibilities.]

common_law 7 Oct 2012 23:47 UTC
5 points
in reply to: torekp’s comment on: The Useful Idea of Truth
It’s vogue to defend correspondence because 1) it sounds like common sense and 2) it signals rejection of largely discredited instrumentalism. But surely a correspondence theorist should have a theory of the nature of the correspondence. How does a proposition or a verbal string correspond to a state of reality? By virtue of what is it a correct description? We can state a metalinguistic relationship about “Snow is white,” but how does this locution hook onto the actual world?

Correspondence theorists think this is a task for a philosophical theory of reference. (Such as in an account where “torekp” refers to you by virtue of the “christening event” of your creating the account and causal connections therefrom.) Deflationists are apt to say it is ultimately a technical problem in the psychology of language.

The concept of belief and the nature of abstraction

common_law31 Mar 2014 20:14 UTC

4 points

3 comments4 min readLW link

common_law 27 Nov 2014 23:07 UTC
4 points
on: The Hostile Arguer
You should question your unstated but fundamental premise: one should avoid arguments with “hostile arguers.”

A person who argues to convince rather than to understand harms himself, but from his interlocutor’s standpoint, dealing with his arguments can be just as challenging and enlightening as arguing with someone more “intellectually honest.”

Whether an argument is worthwhile depends primarily on the competence of the arguments presented, which isn’t strongly related to the sincerity of the arguer.
What links here?
- dxu's comment on The Hostile Arguer by Error (29 Nov 2014 19:54 UTC; 3 points)

common_law 7 Oct 2012 22:52 UTC
4 points
in reply to: ema’s comment on: Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational

The feeling of ‘People who agree with me on X also agree with me on completely unrelated Y’ is awesome.

The halo effect may be awesome … but it’s deadly!

common_law 30 Sep 2012 18:28 UTC
4 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Mandatory Secret Identities
In my humble opinion, snarkiness is a form of rudeness, and we should dispense with it here.

Moreover, since we have a politeness norm, it isn’t so clear that the interpretation you offer is charitable!

common_law 2 Sep 2012 3:47 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Will_Newsome’s comment on: Dealing with meta-discussion and the signal to noise ratio

I like to make things explicit sometimes.

Although rarely.

For example, I wish you’d be more explicit about your disillusionment with LW culture. A few months ago, you were a loyal oppositionist, advising LW on how it can get bigger, while cheering Yudkowsky when he autocratically manipulated the placement of discussion items.

Remember? You advocated for contrarianism; I (or an alter) advocated for dissent. And now, you’ve become the dissent I advocated if not in content at least in form.

common_law 12 Dec 2015 4:57 UTC
3 points
on: Rationality Quotes Thread December 2015
Looking for mental information in individual neuronal firing patterns is looking at the wrong level of scale and at the wrong kind of physical manifestation. As in other statistical dynamical regularities, there are a vast number of microstates (i.e., network activity patterns) that can constitute the same ghloal attractor, and a vast numbmer of trajectories of microstate-to-microstate changes that will tend to converge to a common attractor. But it is the final quasi-regular network-level dynamic, like a melody played by a million-instrument orchestra, that is the medium of mental information. - Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, pp. 516 − 517.

common_law 27 May 2014 17:14 UTC
3 points
in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: Pascal’s Mugging Solved
What you present is the basic fallacy of Pascal’s Mugging: treating the probability of B and of C as independent the fact that a threat of given magnitude is made.

Your formalism, in other words, doesn’t model the argument. The basic point is that Pascal Mugging can be solved by the same logic as succeeds with Pascal’s wager. Pascal ignored that believing in god A was instrumentally rational by ignoring that there might, with equal consequences, be a god B instead who hated people who worshiped god A.

Pascal’s Mugging ignores that giving to the mugger might cause the calamity threatened to be more likely if you accede to the mugger than if you don’t. The point of inflection is that point where the mugger’s making the claim becomes evidence against it rather than for it.

No commenters have engaged the argument!

common_law 21 Nov 2012 2:09 UTC
3 points
on: Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity
Here’s a more germane objection: a single vote, in reality (as opposed to in “should universes”) never truly comes even close to deciding an election. When the votes are close to a tie, the courts step in, as in Bush v. Gore. There are recounts and challenges. The power of connections and influence by judicial politics completely overwhelms the effect of a single vote.

Don’t you think it perverse to derive the value of voting from the very high value of the outcome of an extraordinary event?

common_law 4 Sep 2015 3:54 UTC
2 points
on: Words per person year and intellectual rigor
You’ve drawn a significant distinction, but I don’t think degree of rigor defines it. I’m not sufficiently familiar with many of these thinkers to assess their rigorousness, but I am familiar with several, the ones who would often be deemed most important: Einstein, Darwin on the side you describe as rigorous; Freud and Marx on the side you describe as less rigorous. I can’t agree that Freud and Marx are less rigorous. Marx makes a argument for his theory of capitalism in three tightly reasoned volumes of capital, none of the arguments formulaic. Freud develops the basics of his psychology in “The Interpretation of Dreams,” a rigorous study of numerous dreams, his own and his patients, extracting principles of dream interpretation.

Let me offer an alternative hypothesis. The distinction doesn’t regard rigor but rather elegance. Einstein and Darwin developed elegant explanations; Freud and Marx developed systems of insights, supported by argument and evidence, but less reducible to a central, crisp insight. I haven’t considered a term for the latter, but for the moment, I’ll call them systematic theories.

An elegant theory must be accepted as a whole or not at all. A systematic theory contains numerous insights that despite their integration can often be separated from one another, one idea accepted and another rejected.

With that distinction, it can readily be explained why systematic theorists produce a greater total bulk of work. It takes more words, and more working through, to explain a system than an elegant principle.

common_law 1 Mar 2015 5:03 UTC
2 points
on: Innate Mathematical Ability
What’s your basis for concluding that verbal-reasoning ability is an important component of mathematical ability—particularly important in more theoretical areas of math?

The research that I recall showed little influence of verbal reasoning on high-level math ability, verbal ability certainly being correlated with math ability but the correlation almost entirely accounted for by g (or R). There’s some evidence that spatio-visual ability, rather unimportant for mathematical literacy (as measured by SAT-M, GRE-Q), becomes significant at higher levels of achievement. But from what I’ve seen, the factor that emerged most distinctive for excellent mathematicians (distinguishing them from other fields also demanding high g) isn’t g itself, but rather cognitive speed. Talented mathematicians are mentally quick.

common_law 1 Apr 2014 21:15 UTC
2 points
on: Natural Rights as Impediment to Artificial Intelligence
This essay makes a correct appraisal of Less Wrong thinking, but it denominates the position confusingly as “natural rights.” The conventional designation is “moral realism,” with “natural rights” denoting a specific deonotological view.

A more charitable reading than than provided by commenters would have understood that all the arguments invoked against natural rights (as well as the arguments attributing natural-rights thinking to Less Wrong) hold for other forms of moral realism, in particular utilitarianism/consequentialism. For an argument that utilitarianism is necessarily a form of moral realism (and other problems with utilitarianism) see “Utilitarianism twice fails”.

In short, substitute “moral realism” for “natural rights.”

common_law 9 Oct 2012 1:27 UTC
2 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational
Do you agree then that it is a potential explanation? If so, what’s a more plausible one? It may limitations of my imagination, but I don’t see one.

common_law

The con­cept of be­lief and the na­ture of abstraction

The concept of belief and the nature of abstraction