Constant2

Karma: 527

Constant2 2 Aug 2007 20:59 UTC
−1 points
on: Belief as Attire
Eliezer, your lack of familiarity with “the other side” on the topic of terrorists is all too obvious from your crude attempt at a characterization of it. All you appear to know about it is a few platitudes. Often I get the feeling from this site that it is not so much about overcoming your own biases as it is about coming up with new excuses to dismiss views that you don’t agree with by applying the genetic fallacy over and over (e.g. “suchandsuch belief is a product of suchandsuch bias”).

Constant2 3 Aug 2007 5:08 UTC
7 points
on: Belief as Attire
“Eliezer’s characterization describes a large minority of Americans very well.”

All I see there are familiar platitudes, not a description of anybody who thinks about things. All I see, in fact, are familiar formulas employed by politicians. Nor are the formulas necessarily wrong. It should not be hard to see what is cowardly about most terrorist attacks.

American Heritage has a fairly good definition of cowardice: “Ignoble fear in the face of danger or pain.”

The ignobility is an important factor which other dictionaries tend to miss. But American Heritage misses something that Cambridge has: “a person who is too eager to avoid danger, difficulty or pain”

It does not have to be danger and pain, it can be difficulty. So in a nutshell, a coward is someone who commits a discreditable act in order to avoid a difficulty (which might be pain or danger but might be something else). In the case of terrorists, the discreditable act is an attack on civilians, and the difficulty thereby avoided is the difficulty of engaging the enemy’s armed forces. Similarly, it is cowardly to break certain Geneva conventions, for example disguising yourself as, and mixing with, civilians, to thereby shield yourself from the enemy, is cowardly, because you are committing a discreditable act (using civilians as shields) in order to avoid difficulty (greater exposure to enemy fire).

I will quote an old essay on the topic and answer some key points.

http://www.slate.com/id/1008268/

“Perhaps the idea is that it is cowardly to make a sneak attack, especially on a defenseless civilian target, rather than confront an armed enemy face to face. But no one seriously expects Osama Bin Laden to invite the 101st Airborne to fight his terrorist organization on equal terms.”

The first sentence is a fair summary of the point I just made, but the second sentence is no answer. Compare the above with the following:

“Perhaps the idea is that rape is forcible sexual intercourse. But no one seriously expects Ugly Albert to get sex any other way than by forcing the girl.”

The fact that the only possible way to succeed is discreditable or illegal or immoral, is no answer to the point that it is nevertheless discreditable or illegal or immoral. It is still what it is, even if it is the only way. If the only way to make a mark is a cowardly way, that makes it no less cowardly.

“And besides, the reason we usually consider it cowardly to make a sneak attack is because the attacker avoids facing the consequences.”

Not necessarily. As the Chambers dictionary correctly recognized, what is necessary is an avoidance of a difficulty. It does not have to be specifically “facing the consequences”.

So it should be fairly easy to see that it is not incorrect to say that the terrorists are cowards. It is furthermore, then, not incorrect to say that if someone says the terrorists are not cowards, then he is wrong.

But backing up, even though I have defended the familiar platitude that terrorist attacks are cowardly, nevertheless I do not think this accurately reflects man in the street thinking on the topic. Rather, it represents an old political formula that has caught on and that hardly makes a ripple. It’s about as meaningful as saying “good morning”. It is not significant to say it; it would be significant to stop saying it. Same as “good morning.” We say that in order to avoid doing anything significant. It is a distant cousin of the “dead metaphor”—a metaphor that has lost its force through overuse. But like the dead metaphor, its overuse does not mean that it is not valid.

Setting this aside, there is also the matter of the habit that some intellectuals have of shocking the bourgeoisie. If you say that the bad guys think that they’re the good guys and we’re the bad guys, you probably won’t raise any eyebrows. But if you make the statement in a way that implies that you agree with the bad guys’ assessment, or that you are positioning yourself as a neutral party who favors neither side, then you will probably raise some eyebrows. And based on my own experience, an awful lot of people like to present the rather familiar and tired and unremarkable view that the bad guys think that they’re the good guys, in just such a way, so as to maximize their effect on their listener. This seeming undercurrent of support for the enemy is something that can be easily avoided without changing the factual content of what you’re saying, but it is in my experience often not avoided, indeed, it seems to be sought out and nurtured. And then, when the predictable reaction occurs, like clockwork Mr. Epater-les-bourgeois loudly complains about the impossibility of making obviously true statements in front of the the foolish masses.
What links here?
- Document's comment on When Truth Isn’t Enough by Scott Alexander (3 Aug 2013 5:43 UTC; 3 points)

Constant2 15 Aug 2007 22:31 UTC
5 points
on: One Argument Against An Army
Interesting thought, but this sort of abstract discussion about a possible error would greatly benefit from real and documented examples in which the described error cropped up.

Constant2 16 Aug 2007 11:41 UTC
2 points
on: One Argument Against An Army
“Constant, virtually any modern hot-button political issue will do.”

Actually, I think it would be pretty hard to come up with unambiguous examples of this, because what you’re describing is not misbehavior that occurs in any given encounter, but a pattern over time in which an individual changes his own beliefs in the wrong way in response to the evidence. This is hard to demonstrate for at least two reasons. First, since it occurs over time rather than on a single occasion it’s difficult to observe. Second, since what you’re really talking about (the revision of one’s beliefs) occurs inside a person’s head there’s the problem of gaining access to the person’s head.

But if it is difficult to come up with unambiguous examples of it, then by the same token it is hard to observe in the first place. Any supposed observation of it will almost certainly require a large element of speculation about what is going on inside someone else’s head.

What can we actually observe? Relevant to what you describe, we can observe two things:

1) We know generally that people’s political views often harden over time. And since they do it in different directions, then in at least some cases the hardening is unlikely to be occurring for the right (the rational truth-seeking) reasons.

2) People do observably rehearse already-known support.

But (2) in itself is perfectly legitimate. Meanwhile (1) already has many explanations apart from the phenomenon that you are speculating exists. It’s a much observed and much talked about phenomenon, and what you have done here is added only one more speculation about why it happens to the bulging library of explanations. While you are not necessarily wrong, at the same time as far as I can see there isn’t all that much compelling evidence in favor of your speculation.

Constant2 18 Aug 2007 13:59 UTC
1 point
0
on: Hindsight Devalues Science
Frankly none of the five examples strikes me as something I could have predicted, nor ever struck me as such. Nevertheless, social science may indeed produce few significant results which are not predictable. How is that possible given the examples above? Simple: the examples may have been cherry picked to make the point. In particular, their significance (to us now) is seriously damaged by the fact that they are not general statements but are statements about a time and place. While they may be generalizable to the present day while preserving their truth, they may not be. We just do not know. So, as they stand, they are not that useful to us now.

Social science almost certainly produces many insignificant results which are not predictable. It is easy enough to come up with questions which we can then methodically answer by gathering data. What percentage of Massachusetts residents like Fig Newtons? Is it higher or lower than the percentage of New York residents who like Fig Newtons? This is certainly a question that can be asked, and one whose answer I do not know. I could obtain a grant and then spend the grant money studying this question. But it is not a significant question, and learning its answer does not advance human knowledge in a significant way.

But what about significant results? Here’s a much more important question: in general, does extreme lack of sleep tend to have any significant negative impact? This is important because if it does not tend to have any significant negative impact, then many people will find this highly useful knowledge. Many people will sleep much less.

But notice something: it is not only an important question, it is also a question which people know the answer to. And this is no coincidence. It is often hard to hide important truths about people, from people.

This is not true of all social facts. Economic facts are facts about large numbers of people interacting, sometimes very indirectly, and so are a kind of fact which people have a hard time seeing, since they only encounter small numbers of other people at any given time, so they do not see the whole.

Constant2 18 Aug 2007 20:45 UTC
−3 points
on: Hindsight Devalues Science
pdf23ds, I don’t think it’s odd.

Let us grant the two points you have made (of which I am, of course, well aware, as is pretty much anyone who knows what “Digg” or “Reddit” is). In fact let’s go further. Suppose that polyphasic sleep lets you do away with sleep entirely (you just blink once every four hours). Suppose furthermore that a single dose of the new drug lets you do completely without sleep without any ill effects for the rest of your life. Now look at this question and try to answer it:

“in general, does extreme lack of sleep tend to have any significant negative impact?”

The correct answer is still “yes”, because even if you add up the people who have taken the drug and who practice polyphasic sleep, they make up a small minority of the whole population. Since the statement begins with, “in general”, it fails to be contradicted by a small minority.

As for polyphasic sleep and the drug, you can of course prove me wrong but as far as I know, the field of social science gets little if any credit for the discovery and ongoing investigation of polyphasic sleep. From what I have read, the main investigation seems to be done by individual self-experimenters. At least, that’s what’s made it to the social sites. Similarly, drugs are developed by and large by scientists in the fields of biology, chemistry, biochemistry, etc., not social science, and clinical trials are performed by and large by doctors, not social scientists.

Constant2 20 Aug 2007 19:08 UTC
−2 points
on: Hindsight Devalues Science
“What’s with the nitpicking, Constant? [...] they weren’t relevant to your point”

I had—mistakenly as it turns out—assumed that you were obeying Grice’s maxims. You were, by your own eventual admission, disobeying the maxim of relevance. That is why I misunderstood you.

Constant2 20 Aug 2007 19:51 UTC
6 points
on: Is Molecular Nanotechnology “Scientific”?
From Google:

Your search—“nanotech is pseudoscience”—did not match any documents.

Again, I’m looking for examples. I have heard many criticisms of nanotech—specific, science-based criticisms. You can’t be talking about those. But I’m not aware of others. Google was no help. (That wasn’t my only search term BTW, the other ones I tried also failed, that particular search term simply makes the point.)

What I want to guard against is tarring valid criticisms of nanotech and nanotech advocates by associating them with a made-up, straw man attack.

Constant2 22 Aug 2007 7:41 UTC
19 points
on: Guessing the Teacher’s Password
“Then you may think that “Light is arglebargle” is a good explanation, that “arglebargle” is the correct password. It happened to me when I was nine years old—not because I was stupid, but because this is what happens by default. This is how human beings think, unless they are trained not to fall into the trap. Humanity stayed stuck in holes like this for thousands of years.”

Okay, but there’s one innocent interpretation even here. People learn language, and when we learn language we copy the verbal behavior of other people. Maybe “arglebargle” is a synonym for light in some language, or maybe it’s a supercategory of light (a category that includes light among other things). Maybe the teacher is still in the process of explaining to us what arglebargle means and the first step is to say that light is arglebargle—later on the teacher will tell us what else is arglebargle so that we will gradually build a good concept of it but initially we need to retain the point that light is arglebargle while not yet knowing what arglebargle is, because this is a step in learning what arglebargle is. In that case, we’re learning new language when we learn that “light is arglebargle”. That’s innocent, it’s not a mistake.

This suggests that the error may not be learning the teacher’s passwords per se, as such, but learning the teacher’s passwords when we should ideally be learning something else. The context matters.

But the student is the student and therefore ignorant by assumption, so it may in many cases be too much to expect the student to know when it is time to learn the passwords and when it is time to learn something else. If the student experiences academic success only from learning the passwords, then it may be that the student is not at fault, it’s the curriculum that is at fault—the teacher.

So the right recommendation may not be to tell the student to stop learning passwords. Passwords are a legitimate thing to learn, sometimes, and the student, being a student, doesn’t know ahead of time which times. The right recommendation may be to adjust the curriculum so that only the right kind of learning yields academic success.

That’s probably not easy.

Constant2 22 Aug 2007 20:22 UTC
2 points
on: Guessing the Teacher’s Password
“This is not innocent! Just because everyone does it, doesn’t make it okay.”

That’s not what I said. I said it is okay, directly. Not because everyone does it, but because it is a legitimate aspect of some kinds of valuable learning. But there’s probably a miscommunication here about exactly what “it” refers to. My point was to try to draw a distinction between a couple of things which you seem to have missed in your reply.

Constant2 22 Aug 2007 21:37 UTC
8 points
on: Guessing the Teacher’s Password
“Constant, just because something is part of how humans learn language, does not make it okay.”

Learning the passwords is okay in the context of learning language (I think). Take it away and you impede the ability to learn language. More generally, I think that learning empty slogans isn’t wrong, it’s merely incomplete. Part of learning is unintelligent aping, where we first learn to go through some of the motions without necessarily understanding them. You have to start somewhere. Understanding is complex and so necessarily requires passage through stages which do not each one constitute understanding, just as an office building as it is being built passes through many stages where what it is is just a useless structure that serves no immediate purpose. What is bad is not learning the passwords, it’s failing to learn more beyond the passwords. Similarly, what is bad is not laying a foundation under a building, what is bad is abandoning the construction of the building after the foundation is laid but before the building is complete.

“a floating, non-anticipation-controlling belief that feels like ordinary knowledge, and is not labeled as a hint about someone else’s word-associations”

It is almost necessarily the case that people who do not understand yet (e.g., students who are in the process of learning), do not yet have the understanding that it takes to understand that they do not understand yet. Knowing that you did not know is more easily done in hindsight once you know, than while you still do not know.

So the burden is probably better placed on the teacher to ensure that the students’ education is not left incomplete.

I myself find it hard to see what the gaps are in my knowledge unless that knowledge is tested. So I think a good place to start in fixing whatever problem it is that you see, is in the testing of the students.

Constant2 22 Aug 2007 22:02 UTC
24 points
0
on: Guessing the Teacher’s Password
To expand on my point, I think there is not enough testing in schools, and what testing there is is too associated with grades. Suppose that you are teaching a child to ride a bike, but suppose that each time he falls you give him a bad grade. At the end of it he knows how to ride a bike really well, and any honest assessment of him should be, “great, he learned well, he’s done”. Unfortunately, that is not what happens in school. Instead, all his stumbles on the way to learning are summarized and then put into the report card that his parents see.

Once the child has learned, why should it matter how many times he failed in the process of learning? What should matter is whether he knows now.

Because children are keen not to get poor grades, they are worried about never stumbling even once in any of the tests of their knowledge, because they know that each stumble will make it into their permanent record. In order to make it at least possible for students never to stumble, the tests must be designed so that with enough preparation students will not stumble. This limits what can be tested.

The test of getting on a bike and trying to ride will invariably result in stumble after stumble until the child eventually learns to ride. This kind of test is therefore necessarily excluded from the tests that the school will give children. And since such tests are key to learning important aspects of knowledge, schools will fail to teach those aspects of knowledge.

Imagine a bike riding course in which children are taught the theory of bike riding but not actually placed on a bike until the end of the semester. In fact, to ensure that at least some students will pass the test, even the final exam cannot place them on a bike, but will instead need to be a form where they regurgitate the bike riding theory they learned.

I am exaggerating of course, but I do see this as a pronounced tendency in learning.

Constant2 23 Aug 2007 2:42 UTC
1 point
on: Guessing the Teacher’s Password
“I think primacy should be given to figuring out how to optimize these learning processes, rather than justify the functional elements of the learning processes we currently have.”

Part of the problem may be that a lot of the educational system simply has no proper criterion of success. What, after all, is a successful class in (say) physics? The teacher’s success is measured by the students’ success, but the students’ success is measured by their performance on the exams, and the exams are written by the teacher, so the teacher is indirectly evaluating himself. Which is not a proper criterion of success. Even if the educational system as a whole writes a national exam to test the teacher, the fundamental problem remains, because the test is written by the same organization that is ultimately testing itself.

What is a teacher supposed to teach? How is this decided? I think there is such a large gap between learning and life that in effect a lot of learning goes untested, or tested badly (e.g., tested by the very organization whose performance is being tested).

This is presumably much less of a problem in vocational training. The value of a vocational school is tested in the workplace, and it is quickly discovered whether a particular school churns out worthless graduates.

Constant2 25 Aug 2007 0:09 UTC
14 points
on: Semantic Stopsigns
Synonyms for “I don’t know”.

There might be more of these than we think. Two candidates:

Aesthetics. People have a lot of understandable preferences: they prefer bigger houses to smaller ones, longer vacations to shorter ones, air conditioned rooms to hot and humid ones, and so on. What these have in common is that we can easily understand and explain the preferences. Aesthetic preferences, however, are generally characterized by it being hard, maybe impossible, to explain what it is about one thing that makes it more aesthetically pleasing than another. This suggests when we say “aesthetically pleasing”, we almost mean, “pleasing, but if you asked why I wouldn’t really be able to give you a satisfactory explanation.”

Intelligence. Many have observed that each new success in reproducing, in machinery, the capabilities of the human mind, has in turn led to a narrowing of what is considered “intelligent”—a narrowing that excludes whatever it is that machines can now do. This phenomenon is explained if “intelligent behavior” is a subclass of some larger class of behavior (a larger class that includes the things that we have gotten machines to do, such as play a strong game of chess). In particular, the subclass labeled “intelligent” is that subclass of behaviors whose mechanism we have not yet discovered. I have often heard or read people say something like, “this is not intelligent behavior because what the computer is doing is [description of mechanism].” What really seems to be getting said is, “this is not intelligent behavior because I am able to describe it to you.”

Constant2 27 Aug 2007 0:27 UTC
28 points
on: The Futility of Emergence
Okay, but that’s really not how I have understood emergence. It delineates a subject matter, and does so in an abstract way that includes many specific examples which are purportedly alike in some important way. But I don’t think this use necessarily implies that the explanation has thereby been given. It is, rather, usually an attempt to delineate a subject matter which can be further investigated. I believe that the hope is that a general theory of emergence is possible, though my impression is that there isn’t even a generally agreed-upon definition of it, let alone a commonly accepted theory.

One common element that I have sometimes noticed is that an emergent phenomenon can be idealized and a simplified mathematical model constructed of it, which is not precisely correct but which is a very good approximation. The existence of such simple and very good models is remarkable and extremely lucky for us.

For example, an actual fluid such as water is really made up of molecules that interact, but there is a simple mathematical model for fluids which treats fluids as absolutely continuous and smooth all the way down, not composed of atoms but fluid at every scale. As I vaguely recall, this simple mathematical model can be adjusted by plugging in values for viscosity, compressibility, and so forth. It is not exactly the same as actual fluids (the resemblance breaks down completely on the scale of molecules) but it is very close at the macroscopic scale.

Similarly, we have the concept of the “ideal gas”, which is only an approximation to real gases but on a macroscopic scale a very close and useful one.

That we can vastly simplify and idealize something without losing all that much predictive power seems to be a characteristic of many so-called emergent phenomena.

Constant2 27 Aug 2007 21:07 UTC
2 points
on: The Futility of Emergence
The concept of emergence is useful as a guard against certain errors, such as, for example, conspiratorial theories which explain phenomena as the product of intentions (malign or benevolent). Order does not always arise from intention. If society is lawful, that is not necessarily because there is some commander dictating that it be lawful. The lawfulness of society may be a phenomenon with a mostly dispersed, decentralized cause (e.g., lawfulness may be in large part enforced by ostracism of transgressors and thus enforced by all members of society rather than by an elite and privileged police apparatus applying the decisions of a legislature). Similarly, a sudden rise in the price of something may not be the product of a secret cartel or of a particular government policy or politician, but may be the result of a non-obvious confluence of disparate causes. When we say that prices emerge from the marketplace rather than being set by some authority, we are denying the idea that there is some person or group who has chosen that the price should be what it is, a person who can be appealed to to change his mind, or blamed for his decision.

Constant2 27 Aug 2007 21:22 UTC
1 point
on: The Futility of Emergence
“It seems as if every new observation is “surprising,” or “shocking,” or “baffling.” ”

Surely the underlying reality of this “seeming” is that a large fraction of new newsworthy observations is “baffling” etc.

Constant2 27 Aug 2007 22:48 UTC
0 points
on: The Futility of Emergence
“Let K(.) be Kolmogorov complexity. Assume you have a system M consisting of and fully determined by n small identical parts C. Then M is ‘emergent’ if M can be well approximated by an object M’ such that K(M’) << n*K(C).”

That seems to describe what I described earlier:

“One common element that I have sometimes noticed is that an emergent phenomenon can be idealized and a simplified mathematical model constructed of it, which is not precisely correct but which is a very good approximation.”

I didn’t, by the way, intend this as a definition of emergence, though it or something thereabouts might qualify.

Constant2 28 Aug 2007 5:43 UTC
28 points
on: Positive Bias: Look Into the Dark
I think something else is going on with the 2 4 6 experiment, as described. Many of the students are making the assumption about the set of potential rules. Specifically, the assumption is that most pairs of rules in this set have the following mutual relationship: most of the instances allowed by one rule, are disallowed by the other rule. This being the case, then the quickest way to test any hypothetical rule is to produce a variety of instances which conform with that rule, to see whether they conform with the hidden rule.

I’ll give you an example. Suppose that we are considering a family of rules, “the third number is an integer polynomial of the first two numbers”. The quickest way to disconfirm a hypothetical rule is to produce instances in accordance with it and test them. If the rule is wrong, then the chances are good that an instance will quickly be discovered that does not match the hidden rule. It is much less efficient to proceed by producing instances not in accordance with it.

I’ll give a specific example. Suppose the hidden rule is c = a + b, and the hypothesized rule being tested is c = a—b. Now pick just one random instance in accordance with the hypothesized rule. I will suppose a = 4, b = 6, so c = −2. So the instance is 4 6 −2. That instance does not match the hidden rule, so the hypothesized rule is immediately disconfirmed. Now try the following: instead of picking a random instance in accordance with the hypothesized rule, pick one not in accordance with it. I’ll pick 4 6 8. This also fails to match the hidden rule, so it fails to tell us whether our hypothesized rule is correct. We see that it was quicker to test an instance that agrees with the hypothetical rule.

Thus we can see that in a certain class of situations, the most efficient way to test a hypothesis is to come up with instances that conform with the hypothesis.

Now you can fault people on having made this assumption. But if you do, then it is still a different error from the one describe. If the assumption about the kind of problem faced had been correct, then the approach (testing instances that agree with the hypothesis) would have been a good one. The error, if any, lies not in the approach per se but in the assumption.

Finally, I do not think one can rightly fault people for making that assumption. For, it is inevitable that very large and completely untested assumptions must be made in order to come to a conclusion at all. For, infinitely many rules are consistent with the evidence no matter how many instances you test. The only way ever to whittle this infinity of rules consistent with all the evidence down to one concluded rule is to make very large assumptions. The assumption that I have described may simply be the assumption which they made (and they had to make some assumption).

Furthermore, it doesn’t matter what assumptions people make (and they must make some, because of the nature of the problem), a clever scientist can learn what assumptions people tend to make and then violate those assumptions. So no matter what people do, someone can come along, construct an experiment in which those assumptions are violated, and then say, “gotcha” when the majority of his test subjects come to the wrong conclusions (because of the assumptions they were making which were violated by the experiment).

Constant2 28 Aug 2007 7:15 UTC
0 points
on: Positive Bias: Look Into the Dark
I meant that first comment to be more speculative than definite. I was speculating about an alternative explanation of the observed behavior, which locates the fault elsewhere.