Creutzer

Karma: 981

Creutzer 20 Jul 2013 9:28 UTC
38 points
on: Rationality Quotes July 2013

“As I looked out into the night sky, across all those infinite stars, it made me realize how insignificant they are.”

Peter Cook

Not, perhaps, a rationality quote per se, but a delightful subversion of a harmful commonplace.

Creutzer 19 Jan 2014 9:57 UTC
36 points
0
in reply to: Julia_Galef’s comment on: Tell Culture
Interesting, I have the exact opposite gut reaction. It could be rephrased in slight variations, e.g. “until we’ve figured that out”, or, as shokwave below suggested, with a request for assistance, but in general, if someone said that to me, I would, ceteris paribus, infer that they are a self-aware and peaceful/cooperative person and that they are not holding anything in particular against me.

Whereas when someone leaves a conversation with an excuse that may or may not be genuine, it leaves me totally stressed-out because I have no idea what’s going on and now I have the burden of figuring everything out on my own, about another person who is obviously intent on not sending many informative signals. Great.

Creutzer 13 Mar 2014 21:49 UTC
21 points
on: Parenting versus career choice thinking in teenagers
If we’re talking about parental encouragement, there’s another issue. It’s much easier as a parent to admit to having made a mistake in one’s career choice and encourage one’s child to do better than it is for a parent to admit to their child’s face that they made a mistake in their reproductive decision. So if you engage in serious discussion of rational reproductive decisions, some pretty unpleasant conclusions may be forthcoming...

Creutzer 29 Oct 2014 7:22 UTC
20 points
on: 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
I’m a bit unhappy about the options for metaethical positions. I object to the identification of non-cognitivism with emotivism, because if non-cognitivism is defined as the position that moral statements don’t have truth-values, then I’m a non-cognitivist, but I still hold that there are logical relationships between moral statements, and between moral and factual statements.

Creutzer 6 Jul 2013 20:19 UTC
15 points
in reply to: TrE’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 22, chapter 93
Yes, exactly. Neville’s death would not have created these emotions, but the reason is not that he is male and Hermione is female. Neville should not be able to stand just as close to Harry. Neville is in no position to be anything as close to a comrade or equal as Hermione was. Neville is just someone who Harry has sympathy for and by whose development Harry was impressed. This is a very different thing from the “the two of us are different from the rest of the world” connection that he quickly developed with Hermione at the beginning (and which then faded off a bit, not least due to the questionable SPHEW arc).

Creutzer 6 May 2014 3:14 UTC
14 points
on: Arguments and relevance claims
Congratulations on rediscovering relevance implicatures.

Creutzer 6 Jul 2013 18:13 UTC
14 points
in reply to: thakil’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 22, chapter 93
If it’s okay for something to fail a critique, doesn’t that kind of mean there’s something wrong with the critique?

And I think there is something wrong with the critique. You don’t quite seem to appreciate the point Eliezer is making in his response.

I take it as a given that it is perfectly legitimate to have the main character of a story motivated by the death of his best friend. It is a premise of the whole endeavor that the main character is a super-smart Harry. So now we have to find a friend. Who could that naturally be? Well, it so happens that the smartest student in Harry’s year in the original is a girl; naturally, she will now be the second-smartest student in the class, because otherwise we’d have to dumb her down. She has the brains and personality to be Harry’s friend—so unless Eliezer takes additional pains to move further away from the original, she is going to be that friend. And it just so happens that she is female, which is entirely irrelevant.

Indeed, one could also turn it around and point out that it’s a positive thing that the person smart enough to be such good friends with Harry that their death motivates him suitably is a girl. But that would be equally besides the point, because Eliezer never chose her gender. The character was already there, gender included, and everything just falls into place as it is. He would have had to distort the original even further to prevent this; which is not the point of such a derivative work, and also the same people who have complained now would then probably have complained about him putting a smart and important female character from the original into a different, necessarily less central role, or removing her altogether (like Ron, who was unusable).

So what exactly is it that people are complaining about? Isn’t this really a problem with their own pattern-matching, which in this case turns out to be inappropriate? Maybe it’s making them uncomfortable, but that’s their problem; it’s not something on the basis of which to critique the story, because we can objectively argue that the pattern-matching went awry. Issues are not a purely subjective thing.

Note that this takes care only of the alleged fridging issue. It does not address the S.P.H.E.W. arc, which is more suspect of being genuinely problematic. I found it at least weird.

Creutzer 18 Feb 2014 17:32 UTC
13 points
in reply to: trifith’s comment on: Don’t rely on the system to guarantee you life satisfaction

There are vast educational resources available online for both parents and students, and the fact that formal schooling is going on is no barrier to making use of those resources.

Actually, it is, because your children spend a lot of time at school and you’d have to teach them in their “free time”.

Creutzer 17 Sep 2013 17:26 UTC
13 points
on: Dennett on the selfish neuron, etc.

I think you really have to think in terms of individual neurons as micro-agents, and ask what’s in it for them?

And how does that sort of anthropomorphization explain anything?

Creutzer 27 Jul 2013 20:49 UTC
13 points
on: Norbert Wiener on automation and unemployment
Based on the quotes you give, I feel you’re being uncharitable to Wiener here by talking as if his prediction had been falsified empirically. It has not; what he calls “cybernetic revolution”, in which the human brain itself would be devalued, hasn’t really happened yet. So far, what’s been devalued is mostly human limbs, if you will.

Creutzer 2 Jul 2015 8:46 UTC
12 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Stupid Questions July 2015
Off the top of my head, some reasons why people would to marry despite intending not to have children:
1. residence permits
2. taxes (a pretty big deal in some countries)
3. warm fuzzy feeling about cementing a very-long-term relationship in the culturally approved way, signalling commitment
4. doing the culturally expected thing in a very-long-term relationship and not wanting to advertise their child-free status

Creutzer 26 May 2015 15:15 UTC
12 points
on: Dissolving philosophy
Are you aware of the movement of Experimental Philosophy? They say exactly the same thing: that what we should really do is investigate the cognitive algorithms that give rise to philosophical intuitions. Which requires doing cognitive psychology rather than pointless arguing. There have been very interesting investigations into, for example, what factors people’s attributions of blame or causation are sensitive to.

Creutzer 17 Sep 2013 19:23 UTC
12 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Dennett on the selfish neuron, etc.
I don’t see anything in the quoted passage that suggests that individual neurons do something in their own interest to the detriment of the brain/person. But much more importantly, neurons don’t aim for anything. They’re not, you know, agents.

So this is why I’m objecting: the anthropomorphization is singularly unhelpful in understanding any of this, because whatever the mechanism behind what’s going on, goal-directed intentional behavior is very far from it.

Creutzer 7 Feb 2014 12:59 UTC
10 points
on: Maximizing life universally
Preference utilitarianism has none of the problems that you mention in the first paragraph and is still about something that people actually care about—as opposed to arbitrarily fetishising life. To be honest, someone with the values you outline registers basically as a paperclip-maximiser to me.

Creutzer 6 Jan 2014 12:54 UTC
10 points
in reply to: somervta’s comment on: [LINK] Why I’m not on the Rationalist Masterlist
Any kind of utilitarianism entails every statement of the form “p, if it results in measurably maximized utility” (kinds of utilitarianism differ in what they mean by “maximized utility”, since the phrase itself is underspecified), and I find it a bit disingenuous to instantiate p in a way that people wouldn’t like in order to defame its proponents instead of saying straightforwardly that you just don’t agree with utilitarianism.

Which is quite a different question from that of whether a given p does, in fact, result in maximized utility. Not idea if the above one does. So cousin_it’s question makes perfect sense: does p in fact result in maximized utility? Because if it doesn’t, then the blogger’s statement is even more disingenuous.

Creutzer 26 Aug 2013 7:54 UTC
10 points
in reply to: ChrisHallquist’s comment on: How sure are you that brain emulations would be conscious?
But that is exactly what wedrifid did, only consciously so. He didn’t want to expend the cognitive effort to find the value on a finer-grained scale, so he used a scale with granularity 1%. He knew he couldn’t assign 100%, so the only value to pick was 99%. This is how we use numbers all the time, except in certain scientific contexts where we have the rules about significant figures, which behave slightly differently.

Creutzer 11 Apr 2013 21:16 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Randy_M’s comment on: LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny
He didn’t assert it, he presupposed it.

“I hope that one day you learn that p” doesn’t mean “I hope that p is the case and one day you learn it”. It presupposes p and asserts “I hope that one day you learn it”.

Creutzer 2 Jun 2014 6:34 UTC
9 points
on: Political ideas meant to provoke thought
Aren’t government officials also incentivised to do stupid things? If so, replacing them by smarter people won’t solve many problems.

Creutzer 18 Jan 2014 17:42 UTC
9 points
in reply to: pianoforte611’s comment on: Tell Culture

I do think that it is unfair, and a common failure mode, to use the guess culture and then get angry if the other person doesn’t read you correctly.

Definitely.

But there is another unfair failure mode, perhaps not quite as common: to endorse to the use of the guess culture and then fail to deliver by failing to guess anything right. This has been driving me nuts in my interactions with some people. And yes, I’m pretty sure for a number of reasons that they aren’t merely pretending to be oblivious, but actually fail to notice the hints.

It is also a mistake that I have made myself.

Creutzer 6 Jul 2013 19:26 UTC
9 points
in reply to: thakil’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 22, chapter 93

No, it doesn’t indicate a problem with the critique. If I tell you that super mario is not a particularly feminist piece of work I don’t think you’d disagree, but I imagine you’d probably not agree that we shouldn’t play it.

Criticism isn’t about saying that something is unworthy of our time: quite the contrary, its about looking at worthy pieces of work and seeing where they fail and they succeed.

When you say something fails, one of two things is the case: either the thing you’re talking about is deficient in some way and should or could be improved; or you’re making an irrelevant statement. Otherwise you shouldn’t have used the language of “fail” and “succeed”.

Also, people are not just saying that HPMoR isn’t particularly feminist. That I would take as meaning that it’s simply orthogonal to feminism. But they are saying it in a way that suggests they think it is a flaw. I don’t think anybody will deny this.

Now, if I understand you correctly, what you’re saying is that people are wrong to utter this as a complaint, but that it’s legitimate to point out that HPMoR instantiates certain patterns. Even if you are explicit that you’re not saying it shouldn’t conform to these pattern, I think it’s not relevant. And the reason is this:

However, because so many heroes in literature and film are men, and so many of the friends that die are women, it begins to be problematic.

I’m not saying that it can never be problematic. There is this problematic pattern. What I’m saying is that this pattern-matching leads you astray in the case of HPMoR because its conforming to this pattern is an accident brought about by completely feminism-irrelevant meta-issues (namely the relation between certain unobjectionable story premises and the original from which it is derived). Instantiations of tropes that come about in this accidental way don’t count; in the same way that someone who doesn’t speak Chinese by chance producing a sequence of sounds with the right pitch contour that by a Chinese speaker would be perceived as a word doesn’t count as that person having spoken a word of Chinese.