HalMorris

Karma: 197

HalMorris 11 Mar 2022 0:25 UTC
3 points
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on: Gravity Turn
Very nice analogy. Also this bit: “even as it’s continuously accelerating towards the Earth, it continually misses” sounds like Douglas Adams’ (Hitchhiker’s Guide..) explanation how how to fly: aim to fall to the earth, but miss.

HalMorris 21 Aug 2015 16:19 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Reason as memetic immune disorder

which exactly part of your worldview would say that Western education and living in a city should be incompatible with religious fanaticism?

Cultural development seems not to follow such orderly laws that we can use the word “incompatible” very often if ever. But going to a western university tends to promote individual thought over blind acceptance of whatever you were taught in childhood, and while someone who spent their live in some valley in Afghanistan or northern Pakistan, never exposed to different people, might imagine westerners as cloven hoofed devils, it is at least a reasonable point of view to suppose that going to school with westerners could lesson that kind of visceral revulsion.

I’m a little take aback, as “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” is an admonition to obey established political authority. And “render unto God what is God’s” is the possibly subversive part—though it’s only recommending obedience to a competing authority”. Also, Christian Russia, esp around the time of Ivan the Terrible was arguably the most totalitarian major state for its time (the main argument would be over China, I think). I believe Paul’s writings give ample admonitions to obey authority, and for slaves to obey their masters.

What would you say in the doctrines of Islam makes it “naturally a totalitarian religion”? I assume you have some analysis that leads you to that conclusion.

HalMorris 21 Aug 2015 3:13 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Reason as memetic immune disorder
The OP did write:

The history of religions sometimes resembles the history of viruses. Judaism and Islam were both highly virulent when they first broke out, driving the first generations of their people to conquer (Islam) or just slaughter (Judaism) everyone around them for the sin of not being them. They both grew more sedate over time.

Which I think acknowledges some of that early history. I assume what is said about Judaism has to do with the slaughter of Canaanites, which is possibly more than half legendary, unlike the exploits of Islam which happened in a much better documented time.

In different times and places, Islam has been extremely sometimes fanatical, and at other times received Jews who were driven out of Spain by the Inquisition, and showed toleration of other ideas. The ups and downs have probably been due to many causes, but there really has been an awakening in recent decades of Islamic fanaticism, and in this case, at least, I think the OP’s thesis might account for some of that; the thinking was just a bit too loose and brainstorm-ey. It is kind of a puzzle to have so many Muslims combining western education, and the ability to function in a modern metropolitan setting combined with extreme fanaticism.

A peak of Christian holy-warring, torturing and witch-burning came when Protestants set out to rid Catholicism of the many “irrational” (having no basis in the bible) false sacraments, and between the Reformation and the Counter-reformation, both Protestants and Catholics were studying the gospels more rigorously and attempting to weave it into a more logical justifiable structure.

I grew up in the 50s and 60s in a very loose sort of Methodist protestantism that was very unconcerned with issues like the literal 7 days of creation, with hell for sinners, with Satan going around tempting people, or with contesting evolution. It seemed to me only a few fossils insisted on all those sorts of things. For most, a general sort of largely “good Samaritan” morality seemed the most salient thing, and there was not much in society to challenge the general sexual mores of moderate protestantism.

I think it’s true generally, that religions, especially if lacking a strong central structure like that of Catholicism or Mormonism, or Islam esp. in times when the idea of a a caliph seemed remote, tend to “mellow” most of the time, especially when not particularly challenged, and to evolve into largely going through the motions, but many different things contribute to a stirring of popular zeal and fanaticism. Both being in close contact with challenges from other belief systems and schooling that trains people to be more logical can contribute, and the result can be a lot of ideas that people half-forgot and certainly didn’t apply rigorously start to come to the fore.

I have listened on audio to both the Koran and the Bible, and admit that the Koran has a stronger more consistent version of the meme that God loathes unbelievers and intends to torture them for eternity, but it is a part of Christianity too, and in Islam it has frequently faded into the background. Again, Islam having been established last, is intensely aware of Judaism and Christianity, and rants against them specifically, but at times (esp the 16 and 17 centuries) there were more islands of toleration for Jews in the Muslim world than in Christiandom. Constant assertion that Islam is uniquely inhumane are just the sort of thing that strengthens fanaticism. In criticizing religion, I’ve come to the conclusion that we should tell believers that to the extent they believe in God’s loathing and wanting to torture “Infidels”, their beliefs present a real problem to others.

HalMorris 13 Apr 2015 2:11 UTC
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in reply to: Alex_Kennedy’s comment on: Rational vs. Scientific Ev-Psych
And if you startle a cat when he’s licking his crotch he’ll freeze in whatever awkward posture he’s in (that’s my overgeneralization from one male cat).

HalMorris 28 Mar 2015 1:50 UTC
9 points
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on: Defeating the Villain

HalMorris 2 Feb 2015 16:08 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Kindly’s comment on: Rationality Quotes Thread February 2015
To criticize hypocrisy in debate you don’t even have to understand the other’s argument—you only have to be able to find a logical contradiction, and you can always find a contradiction, or something you can plausibly claim is a contradiction.

For the debater, it may be very hard to give up. Many of us can find (or generate plausible arguments for) contradictions with 10% of your brain power, thus keeping the other on the defensive, while using the rest of ones mind to search for a deeper argument. But for this reason it makes for tedious unilluminating debate, and ought to be given less encouragement than it gets—that is, if we want more insightful argument.

HalMorris 6 Jan 2015 4:57 UTC
1 point
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on: Why do you really believe what you believe regarding controversial subjects?
I wrote as a little part of a comment in the middle of a longish thread:

There is a paper “Experts: Which ones should you trust” addressing this issue by Alvin Goldman—you need google scholar or JSTOR or something to actually get the article), one of the biggest names in epistemology and specifically social epistemology. Actually I don’t think the article does very much to resolve the issue unfortunately.

One article (cited in Goldman “Experts...”) that I really like is John Hardwig “The Role of Trust in Knowledge”, which gets at the critical need for experts to trust other experts, and illustrates with examples of scientific and mathematical accomplishment that just don’t fit in one person’s head.

Besides the qualities of individuals, we must ask whether a particular study discipline has anything trustworthy to say. As Dustin said:

My goal … on subjects on which there truly is not a expert consensus is to acknowledge that there is no consensus and thus not choose one side or another.

DanArmak spoke of the “consensus-making process in the field” which “has to be explicitly rational and truth-seeking”—a very good point, I think, that I’ve tried to illustrate in “Global Warming and the Controversy: What is Scientific Consensus? Continental Drift as Example”.

One point: An area of scientific study has to be tractable (this is relative to available technology—medical science remained largely intractable until pretty recently), and there has to be a there there. See cartoon: http://xkcd.com/451/

I got the impression from some passing reference (if I didn’t imagine it) that Stephen Toulmin has had some things to say about this aspect of “what makes (a) science work” (still haven’t found something he wrote to confirm this); I’ve made some attempts at dealing with it myself in “What is A Machine? Natural Machines and Origins of Science” and “Finding Your Invisible Elephant. A Science Requires, and is Shaped by, a Tractable Subject Matter”. The articles aren’t as polished as I wish they were—my New Years resolution is to do better.

HalMorris 4 Jan 2015 21:12 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: Why do you really believe what you believe regarding controversial subjects?

This rules out religion, politics, philosophy and most policy proposals as interesting controversies, leaving scientific and epistemological questions.

Slightly problematic unless you don’t admit epistemology being part of philosophy. And it seems like almost as big a swamp as the rest of philosophy, though the problems seem much more worth resolving than in most of philosophy.

There is a paper “Experts: Which ones should you trust” addressing this issue by Alvin Goldman (http://philpapers.org/rec/GOLEWO—you need JSTOR or something to actually get the article), one of the biggest names in epistemology and specifically social epistemology. Actually I don’t think the article does very much to resolve the issue unfortunately. By the way, there are two schools of thought self-described as social epistemology which don’t acknowledge each other except mostly to trade deprecations. Actually I don’t think the article does very much to resolve the issue unfortunately.

HalMorris 29 Dec 2014 2:51 UTC
5 points
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on: Friendly UI
I think it is a very good question. Forget ideas you may have had about UX 10 or 20 years ago. Google is a user interface to the rest of the internet. “Unfriendly” might not be the word for it, but the impression that it is there to serve me is an illusion. It is becoming too much like the “friendly” used car salesman.

Whatever we want to access on the internet is increasingly mediated by highly intelligent interfaces that have their own agendas, and I doubt we have thought enough about what constraints it would take to keep these agendas from getting out of hand. In a worst case scenario, these agents might systematically mislead people so as to hide some uncontrollable super-agent being put into place. It is the old agency problem. The attempt to impose ethics and good behavior on those we take to be our agents (doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, finance advisers) raises different questions from those aimed at most fellow beings. “Professional ethics” is a name for one sometimes effective approach to the problem, and it imposes a whole other set of constraints than those we put on peoples treatment of one another generally, so I think it is worth looking at from a special angle which might well be neglected by FAI generally.

HalMorris 29 Dec 2014 1:59 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: ozziegooen’s comment on: Why “Changing the World” is a Horrible Phrase

I think it’s still useful to point out when its done, and that was what I was trying to do here with that point. Just because it’s an endemic everywhere doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be understood and is not a problem towards this one mentality.

Black-and-white thinking is more dangerous the more important the area of thinking is. This area (one’s perceived ‘purpose’ in life) is quite important, so I believed that this was dangerous enough to point out and think about.

I totally agree it’s dangerous and worth pointing out. And humankind is is serious danger. I have no idea what the odds are; it’s one of my points of agreement with N. N. Taleb that another addiction of human race is thinking we know—thinking we can calculate the odds.

Have I made you feel defensive? If so, not at all what I intended. I’ve had enough of those games. If you took my post as saying “Your post is lame and pointless so I’m 1-upping you”, I sincerely urge you to question that, and wonder if that was some sort of automatic reaction and if so, where it might have come from.

I was glad to see your post; it’s one of the more interesting things to come up here lately—it just reminded me of my point of view, which is related but somewhat different.

HalMorris 28 Dec 2014 21:03 UTC
1 point
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on: Why “Changing the World” is a Horrible Phrase
Basically, I am in total agreement, although w.r.t.

Problem 2: ‘Changing the World’ Creates Black and White Thinking

Actually, I think human beings can’t help being drawn to black and white thinking of one kind or another. Even while thinking this, an insidious something in my mind is trying to turn it into some kind of black and white thinking: There are two kinds of people in the world: people who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and people who don’t.

So I suggest you have the causation backwards, and rather, the reason so many heated arguments fall into some dichotomy between two Schelling points (like “Change the World” <--> “Stop the catastrophe caused by the maniacs trying to change the world”) is a tendency so central to our being that we can’t ever expect to extinguish it—we can only learn to be vigilant about it, laugh at ourselves (and others).

At bottom, I think it is something like an instinct for orienting oneself, like “my people” vs “those I’d better beware of”, which to me seems right for hunter-gatherers, who are very likely to only know of two groups (or they can easily view it this way): the people I live my life with, cooperate with, who are mostly likely to defend me in some way, vs those other people who don’t think, talk, or decorate their bodies in the proper way, who have neutral at best, and frequently hostile intentions towards me and my people.

Ask yourself (ozziegooen) whether it’s happened to you to some extent. Was there, in the feelings that motivated you to post, an element of anticipation of the agreement of people you’d like to get to know better, and simultaneous head-shaking over all those silly people to whom “Change the world” seems meaningful? There certainly was for me while reading it.

HalMorris 21 Dec 2014 0:31 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Velocity of behavioral evolution
So if I understand what you’re suggesting, mice might have inherited a self-gene-modification facility that for smells passing certain criteria (highly associated with a threat somehow), can splice into the genome a representation of a receptor for that smell directly engineered from the molecular structure that “is” that smell. By modifying the genome, it seems we must mean modifying the genome in some or all sperm cells in males, and some or all egg cells in females.

Alternatively, mice sperm or egg cells might contain a previously unknown organelle into which the organism somehow routes samples of really bad smells that would play an active role in structuring the olfactory area of the embryo mouse brain predetermining their reaction to that molecule. This might predict a “washing out” effect over some number of generations.

If such a special case of Lamarkian modification is remotely plausible, it seems impossible to generalize to any sorts of trait other than smell perception.

I vaguely remember some other cases where internal stem cell structure other than the DNA played some role given as an example in Miriam Solomon’s Social Epistemology as examples of challenges to Darwinism—but they also seemed to come down to freakish ungeneralizable phenomena.

HalMorris 5 Dec 2014 19:25 UTC
−4 points
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Rationality Quotes December 2014
Militant atheism is of course more than just not believing in god There is also believing that terrible things are almost sure to happen when people believe in god (largely true with the collection of esp Abrahamic gods we have running around these days) AND believing that getting people not to believe in god will make it so much better

The USSR helped prove that “godless religions” can have all the worst characteristics of the worst religions (of course they didn’t truly wipe out religion, but the dominant ideology didn’t involve a theistic god—we could debate whether it made “history” a sort of god.

As with so many things, including “regime change”, it is harder than it looks to eliminate something bad without getting something worse.

Of course LW is very conscious of the need to put something better in place of the old thinking.

HalMorris 5 Dec 2014 0:47 UTC
−5 points
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on: Rationality Quotes December 2014
If atheism is a religion then “OFF” is a TV channel

(from: http://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014/12/04/do-atheists-reject-the-wrong-kind-of-god-not-likely/comment-page-1/#comments)

HalMorris 2 Dec 2014 2:25 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Sophronius’s comment on: Irrationalism on Campus?
Thanks. I appreciate the additional point of view and observations.

HalMorris 2 Dec 2014 2:20 UTC
−2 points
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in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Narcissistic Contrarianism

I’m extremely intellectually compulsive if I do say so perhaps immodestly

To break a little bad news, calling yourself “intellectually compulsive” really isn’t complimenting yourself.

Generally I expect (and get) a higher quality of sarcasm than this from LW.

In your prev. post to which I was responding—headed “Not everything is signaling”, you seemed to be reading me as thinking everything is signalling,

In saying

Some people are just intellectually compulsive, and don’t spend their days saying or doing things primarily to present an image to others. No doubt that attitude is hard for those who do to comprehend, just as it is difficult for those who don’t to get their head around the attitude of those who do.

It seemed like you might be promoting being “intellectually compulsive” with the withering clause “No doubt that attitude is hard for those who do [my interp: mostly preoccupy themselves with presenting an image] to comprehend”. I hope you can see why I inferred that the “intellectually compulsive” were a superior fraternity to those who “mostly preoccupy themselves with presenting an image”.

But it seems that by your lights, the intellectually compulsive are trumped by those who know that

ideas are a means to accomplishing things in the world. Indulging in a compulsion to tidy them up regardless of any intent or plan to use them is intellectual OCD, mental masturbation, or both, depending on the precise drive/reward structure of the compulsion.

So would that be your characterization of those involved in pure mathematics? To say nothing of those who spent centuries collating tables of apparent (as seen from position x,y on earth on x date/time) positions of the planets against the backdrop of the fixed stars which became the raw data for validating Kepler’s and Newton’s theses. Were they OCD mental masturbators whose lives were wasted?

I think perhaps you are spending an inordinate amount of effort making other writers seem like silly straw men. I would suggest you primarily read posts that you can respect, and bother to understand and engage with. I am being serious here, trying not to engage in mere putdown-ism.

HalMorris 23 Nov 2014 16:22 UTC
−2 points
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on: [Link] If we knew about all the ways an Intelligence Explosion could go wrong, would we be able to avoid them?
I’m pretty new to this although I’ve read Kurzweil’s book and Bostrom’s Superintelligence, and a couple of years worth of mostly lurking on LW, so if there’s if there’s a shitload of thinking about this I hope to be corrected civilly

If friendly AI is to be not just a substitute for but our guardian against unfriendly AI, won’t we end up thinking of all sorts of unfriendly AI tactics, and putting them into the friendly AI so it can anticipate and thwart them? If so, is there any chance of self-modification in the friendly AI turning all that against us? Ultimately, we’d count on the friendly AI itself trying to imagine and develop countermeasures against unfriendly AI tactics that are beyond our imagination, but then same problem maybe.

I’ve been pondering for some time, especially prompted by the book Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram, how one might distinguish qualities of possible knowledge that make them more or less likely to be of general benefit to humankind. Conflict knowledge seems to have a general problem. It is often developed under the optimistic assumption that it will give “us” who are well-intentioned the ability to make everybody else behave—or what is close to the same thing, it is developed under existential threat such that it is difficult to think a few years out—we need it or the evil ones will annihilate us. Hence the US and the atom bomb from 1945-49. Note that this kind of situation also motivates some (who have anticipated where I’m going) to insist “We have this advantage today—we probably won’t have it a few years from now—lets maximize our advantage while we have it (i.e. bomb the hell out of the USSR in 1946).

Another kind of knowledge might be called value-added knowledge—knowledge that disproves assumptions about economics being a zero-sum game. Better agriculture, house construction, health measures … One can always come up with counterexamples and some are quite non-trivial—the Internet facilitates formation of terrorist groups and other “echo chambers” of people with destructive or somehow non-benign belief systems. Maybe indeed media development falls in some middle-ground between value-added and conflict-oriented knowledge. Almost anything that can be considered “beneficial to humankind” might just advantage one supremely evil person, but I still think we can meaningfully speak of its general tendency to be beneficial, while the tendency of conflict-knowledge seems mostly in the long run to be neutral at best

Boyd, while developing a radically new philosophy of war-fighting got few rewards in the way of promotion and he was always embattled in the military establishment, but he collected around him a few strong acolytes, and did really if inadequately affect the design of fighter planes and their tactics, and his thought grew more and more ambitious until they embraced the art of war generally, and Coram strongly suggests he was as the side of the planners of the first Gulf War, and had a huge impact on how that was waged.

Unfortunately, as the book was being written several years later, there was speculation that people like Al Qaeda had incorporated some of the lessons of new warfare doctrines developed by the US.

It is generally problematic to predict where knowledge construction is going—because by definition we are making predictions about stuff the nature of which we don’t understand because it hasn’t been thought up yet—yet it seems we had better try, and Moore’s law gives one bit of encouragement. MIRI seems to be in part a huge exercise in this problematic sort of thinking.

If I have anything more than maybe “food for thought”, it may be to look for general tendencies (perhaps unprovable tendencies like Moore’s law) in the way kinds of knowledge affect conflict.

HalMorris 21 Nov 2014 19:11 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Salemicus’s comment on: Narcissistic Contrarianism

I am deeply suspicious when people try to explain away their opponents’ beliefs, rather than defeat them intellectually

Part of your misunderstanding, I think, is to assume I have an “opponent”. I’ve read 3 of Taleb’s books, and will probably read him again—maybe some of the more technical stuff he puts on his facebook page, when I’m willing to work hard enough to understand it, but sometimes I take him with a grain of salt, or think to myself “Oh I wish you wouldn’t do that”. I think I’ve read enough of Paglia (which isn’t much) for a lifetime, though maybe I’ll be proven wrong some day—the possibility of proving myself wrong just isn’t enough of a priority to make me pick up another article of hers at present.

Neither are you an enemy, and in this whole exchange, I’ve learned two useful concepts, one of them from you, so thanks.

You are calling for a refusal to engage with arguments you specifically concede are apparently persuasive (“dazzle their fans”),

No, I wouldn’t call that (“dazzle...) a concession that the arguments are “apparently persuasive”, whatever that means, and “calling for a refusal to engage with arguments” sounds like a sort of high drama that I’d very seldom if ever engage in.

HalMorris 21 Nov 2014 15:51 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Narcissistic Contrarianism
Actually I suspect there are a few more self-aware ones who just have a grand old time dazzling people.

In order of decreasing likelihood:

Norman Mailer (and I was trying to think of someone probably living or more recently deceased who’s more Norman Mailer than Norman Mailer—any clues?)

Camille Paglia

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

HalMorris 21 Nov 2014 15:45 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: Narcissistic Contrarianism

The easiest way to filter out 99 percent of this is to ignore anything that has no impact on your life (ie doesn’t pay rent).

Eh? If I was renting, I think that would have an impact on my life—so maybe this is yet another metaphor I never heard of.

If everyone was processing reality to the best of their analytical (and other) abilities, and honestly passing on the conclusions they reach then virtuosity at recognizing rational fallacies would go a lot further than I think it actually does; I’m afraid much of what we need is a social understanding of others.

Just FWIW, Aspergers types, which many I encounter here are self-proclaimed to be, have a chance to do this better than other people, because they have to do consciously what others have no idea that they’re doing. By the way, book recommendation: The Journal of Best Practices by David Finch. Very funny and enlightening, about an Aspergers/non-Aspergers mixed marriage. My wife and I had a good time reading it.