MarkusRamikin

Karma: 2,653

MarkusRamikin 8 Jun 2011 15:26 UTC
21 points
on: Rationality Quotes: June 2011

“Attack and absorb the data that attack produces!”

-Tylwyth Waff in Heretics of Dune

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- MarkusRamikin's comment on Shut up and do the impossible! by Eliezer Yudkowsky (23 Jun 2011 16:25 UTC; 5 points)

MarkusRamikin 15 Jun 2011 9:46 UTC
4 points
in reply to: simplyeric’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: June 2011
Exactly. Poke the confusing-thing, make it give up evidence about how it works. And pay attention to that evidence.

I like your last two examples because they involve situations where you don’t have all the time in the world to approach a phenomenon, like we do (or at least feel like we do) when studying the fundamental and unchanging laws of Nature. You have to learn and adapt in real time.

Of course in a sports game you’re already going to “attack” because it’s part of the game. So the virtue lies in noticing the evidence it produces. It might seem like an obvious thing to say, but then you see people/teams repeating the same failed strategy over and over.

Haggling, negotiation, is pretty much the original context of the quote, and I think the immediate point was to avoid playing defensively and giving up initiative. Waff was trying to tell himself something like, “don’t just sit there intimidated by this powerful and mysterious woman, letting her frame the conversation to her advantage. Look for a way to learn more. Probe. Evoke a response.”

I’m also thinking of strategy games like, say, Starcraft. You want to commit some resources (units, time, your own attention) to scouting, in order to find out what types of units the enemy is relying on (so as to best counter them), which patches of valueable resource he has covered and how vulnerable they are to attack, how well he responds to raiding/harassment etc.

MarkusRamikin 15 Jun 2011 10:20 UTC
2 points
in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: June 2011
“She made rules about food because it made it easier to decide what to eat”—This actually works for such a person? Interesting, I think a lot of people have the opposite problem. I wish I found it easy to follow my own rules.

MarkusRamikin 15 Jun 2011 15:47 UTC
12 points
in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: June 2011
Noooot the same thing.

MarkusRamikin 16 Jun 2011 12:38 UTC
11 points
on: The Amanda Knox Test: How an Hour on the Internet Beats a Year in the Courtroom
I’ve wanted to reply here for a good while, so now that I’ve finally emerged from Lurkdom, I might as well do that. Great post!

Think about what you’re doing here: you are invoking the hypothesis that Amanda Knox is guilty of murder in order to explain the fact that she hung up the phone after three seconds.

That was beautiful. Probably the single most important sentence in that whole article, at least in terms of convincing me to your reasoning.

I have to say though, at least one thing you say sounds not just overconfident but blatantly partisan:

known to have had utterly benign dispositions prior to these events”.

I wonder how you could know this. If you picked it up from any pro-Knox source of information, it strikes me as a safe assumption that such a source would paint the defendants as angels regardless of the truth.

I’d also like to ask, how necessary to your argument was using that Jesus example? That’s preaching to a very narrow choir, even considerably narrower than just “atheists”. If that’s what you wanted then no problem, but I’m thinking about the lost potential of this article to be persuasive to a more general public. This would be a great article to link friends to if it didn’t rely on, not just the tools of rationality, but on specific conclusions shared by (I presume) most lesswrongians.

MarkusRamikin 16 Jun 2011 13:32 UTC
7 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: The Amanda Knox Test: How an Hour on the Internet Beats a Year in the Courtroom
Part of it appears to be Komponisto’s style: the post is peppered with things like “completely”, “utterly” “nothing”, “ruthlessly”, “gigantic”.

However, I think “shut that voice out, ruthlessly” may be pretty good advice at least at some point in the thinking/decision process. Because even after you’ve taken everything (including that voice) into account, and concluded that the true answer is different than it “feels”, and the intuition you feel is the result of an identified bias, your right answer might still “feel” wrong. The bias will keep injecting doubt, and it takes effort to shake it off. It’s hard to get a heuristic to admit it when it’s leading you astray. ;)

MarkusRamikin 18 Jun 2011 18:01 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Jordan’s comment on: Heading Toward: No-Nonsense Metaethics
Positive ones don’t have to have substance? ;)

MarkusRamikin 21 Jun 2011 19:42 UTC
0 points
in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: June 2011
I see, that makes sense.

Nancy: probably not enough care. But hm, “want to” follow or “feel like” following? Because I may “want to” be conscientious and work hard towards my goals, but I “feel like” slacking off.

MarkusRamikin 22 Jun 2011 16:16 UTC
0 points
on: How to Not Lose an Argument

evolutionary psychology tells us humans are notoriously bad liars

Does it? I genuinely don’t know, since I haven’t really studied the subject yet, but it strikes me that if lying didn’t work, we wouldn’t have developed this whole arms race of deception and social games. You might as well say that the Dark Arts in general don’t really work, that humans are notoriously bad at them. Yet my own impression is that if you find something to say that’s nice or what the other person wants to hear, regardless of whether you mean it, a lot of people will lap it up if you aren’t too crude about it. As has been said elsewhere on lesswrong, it takes effort to detect falsehood, whereas acceptance is natural.

MarkusRamikin 22 Jun 2011 19:29 UTC
3 points
on: Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable
Excellent article, I enjoyed it a lot.

One thing bothers me. What the hell are children told to persuade them to belief in a God, anyway? I don’t remember what mine told me; I became atheist at the age of like 10 and even that is a very fuzzy memory. Basically I remember that as soon as non-belief became apparent to me as an option, belief has struck me as completely lacking in justification; a big unanswered “why”—all the more annoying because for some reason asking “why” was not considered reasonable among most people I talked to (other children and adults). I have very little memory of myself-as-believer, though I know I was one.

So is there some general data on what parents tell children to persuade them? I imagine it’ll prove very silly, but I’m curious.

MarkusRamikin 24 Jun 2011 14:07 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Doug3’s comment on: Do We Believe Everything We’re Told?
Funny, my brain just assumed it’s all broken hyperlinks or something, and until the PS I didn’t consciously realize there were any colors in the article.

MarkusRamikin 25 Jun 2011 20:18 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks

Backrubs are excellent. Nonthreatening (well, assuming you don’t say anything creepy while near the neck

Now that you said that, how the hell am I ever going to resist the temptation next time :(

MarkusRamikin 26 Jun 2011 7:31 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Mercy’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: June 2011
Probably, but Brazzy’s explanation without adding all those other variables fits well enough to show why Milton’s statement might have been missing something important. The point of a jobs program is that society pays some cost (of not using the most optimal method, i.e. more machines and fewer workers) in order to keep its members out of the unemployment trap. To propose, even as a deliberate reductio ad absurdum, that this would go just as well with spoons rather than shovels is not rationality, it’s Spock-logic.

Now I’m quite willing to suppose that he understood the usefulness of such programs as an economist and overall had good reasons to see them as not worth it, or that some other measure would do better, but that particular quote fails to show it.

MarkusRamikin 26 Jun 2011 9:38 UTC
13 points
in reply to: see’s comment on: The Proper Use of Humility
Hm… this doesn’t seem right. Let me take a stab at this.

What you’re saying assumes that rationality—or such specific tools of it as Occam’s Razor—get applied equally to everything. Theists are making this big salient mistake, and so we assume they make this mistake everywhere. Which is not how people work. Like you have overall successful people who happen to also be, say, creationists.

To say that everything in theism is equally worthless is the outside view: we can see the whole field is based on an undeservedly priviledged hypothesis, so to us everything in that volume of theory space is not worth distinguishing between. Like distinguishing between two conditional probabilities where the condition itself is extremely unlikely; not practically useful. But from the inside, where the condition is already granted—there’s still bound to be some things that make considerably more sense than others. To deny that is to just say that you’re not interested in the distinction (which is reasonable), not that it couldn’t be made for good reasons.

The irrational can’t be trusted to do the reasoning correctly

I haven’t studied it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that theology, past the fact that it takes its theistic assumptions as a given, contained quite a lot of good thinking and that historically it contributed to our understanding of logic and valid reasoning. The reason I think so is that for long periods of time in history, becoming a clergyman was the main way of getting an education and getting to work on anything science-like, so at least some of the greatest minds in history were clergymen. Like Thomas Bayes. ;)

So I see a warning sign whenever aspiring rationalists dismiss theists as idiots.

(I’m probably failing to signal my allegiance to the tribe here ;) )

MarkusRamikin 26 Jun 2011 16:23 UTC
0 points
on: Influence = Manipulation
Hm, I’m trying to delete a double post. All I can see is this “retract” button, after which the post is crossed out but still there, even when I’ve logged out. What am I doing wrong?

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MarkusRamikin26 Jun 2011 16:29 UTC

9 points

14 comments1 min readLW link

MarkusRamikin 26 Jun 2011 19:19 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Influence = Manipulation
Thank you. I don’t understand why this change was considered a good thing, but no matter.

MarkusRamikin 27 Jun 2011 7:16 UTC
2 points
in reply to: diegocaleiro’s comment on: Have no heroes, and no villains
I don’t know. Since when is bias good?

In my own wild and reckless youth I read all sorts of stuff, including religious scriptures, occultism stuff, philosophers of all kinds. I don’t regret it, and I wouldn’t want to have not considered some idea because of having it already established as a “villain” idea. It was interesting and promising at the time, and now I have the experience of what it feels like to have (or at least be dabbling in) other worldviews than my current one.

To use Professor Quirrel’s words, if I could go back in time and remove the desire to do that from my younger self, my present self would not benefit from it.

The problem with the heroes and villains heuristic is that if you happened to initially choose your allegiance wrongly, you’d suffer that much stronger bad consequences; you’ll get stuck somewhere stupid. If your judgement were good enough to reliably choose well, you’d not need heroes and villains anyway, just use that judgement.

Heroes and villains happen automatically, anyway, it’s avoiding it that takes effort. Whenever a searching young person manages to do that, that’s a virtue, not a problem. The way I see it, the age of 16 is pretty much for exploring ideas. And I can’t imagine why we’d prefer a closedminded approach to an openminded one, at any age. Or why you’d think not having read things you disagree with is a boast.

MarkusRamikin 27 Jun 2011 7:38 UTC
8 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: Have no heroes, and no villains

Every politician is completely sincere.

This is patently, staggeringly false. Politics isn’t Wikimedia. There are completely different motivations, rewards and therefore different people get into it. There is money, power, status involved and it’s a competitive setting.

What do you think politicians think of themselves when they deceive, become corrupt, sacrifice the interest of the state for that of their own or their party, or go into the pocket of another nation/businessman/organised crime? Calling them “sincere” and acting for the good of the world sounds naive, like you don’t believe in the existence of cynical people. As long as the interest of someone else than the voter is being served, and the voter is being deceived about that, that’s not sincerity.

EDIT: the amount of upvotes the parent comment got is a bit scary. Either I’m missing something important, or there’s a lot of very innocent readers around...

MarkusRamikin 27 Jun 2011 8:10 UTC
−1 points
on: Richard Dawkins: Should employers be blind to private beliefs? [link]
Well this is disappointing; I like Dawkins. But this seems to me like an “us vs them” thing so obvious that it should be embarassing. When an atheist most competent for a job is denied it, that’s bad, but when it’s a creationist, Dawkins gets busy looking for a way to justify it. His wording pretty much says that all the real arguments are against him but he wants the particular conclusion and gets busy on trying to get there.

Putting myself in the shoes of an employer, I’d have no problem hiring a stork theory believer to operate on eyes if he was a great eye surgeon. The fact that he’s a great eye surgeon screens off any other considerations—I already know everything that matters for the decision.

On the other hand, I’m not sure I’m a fan of the law interfering with employers’ choice whom to let into their business, but that’s a different debate. IF we are to have anti-discrimination laws, then they should be applied fairly to everyone.

Perhaps Dawkins is forgetting to take into account, because of how alien that way of thinking is to him, how well religious people tend to compartmentalise their views so that they can have real-life knowledge contradictory to their religious beliefs and neither really affects the other—that would require the dragon in the garage doing something detectable.

MarkusRamikin

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