PhilGoetz

Karma: 12,790

PhilGoetz 3 Jun 2021 14:34 UTC
2 points
in reply to: MARIELLA PITTARI’s comment on: Rescuing the Extropy Magazine archives
Hi, see above for my email address. Email me a request at that address. I don’t have your email. I just sent you a message.
ADDED in 2021: Some people tried to contact me thru LessWrong and Facebook. I check messages there like once a year. Nobody sent me an email at the email address I gave above. I’ve edited it to make it more clear what my email address is.

PhilGoetz 12 Jan 2021 2:09 UTC
7 points
on: Debate update: Obfuscated arguments problem
[Original first point deleted, on account of describing something that resembled Bayesian updating closely enough to make my point invalid.]
I don’t think this approach applies to most actual bad arguments.
The things we argue about the most are ones over which the population is polarized, and polarization is usually caused by conflicts between different worldviews. Worldviews are constructed to be nearly self-consistent. So you’re not going to be able to reconcile people of different worldviews by comparing proofs. Wrong beliefs come in sets, where each contradiction caused by one wrong belief is justified by other wrong beliefs.
So for instance, a LessWrongian would tell a Christian that positing a God doesn’t explain how life was made, because she’s just replaced a complex first life form with an even more-complex God, and what made God? The Christian will reliably respond that God is eternal, outside of space and time, and was never made.
This response sounds stupid to us, but it’s part of a philosophical system built by Plato, which he designed to be self-consistent. The key parts here are the inversion of “complexity” and the denial of mechanism.
The inversion of complexity is the belief that simple things are greater and more powerful than complex things. The central notion is “purity”, and pure, simple things are always superior to complicated things. God is defined as ultimate purity and simplicity. God is simple because you can fully describe Him just by saying he’s perfect, and there’s only one way of being perfect. He’s eternal, because if he had a starting-point or an ending-point in time, then other points in time would be equally good, and “perfection” would be ambiguous. “God is perfectly simple” is actually part of Catholic dogma, and derived from Plato. So a Christian doesn’t think she’s replaced complex life with a more-complex God; she’s replaced it with a more-simple and therefore more-powerful God.
The denial of mechanism is the denial that anything gets its properties mechanistically. An animal isn’t alive because it eats food and metabolizes it and reproduces; it eats food and metabolizes it and reproduces because it’s alive. Functions are magically inherited from categories (“Forms”), rather than categories arising from a cooperative combination of functions. (This is why spiritualists who believe in a good God dislike machinery. It’s an abomination to them, as it has new capabilities not inherited from any eternal Form, and their intuition is that it must be animated by some spirit other than God. They think of magic as natural, and causes other than magic as unnatural; we think just the opposite.)
Because God is perfect, He is omnipotent, and hence has every possible capability, just as he is perfect in every way. Everything less than God is less powerful, lacking some capabilities, and more-complex, because you must enumerate all those missing capabilities and perfections to describe it. (This is the metaphysics behind Tolstoy’s saying, “Every happy family is happy in the same way. Every unhappy family is unhappy in different ways.”) The Great Chain of Being is a complete linear ordering of every eternal Form, proceeding from God at the top (perfect, simple, omnipotent), down to complete lack and emptiness at the other end (which is Augustinian Evil). Each step along that chain is a loss of some perfection.
Hence, to the Christian there’s no “problem” of complexity in saying that God created life, because God is less-complex than life, and therefore also more-powerful, since complexity implies many losses of perfection and capabilities. There is no need to posit that God is complex to explain His powers, because capabilities arise from essence, not from mechanics, and God’s perfectly-simple essence is to have all capabilities. This is because Plato designed his ontology to eliminate the problem of how complex life arose.
If you argue with Marxists, post-modernists, or the Woke, you’ll similarly find that, for every solid argument you have that proves a belief of theirs is wrong, they have some assumptions which to them justify dismissing your argument. You’ll never find yourself able to compare proofs with an ideological opposite and agree on the validity of each step.

PhilGoetz 1 Dec 2020 20:34 UTC
15 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Where do (did?) stable, cooperative institutions come from?
“Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy; believing that an institution is bad makes the people within it stop trying, and the good people stop going there.”
I think this is a key observation. Western academia has grown continually more cynical since the advent of Marxism, which assumes an almost absolute cynicism as a point of dogma: all actions are political actions motivated by class, except those of bourgeois Marxists who for mysterious reasons advocate the interests of the proletariat.
This cynicism became even worse with Foucault, who taught people to see everything as nothing but power relations. Western academics today are such knee-jerk cynics that they can’t conceive of loyalty to any organization other than Marxism or the Social Justice movement as being anything but exploitation of the one being loyal.
Pride is the opposite of cynicism, and is one of the key feelings that makes people take brave, altruistic actions. Yet today we’ve made pride a luxury of the oppressed. Only groups perceived as oppressed are allowed to have pride in group memberships. If you said you were proud of being American, or of being manly, you’d get deplatformed, and possibly fired.
The defamation of pride in mainstream groups is thus destroying our society’s ability to create or maintain mainstream institutions. In my own cynicism, I think someone deliberately intended this. This defamation began with Marxism, and is now supported by the social justice movement, both of which are Hegelian revolutionary movements which believe that the first step toward making civilization better is to destroy it, or at least destabilize it enough to stage a coup or revolution. This is the “clean sweep” spoken of so often by revolutionaries since the French Revolution.
Since their primary goal is to destroy civilization, it makes perfect sense that they begin by convincing people that taking pride in any mainstream identity or group membership is evil, as this will be sufficient to destroy all cooperative social institutions, and hence civilization.

PhilGoetz 17 Oct 2020 3:14 UTC
21 points
on: The Solomonoff Prior is Malign
“At its core, this is the main argument why the Solomonoff prior is malign: a lot of the programs will contain agents with preferences, these agents will seek to influence the Solomonoff prior, and they will be able to do so effectively.”
First, this is irrelevant to most applications of the Solomonoff prior. If I’m using it to check the randomness of my random number generator, I’m going to be looking at 64-bit strings, and probably very few intelligent-life-producing universe-simulators output just 64 bits, and it’s hard to imagine how an alien in a simulated universe would want to bias my RNG anyway.
The S. prior is a general-purpose prior which we can apply to any problem. The output string has no meaning except in a particular application and representation, so it seems senseless to try to influence the prior for a string when you don’t know how that string will be interpreted.
Can you give an instance of an application of the S. prior in which, if everything you wrote were correct, it would matter?
Second, it isn’t clear that this is a bug rather than a feature. Say I’m developing a program to compress photos. I’d like to be able to ask “what are the odds of seeing this image, ever, in any universe?” That would probably compress images of plants and animals better than other priors, because in lots of universes life will arise and evolve, and features like radial symmetry, bilateral symmetry, leafs, legs, etc., will arise in many universes. This biasing of priors by evolution doesn’t seem to me different than biasing of priors by intelligent agents; evolution is smarter than any agent we know. And I’d like to get biasing from intelligent agents, too; then my photo-compressor might compress images of wheels and rectilinear buildings better.
Also in the category of “it’s a feature, not a bug” is that, if you want your values to be right, and there’s a way of learning the values of agents in many possible universes, you ought to try to figure out what their values are, and update towards them. This argument implies that you can get that for free by using Solomonoff priors.
(If you don’t think your values can be “right”, but instead you just believe that your values morally oblige you to want other people to have those values, you’re not following your values, you’re following your theory about your values, and probably read too much LessWrong for your own good.)
Third, what do you mean by “the output” of a program that simulates a universe? How are we even supposed to notice the infinitesimal fraction of that universe’s output which the aliens are influencing to subvert us? Take your example of Life—is the output a raster scan of the 2D bit array left when the universe goes static? In that case, agents have little control over the terminal state of their universe (and also, in the case of Life, the string will be either almost entirely zeroes, or almost entirely 1s, and those both already have huge Solomonoff priors). Or is it the concatenation of all of the states it goes through, from start to finish? In that case, by the time intelligent agents evolve, their universe will have already produced more bits than our universe can ever read.
Are you imagining that bits are never output unless the accidentally-simulated aliens choose to output a bit? I can’t imagine any way that could happen, at least not if the universe is specified with a short instruction string.
This brings us to the 4th problem: It makes little sense to me to worry about averaging in outputs from even mere planetary simulations if your computer is just the size of a planet, because it won’t even have enough memory to read in a single output string from most such simulations.
5th, you can weigh each program’s output proportional to 2^-T, where T is the number of steps it takes the TM to terminate. You’ve got to do something like that anyway, because you can’t run TMs to completion one after another; you’ve got to do something like take a large random sample of TMs and iteratively run each one step. Problem solved.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something basic, but I feel like we’re talking about many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that you’re talking about an entire universe of intelligent agents conspiring to change the “output string” of the TM that they’re running in. This requires them to realize that they’re running in a simulation, and that the output string they’re trying to influence won’t even be looked at until they’re all dead and gone. That doesn’t seem to give them much motivation to devote their entire civilization to twiddling bits in their universe’s final output in order to shift our priors infinitesimally. And if it did, the more likely outcome would be an intergalactic war over what string to output.
(I understand your point about them trying to “write themselves into existence, allowing them to effectively “break into” our universe”, but as you’ve already required their TM specification to be very simple, this means the most they can do is cause some type of life that might evolve in their universe to break into our universe. This would be like humans on Earth devoting the next billion years to tricking God into re-creating slime molds after we’re dead. Whereas the things about themselves that intelligent life actually care about with and self-identify with are those things that distinguish them from their neighbors. Their values will be directed mainly towards opposing the values of other members of their species. None of those distinguishing traits can be implicit in the TM, and even if they could, they’d cancel each other out.)
Now, if they were able to encode a message to us in their output string, that might be more satisfying to them. Like, maybe, “FUCK YOU, GOD!”

PhilGoetz 27 Sep 2020 1:05 UTC
15 points
in reply to: Measure’s comment on: Honoring Petrov Day on LessWrong, in 2020
I think we learned that trolls will destroy the world.

PhilGoetz 19 Mar 2020 15:29 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Applesauce’s comment on: Stupidity as a mental illness
It’s only offensive if you still think of mental illness as shameful.

PhilGoetz 19 Mar 2020 15:26 UTC
2 points
in reply to: siIver’s comment on: Stupidity as a mental illness
Me: We could be more successful at increasing general human intelligence if we looked at low intelligence as something that people didn’t have to be ashamed of, and that could be remedied, much as how we now try to look at depression and other mental illness as illness—a condition which can often be treated and which people don’t need to be ashamed of.
You: YOU MONSTER! You want to call stupidity “mental illness”, and mental illness is a bad and shameful thing!

PhilGoetz 14 Jun 2019 18:39 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Group selection update
That’s technically true, but it doesn’t help a lot. You’re assuming one starts with fixation to non-SC in a species. But how does one get to that point of fixation, starting from fixation of SC, which is more advantageous to the individual? That’s the problem.

PhilGoetz 1 Jun 2019 5:30 UTC
2 points
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Group selection update
It’s not that I no longer endorse it; it’s that I replied to a deleted comment instead of to the identical not-deleted comment.

PhilGoetz 1 Jun 2019 5:30 UTC
2 points
in reply to: DuncanS’s comment on: Group selection update
Group selection, as I’ve heard it explained before, is the idea that genes spread because their effects are for the good of the species. The whole point of evolution is that genes do well because of what they do for the survival of the gene. The effect isn’t on the group, or on the individual, the species, or any other unit other than the unit that gets copied and inherited.
Group selection is group selection: selection of groups. That means the phenotype is group behavior, and the effect of selection is spread equally among members of the group. If the effect is death, this eliminates an entire group at once—and the nearer a selfish gene approaches fixation, the more likely it is to trigger a group extinction. Consider what would happen if you ran Axelrod’s experiments with group selection implemented, so that groups went extinct if total payoff in the group below some threshold.
The key point is nonlinearity. If the group fitness function is a nonlinear function of the prevalence of a gene, then it dramatically changes fixation and extinction rates.
Well, maybe. If the plant has a typical set of recessive genes in its genome, self-fertilisation is a disaster. A few generations down the line, the self-fertilising plant will have plenty of genetic problems arising from recessive gene problems, and will probably die out. This means that self-fertilisation is bad—a gene for self-fertilisation will only prosper in those cases where it’s not fertilising itself. It will do worse.
No. Self-fertilisation doesn’t prevent cross-fertilisation. The self-fertilizer has just as many offspring from cross-fertilization as the self-sterile plant, but it has in addition clones of itself. Many of these clones may die, but if just one of them survives, it’s still a gain.
Reply

PhilGoetz 1 Jun 2019 5:27 UTC
8 points
in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: Group selection update
You’re assuming that the benefits of an adaptation can only be linear in the fraction of group members with that adaptation. If the benefits are nonlinear, then they can’t be modeled by individual selection, or by kin selection, or by the Haystack model, or by the Harpending & Rogers model, in all of which the total group benefit is a linear sum of the individual benefits.
For instance, the benefits of the Greek phalanx are tremendous if 100% of Greek soldiers will hold the line, but negligible if only 99% of them do. We can guess—though I don’t know if it’s been verified—that slime mold aggregative reproduction can be maintained against invasion only because a slime mold aggregation in which 100% of the single-cell organisms play “fairly” in deciding which of them get to produce germ cells survives, while a slime mold aggregation in which just one cell’s genome insisted on becoming the germ cell would die off in 2 generations. I think individual selection would predict the population would be taken over by that anti-social behavior.

PhilGoetz 1 Jun 2019 5:16 UTC
2 points
in reply to: DuncanS’s comment on: Group selection update
Group selection, as I’ve heard it explained before, is the idea that genes spread because their effects are for the good of the species. The whole point of evolution is that genes do well because of what they do for the survival of the gene. The effect isn’t on the group, or on the individual, the species, or any other unit other than the unit that gets copied and inherited.
Group selection is group selection: selection of groups. That means the phenotype is group behavior, and the effect of selection is spread equally among members of the group. If the effect is death, this eliminates an entire group at once—and the nearer a selfish gene approaches fixation, the more likely it is to trigger a group extinction. Consider what would happen if you ran Axelrod’s experiments with group selection implemented, so that groups went extinct if total payoff in the group below some threshold.
The key point is nonlinearity. If the group fitness function is a nonlinear function of the prevalence of a gene, then it dramatically changes fixation and extinction rates.
Well, maybe. If the plant has a typical set of recessive genes in its genome, self-fertilisation is a disaster. A few generations down the line, the self-fertilising plant will have plenty of genetic problems arising from recessive gene problems, and will probably die out. This means that self-fertilisation is bad—a gene for self-fertilisation will only prosper in those cases where it’s not fertilising itself. It will do worse.
No. Self-fertilisation doesn’t prevent cross-fertilisation. The self-fertilizer has just as many offspring from cross-fertilization as the self-sterile plant, but it has in addition clones of itself. Many of these clones may die, but if just one of them survives, it’s still a gain.

PhilGoetz 15 May 2019 23:35 UTC
0 points
in reply to: djc’s comment on: How SIAI could publish in mainstream cognitive science journals
Thanks!
I have great difficulty finding any philosophy published after 1960 other than post-modern philosophy, probably because my starting point is literary theory, which is completely confined to—the words “dominated” and even “controlled” are too weak—Marxian post-modern identity politics, which views literature only as a political barometer and tool.

PhilGoetz 15 May 2019 20:29 UTC
8 points
on: Pascal’s Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities
I think you’re assuming that to give in to the mugging is the wrong answer in a one-shot game for a being that values all humans in existence equally, because it feels wrong to you, a being with a moral compass evolved in iterated multi-generational games.
Consider these possibilities, any one of which would create challenges for your reasoning:
1. Giving in is the right answer in a one-shot game, but the wrong answer in an iterated game. If you give in to the mugging, the outsider will keep mugging you and other rationalists until you’re all broke, leaving the universe’s future in the hands of “Marxians” and post-modernists.
2. Giving in is the right answer for a rational AI God, but evolved beings (under the Darwinian definition of “evolved”) can’t value all member of their species equally. They must value kin more than strangers. You would need a theory to explain why any being that evolved due to resource competition wouldn’t consider killing a large number of very distantly-related members of its species to be a good thing.
3. You should interpret the conflict between your intuition, and your desire for a rational God, not as showing that you’re reasoning badly because you’re evolved, but that you’re reasoning badly by desiring a rational God bound by a static utility function. This is complicated, so I’m gonna need more than one paragraph:
Intuitively, my argument boils down to applying the logic behind free markets, freedom of speech, and especially evolution, to the question of how to construct God’s utility function. This will be vague, but I think you can fill in the blanks.
Free-market economic theory developed only after millenia during which everyone believed that top-down control was the best way of allocating resources. Freedom of speech developed only after millenia during which everyone believed that it was rational for everyone to try to suppress any speech they disagreed with. Political liberalism developed only after millenia during which everybody believed that the best way to reform society was to figure out what the best society would be like, then force that on everyone. Evolution was conceived of—well, originally about 2500 years ago, probably by Democritus, but it became popular only after millenia during which everyone believed that life could be created only by design.
All of these developments came from empiricists. Empiricism is one of the two opposing philosophical traditions of Western thought. It originated, as far as we know, with Democritus (about whom Plato reportedly said that he wished all his works to be burned—which they eventually were). It went through the Skeptics, the Stoics, Lucretius, nominalism, the use of numeric measurements (re-introduced to the West circa 1300), the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and eventually (with the addition of evolution, probability, statistics, and operationalized terms) created modern science.
A key principle of empiricism, on which John Stuart Mill explicitly based his defense of free speech, is that we can never be certain. If you read about the skeptics and stoics today, you’ll read that they “believed nothing”, but that was because, to their opponents, “believe” meant “know something with 100% certainty”.
(The most-famous skeptic, Sextus Empiricus, was called “Empiricus” because he was of the empirical school of medicine, which taught learning from experience. Its opponent was the rational school of medicine, which used logic to interpret the dictums of the ancient authorities.)
The opposing philosophical tradition, founded by Plato—is rationalism. “Rational” does not mean “good thinking”. It has a very specific meaning, and it is not a good way of thinking. It means reasoning about the physical world the same way Euclid constructed geometric proofs. No measurements, no irrational numbers, no observation of the world, no operationalized nominalist definitions, no calculus or differential equations, no testing of hypotheses—just armchair a priori logic about universal categories, based on a set of unquestionable axioms, done in your favorite human language. Rationalism is the opposite of science, which is empirical. The pretense that “rational” means “right reasoning” is the greatest lie foisted on humanity by philosophers.
Dualist rationalism is inherently religious, as it relies on some concept of “spirit”, such as Plato’s Forms, Augustine’s God, Hegel’s World Spirit, or an almighty programmer converting sense data into LISP symbols, to connect the inexact, ambiguous, changeable things of this world to the precise, unambiguous, unchanging, and usually unquantified terms in its logic.
(Monist rationalists, like Buddha, Parmenides, and post-modernists, believe sense data can’t be divided unambiguously into categories, and thus we may not use categories. Modern empiricists categorize sense data using statistics.)
Rationalists support strict, rigid, top-down planning and control. This includes their opposition to free markets, free speech, gradual reform, and optimization and evolution in general. This is because rationalists believe they can prove things about the real world, and hence their conclusions are reliable, and they don’t need to mess around with slow, gradual improvements or with testing. (Of course each rationalist believes that every other rationalist was wrong, and should probably be burned at the stake.)
They oppose all randomness and disorder, because it makes strict top-down control difficult, and threatens to introduce change, which can only be bad once you’ve found the truth.
They have to classify every physical thing in the world into a discrete, structureless, atomic category, for use in their logic. That has led inevitably to theories which require all humans to ultimately have, at reflective equilibrium, the same values—as Plato, Augustine, Marx, and CEV all do.
You have, I think, picked up some of these bad inclinations from rationalism. When you say you want to find the “right” set of values (via CEV) and encode them into an AI God, that’s exactly like the rationalists who spent their lives trying to find the “right” way to live, and then suppress all other thoughts and enforce that “right way” on everyone, for all time. Whereas an empiricist would never claim to have found final truth, and would always leave room for new understandings and new developments.
Your objection to randomness is also typically rationalist. Randomness enables you to sample without bias. A rationalist believes he can achieve complete lack of bias; an empiricist believes that neither complete lack of bias nor complete randomness can be achieved, but that for a given amount of effort, you might achieve lower bias by working on your random number generator and using it to sample, than by hacking away at your biases.
So I don’t think we should build an FAI God who has a static set of values. We should build, if anything, an AI referee, who tries only to keep conditions in the universe that will enable evolution to keep on producing behaviors, concepts, and creatures of greater and greater complexity. Randomness must not be eliminated, for without randomness we can have no true exploration, and must be ruled forever by the beliefs and biases of the past.

PhilGoetz 15 May 2019 17:32 UTC
9 points
on: Rescuing the Extropy Magazine archives
I scanned in Extropy 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 16, and 17, which leaves only #2 missing. How can I send these to you? Contact me at [my LessWrong user name] at gmail.com.
What links here?
- Pablo's comment on Rescuing the Extropy Magazine archives by Deku-shrub (20 Feb 2020 23:06 UTC; 4 points)

PhilGoetz 17 Dec 2017 18:26 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ike’s comment on: Why Bayesians should two-box in a one-shot
I just now read that one post. It isn’t clear how you think it’s relevant. I’m guessing you think that it implies that positing free will is invalid.

You don’t have to believe in free will to incorporate it into a model of how humans act. We’re all nominalists here; we don’t believe that the concepts in our theories actually exist somewhere in Form-space.

When someone asks the question, “Should you one-box?”, they’re using a model which uses the concept of free will. You can’t object to that by saying “You don’t really have free will.” You can object that it is the wrong model to use for this problem, but then you have to spell out why, and what model you want to use instead, and what question you actually want to ask, since it can’t be that one.

People in the LW community don’t usually do that. I see sloppy statements claiming that humans “should” one-box, based on a presumption that they have no free will. That’s making a claim within a paradigm while rejecting the paradigm. It makes no sense.

Consider what Eliezer says about coin flips:

We’ve previously discussed how probability is in the mind. If you are uncertain about whether a classical coin has landed heads or tails, that is a fact about your state of mind, not a property of the coin. The coin itself is either heads or tails. But people forget this, and think that coin.probability == 0.5, which is the Mind Projection Fallacy: treating properties of the mind as if they were properties of the external world.

The mind projection fallacy is treating the word “probability” not in a nominalist way, but in a philosophical realist way, as if they were things existing in the world. Probabilities are subjective. You don’t project them onto the external world. That doesn’t make “coin.probability == 0.5″ a “false” statement. It correctly specifies the distribution of possibilities given the information available within the mind making the probability assessment. I think that is what Eliezer is trying to say there.

“Free will” is a useful theoretical construct in a similar way. It may not be a thing in the world, but it is a model for talking about how we make decisions. We can only model our own brains; you can’t fully simulate your own brain within your own brain; you can’t demand that we use the territory as our map.

PhilGoetz 17 Dec 2017 16:28 UTC
1 point
on: 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong
Yep, nice list. One I didn’t see: Defining a word in a way that is less useful (that conveys less information) and rejecting a definition that is more useful (that conveys more information). Always choose the definition that conveys more information; eliminate words that convey zero information. It’s common for people to define words that convey zero information. But if everything has the Buddha nature, nothing empirical can be said about what it means and it conveys no information.

Along similar lines, always define words so that no other word conveys too much mutual information about them. For instance, many people have argued with me that I should use the word “totalitarian” to mean “the fascist nations of the 20th century”. Well, we already have a word for that, which is “fascist”, so to define “totalitarian” as a synonym makes it a useless word.

The word “fascist” raises the question of when to use extensional vs. intensional definitions. It’s conventionally defined extensionally, to mean the Axis powers in World War 2. This is not a useful definition, as we already have a label for that. Worse, people define it extensionally but pretend they’ve defined it intensionally. They call people today “fascist”, conveying connotations in a way that can’t be easily disputed, because there is no intensional definition to evaluate the claim.

Sometimes you want to switch back and forth between extensional and intensional definitions. In art history, we have a term for each period or “movement”, like “neo-classical” and “Romantic”. The exemplars of the category are defined both intensionally and extensionally, as those artworks having certain properties and produced in certain geographic locations during a certain time period. It is appropriate to use the intensional definition alone if describing a contemporary work of art (you can call it “Romantic” if it looks Romantic), but inappropriate to use examples that fit the intension but not the extension as exemplars, or to deduce things about the category from them. This keeps the categories stable.

A little ways back I talked about defining the phrase “Buddha nature”. Phrases also have definitions—words are not atoms of meaning. Analyzing a phrase as if our theories of grammar worked, ignoring knowledge about idioms, is an error rationalists sometimes commit.

Pretending words don’t have connotations is another error rationalists commit regularly—often in sneaky ways, deliberately using the connotations, while pretending they’re being objective. Marxist literary criticism, for instance, loads a lot into the word “bourgeois”.

Another category missing here is gostoks and doshes. This is when a word’s connotations and tribal affiliation-signalling displace its semantic content entirely, and no one notices it has no meaning. Extremely common in Marxism and in “theory”; “capitalism” and “bourgeois” being the most-common examples. “Bourgeoisie” originally meant people like Rockefeller and the Borges, but as soon as artists began using the word, they used it to mean “people who don’t like my scribbles,” and now it has no meaning at all, but demonic connotations. “Capitalism” has no meaning that can single out post-feudal societies in the way Marxists pretend it does; any definition of it that I’ve seen includes things that Marxists don’t want it to, like the Soviet Union, absolute monarchies, or even hunter-gatherer tribes. It should be called simply “free markets”, which is what they really object to and much more accurate at identifying the economic systems that they oppose, but they don’t want to admit that the essence of their ideology is opposition to freedom.

Avoid words with connotations that you haven’t justified. Don’t say “cheap” if you mean “inexpensive” or “shoddy”. Especially avoid words which have a synonym with the opposite connotation: “frugal” and “miserly”. Be aware of your etymological payloads: “awesome” and “awful” (full of awe), “incredible” (not credible), “wonderful” (thought-provoking).

Another category is when 2 subcultures have different sets of definitions for the same words, and don’t realize it. For instance, in the humanities, “rational” literally means ratio-based reasoning, which rejects the use of real numbers, continuous equations, empirical measurements, or continuous changes over time. This is the basis of the Romantic/Modernist hatred of “science” (by which they mean Aristotelian rationality), and of many post-modern arguments that rationality doesn’t work. Many people in the humanities are genuinely unaware that science is different than it was 2400 years ago, and most were 100% ignorant of science until perhaps the mid-20th century. A “classical education” excludes all empiricism.

Another problem is meaning drift. When you use writings from different centuries, you need to be aware of how the meanings of words and phrases have changed over time. For instance, the official academic line nowadays is that alchemy and astrology are legitimate sciences; this is justified in part by using the word “science” as if it meant the same as the Latin “scientia”.

A problem in translation is decollapsing definitions. Medieval Latin conflated some important concepts because their neo-Platonist metaphysics said that all good things sort of went together. So for instance they had a single word, “pulchrum”, which meant “beautiful”, “sexy”, “appropriate to its purpose”, “good”, and “noble”. Translators will translate that into English based on the context, but that’s not conveying the original mindset. This comes up most frequently when ancient writers made puns, like Plato’s puns in the Crito, or “Jesus’” (Greek) puns in the opening chapters of John, which are destroyed in translation, leaving the reader with a false impression of the speaker’s intent.

I disagree that saying “X is Y by definition” Is usually wrong, but I should probably leave my comment on that post instead of here.

PhilGoetz 17 Dec 2017 16:17 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Psychohistorian2’s comment on: 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong
[moved to top level of replies]

PhilGoetz 17 Dec 2017 16:02 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: MugaSofer’s comment on: 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong
But you’re arguing against Eliezer, as “God” and “miracle” were (and still are) commonly-used words, and so Eliezer is saying those are good, short words for them.

PhilGoetz 17 Dec 2017 2:10 UTC
1 point
on: Fallacies of Compression
Great post! There is also the non-discrete aspect of compression: information loss. English has, according to some dictionaries, over a million words. It’s unlikely we store most of our information in English. Probably there is some sort of dimension reduction, like PCA. There is in any case probably lossy compression. This means people with different histories will use different frequency tables for their compression, and will throw out different information when encoding a verbal statement. I think you would almost certainly find that if you measure word use frequency for different people, then cluster the word use distributions, some clusters would correspond to ideologies. The interesting question is which comes first, the ideology, or the word usage frequency (caused by different life experiences).