Convincing someone not to pursue a PhD is rather different than convincing someone to drop out of a top-10 PhD program to attend LW training camps. The latter does indeed merit the response WTF.
Also, there are lots of people, many of them graduate students and PhD’s themselves, who will try to convince you not to do a PhD. Its not an unusual position.
but we had entirely different background assumptions about how one makes a case for said position. There was a near-Kuhnian incommensurability between us.
This is very frustrating and when I realize it is happening, I stop the engagement. In my experience, rationalists are not that different from smart science or philosophy types because we agree on very basic things like the structure of an argument and the probabilistic nature of evidence. But in my experience normal people are very difficult to have productive discussions with. Some glaring things that I notice happening are:
a) Different definitions of evidence. The Bayesian definition of evidence is anything that makes A more likely than not A. But for many people, evidence is anything that would happen given A. For example a conspiracy theorist might say “Well of course they would deny it if were true, this only proves that I’m right”.
b) Aristotelianism: the idea that every statement is either true or false and you can prove statements deductively via reasoning. If you’ve reasoned that something is true, then you’ve proved it so it must be true. Here is a gem from an Aristotelian friend of mine “The people in the US are big, it must be the food and they use growth hormones in livestock, therefore people in the US are big because of growth hormones”.
c) Arguments that aren’t actually arguments. Usually these are either insults or signals of tribal affiliation. For example “Good to know you’re better than everyone else” in response to a critical comment. But insults can be more subtle and they can masquerade as arguments. For example in response to a call for higher taxes someone might say “If you love taxes so much then why aren’t you sending extra money to the treasury?”.
d) Arguments that just have nothing to do with their conclusion. An institute called Heartmath stated this gem (rough paraphrase): “The heart sends more information to the brain than the brain does to the heart therefore the heart is more important that the brain”.
e) Statistical illiteracy. I want to grab a flamethrower every time the following exchange happens:
Salviati: “According to this study people who are X tend to be Y”
Simplicio: “Well I know someone who is X but isn’t Y, so there goes that theory”
f) Logical illiteracy:
Example 1:
Salviati: ” If A then B”
Simplicio: “But A isn’t true therefore your argument is invalid”
Example 2:
Simplicio: “X is A therefore X is B”
Salviati: “Let us apply a proof by contradiction. ‘A implies B’ is false because Y is A, but Y is not B”
Simplicio: “How dare you compare X to Y, they are totally different! Y is only not B because …”
Sorry if the symbolic statements are harder to read, I didn’t want to use too many object level issues.
Would it be fair to characterize most of your complaints as roughly “Less Wrong focuses too much on truth seeking and too little on instrumental rationality—actually achieving material success”?
I use the tell culture with close friends, the ask culture with acquaintances and guess culture with everyone else, including family. Not on purpose—perhaps this isn’t the best way of interacting with people.
I tried the tell culture when trying to get out of aversive conversations with my parents to disastrous effect. 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.
I certainly considered that possibility and then rejected it. (If there are more 2 regular commenters here who think that rationality guarantees correctness and will solve all of their lives problems, I will buy a hat and then eat it).
Skepticism. In theory it allows you to weed out bad ideas and find good ones, in practice it allows you to dismiss any idea you don’t like.
What do you mean by racist?
Edit: If by racist you mean “hate people who don’t share the same skin color with them” then I would guess that there are almost no racists on LW.
If by racist you mean “think that some racial groups are superior and others inferior” then I would also guess that there are almost no racists on LW.
If by racist you mean “think that different populations of people differ significantly along various axes such as athletic ability, intelligence, memory etc.” then yes there are a lot of racists on LW.
The third option does not imply either of the first two.
I dislike these threads. They encourage and reward ill thought out contrarian (often straight up crackpot) ideas. Correcting them is a large cost, in part because convincing an audience doesn’t require arguing things that are true, it merely requires arguing things that take more time to refute than to assert. I’d rather not get tangled up in object level for this reason by citing real examples but here is an example of the kind of idea I would expect to see here.
Made up crazy idea (that I expect some people here would endorse):
“Get rid of research ethics boards, they prevent useful research from being done that would benefit society out of an ill founded fear of us becoming the Nazis”
This sort of argument ignores the history behind why research ethics boards exist, and is usually asserted by people who are ignorant of the actual guidelines that research ethics boards abide by. It’s also usually asserted without knowledge of the actual abuses of patient trust that were committed before research ethics guidelines were established), which include withholding known treatments and doing liver toxicity study in children without telling them (quite an extensive one in which biopsies were taken, and upon recovery, liver toxicity was re-induced leading to damage lasting at least a month).
(Of course, it took me much longer to write that response than to make the initial claim)
That’s a tall order. I’ll try:
Noticing that people who are the best in any sport practice the most and concluding that being good at a sport is simply a matter of practice and determination. Tabula Rasa in general.
The supply-demand model of minimum wage? Is this political? I’m not saying minimum wage is good or bad, just that the supply-demand model can’t settle the question yet people learning about economics tend to be easily convinced by the simple explanation.
That thermodynamics proves that weight loss + maintenance is simply a matter of diet and exercise (this is more Yudkowsky’s fight than mine).
In that case, I’m afraid your goals and the goals of many people here may simply be different. The common definition of rationality here is “systematic winning”. However, this definition is very fuzzy because winning is goal dependent. Whether you are “winning” is dependent on what your goals and values are.
Can’t speak for anyone else, but the reason why I am here is because I like polite but vigorous discussion. Its nice to be able to discuss topics with people on the internet in a way that does not drive me crazy. People here are usually open to new ideas, respectful, yet also uncompromising in the force of their arguments. Such an environment is much more helpful to me in learning about the world than the adversarial nature of most forum discussions. My goal in reading LessWrong is mostly finding likeminded people who I can talk to, share ideas with, learn form and disagree with, all without any bad feelings. That is a rare thing.
If your goal is achieving material success there are certainly very general tools and skills you can learn like getting over procrastination, managing your emotional state, or changing your value system to achieve your goals. CFAR is probably a better resource than Lesswrong for learning about these tools (but I’ve never actually been to a workshop). However, there is no general way to achieve success that is specific enough to be useful to one person’s goals. No one resource can possibly provide that. There are heuristics like “Find someone who is as successful as you would like to be and is willing to help you on your path; if necessary harass them enough so that they help you”. Which I would advocate for medicine or “Find someone who is both very high status and willing to help lesser beings and get them to be your mentor” which I would tentatively advocate for graduate school (my sample size is small though). But I don’t know of a general path.
Don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote that.
Just want to say I find your writing style very pleasant and easy to read.
Well this certainly lives up to the discussion thread title. This is an ill posed question because it selectively carves out a very specific definition of human value for obviously ideological reasons. Why is capital the definitive measure of contributions to the human race? What about the wheel (Mesopotamians), what about fire (Africans—geographically, probably no one knows the taxonomy but certainly not northern Eurasians). What about geometry? Or perhaps something fairly important called numbers. Are those not knowledge?
“HIV can affect anyone” is far better than “HIV is a gay thing” along several criteria.*
One: factual—it can indeed affect anyone. And the difference in prevalence varies form country to country. In parts of Southern Africa the prevalence is about the same as the general population.
Two: Instrumental. If those involved in public health used HIV as leverage to get everyone to wear condoms more often, then I applaud them. Many lives were saved, and many infections prevented.
Three: Political. I’d be very curious to know what proportion of people reporting that HIV affect gay men more are doing so out of genuine concern rather than as code for “Those gays are dirty and disgusting and deserve to die/be ridiculed”.
“Some groups are at higher risk for HIV than others, and the transmission rates depend on the nature of the sex act” is the most correct, but it is unwieldy for a public health effort.
there really is a substantial fraction of what self-identifies as the “social justice” movement, primarily in an online context, that really is toxic, and that the rest of the left and the serious, sane part of the SJers aren’t doing enough to call them out on it
Minus the online bit, this is fully generalizable against any political group, (and a lot of non-political groups as well). Which groups do you choose to lambast for “not calling out toxic members of that group”? Presumably the groups that you don’t like. This is the art of politics.
“I don’t have a problem with X group, but you have to agree that the subset Y of them are really horrible so lets continue to talk about how horrible they are” is Dark Arts to the max.
Would you recommend it to gay men and women?
it doesn’t appear to be heterosexually transmitted in western countries
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1473309909700210
Not just slightly, the HIV prevalence in the UK among MSM is less than 5% using demographic data here and here. And the total HIV prevalence in the UK is relatively high for Europe see here.
I should probably mention this in the OP. I live in the US, and I couldn’t exactly obtain a prevalence rate for every single country and every disease. But the US is an outlier with respect to many diseases.
I completed most things except for the digit ratio. Thanks for putting this together, the results are always very interesting to see. Now to see how many of the trivia I got right.