I’m with Scott. It’s so natural to think that if your enemies are as ruthless as the Tsars and their goons, you need to be as ruthless as the Bolsheviks to fight them. But we all know how that worked out, and it hardly seems to be an outlier; rather, it seems to be the norm for those willing to sink to their opponents’ level. If the goal is victory for our cause, and not just victory for some people who find it convenient to claim to be cheerleaders for our cause, we need to be very careful that our tactics are not training up Stalins within our ranks. Not that I’m advocating total purity at all times and in all respects, but I think before playing dirty you need to make sure you have a much better reason to think it’s a good idea than “the other guys are doing it.”
Protagoras
I was under the impression that the research into biases by people like Kahneman and Tversky generally found that eliminating them was incredibly hard, and that expertise, and even familiarity with the biases in question generally didn’t help at all. So this is not a particularly surprising result; what would be more interesting is if they had found anything that actually does reduce the effect of the biases.
If someone is interested in freedom but does not think unpredictability is fundamental to freedom, they are unlikely to be very interested in engaging with a lengthy paper arguing for unpredictability. And the view that unpredictability is not fundamental to freedom is pretty widespread, especially among compatibilists. An unpredictable outcome seems a lot like a random outcome, and something being random seems quite different from it being up to me, from it being under my control. Now, of course, some people think anything predictable can’t be free, but if so, the conclusion would seem to be that there is no such thing as freedom, since saying the predictable is unfree doesn’t do anything to undermine the reasons for thinking the unpredictable is unfree.
Actually, most nuclear weapons get roughly comparable amounts of their force from fission and fusion, usually a little more from fission. Fission-only bombs are so much less powerful not because fission is but because they have very incomplete fission (around 1% for the Hiroshima bomb design, for example). The fusion reactions used in bombs produce a lot of excess neutrons, by design; all those neutrons flying around mean a lot more fission ends up happening. The only bombs that get most of their power from fusion are neutron bombs (which use a lot less fissionable material, and use the excess neutrons to increase the radiation damage) and clean bombs (which also use a lot less fissionable material, but replace it with lead to absorb the excess neutrons; clean is of course a relative term here).
I’m not sure how common or rare this is, but the visual images I recall are stunningly lacking in detail. For example, in the case of people, even with someone I know very well, it is rare for me to be able to report so much as their hair color on the basis of the mental image I call up when I try to think of them. I don’t seem to have any unusual difficulty recognizing people, or any tendency to confuse my various mental images with one another, and the mental images don’t seem incomplete until I start thinking about questions like how to describe them. I’m sure I would be completely useless to a police sketch artist if I were ever a witness to a crime.
- 27 Jan 2012 17:11 UTC; 9 points) 's comment on Describe the ways you can hear/see/feel yourself think. by (
I’m pretty sure I was also a victim, if a rather recent and relatively small scale one, and I’m glad to see something was done. However much I told myself it wasn’t really important, that karma’s a horribly noisy measure, with a few slightly funny comments gaining me the majority of my karma while my most thoughtful contributions usually only gathered a handful, the block downvoting really did make me feel disinclined to post new comments. Banning seems like an extreme measure, and I guess I can see where people who think there should have been warnings are coming from, but I’m actually kind of surprised that it was all or nearly all one person, and given the amount of distress it seems to have caused, I think we can do without a person like that around here, even if he did sometimes contribute good comments.
In most societies, there was no remotely adequate solution to the problems of tracking reputations and punishing violations of trust for merchants who operated outside the narrow circle of their own communities. So merchants were largely viewed as scammers because they mostly were; nothing naive about it.
Quite a number of things feminists find problematic in fiction are so not because of anything intrinsic in them (surely stories don’t really have any intrinsic meaning, really; they always only mean something to people who have interpreted them somehow), but because in the context of broader culture those things have Unfortunate Implications. Now, simply avoiding doing anything that has Unfortunate Implications severely restricts what can be said about women, which in turn has Unfortunate Implications of its own. So, short of just fixing all of society so the context isn’t so troublesome any more, there are always going to be hard choices, and reasonable people are going to disagree about whether the right choice has been made. The present critique is pointing out, correctly, that Hermione’s fate has Unfortunate Implications. Perhaps there was a better way to tell the story, but one can point out the UIs without knowing such a better way, and even if one doubts that it really exists; drawing attention to UIs may improve understanding and contribute to other projects even if there is no fixable deficiency in the present target.
Logical Positivism didn’t fall because people asked if the verification principle is verifiable; most LPists were clear that the verification principle was supposed to be analytic (it’s somewhat murky what that means, but for present purposes it should suffice to note that in any version it amounts to something similar to what you suggest here). This version of history is even worse than the story that LPism failed because of the impossibility of drawing the analytic/synthetic distinction; at least that criticism was actually made, and believed by some, though it also fails to explain the disappearance of LPism as there still seem to be large numbers of philosophers who believe in analyticity or something like it. Why none of the believers in analyticity call themselves Logical Positivists any more is a complicated question, and while there are some substantial issues involved, some of it seems to involve something more like a change of fashions.
These illnesses are definitely not well understood, but you may have characterized sociopathy reasonably when you described it as lack of sympathy without lack of empathy. How they can come apart is indeed not intuitively obvious, but lots of the ways the brain works are unintuitive. Sociopaths seem to be the mirror image of autistics, who seem to lack empathy but not sympathy (autistics have great difficulty understanding the feelings of others, but seem as motivated as anyone to avoid hurting others when they can figure out how).
This is why many scientists are terrible philosophers of science. Not all of them, of course; Einstein was one remarkable exception. But it seems like many scientists have views of science (e.g. astonishingly naive versions of Popperianism) which completely fail to fit their own practice.
The description of the case doesn’t make sense to me, either. But I’m not having an easy time imagining what the philology example would be like, which makes me worry that there might be something specific about the philology example that would affect things. I presume there’s a reason you’re avoiding giving too many details on purpose, but if you only reconstruct the features of the case that you consider relevant, and the case doesn’t make sense to you, it may not be very revealing that the case doesn’t make sense to others; the problem may be that something you are treating as irrelevant and not mentioning actually matters.
I mean, if I imagine that we’re looking at words in a body of literature, and horses are word A and zebras are word B, and the argument is intended to show that word B was actually in use in that body of literature (as opposed to only appearing as a result of slips of the pen, copyist errors, etc.), then I can’t see that this statistical argument proves anything; what we’d really want is some data about how common such errors are and what forms they usually take, in order to determine how many errors would be likely to arise by chance. Comparing to a hypothetical no-error case seems, as you say, a red herring, entirely and bizarrely beside the point. But this is also so obvious that I find it hard to imagine that anything like this was the original argument. Perhaps I am being too charitable.
Is it that unproductive to read a lot of fiction? I read extremely quickly and still retain a lot of what I read, and this seems to be quite a useful skill, and I’ve always assumed that one of the reasons I have this skill is because I read so much as a child. Admittedly, natural talent probably also plays a role, but surely the tremendous amount of practice helped a lot. And most of what I read as a child was fiction. Perhaps it would have been even more productive to read more non-fiction, but I’m not certain of that, and even if that were the case I’d have thought calling it “strongly” suboptimal was a little, well, strong.
The most blatantly racist/sexist/whatever people tend not to be the truly powerful; they tend to be marginal members of privileged groups, seeking scapegoats and any distraction from their marginal status. But everybody is biased in favor of those who they can get along with, those who think similarly, who they can understand and who can understand them. The truly powerful all have that bias, like everyone else. And so people with the same backgrounds as the powerful are more likely to fit in, to benefit from this bias. But some people are just good at fitting in, even without the similarity of background. Such people are likely to underestimate the general influence of privilege. And their existence also makes it easier for members of privileged groups to underestimate their own privilege; they have examples of people from marginal groups who they get along with perfectly well and who seem to do fine to show that they or the system couldn’t really be all that biased against such groups.
And, of course, there are people who are no good at fitting in regardless of similarity of background, who aggravate everyone because of poor social skills or whatever. They also don’t benefit from the bias in favor of those who fit in, so if they’re members of privileged groups they become convinced that privilege is a myth (since it doesn’t seem to be helping them) and they become MRAs or white supremicists or whatever.
Your requirements are very slightly too strong. If you have more than 6 cards in a suit, the amount of them that have to be top cards is reduced. In your second example, a spade suit of A,K,Q,8,7,6,5,4,3,2 would have served just as well, as even if all the opposing spades were in one hand, playing out the A,K,Q would force them all out, making the remaining spades also winners.
A very interesting paper. The main thesis is that when extremely harmful tactics are used, those who employ those tactics are generally perceived by their victims as having extremely harmful goals. Thus, the victims become more motivated to oppose their goals, rather than becoming more motivated to comply. I’ve summarized this because I did have one quibble; while the paper usually is pretty neutral about this whole process (as in the summary where the word “heuristic” is used for it), there are a couple of places which make it sound like this is a bias or a mistake in the way people understand the motives of violent agents. But agents willing to resort to violence really are dangerous, and there’s plenty of historical evidence to suggest that it’s not unusual for them to escalate or to continue to employ violence in pursuit of further ends. Inferring hostility from violence also doesn’t look particularly like a mistake, even if there may be rare cases where it is misleading. Humans are reluctant to inflict violence on one another, and often when they overcome this it is by rationalizing that their victims deserve it, or in other words by developing hostility toward their victims. Perhaps the hostility only developed because the violent agent had some other agenda, but it’s quite likely to be present, so the victim is quite sensible to be concerned about it.
In my personal contact with this crowd (women’s studies, not sociology, to be clear), I’ve often been quite frustrated. When approached in a reasonable manner, at least those I’ve encountered have been reasonable in return, willing to seriously discuss problems and alternative theories. But in their public statements and publications they go to great lengths to avoid expressing any doubt or disagreement with one another or with the orthodoxy in the field. I suppose they feel solidarity is necessary in the face of outside threats, and I’m not unaware that they do in fact face outside threats, but this still seems to me like a problem.
Also, with punishment generally, there’s a problem that people almost inevitably overestimate its effectiveness. Punishment generally follows exceptionally bad behavior, exceptional behavior is, obviously, exceptional, so punishment would be expected to be followed by behavior which is not exceptionally bad just because of regression to the mean, even if punishment were totally ineffective or even mildly counter-productive. But, unfortunately, people are almost totally oblivious to regression to the mean, and so what should be the expected result regardless becomes for them evidence of the effectiveness of punishment.
I’ve felt like the whole story is too fast, but there are apparently reasons EY wanted to cram the story into a single year. To have only one defense professor? To avoid having to deal with Harry’s sex life? I’m not quite sure what all the reasons are (I imagine they’re multiple, and that some have probably been mentioned by EY and I’m forgetting), but while I think I would have preferred having Harry develop over 7 years as in canon instead of solving everything as an 11 year old, it’s obvious that as the story is actually set up some things just are going to have to happen implausibly quickly.
One respect in which Less Wrongers resemble mainstream philosophers is that many mainstream philosophers disparage mainstream philosophers and emphasize the divergence between their beliefs and those of rival mainstream philosophers. Indeed, that is something of a tradition in Western philosophy.