Said Achmiz

Karma: 10,718

Said Achmiz 26 Feb 2021 8:06 UTC
2 points
in reply to: kithpendragon’s comment on: Yes, words can cause harm
The “core claim” you quote is actually several claims appended to each other, with the connections between them left as implicit additional claims. So when you ask if I disagree that “this” happens, I can’t answer in a binary fashion because you’re asking multiple questions, some of which are unstated (and which I have to infer, with the possibility of inferring incorrectly).

(This is very similar to one of the several ways in which your post itself is flawed.)

I will comment as I am able, however. So:

The purpose of symbolic language is to transmit ideas from one mind to another.

This can reasonably be said to be a purpose of symbolic language (certainly it’s not the only purpose, but it’s a big one).

In the new mind, the idea can prompt or set the stage for (sometimes strong) urges to arise.

I am not quite sure what you mean by “urges” (I can think of multiple possible sense of this word which might be relevant), but clearly you’re referring to some variety of mental states.

Mental states in general arise for various reasons and in various ways. Any given mental state may be capable of arising in any of a variety of ways, “triggered” or immediately preceded by any of a number of precursor mental states or external stimuli etc. Certainly ideas introduced by communication by another person is one possible type of such precursors or triggers.

Does this mean that the communicative act “caused” (“prompted” and “set the stage for” seem to be synonyms for “caused”, with, perhaps, variation in emphasis) the mental state in question? Maybe, maybe not. In the case of overdetermination, the answer would be “not”. (How common is that case? I don’t know. Fairly common, it seems to me.) In other cases, the answer is more ambiguous. It depends on the type of mental state, certainly. Whatever you mean by “urges”, it seems particularly unlikely that mental states that could be described thus (especially those which can reasonably be described as “strong urges”), would be “caused” (in a non-overdetermined way) by communicative acts of others.

[… here we have an apparent gap in the chain of reasoning …]

You jump from “urges” to “humans acting on” those “urges”. This seems like it needs more examination, to say the least. Most people don’t just act on whatever thoughts pop into their heads. Reflexive actions exist, of course, but I’m not sure you have those in mind. If I understand correctly the sort of mental states you refer to, they are such that acting on them, or not doing so, is a choice. People are quite capable of suppressing even very strong emotions, taking no actions whatsoever on their basis.

Humans acting on strong urges can be destructive in lots of ways.

This is literally true, but quite misleading in its implication that “strong urges” are somehow unusual or unique in being mental states which, when humans act on them, result in destructive behavior.

In fact people can be destructive in lots of ways regardless of the nature of the mental state or states which resulted in those destructive actions. A man may strangle a rival in a fit of rage, or strike down a pedestrian with his car while being distracted by a funny picture on his smartphone, or carefully orchestrate a murder while seething with bile and cold hatred, or calmly sign an order that sends thousands to their deaths while taking his morning tea. There is nothing particularly special about any of these mental states. It is simply easy to inflict pain and death and horror, if one is placed in circumstances that permit such actions.

Said Achmiz 25 Feb 2021 17:55 UTC
2 points
in reply to: kithpendragon’s comment on: Yes, words can cause harm

That’s as much cause as your releasing a catch causing the spring tension to be released and resulting in a lid opening.

A cause of the thought? Sure. A cause of the action? Certainly not.

You don’t need to actually follow through on a threat for it to be effective, someone need only believe that the threat is genuine. That constitutes a necessary condition and a linguistic trigger.

Actions are what cause people to believe in threats. The words communicate intent, they do not themselves cause ‘harm’ or anything else.

Said Achmiz 25 Feb 2021 13:10 UTC
3 points
in reply to: kithpendragon’s comment on: Yes, words can cause harm

I think most people would agree that your asking caused the salt to be passed because the conditions were right for it to do so.

I do not agree with that.

In the everyday sense of ‘cause’, you didn’t cause the person in question to pass the salt. They chose to pass the salt, after you asked them to do so. They could’ve chosen otherwise. (Indeed, it’s easy to imagine reasons why they would.)

How many people have been threatened into doing terrible things? Or ordered by a superior?

These are examples of causation by actions, not by words. The words in question communicate information about intentions and actions; but the actions (and/or threat/promise thereof) are what cause things to happen.

Said Achmiz 25 Feb 2021 6:36 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Ikaxas’s comment on: Yes, words can cause harm

Their argument is quite simple, as I understand it: […] It borders on a technicality, and elsethread I disputed its practical importance, but for all that it is successful at what it’s trying to do.

It’s worse than a technicality—it’s an equivocation between meanings of “cause”. In ordinary speech we do not speak of one thing “causing” another if, say, the purported “cause” is merely one of several possible (collectively) necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions for the purported “effect” to occur—even though, in a certain sense, such a relationship is “causal”—because if we did, then we would have to reply to “what caused that car accident” with “the laws of physics, plus the initial conditions of the universe”.

So kithpendragon proves that words can “cause harm” in the latter technical sense, but the force of the argument comes from the claim that words can “cause harm” in the former colloquial sense—and that has assuredly not been proven.

(And this is without even getting into the part about “large cascades of massive change” and “downward spiral of self destruction with truly unfortunate consequences” and such things, that can allegedly be caused by “what seems like a tiny thing”—a claim that is presented without any support at all, but without which the injunction that motivates the post simply fails to follow from any of the rest of it!)

Said Achmiz 25 Feb 2021 3:26 UTC
2 points
in reply to: kithpendragon’s comment on: Yes, words can cause harm
But you didn’t refute the claim that words can’t cause harm. To do that, you’d have to provide examples, which you did not do. Given this, what is the substance of this post? I see none.

The idea that concrete examples of harmful words would be a “likely hazard” also strikes me as absurd. I could be convinced otherwise, but for that to happen, I’d have to see some… examples.

Said Achmiz 24 Feb 2021 7:48 UTC
13 points
on: Yes, words can cause harm
Without examples, this post is almost entirely devoid of content.

Said Achmiz 1 Feb 2021 23:59 UTC
8 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Jimrandomh’s Shortform Posts
Note that many people don’t know about ad blockers:

As usual, I use Google Surveys to run a weighted population survey. On 2019-03-16, I launched a n = 1000 one-question survey of all Americans with randomly reversed order, with the following results: […]

… I am however shocked by the percentage claiming to not know what an adblocker is: 72%! I had expected to get something more like 10–30%. As one learns reading surveys, a decent fraction of every population struggles with basic questions like whether the Earth goes around the Sun or vice-versa, so I would be shocked if they knew of ad blockers but I expected the remaining 50%, who are driving this puzzle of “why advertising avoidance but not adblock installation?”, to be a little more on the ball, and be aware of ad blockers but have some other reason to not install them (if only myopic laziness).

But that appears to not be the case. There are relatively few people who claim to be aware of ad blockers but not be using them, and those might just be mobile users whose browsers (specifically, Chrome, as Apple’s Safari/iOS permitted adblock extensions in 2015), forbid ad blockers.

(I highly recommend reading that entire section of the linked page, where gwern describes the results of several follow-up surveys he ran, and conclusions drawn from them.)

Said Achmiz 27 Jan 2021 22:19 UTC
13 points
in reply to: Sam Charles Norton’s comment on: What is up with spirituality?
Some questions (either answers, or summaries of answers plus pointers elsewhere for the full treatment, would be fine):

the existence of God is not an empirical question

What kind of question is it?

God is not a supernatural agent

What kind of agent is he?

“theologically necessary level of denial”

In what sense is “theologically necessary” a relevant or interesting category in epistemological terms? (More bluntly, if you like: why should we care what is, or is not, theologically necessary, as distinct from what is epistemologically necessary?)

it’s not that the specific claim being made by the atheist is incorrect, it’s that the implication that is believed to follow does not actually follow

What is the specific claim, and what is the believed implication?

techniques to enable a closer appropriation of the truth

What, exactly, is an “appropriation of the truth”? I have never encountered this phrase, and am unsure what it could mean.

In so far as institutions succeed in cultivating such honesty then they are operating as spiritual bodies.

This claim seems to beg the question by defining ‘spiritual’ in a way very different than how it’s normally defined. No conclusions that might be reached after starting with such an unusual usage could possibly apply to ‘spirituality’ in the way the term is normally used.

I would personally argue that the edifice of science that we presently have is structurally dependent on that Thomistic tradition I mentioned above, and that it could not exist separately from that tradition, but that’s an argument that might be distracting as it is very contentious

Indeed.

lastly, that an important form of spirituality that is also massively understood in contemporary culture, although it is of major historical significance in the West, is that of magic. Rightly understood, this is not about Harry Potter-esque actions that violate natural law but about ‘change of consciousness in accordance with will’ - in other words, it is about the training of the intellect in ways of seeing. (Some of the ways of seeing can be bonkers of course.)

Needless to say, this runs into the usual “show me the money” (a.k.a. “cake”) kinds of problems that we see with ‘Looking’, ‘kensho’, and all the rest. Absent an answer to such demands for demonstration of effectiveness, the mere fact that ‘magic’ is not judged to be important or worthy of study is simply correct and appropriate.

Said Achmiz 25 Jan 2021 19:52 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Unnamed’s comment on: The Real Rules Have No Exceptions
This comment discusses a class of situations where what you say seems likely to be true.

In most other cases, I think the sort of attitude you describe is likely to be a way to avoid admitting (to yourself or others) what the “real rules” are. Once you start saying stuff like…

… treating the “real process” as a rule is more fitting in some cases than others, a better fit for some people’s style of thinking than for other people’s, and also something that a person could choose to aim for more or less.

… then the usefulness of the concept/approach described in the OP is destroyed.

The request for more examples (note that I give three extended ones downthread) is not unreasonable, but if the existing examples don’t convince, I’m not entirely sure more would, either. What is your take on the examples I’ve provided so far?

Said Achmiz 23 Jan 2021 0:18 UTC
0 points
in reply to: G Gordon Worley III’s comment on: The Problem of the Criterion

I’m not sure what your argument is here? Eliezer already wrote a post on this so no one should bother writing anything about the same topic ever again?

Eliezer already wrote a post on this, so no one should bother writing anything about the same topic that does not add anything new to Eliezer’s post, or do anything to result in changing one’s conclusion from that described in Eliezer’s post. This post does not (indeed, it would be quite difficult to write anything that does).

As best I can tell you are making an argument here for pragmatism but want to skip talking about epistemology.

My point is precisely that conundrums of epistemology, and epistemological questions in general, are motivated by pragmatic things or else by nothing.

I do not think there is any “problem of the criterion”, except in a way such as is already addressed to the maximum possible degree of satisfaction by the linked Sequence post. Hence no “conundrum” exists.

When I said that nothing remains to say, I meant that anything else that’s said on this topic, over and above the linked post, is strictly superfluous—not that in general saying things is bad.

Said Achmiz 22 Jan 2021 16:34 UTC
2 points
on: The Problem of the Criterion
This approach seems wrongheaded to me, from the start. Perhaps I am misunderstanding something. But let’s take your example:

Let’s say you want to know something. Doesn’t really matter what. Maybe you just want to know something seemingly benign, like what is a sandwich?

HALT! Proceed no further. Before even attempting to answer this question, ask: why the heck do you care? Why do you want to know the answer to this strange question, “what is a sandwich”? What do you plan to do with the answer?

In the absence of any purpose to that initial question, the rest of that entire section of the post is unmotivated. The sandwich alignment chart? Pointless and meaningless. Attempting to precisely define a “sandwich-like object”? Total waste of time. And so on.

On the other hand, if you do have a purpose in mind, then the right answer to “what is a sandwich” depends on that purpose. And the way you would judge whether you got the right answer or not, is by whether, having acquired said answer, you were then able to use the answer to accomplish that purpose.

Now, you could then ask: “Ah, but how do you know you accomplished your purpose? What if you’re a brain in a jar? What if an infinitely powerful demon deceived you?”, and so on. Well, one answer to that might be “friend, by all means contemplate these questions; I, in the meantime—having accomplished my chosen purpose—will be contemplating my massive pile of utility, while perched atop same”. But we needn’t go that far; Eliezer has already addressed the question of “recursive justification”.

It does not seem to me as if there remains anything left to say.

Said Achmiz 20 Jan 2021 15:58 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: Praying to God
What does this mean, for those of us who aren’t personally acquainted with the OP (or possess whatever source of insider knowledge that leads you to make this comment)?

Said Achmiz 7 Jan 2021 11:02 UTC
9 points
in reply to: AllAmericanBreakfast’s comment on: The Real Rules Have No Exceptions
Quite reasonable. In that case, yes, I invite readers who enjoyed (and believe that they did properly understand) this post to say what they believe the answer to this question is.

If there aren’t any responses in, let us say, two weeks, then I will post my own explanation.

Said Achmiz 7 Jan 2021 3:55 UTC
2 points
in reply to: AllAmericanBreakfast’s comment on: The Real Rules Have No Exceptions

It’s hard to give examples, because you don’t actually explain the specific function of not stating the “real rule” in any particular case.

By no means is it hard to give examples. Indeed, I did give several examples in an earlier comment.

As for reasons to keep the real rule unstated, they seem clear enough to me. I did not state them because I considered them too obvious to belabor… of course, it’s possible that I was wrong about this!

I can make my views of this explicit, if you like, but I don’t think I will be adding much to the understanding of signaling already common in this forum. In fact, I wonder if anyone else (perhaps one of the folks who liked or benefited from this post) would like to try their hand at explaining this? It would give me useful info about whether readers of this post understood it as I intended it to be understood (and would help to clarify the post for anyone confused, of course).

Said Achmiz 7 Jan 2021 2:15 UTC
2 points
in reply to: AllAmericanBreakfast’s comment on: The Real Rules Have No Exceptions

My point of disagreement is the conclusion—that exceptions are primarily a form of self-signaling, a way to avoid being honest about the real rule.

I did not say “self-signaling”.

Note well that the idea of “the real rules have no exceptions” applies to rules that govern social groups and organizations and subcultures and societies just as much (if not more!) as it applies to rules made by a person to govern their own actions.

In that light, the signaling is not to oneself, but to others; and it is of great importance (as the rule-as-stated, clean and exception-free as it is, creates legitimacy, and the appearance of explicit structure and order). And for this reason also, the insight described in the OP is, in such contexts, subversive to the group and to those in power within it, because it is corrosive to the beliefs and behaviors that maintain the group’s cohesion and stability.

Said Achmiz 5 Jan 2021 16:34 UTC
2 points
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: The Sense-Making Web
I second this. I have no idea who this post is talking about, and find that I am very confused about this whole “Sensemaking scene” thing.

Said Achmiz 5 Jan 2021 14:53 UTC
2 points
in reply to: hermanc1’s comment on: 100 Tips for a Better Life
A tangential comment—you say:

Maybe it is because of my scientific training and having looked at the data from the perspective of a scientist.

Indeed, this is one of the answers to the fundamental question of epistemic rationality, i.e. “what do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?”. Oftentimes the answer to the latter clause is “because someone told me”, but that just pushes back the problem: whom can you trust to provide you with truth? Of course we have to get some (indeed, most!) of our information about the world from others, but it’s a thorny problem, to be sure… but as you imply, one way to sidestep it is “nullius in verba”—to personally gain the relevant expertise, and to apply it to the problem at hand.

But we cannot do this for every problem! There are only so many hours in the day (not to speak of more fundamental difficulties, like the possibility that we might find some given problem to be beyond our capacity for understanding, try as we might to unravel it). And it obviously does no good for you (or anyone else) to say “fear not, I have investigated the problem on your behalf, and here is the answer”, because in that case we’re right back to “whom to trust”…

All of this is to say that if you investigate some question (e.g., climate change), and find an answer to your own satisfaction, then you have solved the epistemic problem—for yourself only. Absolutely no one else is helped by this unless you can convince them that your judgment is reliably correct (or, of course, induce them to undertake the same journey of discovery as you did). This is surely frustrating (I know from personal experience), and indeed you may decide not to bother trying to convince others (and few would blame you for it)… but the fact remains that there’s no royal road to truth, and in particular “just take the word of someone who has figured it out” isn’t it.

Said Achmiz 5 Jan 2021 14:34 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Unnamed’s comment on: 100 Tips for a Better Life

Those public health official examples seem unrelated to tip #59 (“Those who generate anxiety in you and promise that they have the solution are grifters.”).

To the contrary, I think they are directly related, for the same reason that my anti-example of pro-“war on terrorism” public figures is related.

Grifters aren’t always out for your money.

Said Achmiz 5 Jan 2021 14:30 UTC
2 points
in reply to: hermanc1’s comment on: 100 Tips for a Better Life

Just for the record, climate change is not really controversial or doubtful in any meaningful, scientific way. I am sincerely puzzled by you viewing it as such.

Just for the record, I most certainly did not say that I view climate change as “controversial or doubtful” in any “meaningful, scientific way”. (Indeed I went out of my way to note that I am not expressing any opinion on the topic!)

However, as I said, many people hold the view that you are puzzled by—people who are, I repeat, not obviously irrational.

In that sense, it’s clear that the matter is controversial, in the most straightforward and ordinary sense of the word!

I make no claims to scientific expertise, either on my own behalf or on behalf of the aforementioned (and unspecified) others. But you must recognize, I think, that there is such a thing as public controversy; and also, that experience shows us that it’s foolish to surrender the burden of judgment to some group of credentialed experts, merely on the strength of their being labeled, formally or by convention, as “scientists” of one sort or another. (The replication crisis alone is proof enough of that; and the history of science is rife with more examples.)

As to the matter of COVID, others have addressed this in sibling threads, so I will comment no more on it here.

Said Achmiz 5 Jan 2021 8:38 UTC
2 points
in reply to: hermanc1’s comment on: 100 Tips for a Better Life

I think that the burden of proof is rather on you to prove that all statements that are anxiety-inducing and have solutions, are false. Or that all people who make such statements are grifters (have ulterior motives that do not include your wellbeing).

But I never claimed this, so why would I need to prove it…?

My problem was with your examples (and, more speculatively, with what your choice of examples—and their problematic nature—tells us about the larger point). I am not the OP, however, and will not attempt to defend statements I never made!

The other examples you have now given are both better and worse than your original two. Better, because less controversial… but worse, because less representative (most of them lack the quality of their claimants attempting to induce anxiety in the supposed beneficiaries). (Take the “Big Pharma” example, which is particularly interesting. The pharmaceutical substances which are most unquestionably beneficial also tend to be the least profitable, and tend to be least associated with anxiety-inducing advertising and messaging. The correlation is imperfect, yet quite evident. Is this not another example that proves the rule? …or would not, at least, many people say so, who are, again, not obviously irrational?)

Perhaps one general point to extract from this is that it’s misleading to equivocate between “someone tells you the truth” and “someone generates anxiety in you”. Truth may be anxiety-inducing, yet these two activities aren’t the same.