simplicio

Karma: 3,301

The scourge of perverse-mindedness

simplicio21 Mar 2010 7:08 UTC

122 points

255 comments5 min readLW link

simplicio 14 Sep 2010 2:07 UTC
59 points
on: Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism
Implementing your suggestion is easy. Just keep going “meta” until your opinions become stupid, then set meta = meta − 1.

There’s an art to knowing when;

Never try to guess.

Toast until it smokes & then

20 seconds less.

simplicio 6 Sep 2010 6:20 UTC
50 points
in reply to: homunq’s comment on: Rationality quotes: September 2010

I had, also, during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer.

-From his Autobiography, 1902.

A wonderful quote indeed. Found by guessing that it was biographical or autobiographical (it seemed a little too personal for a scientific treatise) and searching for the word “fact” in the online text of the (very readable) autobiography.
What links here?
- Let Your Workers Gather Food by D_Malik (24 Oct 2011 19:51 UTC; 29 points)
- TheMajor's comment on Rationality Quotes Thread February 2015 by Vaniver (3 Feb 2015 21:45 UTC; 14 points)

simplicio 15 Mar 2010 4:02 UTC
39 points
on: Undiscriminating Skepticism
I’ll bite the bullet and say global warming is the perfect example here. It’s pretty clear to me that many people hold their positions on this issue—pro and contra—for political/social reasons rather than evidential ones.

Unfortunately that often seems to be the case when there are vested interests in the answer going one way or the other.

The impact of genetics on behaviour is another example. Most of the educated people I know are ultra-behaviorists, so if I see somebody argue that genes matter (but aren’t everything), they definitely get brownie points. Especially since such a view tends to be seen as vaguely quasi-racist.

simplicio 17 Mar 2010 4:03 UTC
37 points
in reply to: DonGeddis’s comment on: Undiscriminating Skepticism

Once you’ve used atheism to eliminate a soul, and humans are “just” meat machines, and abortion is an ok if perhaps regrettable practice …

Kudos to you for forthrightness. But em… no. Ok, first, it seems to me you’ve swept the ethics of infanticide under the rug of abortion, and left it there mostly unaddressed. Is an abortion an “ok if regrettable practice?” You’ve just assumed the answer is always yes, under any circumstances.

I personally say “definitely yes” before brain development (~12 weeks I think), “you need to talk to your doctor” between 12 and 24 weeks, and “not unless it’s going to kill you” after 24 weeks (fully functioning brain). Anybody who knows more about development is welcome to contradict me, but those were the numbers I came up with a few years ago when I researched this.

If a baby/fetus has a mind, in my books it should be accorded rights—more and more so as it develops. I fail to see, moreover, where the dividing line ought to be in your view. Not to slippery-slope you but—why stop at infants?

*(Also note that this is a first-principles ethical argument which may have to be modified based on social expedience if it turns into policy. I don’t want to encourage botched amateur abortions and cause extra harm. But those considerations are separate from the question of whether infants have worth in a moral sense.)

Once you’ve used atheism to eliminate a soul, and humans are “just” meat machines...

This gave me a nasty turn, because probably the most annoying idea religious people have is that if we’re “just” chemicals, then nothing matters. One has to take pains to say that chemicals are just what we’re made of. We have to be made out of something! :) And what we’re made of has precisely zero moral significance (would we have more worth if we were made out of “spirit”?).

I mean, I could sit here all day and tell you about how you shouldn’t read “Moby Dick,” because it’s just a bunch of meaningless pigment squiggles on compressed wood pulp. In a certain very trivial sense I am absolutely right—there is no “élan de Moby Dick” floating out in the aether somewhere independent of physical books. On the other hand I am totally missing the point.

simplicio 16 Aug 2010 0:09 UTC
34 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?
To repeat fairly standard speculation in this regard, engineers aren’t taught critical thinking and are taught to not tolerate uncertainty. This is not a good combination.

Full disclosure: I am (almost) an engineer.

I don’t think that’s quite correct (uncertainty is a huge concern of engineers), although it’s getting there. I would speculate as follows:
- We know a lot of science, but it’s mostly divorced from its epistemic basis. We don’t know how we know.
- We have just enough “science cred” to feel entitled to have opinions on any & all scientific issues, but are probably not actually educated outside a small area.

simplicio 10 Nov 2012 21:04 UTC
33 points
in reply to: RomeoStevens’s comment on: Rationality Quotes November 2012

If you don’t think your life is more important than someone else’s, sign your organ donor card and kill yourself.

(House, MD deals with moral grandstanding)

simplicio 4 Nov 2012 22:04 UTC
32 points
on: 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
I am continually amused by how much nuance the contrarians of LW want in these questions. Even I thought the simulation question was ill-posed & wanted a “mu” answer.

Politics is always nearly hopeless, short of asking people to write a 14-page essay on their particular chimera of left-libertarian whig marxism, or whatever.

simplicio 1 Sep 2012 16:06 UTC
30 points
on: Rationality Quotes September 2012

...a good way of thinking about minimalism [about truth] and its attractions is to see it as substituting the particular for the general. It mistrusts anything abstract or windy. Both the relativist and the absolutist are impressed by Pilate’s notorious question ‘What is Truth?’, and each tries to say something useful at the same high and vertiginous level of generality. The minimalist can be thought of turning his back on this abstraction, and then in any particular case he prefaces his answer with the prior injunction: you tell me. This does not mean, ‘You tell me what truth is.’ It means, ‘You tell me what the issue is, and I will tell you (although you will already know, by then) what the truth about the issue consists in.’ If the issue is whether high tide is at midday, then truth consists in high tide being at midday… We can tell you what truth amounts to, if you first tell us what the issue is.

There is a very powerful argument for minimalism about truth, due to the great logician Gottlob Frege. First, we should notice the transparency property of truth. This is the fact that it makes no difference whether you say that it is raining, or it is true that it is raining, or true that it is true that it is raining, and so on forever. But if ‘it is true that’ introduced some substantial, robust property of a judgment, how could this be so? Consider, for example, a pragmatism that attempts some equation between truth and utility. Then next to the judgment ‘it is raining’ we might have ‘it is useful to believe that it is raining.’ But these are entirely different things! To assess the first we direct our attention to the weather. To assess the second we direct our attention to the results of believing something about the weather—a very different investigation.

Let us return to Pilate. Where does minimalism about truth leave him? It suggests that when he asked this question, he was distracting himself and his audience from his real job, which was to find out whether to uphold certain specific historical charges against a defendant. Thus, if I am innocent, and I come before a judge, I don’t want airy generalities about the nature of truth. I want him to find that I did not steal the watch if I did not steal the watch. I want him to rub his nose in the issue. I want a local judgment about a local or specific event, supposed to have happened in a particular region of time and space.

(Simon Blackburn, Truth)

simplicio 14 Jul 2010 2:39 UTC
29 points
on: Some Thoughts Are Too Dangerous For Brains to Think
I upvoted this post because it’s a fascinating topic. But I think a trip down memory lane might be in order. This ‘dangerous knowledge’ idea isn’t new, and examples of what was once considered dangerous knowledge should leap into the minds of anybody familiar with the Coles Notes of the history of science and philosophy (Galileo anyone?). Most dangerous knowledge seems to turn out not to be (kids know about contraception, and lo, the sky has not fallen).

I share your distrust of the compromised hardware we run on, and blindly collecting facts is a bad idea. But I’m not so sure introducing a big intentional meta-bias is a great idea. If I get myopia, my vision is not improved by tearing my eyes out.

simplicio 17 Jul 2010 5:36 UTC
28 points
on: Hindsight bias
Hindsight: a fable

A lark and a wren, perched on the top of a tall tree, were conversing once about the dangers of cuckholdry.

Said the lark, “My sister was fooled by a cuckoo only last year; in her nest were three eggs, one unlike the others. That vile chick ate all the food that she could supply, until it was ready to burst from gluttony.”

“What a fool is your sister!” said the wren. “One egg was not like the others. The deception is surely obvious. I should not have made such a mistake.”

A cuckoo, overhearing, sped fast away to the wren’s nest, where she found three small eggs. Pushing two over the side, she laid her own pair of eggs next to the wren’s remaining one.

Returning, and thinking herself wise, the wren pushed her one egg out of the nest and settled down to warm the remaining two.

simplicio 25 Nov 2012 20:25 UTC
27 points
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance
In short, I don’t think I buy your claim that “Some empirical statements, orthogonal to truth or falsity, are offensive.” At least, I’d like to see it supported better before I consider it.

Some examples of empirical statements with questionable-to-bad ethical undertones. I present them to you as food for thought, not as some sort of knock-down argument.
- “Your husband’s corpse is currently in an advanced stage of decomposition. His personality has been completely annihilated. Remember how he sobbed on his deathbed about how afraid he was to die?” (Reminding a person of a bad thing they don’t want to think about.)
- “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, here are twenty police case files on convicted child murderers, all of them Albanian just like the defendant, without any statistical context.” (Facts presented in a tendentious manner.)
- “Just thought it might be interesting for you to know that women tend to do about 10% worse on this test than men. Anyway, you may turn your papers over now—good luck!” (Self-fulfilling prophesies.)
- “You’re the only asian in our office.” “Did you notice how you’re the only asian in our office?” “Maybe you didn’t realize you’re the only asian in our office.” (Drawing attention to & thereby amplifying the salience of an ingroup/outgroup distinction.)
- “All I’m saying is that girls who wear revealing clothing are singling themselves out for attention from predators!” (Placing blame for a moral harm on a blameless causal link leading to the harm.)
- “If he dresses effeminately like that, he’s going to get bullied.” (Ditto; also, status quo bias.)
- “A black man will never hold the highest office in this country.” (Self-fulfilling prophesy; failure to acknowledge shittiness of (purported) empirical situation.)
I think that the ability and right to say true things regardless of whether someone finds those truths unpleasant is extremely important, and social norms to the contrary should not be adopted or perpetuated lightly.

Not lightly, no. But as I was saying to Daniel_Burfoot above, there is just no avoiding the fact that statements, including statements of truth, are speech-acts. They will affect interlocutors’ probability distributions AND their various non-propositional states (emotions, values, mood, self-worth, goals, social comfort level, future actions, sexual confidence, prejudices). Inconvenient as human mind-design is, it’s really hard to suppress that aspect of it.

But there is a big asymmetry here—you (the speaker) know what you mean, so if it really needs to be said, take an extra second to formulate it in the way that has the least perlocutionary disutility.

simplicio 8 Feb 2013 23:58 UTC
26 points
in reply to: Kindly’s comment on: Philosophical Landmines
Um, I just wanted to parachute in and say that “cached thought” should not be a completely general objection to any argument. All it means is that you’ve thought about it before and you’re not, as it were, recomputing everything from scratch in real time. There is nothing epistemically suspect about nyan_sandwich not re-deriving their entire worldview on the spot during every conversation.

Cached thoughts can be correct! The germane objection to them comes when you never actually, personally thought the thought that was cached (it was just handed to you by your environment), or you thought it a long time ago and you need to reconsider the issue.

simplicio 4 Feb 2013 23:35 UTC
26 points
in reply to: jooyous’s comment on: Rationality Quotes February 2013

You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.

I don’t think this is empirically true, though. Suppose I believe strongly that violent crime rates are soaring in my country (Canada), largely because I hear people talking about “crime being on the rise” all the time, and because I hear about murders on the news. I did not reason myself into this position, in other words.

Then you show me some statistics, and I change my mind.

In general, I think a supermajority of our starting opinions (priors, essentially) are held for reasons that would not pass muster as ‘rational,’ even if we were being generous with that word. This is partly because we have to internalize a lot of things in our youth and we can’t afford to vet everything our parents/friends/culture say to us. But the epistemic justification for the starting opinions may be terrible, and yet that doesn’t mean we’re incapable of having our minds changed.

simplicio 6 Oct 2010 18:57 UTC
26 points
in reply to: Apprentice’s comment on: Rationality quotes: October 2010
I’m continually amused by the abundance of quotes here on LW from sundry wingnuts and theists, some of which are quite good. We’ve had Jack Chick, Ted Kaczynski, CS Lewis (howdya like that reference class, Lewis), GK Chesterton, and that crazy “Einstein was wrong!” guy.

Maybe being a contrarian in anything whatsoever helps one to break through the platitudes and cached thoughts that ordinary folks seem to bog down in whenever they try to think.

simplicio 15 Aug 2010 23:46 UTC
26 points
on: Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?
Another problem with seeing enemies as innately evil is that it lets us off the hook as to our own capacity for evil (so elegantly demonstrated by the Milgram experiments, although I hope I would do better).

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard that Hitler or Stalin or whoever was “just evil,” or that the holocaust was the result of some essentially German negative personality trait, or that child abusers of various kinds are “just monsters.”

To the extent that these statements mean only “Boo Stalin!” or “Boo paedophiles!” I guess they’re not so bad, but I think people actually believe them as propositions to some extent. Certainly, if movies are any guide, the bad guys are usually pure evil—for no readily apparent reason, they just love pain and want to blow up the world.

Which is a big problem, because it leads you to be naive about your own propensity. An acquaintance of mine knew a rapist, through work. This rapist was not a slavering beast, he was an ordinary guy (maybe with some nasty explicit or implicit beliefs about women) until he got drunk and raped somebody. I really don’t want to say “it could have been me,” and I honestly don’t think it could have. But I doubt he thought, say a year before, that it could have been him.

simplicio 23 Mar 2010 16:11 UTC
26 points
on: Understanding your understanding
Excellent post, I like the breakdown. So let’s take a simple example for clarification:

“Why do race cars sound high-pitched when they are coming toward you and low pitched when they’re heading away?”

Level 0: “That’s because of the Doppler effect.”

Level 1: “The frequency is f = (v + vr)/(v+vs) * f0 . Make sure you get the signs right.”

Level 2: “Sound waves have a wavelength, but the wavelength is shortened when the car is coming toward you, because the car ‘catches up’ with its own waves, and lengthened when it’s heading away. Since the waves travel at a constant speed in the medium, a short wavelength implies a high frequency, and frequency is what we hear as pitch. Yes, I know the equation. The phenomenon also happens for light, although the equation is different.”

Level 3: “No, I don’t remember the equation. Here, gimme a minute and I’ll derive it.”

simplicio 6 Mar 2010 6:39 UTC
26 points
on: Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)
I loved this post, but I have to be a worthless pedant.

If you drop a ball off a 120-m tall building, you expect impact in t=sqrt(2H/g)=~5 s. But that would be when the second-hand is on the 1 numeral.

simplicio 27 Jun 2010 7:32 UTC
24 points
in reply to: alsomike’s comment on: Unknown knowns: Why did you choose to be monogamous?

...one of the main forms of conformity today is exactly this pose of throwing off the demands of mainstream society demonstrated in this post...

This is the main form of authoritarianism today, and the correct response to the demand here that we justify our choice of monogamy is “It’s none of your business!”

This sounds very defensive to me; you might wish to examine why that is the case.

To reply to your argument, which is really just guilt (of poly folks) by association (with conspicuous consumption):

(1) Non-monogamous people will experience a high social cost at present for admitting the fact. You can hardly compare them to “rebelling” consumers. Saying you want to choose a polyamorous sexual relationship is not analogous in social cost to buying $2,000 shoes, it’s analogous to buying a butt plug in front of your friends and family. It takes genuine mettle.

(2) Just because consumer culture emphasizes enjoying yourself, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy yourself (reversed cupidity is not eudaimonia). In the case of consumer goods, it means real reflection on what you actually enjoy, for how long, and what are the ethical implications? For sexuality, it means real reflection on what you want, what you already have, what is practical given human nature, ethical concerns, etc. All WrongBot is asking you to do is reflect on why you choose monogamy—publicly on LW, if the mood strikes you. Clearly it does not.

If you really want to enjoy yourself fully, you can’t just settle for the boring default option—whether in toilet paper, jeans, music or relationship style. You are supposed to consider all your options and find out what generates maximum enjoyment.

Well, ceteris paribus, yes! Of course, ceteris are not paribus: there are other people and contingencies to take into account. But your enjoyment is morally considerable in and of itself, as well as in how it impacts others.

simplicio 2 Jan 2013 20:59 UTC
23 points
in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: Rationality Quotes January 2013
Lambs are young sheep; they have less meat & less wool.

The punishment for livestock rustling being identical no matter what animal is stolen, you should prefer to steal a sheep rather than a lamb.

simplicio

The scourge of per­verse-mindedness

The scourge of perverse-mindedness