Stefan_Schubert 26 Jan 2020 14:08 UTC
22 points
on: Have epistemic conditions always been this bad?
I think this is a kind of question where our intuitions are quite weak and we need empirical studies to know. It is very easy to get annoyed with poor epistemics and to conclude, in exasperation, that things must have got worse. But since people normally don’t remember or know well what things were like 30 years ago or so, we can’t really trust those conclusions.

One way to test this would be to fact-check and argument-check (cf. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k54agm83CLt3Sb85t/clearerthinking-s-fact-checking-2-0 ) opinion pieces and election debates from different eras, and compare their relative quality. That doesn’t seem insurmountably difficult. But of course it doesn’t capture all aspects of our epistemic culture.

One could also look at features that one may suspect are correlated with poor epistemics, like political polarisation. On that, a recent paper gives evidence that the US has indeed become more polarised, but five out of the other nine studied OECD countries rather had become less polarised.

https://www.brown.edu/Research/Shapiro/pdfs/cross-polar.pdf

Stefan_Schubert 27 Aug 2014 16:44 UTC
20 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Open thread, 25-31 August 2014
Hi Viliam,

thanks for your interesting and thoughtful response. Possibly I should have used another example. There are other, more clearcut cases in e.g. the postmodernist tradition, but I wanted someone more well-known.

The reason I chose him was not to signal loyalty to the STEM tribe, but rather because he is taken to be a textbook example of irrationality by Popper and Gellner, two of my favourite philosophers. Popper claimed that Freud’s theories were unfalsifiable and that for any possible event E, both E and not-E was standardly taken to confirm his theories. This is inconsistent with probability theory, as pointed out in “Conservation of Expected Evidence” (which is a very Popperian post). The reason Freud and his followers (I think that some people have thought that some of his followers were actually worse on this point than Freud) did this mistake (if they did) presumably was confirmation bias (falsificationism can be seen as a tool to counter confirmation bias).

There is a huge literature on whether this claim is actually true. I have read Freud and Gellner’s (to my mind very interesting) book on psycho-analysis, as well as some of Popper’s texts on the topic, so I’m not merely repeating ideas I’ve heard from others. That said, I don’t know the subject well enough to go into a detailed discussion of your claims. Also, it’s sort of tangential to the topic. My point was not to bash Freud—that was so to say a side-effect of my claim.

Regarding your historical claims, I think that it’s very hard to establish who introduced nebolous ideas such as Freud’s tripartite model of the mind. Some claim that Plato’s theory of the mind foreshadowed it. Gellner claims that all good original ideas in Freud are taken from Nietzsche. I don’t know enough of the topic to determine whether any of these claims are true, but in order to establish whether they are, or whether Freud really was as significant and original as you claim, one would need to take a deep plunge into the history of ideas.

Separating university education from grading

Stefan_Schubert3 Jul 2014 17:23 UTC

17 points

60 comments2 min readLW link

Stefan_Schubert 20 Jan 2014 10:20 UTC
17 points
0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Tell Culture
Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen argued in a classic study that (US) Southern politeness is a reaction to high levels of aggression:

“(The authors also theorize that Southern politeness could be a response to Southern aggression—if Southerners are more likely to take offense than other regional cultures, it follows they would be less likely to give offense, for safety’s sake.)”

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/July-2012/American-Violence-and-Southern-Culture/

That seems to be very much in line with your line of thinking. According to this line of reasoning, “honour” cultures in which people are likely to take offence easily, should generally be more polite.

They made two kinds of experiments that seems to support this line of thinking. In the first, they compared how Southern and Northern young males reacted if you bumped in to them in a conspicuous fashio. Unsurprisingly, the Southerners got more angry. In the second experiment, the experimenters’ collaborators nearly bumped into Southern and Northern young males—in which case the Southerners would be more likely to go out of way to avoid bumping. This makes sense—you should be more careful to avoid bumping into people in a culture where people are more likely to be upset, one would think.

(I can’t find these experiments now though, but it is in line with the quote above.)

So the question is a bit complicated. At the same time, it was interesting to read this very useful comment in the wait vs interrupt comment thread, on French (interrupt) vs American (wait) culture:

“Americans often expressed surprise in my presence at the fact that French people, “who claim to be very big on manners,” are themselves so “rude”:”

http://lesswrong.com/lw/j5n/wait_vs_interrupt_culture/a3c2

What the Americans were thinking of was that the French were not good at listening and frequently interrupted the speaker. At the same time, my guess is that French culture is generally more aggressive—it is more of an “honour” culture—than the US is. In any case, I know for a fact that French culture is more aggressive than my own, Swedish, culture, and Swedes are likely to make similar comments as Americans to this kind of behaviour.

So it seems to me that the whole issue of politeness is quite complicated—there are several different aspects of politeness. I’m thinking many traditional “honour” cultures focus heavily on adherence to some polite “rituals”—titles, never bump into anyone, always pay the bill at restaurants, etc; really salient things—whereas more modern cultures don’t focus on that. Swedes don’t use titles at all, for instance. On the other hand, Swedish traffic, conversational style, etc, are very polite. Perhaps it reflects the fact that Protestantism (Sweden is a Protestant country, as is the US to a large extent) focuses less on rituals than most other religions (e.g. Catholicism). (I realize that this might sound a bit prejudiced; sorry about that.)

I also think there might be several different reasons for why you could end up a guesser or asker. One reason might why you end up as a guesser is that you know that people around you are very easily offended. In this case, guessing is driven by fear. But it might also be that you are a guesser because you’re considerate—you don’t want to hurt other people, and you know that if you’re not trying to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and imagine what they’re thinking, there is a risk that might happen when you start asking them things.

Conversely, you might end up an asker because you’re just unusuall candid. But there is also another kind of asker—the pushy domineering types. Their questions aren’t really questions but a kind of semi-orders. Now my guess is that the latter kind of askers are much more common than people in this thread seem to think. Also, because they’re so common, people are likely to interpret the first kind of askers as being domineering, even though that wasn’t their intention. This is a fact, and something that people who wish our culture to be more candid and open will have to take into account. They cannot blame the interpreter if they’re interpreted in this way, since that’s the normal interpretation of asky behaviour in our culture. Perhaps the “tell” proposal is an attempt to deal with this fact, but I’m not sure I think it’s very succesful.

In any case, it would be interesting to hear or read more empirical stuff on this question. The Pinker video and the quote on French vs American conversational styles were really good. I really think this is the way to go since otherwise there is a risk that we just end up trading anecdotes and prejucided images of ask/guess culture with each other.
What links here?
- Social status part 1/2: negotiations over object-level preferences by Steven Byrnes (5 Mar 2024 16:29 UTC; 109 points)

Stefan_Schubert 2 Aug 2023 6:17 UTC
16 points
8
on: The “public debate” about AI is confusing for the general public and for policymakers because it is a three-sided debate
Realist and pragmatist don’t seem like the best choices of terms, since they pre-judge the issue a bit in the direction of that view.

Stefan_Schubert 28 Mar 2020 11:57 UTC
16 points
in reply to: Hauke Hillebrandt’s comment on: The case for C19 being widespread
In the province of Lodi (part of Lombardy), 388 people were reported to have died of Covid-19 on 27 March. Lodi has a population of 230,000, meaning that 0.17% of _the population_ of Lodi has died. Given that everyone hardly has been infected, IFR must be higher.
The same source reports that in the province of Cremona (also part of Lombardy), 455 people had died of Covid-19 on 27 March. Cremona has a population of 360,000, meaning that 0.126% of the population of Cremona has died, according to official data.
Note also that there are reports of substantial under-reports of deaths in the Bergamo province. Some reports estimate that the true death rates in some areas may be as much as 1%. However, those reports are highly uncertain. And they may be outliers.
https://www.facebook.com/stefan.schubert.3954/posts/1369053463295040

Stefan_Schubert 15 Jun 2015 18:49 UTC
16 points
on: European Community Weekend 2015 Impressions Thread
Great weekend with lots of good talks. Many thanks to the flawless organization! Truly excellent. It would be great if Berlin could develop into a rationalist/EA hub, as was mentioned at the end.

Division of cognitive labour in accordance with researchers’ ability

Stefan_Schubert16 Jan 2014 9:28 UTC

15 points

69 comments5 min readLW link

Stefan_Schubert 1 Nov 2019 0:01 UTC
15 points
on: Is there a definitive intro to punishing non-punishers?
One of those concepts is the idea that we evolved to “punish the non-punishers”, in order to ensure the costs of social punishment are shared by everyone.
Before thinking of how to present this idea, I would study carefully whether it’s true. I understand there is some disagreement regarding the origins of third-party punishment. There is a big literature on this. I won’t discuss it in detail, but here are some examples of perspectives which deviate from that taken in the quoted passage.
Joe Henrich writes:
This only makes sense as cultural evolution. Not much third party punishment in many small-scale societies .
So in Henrich’s view, we didn’t even (biologically) evolve to punish wrong-doers (as third parties), let alone non-punishers. Third-party punishment is a result of cultural, not biological, evolution, in his view.
Another paper of potential relevance by Tooby and Cosmides and others:
A common explanation is that third-party punishment exists to maintain a cooperative society. We tested a different explanation: Third-party punishment results from a deterrence psychology for defending personal interests. Because humans evolved in small-scale, face-to-face social worlds, the mind infers that mistreatment of a third party predicts later mistreatment of oneself.
Another paper by Pedersen, Kurzban and McCullough argues that the case for altruistic punishment is overstated.
Here, we searched for evidence of altruistic punishment in an experiment that precluded these artefacts. In so doing, we found that victims of unfairness punished transgressors, whereas witnesses of unfairness did not. Furthermore, witnesses’ emotional reactions to unfairness were characterized by envy of the unfair individual’s selfish gains rather than by moralistic anger towards the unfair behaviour. In a second experiment run independently in two separate samples, we found that previous evidence for altruistic punishment plausibly resulted from affective forecasting error—that is, limitations on humans’ abilities to accurately simulate how they would feel in hypothetical situations. Together, these findings suggest that the case for altruistic punishment in humans—a view that has gained increasing attention in the biological and social sciences—has been overstated.

Stefan_Schubert 2 Sep 2014 11:01 UTC
15 points
on: Overly convenient clusters, or: Beware sour grapes
Good post. Jon Elster (whose works I much recommend; he has one book precisely on Sour Grapes) studies proverbs in his Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions. He notes that there are many contrary proverbs (i.e. of the form “Every S is P” and “No S is P.”) such as “out of sight, out of mind” and “absence makes the heart grow fonder” and “opposites attract” and “like attracts like”. Elster argues, if I remember correctly, that these denote different mechanisms. According to this analysis, there would be one mechanism that goes from absence via say more loneliness to more love, whereas there is another that goes from absence to greater possibilities of meeting someone else to less love. Which one is the strongest in any individual case depends on various other factors.

If you’re interested in this, I’d recommend reading those parts of Elster’s book. In any case, I think that there is a lot to your analysis. Many of these proverbs are essentially devices to stop thinking (there is a LW term for this, right?). Rather than trying to weigh pros and cons people make themselves and others stop thinking by dropping a proverb. Many of them rhyme as well, which increases their effect.

Identifying bias. A Bayesian analysis of suspicious agreement between beliefs and values.

Stefan_Schubert31 Jan 2016 11:29 UTC

14 points

26 comments1 min readLW link