While this is certainly a nasty pitfall of rationalization, it is necessary to rehearse the evidence from time to time, for those of us without perfect memories. Otherwise, we end up in the situation “I know there was a good reason I believed this but I don’t remember what it was”; this occurs to me far too often. Retracing all of the evidence that led to a particular belief is terribly time-consuming and impractical (“I know this was in a neuroscience book I read three years ago...”). Forgetting why you hold a particular belief is almost as bad as having no reason at all, and every rationalist should naturally strive to avoid this.
Of course, the time to rehearse why you hold a particular belief is not when being confronted with opposing arguments.
undermind
Based on this, I would very much like to make a variant of Monopoly, with beliefs/theories in place of properties, and evidence for money. Invest a large chunk to establish a belief, with its rent determined by sophistication and usefulness of prediction, ranging from Aristotelian physics to relativity, spermatists & ovists to Darwinian evolution, and so on. Other players would have to give you some credit when they land on your theories, and admit that they give results.
This would also be a great way to teach some history of science, if well designed.
Of course, the analogy becomes interesting when you consider what corresponds to the cutthroat capitalism...
The image is using sex to encourage people to learn and act rationally (I have no idea how that might work).
There’s a grand tradition of women withholding sex for political reasons (usually to end a war), starting with Lysistrata. People resurrect this idea from time to time, and often achieve quite remarkable results.
Maintenance: The link in the opening sentence no longer exists.
I think that worrying about being a cult (as distinct from worrying about being seen as a cult) is a pretty good indication that thus far, LessWrong is not a cult. Yes, Raemon’s uze of ritual does push us slightly closer to cult territory, but not enough that I see any reasonable grounds for concern, given the benefits. Actual cults (more accurately, groups with a very high number of cult-indicators doing things that are demonstrably harmful) may worry about being seen as cults, but are probably protected by a bias shield or similar effect from seeing any problems with their own cultishness, and are certainly not likely to start an open discussion about it. This is very strong evidence that LessWrong is not a dangerous group of people propagating one ideology above all others and suppressing dissent.
In summary, I think this whole “cult/not cult” business is silly, and a disguised query for nothing. Yes, by developing rituals, LessWrong now has one more cult indicator, but does not have any particularly bad such indicators and as such is pretty okay.
To me, this is one of the most fundamental posts on LessWrong that has provided the greatest change to my thought processes. The vending-machine example is clear and comes to mind often.
I’ve seen this study cited a lot; it’s extremely relevant to smart self- and other-improvement. But there are various possible interpretations of the results, besides what the authors came up with… Also, how much has this study been replicated?
I’d like to see a top-level post about it.
I was interpreting this not as “do this because we will pay you”, but rather as a way of signalling how much CMR cares about this being done well and quickly.
I found some of the content in the summary sufficiently noteworthy that I will remember it, regardless of the supporting evidence, and for the rest, the supporting evidence doesn’t help. In particular, asking people for favours to give them the opportunity to be kind is a cool idea that is new to me, which I intend to start doing.
- Gaslighting.
Seriously, there’s already a well-established form of psychological abuse founded on this principle. It works, and it’s hard to see how to take it much further into the Dark Arts.
It is—obscurely, and too late, and to those who already know.
It’s called Women’s Studies (though it’s about more that women’s experiences).And people (for whom the inferential distance is too great) love to hate on it.
Upvoted for early parts of the post, especially ” it felt like I needed a persona, so that I could just act ‘in character’ instead of having to think of things to say from scratch.”
Agreed.
To clarify: in my experience (and supported by other anecdotes on this thread), Women’s Studies is, unfortunately, often very badly done. There are big problems around being less concerned with contrary evidence than is appropriate, its often very un-rigorous, and though they are undoubdetdly a small minority, women who unconditionally hate men are drawn to it. It is legitimate to criticize Women’s Studies on these grounds.
However, I originally meant people who seem to think it should not exist. It should, and this post illustrates why.
That’s too simplistic IMO… I think it’s more a desire to avoid “politicizing education”, and people not making sufficiently convincing arguments in favour of its inclusion, rather than just terrible people having power.
In my opinion, the standard English/Math/Science that we expect elementary and high school students to learn are not difficult. I mean this as more than just “they were easy for me”; I think that with good teachers, the right motivation, curiosity, clear relations to other knowledge or interests, and paying attention, any reasonably intelligent child can learn them with far fewer hours of class time dedicated to the task than the current average. This would free up a lot of time to learn such “supplementary” material.
In fact, I think that the supplementary material is really, really helpful for developing interests in the core subjects. Reading and writing are, to a fairly large extent, the practice of thinking. If someone has had experiences facing discrimination and wants to relate their experience or what they think is going on societally, they will generally (or can easily be led to) learn to write well to express this. If someone is puzzled by what’s happening with the population of some animal around their house, they will be willing to learn basic ecological models and the associated math.
Of course, actually implementing any of these—especially good teachers—would require rather large changes to education as it is currently done, which seems difficult, to say the least.
True. Sexism is frickin pervasive, and that is the underlying problem.
Though it’s only pointless quibbling at this point, I still think your previous comment was too simplistic—if nothing else, it doesn’t have any of the depth of this, and, though it is perfectly consistent with the view “most people, even good people, have sexist tendencies due to our culture”, it appears to be coming from a less well-developed view, which is why it has been downvoted. This again may be a question of inferential distance, which thus demonstrates itself to be a very useful concept.
I think it’s not.
I can’t figure out which part this is refering to.
Also: I’m pretty sure I agree with what you’ve been saying in these posts, including this one. (Has that come across clearly? I’m curious.) I also may have been strawmanning you (thanks MugaSofer for pointing this out), which is an interesting combination.
The thought behind it was not too simplistic, but I think its presentation in that comment was, largely due to leaving out this background information; I think this is why it was downvoted, and is also what left it open to strawmanning (sigh sexist language).
Hmm. My attempt at answering this: The “incidental decisions” is about such actions as choosing male candidates over female candidates with identical qualifications, ignoring women`s contributions at meetings and then agreeing strongly when a man later says the exact same thing, and so on. As for “excluding the threat”, maybe it refers to perceptions of women as being less skilled, rather than having the cognitive dissonance involved in admitting you’re picking the man because he is male.
You tread on dangerous ground here. Shouldn’t the detail & scope of its predictions (the rent) be the criterion by which we evaluate any theory? Though creationists’ poor arguments may be suggestive of the indefensibility of their position, this alone does not prove them wrong, and certainly does not confirm evolution.