Viliam_Bur

Karma: 22,193

Viliam_Bur 13 Sep 2014 14:20 UTC
113 points
on: [meta] New LW moderator: Viliam_Bur
Thanks for the trust! I hope my services will not be necessary, but I’m here if they are. Feel free to send me a message, but please have a patience if I don’t respond quickly, because it’s all new to me.

Viliam_Bur 8 Jun 2014 10:18 UTC
97 points
on: Bragging Thread, June 2014
I have translated the whole Sequences ebook to Slovak language. Started in December 2013, finished this week.

Not sure how useful it will be, but at this moment I am happy that I succeeded to not give up during the process, when it felt like it will never be ready. It’s over 2000 pages!

(The full version is not available for download yet; the first half is here. The rest is translated in Word, but I still need to convert it to ebook formats. If someone would be horribly impatient, I can send them the Word documents now by e-mail.)

Viliam_Bur 27 Aug 2014 15:24 UTC
93 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Open thread, 25-31 August 2014
(...continued)

The general ability of updating. At the beginning of Freud’s career, the state-of-art psychotherapy was hypnosis, which was called “magnetism”. Some scientists have discovered that the laws of nature are universal, and some other scientists have jumped to the seemingly obvious conclusion that analogically, all kinds of psychological forces among humans must be the same as the forces which makes magnets attract or repel each other. So Freud learned hyphosis, used it in therapy, and was enthusiastic about it. But later he noticed that it had some negative side effects (female patients frequently falling in love with their doctors, returning to their original symptoms when the love was not reciprocated), and that the positive side effects could also be achieved without hypnosis, simply by talking about the subject (assuming that some conditions were met, such as the patient actually focusing on the subject instead of focusing on their interaction with the doctor; a large part of psychoanalysis is about optimizing for these conditions). The old technique was thrown away because the new one provided better results. Not exactly the “evidence based medicine” by our current standards, but perhaps we could use as a control group all those doctors who stubbornly refused to wash their hands between doing autopsy and treating their patients, despite their patients dropping like flies. -- Later, Freud replaced his original model of unconscious, preconscious and conscious mind, and replaced it with the “id, ego, superego” model. (This is provided as an evidence of the ability to update, to discard both commonly accepted models and one’s own previous models. Which we consider an important part of rationality.)

Speaking about the “id, ego, superego” model, here is the idea of a human brain not being a single agent, but composed of multiple modules, sometimes opposed to each other. Is this something worth considering for Less Wrong readers, either as a theoretical step towards reduction of consciousness, or as a practical tool for e.g. overcoming akrasia? “Ego” as the rational part of the brain, which can evaluate consequences, but often doesn’t have enough power to enforce its decisions without emotional support from some other part of brain. “Id” as the emotional part which does not understand the concept of time. “Superego” as a small model of other people in our brain. Today we could probably locate the parts of the physical brain they correspond to.

“The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” is a book describing how seemingly random human errors (random movements, forgetting words, slips of the tongue) sometimes actually make sense if we perceive them as goal-oriented actions of some mental subagent. The biggest problem of the book is that it is heavy with theory, and a large part of it focuses on puns in German language… but remove all of this, don’t mention the origin, and you could get a highly upvoted article on Less Wrong! (The important part would be not to give any credit to Freud, and merely present it as an evidence for some LW wisdom. Then no one will doubt your rationality.) -- On the other hand, “Civilization and Its Discontents” is a perfect book to be rewritten into a series of articles on Overcoming Bias, about a conflict between forager mentality and farmer social values.

But updating and modelling human brains, those are topics interesting for Less Wrong readers. Most people would focus on, you know, sex. Well, how exactly could we doubt the importance of sexual impulses in a society where displaying a pretty lady is advertising 101, Twilight is a popular book, and internet is full of porn? (Also, scientists accept the importance of sexual selection in evolution.) Our own society is a huge demonstration that Freud was right about the most controversial part of his theory. The only way to make him wrong about this is to create a strawman and claim that according to Freud everything was about sex, so if we find a single thing that isn’t, we proved him wrong. -- But that strawman was already used in Freud’s era; he actually started one of his books by disproving it. Too bad I don’t remember which one. One of the case histories, probably. (It starts like: So, people keep simplifying my theories that all dreams are dogmatically about sex, so here is a simple example to correct the misunderstanding. And he describes a situation where some child wanted an ice cream, parents forbid it, and the child was unhappy and cried. That night, the child had a dream about travelling to North Pole, through mountains of snow. This, says Freud, is what resolving a suppressed desire in a dream typically looks like: The child wanted the ice cream, that’s desire #1, but also the child wanted to avoid conflict with their parents, that’s desire #2. How to satisfy both of them? The “mountains of show” obviously symbolize the ice cream; the child wants it, and gets it, a lot! But to avoid a conflict with parents, even in the dream, the ice cream is censored and becomes snow, so the child can plausibly deny to themselves disobeying their parents. This is Freud’s model of human dreams. It’s just that an adult person would probably not obsess so much about an ice cream, which they can buy if they really want it so much, but about something unavailable, such as a sexy neighbor; and also a smart adult would use more complex censorship to fool themselves.) Also, he had a whole book called “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” where he argues that some mind modules may be guided by principles other than pleasure, for example nightmares, repetition compulsion, aggression. (His explanation of this other principle is rather poor: he invents a mystical death principle opposing the pleasure principle. Anyway, it’s evidence against the “everything is about sex” strawman.)

Freud was an atheist, and very public about it. He essentially described religion as a collective mental disease, in a book called “The Future of an Illusion”. He used and recommended using cocaine… if he lived in the Bay Area today, and used modafinil instead, I can easily imagine him being a very popular Less Wrong member. -- But instead he lived a century ago, so he could only be one of those people spreading controversial ideas which are now considered obvious in hindsight.

lt;dr—I strongly disagree with using Freud as a textbook example of insanity. Many of his once controversial ideas are so obvious to us now that we simply don’t attribute them to him. Instead we just associate him with the few things he got wrong. And the whole meme was started by people who were even more wrong.

[moderator action] The_Lion and The_Lion2 are banned

Viliam_Bur30 Jan 2016 2:09 UTC

91 points

41 comments1 min readLW link

Viliam_Bur 8 Jan 2015 13:54 UTC
90 points
on: The Importance of Sidekicks
I suspect this is a consequence of the situation that rationalists often feel alone. Not necessarily alone as people (although that also happens), but alone as rationalists. Before I found LW, I was in a situation where I had a few friends, but probably none of them would be interested in the kind of debates we have on LW.

If there is only one person in the whole Shire who cares about destroying the ring, would we want that person to be Frodo or Samwise? Frodo would probably try the mission alone, even if less efficiently. Samwise would probably settle for the second best mission, for a mission where he could find a hero to follow.

In different situations different traits are required. In a situation where the individuals are isolated, we would probably want every individual to be a hero, because heroes can act in isolation. On the other hand, in a functional community, having a few highly efficient heroes is probably better than having too many heroes with low efficiency.

So maybe we could use the presence of integrated sidekicks as a measure of health of the community.

This reminds me of some unhealthy behavior I have seen in Mensa: people who have spent so much time in their lives trying to prove their intelligence, that when they finally find a group of their peers, all they can do is continue signalling their intelligence by solving yet another meaningless puzzle, over and over again. Similarly, I guess many wannable rationalists have spent too much time in their lives trying to be the only sane person facing the crazy world, that we may have a problem updating to cooperation with other people who share similar values. It is difficult to cooperate optimally with other rationalists, if we never had an opportunity to learn this behavior in the past.

Viliam_Bur 1 Mar 2013 15:37 UTC
89 points
in reply to: simplicio’s comment on: Rationality Quotes March 2013

Many hands make light work.

Too many cooks spoil the broth.

The optimal solution seems to be one cook with many hands.

Viliam_Bur 27 Aug 2014 15:24 UTC
87 points
in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: Open thread, 25-31 August 2014

Many bigshot social scientists during the last century or so were anything but rational (Foucault and Freud are two of many examples), but were able to convince other (equally biased people) that they were.

I understand that bashing Freud is a popular way to signal “rationality”—more precisely, to signal loyalty to the STEM tribe which is so much higher status than the social sciences tribe—but it really irritates me because I would bet that most people doing this are merely repeating what they heard from others, building their model completely on other people’s strawmans.

Mostly, it feels to me horribly unfair towards Freud as a person, to use him as a textbook example of irrationality. Compared with the science we have today, of course his models (based on armchair reasoning after observing some fuzzy psychological phenomena) are horribly outdated and often plainly wrong. So throw those models away and replace them by better models whenever possible; just like we do in any science! I mostly object to the connotation that Freud was less rational compared with other people living in the same era, working in the same field. Because it seems to me he was actually highly above the average; it’s just that the whole field was completely diseased, and he wasn’t rational enough to overcome all of that single-handedly. I repeat, this is not a defense of factual correctness of Freud’s theories, but a defense of Freud’s rationality as a person.

To put things in context, to show how diseased psychology was in Freud’s era, let me just say that the most famous Freud’s student and then competitor, Carl Gustav Jung, rejected much of Freud’s teachings and replaced them with astrology / religion / magic, and this was considered by many people an improvement compared with the horribly offensive ideas that people could be predictably irrational, motivated by sexual desires, and generally frustrated with the modern society based on farmers’ values. (Then there was also the completely different school of Vulcan psychologists who said: Thoughts and emotions cannot be measured, therefore they don’t exist, and anyone who says otherwise is unscientific.) This was the environment which started the “Freud is stupid” meme, which keeps replicating on LW today.

I think the bad PR comes from combination of two facts: 1) some of Freud’s ideas were wrong, and 2) all of his ideas were controversial, including those which were correct. So, first we have this “Freud is stupid” meme most people agree with, however, mostly for wrong reasons. Then, the society gradually changes, and those Freud’s ideas which happened to be correct become common sense and are no longer attributed to him; they are further developed by other people whom we remember as their authors. Only the wrong ideas are remembered as his legacy. (By the way, I am not saying that Freud invented all those correct ideas. Just that popularizing them in his era was a part of what made him controversial; what made the “Freud is stupid” meme so popular. Which is why I consider that meme very unfair.) So today we associate human irrationality with Dan Ariely, human sexuality with Matt Ridley, and Sigmund Freud only reminds us of lying on a couch debating which object in a dream represented a penis, and underestimating an importance of clitoris in female sexuality.

As someone who has actually read a few Freud’s books long ago (before reading books by Ariely, Ridley, etc.), here are a few things that impressed me. Things that someone got right hundred years ago, when “it’s obviously magic” and “no, thoughts and emotions actually don’t exist” were the alternative famous models of human psychology.

(continued in next comment...)

Viliam_Bur 7 Jan 2014 8:24 UTC
81 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: [LINK] Why I’m not on the Rationalist Masterlist

the average Less Wronger is about 33% more favorably disposed towards the feminist movement than the average woman

Maybe that’s exactly what makes LW a good target. There are too many targets on the internet, and one has to pick their battles. The best place is the one where you already have support. If someone would write a similar article about a website with no feminists, no one on the website would care. Thus, wasted time.

In the same way, it is more strategic to aim this kind of criticism towards you personally than it would be e.g. towards me. Not because you are a worse person (from a feminist point of view). But because such criticism will worry you, while I would just laugh.

There is something extremely irritating about a person who almost agrees with you, and yet refuses to accept everything you say. Sometimes you get angry about them more than about your enemies, whose existence you already learned to accept. At least, the enemies are compatible with the “us versus them” dichotomy, while the almost-allies make it feel like the “us” side is falling apart.

EDIT: Seems like you already know this.

Viliam_Bur 26 Feb 2015 15:13 UTC
78 points
on: If you can see the box, you can open the box
This is how I understand it:
- At some sufficiently high meta level, all people believe “I am trying to do the right thing”.
- But people have widely different models of world; therefore their “trying to do the right thing” may result in almost anything, including many things that we consider wrong.
- Therefore, we are likely to conclude that our enemy, at his high meta level, believes “I am trying to do the wrong thing.” Because this makes our model of him simpler for us. But that is not a realistic model. And having a wrong model of reality is potentially dangerous to our goals.
Generally, I think I agree with this. The question is, how specifically high is the level where people are trying to do “the right thing”. Here I can imagine that people who didn’t have experience with (conventionally called) evil people, can underestimate the necessary level of abstraction.

For some people, in their model of the world, “the right thing” includes e.g. torturing the nonbelievers. Not only because of some reasons that we could consider palatable—for example, when someone burns a witch, we could say “well, in their model of the world, the witch is able to bring a lot of human suffering, and probably already did, so… while I think their model of the world is stupid, I can on the abstract level empathise with the concept of ‘doing the right thing by killing someone who causes a lot of suffering’.” No, this is actually very shallow thinking; something that naive people imagine, and that expert Dark Arts religious apologists like Chesterton make them believe. This is not a credible model of a religious fanatic.

For a credible model one has to go yet a few levels deeper. One has to imagine someone who would torture the nonbeliever because he believes that torturing nonbelievers per se is a good thing. Not because of some consequentialist reasoning based on wrong models… this is trying to push our thinking into someone else’s head. No, there are people who believe that torturing nonbelievers is intrinsically the right thing. To explain why, it would be like to explain why having an orgasm is pleasant. It obviously is, that’s the whole answer. This is how some true believers think, whether they are Nazis, Communists, Muslims, Christians, etc. They may also have some rationalization for why the stuff they consider right will have good (from their point of view) consequences, for example burning the heretics may appease the angry God. But those are just rationalizations. Some people burn heretics because burning the heretics is the right thing to do. Tell them they are wrong, and they will consider you insane.

And yes, one level higher, both these people and the happy hippies of San Francisco are trying to do the right thing.

Maybe the values are not all in the mind. Some values are on level of feelings, associations, reflexes. Orgasm is good because because it feels good. Eating chocolate feels good. Hearing a lullaby feels good. With the right kind of upbringing, the idea of burning the heretic will feel good. Not because we have a specific “heretic burning” sense receptor, but because the parts of the brain containing the idea of burning the heretics were connected by neural pathways to the pleasure centers, just like all associations are created. Given some upbringing, values like this can be hardwired. (The human hardware is not read-only. Associations in human brain develop as we live.) People from different cultures and subcultures can be wired differently, so they may perceive as inherently pleasant the things we abhor, and vice versa. They may feel genuine discomfort from the idea of not burning the heretic.

So what does this mean? Did “doing the right thing” become completely meaningless? Can it predict anything; explain any observation? I don’t think it is completely meaningless. Specifically, I believe that some cultures require more brainwashing, some less. (Although I have no specific methodology for measuring the amount of brainwashing. Even the environment can be a component of brainwashing; what exactly would a “neutral” environment look like?) Some cultures are more reflectively coherent than others. Some cultures promote better models of reality. Giving better information and more intelligence to humans would destroy many cultures. It’s just… the predictions of this hypothesis are less straightforward than a naive reader would imagine.

Viliam_Bur 22 Nov 2013 9:11 UTC
75 points
on: 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Taken. It was relatively quick; the questions were easy. Thanks for improving the survey!

Two notes: The question about mental illness has no “None” answers; thus you cannot distinguish between people who had none, and people who didn’t answer the question. The question about income did not make clear whether it’s pre-tax or post-tax.

Viliam_Bur 2 Jul 2014 16:15 UTC
67 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Downvote stalkers: Driving members away from the LessWrong community?
Just to encourage you, I want to put things in context:
- This is one person that significantly destroys the social capital of the LW community. And in our community, social capital is scarce.
- They probably do this to promote their political views; to silence perceived political opponents. (Including new users.) This is completely against LW values.
If you’d just block their account without further notice right now, I would say: “Well done!”. It is extremely generous to give them a chance to explain themselves; and there probably is no good explanation anyway, so it’s just playing for time.

I mean, really, if one person keeps terrorizing the community, and the community is unwilling to defend themselves, then all the lessons about how rationalists are supposed to win have failed.

A person who did so much damage does not deserve a second chance. If you decide to give them the second chance, I won’t complain. But I would complain against inaction while they continue to do more damage. If you are the only person who has an access to the “Ban User” button, just press it already, before everyone leaves.

EDIT: This whole thread (and it is far from being the first one) is additional damage caused by a single person. People keep proposing solutions without evidence, then they argue with each other. There is a growing frustration when they realize that most of the proposed changes won’t get implemented anyway (either because other people oppose it, or because making changes to LW codebase always takes a lot of time). We keep generating negative emotions, because… why exactly?

Viliam_Bur 4 Dec 2013 8:49 UTC
67 points
on: Open Thread, December 2-8, 2013
It’s funny time now in Slovakia; as if someone declared a call: “Irrational people of all beliefs, unite!”

It started two years ago with the so-called “Gorilla scandal”. (TL;DR: Not a real gorilla, just a nickname of some criminal who was investigated by the secret service. By wiretapping his house the investigation revealed that almost all of our political parties, both left and right, participated in economical crime, cooperating with the same small group of people. The transcripts of the investigation were leaked to internet.) It was followed by a few demonstrations, after which pretty much nothing happened. Realizing that most media in our country actually belong to people involved in the scandal, so they don’t have an incentive to investigate and report on the scandal, an internet radio called “the free broadcast” was created. From that point, it gradually went downhill.

By deciding to focus on ‘news that don’t have place in the official media’, the radio was gradually selecting for hoaxes, conspiracy theories, etc. Which probably led to saner people leaving the radio, concentrating the irrationality of the remaining ones. One year later, it was mostly about how vaccination causes autism and how pharmaceutical companies want to prevent you from using MMS. Two years later, it seems to be mostly about how freemasonic and homosexual conspiracies are ruling the world, which is why we need to make a revolution and create a direct democracy.

Meanwhile, a new religious cult called Magnificat was created by a few excommunicated Catholic priests; or perhaps they joined an already existing cult and brought it here, I am not sure. A few years ago there were some documents about social service in some other countries (mostly Britain) abusing their powers and taking children away from non-abusive families to offer them for adoption to other people, for money. This Magnificat cult is spreading news that this is all a part of world-wide conspiracy against the traditional family, led by atheists, homosexuals and people hating the Virgin Mary. Recently this cult has registered as a political party, and participated in the recent municipal elections (although I am not aware of any significant victories). They also organized a large protest “for life and traditional family”. When our Catholic church saw them stealing its main agenda, it doubled its efforts and last week it published a new pastoral letter criticizing the “culture of death”, “gender ideology” and “the sins of Sodom”.

Meanwhile, a local neo-nazi movement become strong enough to win the municipal election in one of our counties (luckily not the one I live in). Their main agenda is fighting against the corrupted democratic politicians and parasitic Roma minority. They are very popular on “the free broadcast” internet radio, together with Magnificat; at this moment they seem to support each other, at least memetically. This combination of signalling contrarianism and yet appealing to common prejudice, seems very attractive to a lot of people. These days you can’t have an online discussion without someone explaining what a brainwashed sheep you are for not believing in them.

A month ago I burned some of my social capital by publishing a blog about how the Catholic church should stop giving tacit approval to the neo-nazis. (And by “tacit approval” I mean things like the former arch-bishop organizing a private mass for the local neo-nazis and blessing their leader. Which was later described by the church speakers as simply his private affair, which is not anyone else’s business.) So far it doesn’t seem like there was any benefit from it, except for me feeling better for having spoken my mind openly.

I feel like surrounded by complete idiots. To be honest, I always had this feeling, but recently it became very intensive.

Seems to me that irrational people have the advantage that they can relatively easily join their powers. An irrational person mostly cares about one thing; a rational person cares about many things. Suppose that you have a person A believing that people are manipulated by space aliens; a person B believing that vaccination causes autism; and a person C believing that it’s all about homosexuals trying to destroy the traditional family. Technically, none of them contradicts the others. And if you succeed to create a complex theory containing all the necessary components (the space aliens are controlling the humankind by giving more political power to homosexuals, which use their power to destroy the traditional family by using vaccination to cause more autism), you already have three strong believers. And more people mean more political power! Meanwhile the rational person will disagree with A and B and C, and remain without any allies. The ability of an irrational person to accept a compatible irrational belief is popularly called “having an open mind”.
What links here?
- Viliam_Bur's comment on Open thread, Jan. 12 - Jan. 18, 2015 by Gondolinian (14 Jan 2015 11:52 UTC; 13 points)
- Viliam's comment on Open thread, Nov. 16 - Nov. 22, 2015 by MrMind (20 Nov 2015 9:04 UTC; 3 points)

Viliam_Bur 8 Dec 2014 11:21 UTC
56 points
in reply to: pragmatist’s comment on: PSA: Eugine_Nier evading ban?
One of the problems with moderation is that cooperation with LW admins is very slow. As in: extremely slow. Which means: even more slow than you imagine after reading this. Certainly much slower than I imagined when volunteering for this role.

Using my own moderator powers, all I have is a “Ban user” button which can ban a user. (And a corresponding “Unban user” button.) That is the whole moderator user interface as far as I know. If I am wrong, please educate me.

So, my options as this moment are: (a) ban Azathoth123 because I feel sufficiently convinced that he is a reincarnation of Eugine Nier, or (b) send an e-mail asking for more evidence, and wait literally forever, or (c) ignore the whole thing. From the outside, options “b” and “c” seem indistinguishable, and… well, how much happy would you be if I started using the option “a” as a general strategy?

What would really help me at this moment:

Someone with knowledge of Python and SQL, willing to cooperate with me for a few weeks (an hour or two every week). The task would be: reading and analyzing a few already written scripts to understand how exactly the data are stored in database (hint: it is a horrible “database implemented in a database” antipattern); and then writing a few scripts to generate reports from the database, based on a pseudocode I would provide. I could then use the reports to make decisions.

I realize I should have written this much sooner. Uhm, better now than never, I guess. (I thought I would learn some Python and do this myself, but I never put it as the highest priority, and outside view says it’s unlikely to happen in a reasonable time.) So if you know Python and SQL, and are willing to do some free work for LW, please contact me.

(Note: The person writing these scripts will not get access to any private data. I will check the scripts before running them, and the intermediate reports will be anonymized.)

Viliam_Bur 16 Jan 2014 11:44 UTC
56 points
on: Dark Arts of Rationality

If you find yourself on a playing field where everyone else is a TrollBot (players who cooperate with you if and only if you cooperate with DefectBot) then you should cooperate with DefectBots and defect against TrollBots.

An example from real life: DefectBot = God, TrollBots = your religious neighbors. God does not reward you for your prayers, but your neighbors may punish you socially for lack of trying. You defect against your neighbors by secretly being a member of an atheist community, and generally by not punishing other nonbelievers.

I wonder what techniques could we use to make the compartmentalization stronger and easy to turn off when it’s no longer needed. Clear boundaries. A possible solution would be to use the different set of beliefs only while wearing a silly hat. Not literally silly, because I might want to use it in public without handicapping myself. But some environmental reminder. An amulet, perhaps?

Viliam_Bur 11 Jun 2012 16:52 UTC
55 points
on: Intellectual insularity and productivity
Intellectual insularity is because we don’t en masse read other sources. So we can’t discuss them. Sure, good books are mentioned in the post, but that didn’t create a collective action. What could?

Proposal: At the beginning of the month, let’s choose and announce a “book of the month”. At the end of the month, we will discuss the book. (During the month, discussing the book should probably be forbidden, to avoid spoilers and discouraging people who haven’t read it yet.)

Have we grown as a website? I don’t know—what metric do you use? I guess the number of members / comments / articles is growing, but that’s not exactly what we want. So, what exactly do we want? First step could be to specify the goal. Maybe it could be the articles—we could try to create more high-quality articles that would be very relevant to science and rationality, but also accessible for a random visitor. Seems like the “Main” part of the site is here for this goal, except that it also contains things like “Meetups” and “Rationality Quotes”.

Proposal: Refactor LW into more categories. I am not sure how exactly, but the current “Main” and “Discussion” categories feel rather unnatural. (Are they supposed to simply mean: higher importance / lower importance?) A quick idea: Announcements for information about SIAI and upcoming meetups; Forum for repeating topics (open discussion, rationality quotes, media thread, group diary); Top Articles for high-voted articles, and Articles for the remaining articles. In this view, our metric could be to have enough “Top Articles”, though of course having more meetups is also great.

Also, why are Eliezer’s articles so good? He chose one topic and gradually developed it. It was not “hit and run” blogging, but more like teaching lessons at school. Only later, another topic. That’s why his articles literally make sequences; most other articles don’t.

Proposal: We could choose one topic to educate other people about, such as mathematics or statistics or programming, and write a series of articles on this topic. (This can be also done by one person.) It is important to have more articles in sequence, a smooth learning curve, so they don’t overwhelm the layman immediately.

The common factor to all three proposals is: some coordinated action is necessary. When LW was Eliezer’s blog, he did not need to coordinate with himself, but he was making some strategic decisions. To continue LW less chaotically, we would need either a “second Eliezer” (for example Luke wrote a sequence), or a method to make group decisions. Group coordination is generally a difficult problem—it can be done, but we shouldn’t expect it to happen automatically. (One possible solution could be to pay someone to write another sequence.)
What links here?
- Viliam_Bur's comment on Intellectual insularity and productivity by [deleted] (12 Jun 2012 10:19 UTC; 0 points)
- magfrump's comment on Intellectual insularity and productivity by [deleted] (12 Jun 2012 3:26 UTC; 0 points)

Viliam_Bur 30 Apr 2013 8:14 UTC
52 points
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: LW Women Entries- Creepiness

It seems really plausible that inexperienced men with poor social skills who aren’t creepy at all read posts like this and think “Oh my God, am I creepy? I really don’t want to be creepy. Let me try really hard to avoid being creepy at any point in my interactions with women.” The above is totally counterproductive to good socializing and I think a net negative.

This seems to be a general problem with psychological “self-medication”.

Imagine that a standard medicine would practiced in the following way: There would exist a pill to cure almost any problem. Those pills would be freely available in shops. The only missing part would be the diagnosis. So you could go to a shop and buy a pill for increasing blood pressure, or a pill for decreasing blood pressure. But you would not have information about which of these pills (if any) you need.

Even worse, imagine that people would have a bias to medicate themselves the wrong way. For example, people with high blood pressure would be more likely to choose the pill for increasing blood pressure, and vice versa. So despite having a magic pill for almost anything, the medicine practiced this way would be mostly harming people.

Seems to me that psychological “self-medication” works exactly this way. (Except that unlike the reliable magical pill, the therapy is less reliable.) People are often out of their optimal mental state, because their perception of the world and themselves is wrong. So if they choose a therapy, they choose something to move them even more towards their wrongly perceived goal.

There are methods to make yourself less agressive, and there are methods to make yourself more assertive. Unfortunately, people who already are almost doormats, seem to prefer the methods to decrease their perceived “agressivity”, until they make themselves complete doormats, which is their “ethical” ideal. On the other hand, agressive people, who (and everyone around them) could greatly benefit from the former methods, are attracted to the methods for increasing their “assertivity”, until they become dictators.

Unfortunately, most of the feminist advice has the same effect, even when it is essentially a good advice. The man who beats his girlfriends and then rapes them, he is very unlikely to visit a feminist lecture or to read a feminist web page; their words don’t reach him; and the feminists are probably aware of this, so they try to voice their message louder and with stronger words.

Then we have a shy boy who tries to make everyone happy, he hears the lecture, reads the website, and he thinks this is all about him, that he is a horrible monster, that his sexual feelings are something to be ashamed of, that it makes him subhuman, that his mere existence hurts women, and that the whole world would greatly benefit from his suicide or at least castration. And nobody tells him that he is wrong, because simply he is not a priority for anyone. Weak males don’t get any mercy.

And in a same way, “don’t be creepy” messages are typically unheard by creepy people, but catch the attention of insecure people, who are then afraid to even say hello to a stranger, to smile at an attractive person, to ask a phone number or an e-mail, etc., because it is better to be safe than sorry, and anything can be pattern-matched to something negative, especially by an insecure person.

Viliam_Bur 19 Jan 2012 15:28 UTC
50 points
on: The Singularity Institute’s Arrogance Problem
SI is arrogant because it pretends to be even better than science, while failing to publish in significant scientific papers. If this does not seem like a pseudoscience or cult, I don’t know what does.

So please either stop pretending to be so great or prove it! For starters, it is not necessary to publish a paper about AI; you can choose any other topic.

No offense; I honestly think you are all awesome. But there are some traditional ways to prove one’s skills, and if you don’t accept the challenge, you look like wimps. Even if the ritual is largely a waste of time (all signals are costly), there are thousands of people who have passed it, so a group of x-rational gurus should be able to use their magical powers and do it in five minutes, right?

Viliam_Bur 6 Jan 2014 15:47 UTC
49 points
on: [LINK] Why I’m not on the Rationalist Masterlist
The linked article is too long and it is not obvious what exactly its point is. I kept repeating to myself be specific, be specific while reading it.

I believe there was most likely one specific thing that offended the author… and rest of the long unspecific article was simply gathering as many soldiers as possible to the battle—and judging by the discussion that started here, successfully.

The summary at the end hints that it was a use of word “eugenics” somewhere on LW, or maybe somewhere on some LW fan’s blog. Unless that was just a metaphor for something. The author is probably disabled and feels personally threatened by any discussion of the topic, so strongly that they will avoid the whole website if they feel that such discussion would not be banned there. Unless that, too, was a metaphor for something.

(The main lesson for me seems to be this: If you want attention, write an article accusing LW of bad things. LW can’t resist this.)

Viliam_Bur 11 Apr 2013 14:17 UTC
49 points
on: LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny
I noticed that in many descriptions of violence against women, it is emphasised that given person is a normal male. I feel this requires deeper analysis than just saying “I agree” or “I disagree and I feel offended”. Different people may translate these words completely differently, so let’s think about which translations are correct and which are not.

To make this discussion shorter, let’s ignore the part that also women can be violent, only let’s only focus on what “normal male” means in this context. Here are a few possible translations. Actually, I just pick two extreme ones, and anyone is welcome to add other options (because I don’t want to generate too many strawpersons).
- A man can be abusive towards his wife/girlfriend/random girl even if he is not a psychopath, even if he is very nice and polite towards all his friends and strangers, if he is a good student, productive in his job, or a Nobel price winner. Towards a specific person in a specific relationship, his behavior may be completely different.
- Deep in their hearts, all men desire to torture women. Some of them are just too afraid of legal consequences.
Let’s say that I agree with the first version, disagree with the second version… and I am never sure which version a person had in her mind when she uses these words without further explanation. A principle of charity points towards the first explanation, but I know there are people believing the second version too. So I would prefer if people communicated more clearly.

Viliam_Bur 1 Apr 2012 20:44 UTC
49 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Rationality Quotes April 2012
I agree with the necessity of making life more fair, and disagree with the connotational noble Pocahontas lecturing a sadistic western patriarch. (Note: the last three words are taken from the quote.)

Viliam_Bur

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