Zack_M_Davis

• Zack_M_Davis 12 Sep 2019 15:06 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Duncan_Sabien's comment on: G Gor­don Wor­ley III’s Shortform

  as clearly noted in my origi­nal objection

  Ac­knowl­edged. (It felt im­por­tant to re­act to the great-grand­par­ent as a show of moral re­sis­tance to ap­peal-to-in­ner-pri­vacy con­ver­sa­tion halters, and it was only af­ter post­ing the com­ment that I re­mem­bered that you had ac­knolwedged the point ear­lier in the thread, which, in ret­ro­spect, I should have at least ac­knowl­edged even if the great-grand­par­ent still seemed worth crit­i­ciz­ing.)

  there is ab­solutely a time and a place for this

  Ex­actly—and less­wrong.com is the place for peo­ple to re­port on their mod­els of re­al­ity, which in­cludes their mod­els of other peo­ple’s minds as a spe­cial case.

  Other places in So­ciety are right to worry about era­sure, marginal­iza­tion, and so­cially ma­nipu­la­tive dis­mis­sive­ness! But in my ra­tio­nal­ist cul­ture, while stand­ing in the Ci­tadel of Truth, we’re not al­lowed to care whether a map is marginal­iz­ing or dis­mis­sive; we’re only al­lowed to care about whether the map re­flects the ter­ri­tory. (And if there are other cul­tures com­pet­ing for con­trol of the “ra­tio­nal­ist” brand name, then my cul­ture is at war with them.)

  My whole ob­jec­tion is that Gor­don wasn’t both­er­ing to

  Great! Thank you for crit­ciz­ing peo­ple who don’t jus­tify their be­liefs with ad­e­quate ev­i­dence and ar­gu­ments. That’s re­ally use­ful for ev­ery­one read­ing!

  (I be­lieve as a cover for not be­ing able to).

  In con­text, it seems worth not­ing that this is a claim about Gor­don’s mind, and your only ev­i­dence for it is ab­sence-of-ev­i­dence (you think that if he had more jus­tifi­ca­tion, he would be bet­ter at show­ing it). I have no prob­lem with this (as we know, ab­sence of ev­i­dence is ev­i­dence of ab­sence), but it seems in ten­sion with some of your other claims?

• Zack_M_Davis 12 Sep 2019 2:13 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Duncan_Sabien's comment on: G Gor­don Wor­ley III’s Shortform

  leav­ing the con­ver­sa­tion at “he, I, and LessWrong as a com­mu­nity are all on the same page about the fact that Gor­don en­dorses mak­ing this men­tal move.”

  Nesov scooped me on the ob­vi­ous ob­jec­tion, but as long as we’re cre­at­ing com­mon knowl­edge, can I get in on this? I would like you and Less Wrong as a com­mu­nity to be on the same page about the fact that I, Zack M. Davis, en­dorse mak­ing the men­tal move of de­cid­ing that I know bet­ter than other peo­ple what’s go­ing on in those other peo­ple’s heads when and only when it is in fact the case that I know bet­ter than those other peo­ple what’s go­ing on in their heads (in ac­cor­dance with the Li­tany of Tarski).

  the ex­is­tence of bisexuals

  As it hap­pens, bi­sex­ual arousal pat­terns in men are sur­pris­ingly hard to re­pro­duce in the lab!^[1] This is a (small, highly in­con­clu­sive) ex­am­ple of the kind of ob­ser­va­tion that one might use to de­cide whether or not we live in a world in which the cog­ni­tive al­gorithm of “Don’t de­cide that you know other peo­ple’s minds bet­ter than they do” performs bet­ter or worse than other in­fer­ence pro­ce­dures.

  ---

  1. J. Michael Bailey, “What Is Sex­ual Ori­en­ta­tion and Do Women Have One?”, sec­tion ti­tled “Sex­ual Arousal Pat­terns vs. the Kinsey Scale: The Case of Male Bi­sex­u­al­ity” ↩︎

• Zack_M_Davis 8 Sep 2019 20:16 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Matthew Barnett's comment on: Matthew Bar­nett’s Shortform

  Peo­ple who don’t un­der­stand the con­cept of “This per­son may have changed their mind in the in­ter­ven­ing years”, aren’t worth im­press­ing. I can imag­ine sce­nar­ios where your eco­nomic and so­cial cir­cum­stances are so pre­car­i­ous that the in­cen­tives leave you with no choice but to let your speech and your thought be ruled by un­think­ing mob so­cial-pun­ish­ment mechanisms. But you should at least check whether you ac­tu­ally live in that world be­fore sur­ren­der­ing.

• Zack_M_Davis 26 Aug 2019 3:51 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: gilch's comment on: gilch’s Shortform

  What are the no­table differ­ences be­tween Hissp and Hy? (Hyper­link to “Hy” in pre­vi­ous sen­tence is just for con­ve­nience and the benefit of read­ers; as you know, we’re both former con­trib­u­tors.)

• Zack_M_Davis 26 Aug 2019 2:45 UTC

  6 points

  on: Schel­ling Cat­e­gories, and Sim­ple Mem­ber­ship Tests

  Okay, Said, I used LaTeX for the nu­mer­i­cal sub­scripts this time. I hope you’re happy! (No, re­ally—I ac­tu­ally mean it.)

Schel­ling Cat­e­gories, and Sim­ple Mem­ber­ship Tests

• Zack_M_Davis 21 Aug 2019 2:16 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Par­tial sum­mary of de­bate with Ben­quo and Jes­si­cata [pt 1]

  P.S. (to sister com­ment), I’m go­ing to be trav­el­ing through the 25th and prob­a­bly won’t check this web­site, in case that in­for­ma­tion helps us break out of this loop of say­ing “Let’s stop the im­plic­itly-emo­tion­ally-charged back-and-forth in the com­ments here,” and then con­tin­u­ing to do so any­way. (I didn’t get any­thing done at my dayjob to­day, which is an in­di­ca­tor of me also suffer­ing from the “Highly tense con­ver­sa­tions are su­per stress­ful and ex­pen­sive” prob­lem.)

• Zack_M_Davis 20 Aug 2019 6:25 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Par­tial sum­mary of de­bate with Ben­quo and Jes­si­cata [pt 1]

  but I’m guess­ing your word­ing was just con­ve­nient short­hand rather than a dis­agree­ment with the above

  Yes.

  As I said, even if the Judge ex­am­ple, Carol has to un­der­stand Alice’s claims.

  Yes, triv­ially; Jes­sica and I both agree with this.

  Jes­sica’s Judge ex­am­ple still feels like a non­se­quitor [sic] that doesn’t have much to do with what I was talk­ing about.

  In­deed, it may not have been rele­vant to the spe­cific thing you were try­ing to say. How­ever, be­ing that as it may, I claim that the judge ex­am­ple is rele­vant to one of the broader top­ics of con­ver­sa­tion: speci­fi­cally, “what norms and/​or prin­ci­ples should Less Wrong as­pire to.” The Less Wrong karma and cu­ra­tion sys­tems are func­tion­ally a kind of Judge, in­so­far as ideas that get up­voted and cu­rated “win” (get more at­ten­tion, praise, gen­eral ac­cep­tance in the ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity, &c.).

  If Alice’s ten­dency to lie, obfus­cate, ra­tio­nal­ize, play dumb, re­port dishon­estly, filter ev­i­dence, &c. isn’t an im­mutable fea­ture of her char­ac­ter, but de­pends on what the Judge’s be­hav­ior in­cen­tivizes (at least to some de­gree), then it re­ally mat­ters what kind of Judge you have.

  We want Less Wrong speci­fi­cally, and the ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity more gen­er­ally, to be a place where clar­ity wins, guided by the beauty of our weapons. If we don’t have that—if we live in a world where lies and bul­lshit out­com­pete truth, not just in the broader So­ciety, but even in the ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity—then we’re dead. (Be­cause you can’t solve AI al­ign­ment with lies and bul­lshit.)

  As a mod­er­a­tor and high-karma user of less­wrong.com, you, Ray­mond Arnold, are a Judge. Your strong-up­vote is worth 10 karma; you have the power to Cu­rate a post; you have the power to have the power to tell Alice to shape up or ship out. You are the in­cen­tives. This is a huge and im­por­tant re­spon­si­bil­ity, your Honor—one that has the po­ten­tial to in­fluence 10¹⁴ lives per sec­ond. It’s true that truthtel­ling is only use­ful in­so­far as it gen­er­ates un­der­stand­ing in other peo­ple. But that ob­ser­va­tion, in it­self, doesn’t tell you how to ex­er­cise your huge and im­por­tant re­spon­si­bil­ity.

  If Jes­sica says, “Pro­po­nents of short AI timelines are ly­ing, but not nec­es­sar­ily con­sciously ly­ing; I mostly mean covert de­cep­tion hid­den from con­scious at­ten­tion,” and Alice says, “Huh? I can’t un­der­stand you if you’re go­ing to use words in non­stan­dard ways,” then you have choices to make, and your choices have causal effects.

  If you down­vote Jes­sica be­cause you think she’s draw­ing the cat­e­gory bound­aries of “ly­ing” too widely in a way that makes the word less use­ful, that has causal effects: fewer peo­ple will read Jes­sica’s post; maybe Jes­sica will de­cide to change her rhetor­i­cal strat­egy, or maybe she’ll quit the site in dis­gust.

  If you down­vote Alice for pre­tend­ing to be stupid when Jes­sica ex­plic­itly ex­plained what she meant by the word “ly­ing” in this con­text, then that has causal effects, too: maybe Alice will try harder to un­der­stand what Jes­sica meant, or maybe Alice will quit the site in dis­gust.

  I can’t tell you how to wield your power, your Honor. (I mean, I can, but no one listens to me, be­cause I don’t have power.) But I want you to no­tice that you have it.

  If they’re so mo­ti­vat­edly-un­rea­son­able that they won’t listen at all, the prob­lem may be so hard that maybe you should go to some other place where more rea­son­able peo­ple live and try there in­stead. (Or, if you’re Eliezer in 2009, maybe you re­curse a bit and write the Se­quences for 2 years so that you gain ac­cess to more rea­son­able peo­ple).

  I agree that “re­treat” and “ex­ert an ex­traor­di­nary level of in­ter­pre­tive la­bor” are two pos­si­ble strate­gies for deal­ing with un­rea­son­able peo­ple. (Per­son­ally, I’m a huge fan of the “ex­ert ar­bi­trar­ily large amounts of in­ter­pre­tive la­bor” strat­egy, even though Ben has (cor­rectly) ob­served that it leaves me in­cred­ibly vuln­er­a­ble to cer­tain forms of trol­ling.)

  The ques­tion is, are there any other strate­gies?

  The rea­son “re­treat” isn’t suffi­cient, is be­cause some­times you might be com­pet­ing with un­rea­son­able peo­ple for re­sources (e.g., money, land, sta­tus, con­trol of the “ra­tio­nal­ist” and Less Wrong brand names, &c.). Is there some way to make the un­rea­son­able peo­ple have to re­treat, rather than the rea­son­able peo­ple?

  I don’t have an an­swer to this. But it seems like an im­por­tant thing to de­velop vo­cab­u­lary for think­ing about, even if that means play­ing in hard mode.

• Zack_M_Davis 18 Aug 2019 22:54 UTC

  25 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Par­tial sum­mary of de­bate with Ben­quo and Jes­si­cata [pt 1]

  (You said you didn’t want more back-and-forth in the com­ments, but this is just an at­tempt to an­swer your taboo re­quest, not prompt more dis­cus­sion; no re­ply is ex­pected.)

  We say that clar­ity wins when con­tribut­ing to ac­cu­rate shared mod­els—com­mu­ni­cat­ing “clearly”—is a dom­i­nant strat­egy: agents that tell the truth, the whole truth, and noth­ing but the truth do bet­ter (earn more money, leave more de­scen­dants, cre­ate more pa­per­clips, &c.) than agents that lie, obfus­cate, ra­tio­nal­ize, play dumb, re­port dishon­estly, filter ev­i­dence, &c.

  Creat­ing an en­vi­ron­ment where “clar­ity wins” (in this sense) looks like a very hard prob­lem, but it’s not hard to see that some things don’t work. Jes­sica’s ex­am­ple of a judged de­bate where points are only awarded for ar­gu­ments that the op­po­nent ac­knowl­edges, is an en­vi­ron­ment where agents who want to win the de­bate have an in­cen­tive to play dumb—or be dumb—never ac­knowl­edg­ing when their op­po­nent made a good ar­gu­ment (even if the op­po­nent in fact made a good ar­gu­ment). In this sce­nario, be­ing clear (or at least, clear to the “rea­son­able per­son”, if not your de­bate op­po­nent) doesn’t help you win.

• Zack_M_Davis 17 Aug 2019 20:02 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Par­tial sum­mary of de­bate with Ben­quo and Jes­si­cata [pt 1]

  The be­hav­ior I think I en­dorse most is try­ing to avoid con­tin­u­ing the con­ver­sa­tion in a com­ment thread at all

  OK. Look­ing for­ward to fu­ture posts.

• Zack_M_Davis 17 Aug 2019 19:43 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: mr-hire's comment on: Par­tial sum­mary of de­bate with Ben­quo and Jes­si­cata [pt 1]

  The rea­son it’s still tempt­ing to use “de­cep­tion” is be­cause I’m fo­cus­ing on the effects on listen­ers rather than the self-de­ceived speaker. If Win­ston says, “Ocea­nia has always been at war at Eas­ta­sia” and I be­lieve him, there’s a sense in which we want to say that I “have been de­ceived” (even if it’s not re­ally Win­ston’s fault, thus the pas­sive voice).

• Zack_M_Davis 17 Aug 2019 18:27 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Par­tial sum­mary of de­bate with Ben­quo and Jes­si­cata [pt 1]

  It might also be part of the prob­lem that peo­ple are be­ing mo­ti­vated or de­cep­tive. [...] the ev­i­dence for the lat­ter is AFAICT more like “base rates”.

  When we talked 28 June, it definitely seemed to me like you be­lieved in the ex­is­tence of self-cen­sor­ship due to so­cial pres­sure. Are you not count­ing that as mo­ti­vated or de­cep­tive, or have I mi­s­un­der­stood you very badly?

  Note on the word “de­cep­tive”: I need some word to talk about the con­cept of “say­ing some­thing that has the causal effect of listen­ers mak­ing less ac­cu­rate pre­dic­tions about re­al­ity, when the speaker pos­sessed the knowl­edge to not do so, and at­tempts to cor­rect the er­ror will be re­sisted.” (The part about re­sistence to cor­rec­tion is im­por­tant for dis­t­in­guish­ing “de­cep­tion”-in-this-sense from sim­ple mis­takes: if I er­ro­neously claim that 57 is prime and some­one points out that it’s not, I’ll im­me­di­ately say, “Oops, you’re right,” rather than dig­ging my heels in.)

  I’m sym­pa­thetic to the crit­i­cism that ly­ing isn’t the right word for this; so far my best al­ter­na­tives are “de­cep­tive” and “mis­lead­ing.” If some­one thinks those are still too in­ap­pro­pri­ately judgey-blamey, I’m ea­ger to hear al­ter­na­tives, or to use a ne­ol­o­gism for the pur­poses of a par­tic­u­lar con­ver­sa­tion, but ul­ti­mately, I need a word for the thing.

  If an Outer Party mem­ber in the world of Ge­orge Or­well’s 1984 says, “Ocea­nia has always been at war with Eas­ta­sia,” even though they clearly re­mem­ber events from last week, when Ocea­nia was at war with Eura­sia in­stead, I don’t want to call that deep model di­ver­gence, com­ing from a differ­ent on­tol­ogy, or weigh­ing com­pli­cated trade­offs be­tween paradigms. Or at least, there’s more to the story than that. The di­ver­gence be­tween this per­son’s deep model and mine isn’t just a ran­dom ac­ci­dent such that I should humbly ac­cept that the Out­side View says they’re as likely to be right as me. Un­com­mon pri­ors re­quire ori­gin dis­putes, but in this case, I have a pretty strong can­di­date for an ori­gin dis­pute that has some­thing to do with the the Outer Party mem­ber be­ing ter­rified of the Ministry of Love. And I think that what goes for sub­jects of a to­tal­i­tar­ian state who fear be­ing tor­tured and mur­dered, also goes in a much sub­tler form for up­per-mid­dle class peo­ple in the Bay Area who fear not get­ting in­vited to par­ties.

  Ob­vi­ously, this isn’t li­cense to in­dis­crim­i­nately say, “You’re just say­ing that be­cause you’re afraid of not get­ting in­vited to par­ties!” to any idea you dis­like. (After all, I, too, pre­fer to get in­vited to par­ties.) But it is rea­son to be in­ter­ested in mod­el­ing this class of dis­tor­tion on peo­ple’s be­liefs.

• Zack_M_Davis 15 Aug 2019 3:00 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Par­tial sum­mary of de­bate with Ben­quo and Jes­si­cata [pt 1]

  I think Ben­quo has of­ten mixed the third thing in with the first thing (and sort of skipped over the sec­ond thing?), which I con­sider ac­tively harm­ful to the epistemic health of the dis­course.

  Ques­tion: do you mean this as a strictly de­no­ta­tive claim (Ben­quo is, as a mat­ter of ob­jec­tive fact, mix­ing the things, which is, as a mat­ter of fact, ac­tively harm­ful to the dis­course, with no blame what­so­ever im­plied), or are you ac­cus­ing Ben­quo of wrong­do­ing?

• Zack_M_Davis 15 Aug 2019 2:58 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Par­tial sum­mary of de­bate with Ben­quo and Jes­si­cata [pt 1]

  That makes sense. I, per­son­ally, am in­ter­ested in de­vel­op­ing new ter­minol­ogy for talk­ing about not-nec­es­sar­ily-con­scious-and-yet-sys­tem­at­i­cally-de­cep­tive cog­ni­tive al­gorithms, where Ben and Jes­sica think that “lie”/​”fraud”/​&c. are fine and cor­rect.

• Zack_M_Davis 14 Aug 2019 22:56 UTC

  22 points

  on: Par­tial sum­mary of de­bate with Ben­quo and Jes­si­cata [pt 1]

  I define clar­ity in terms of what gets un­der­stood, rather than what gets said.

  Defin­ing clar­ity in terms of what gets un­der­stood re­sults in obfus­ca­tion win­ning au­to­mat­i­cally, by effec­tively giv­ing veto power to mo­ti­vated mi­s­un­der­stand­ings. (As Up­ton Sin­clair put it, “It is difficult to get a man to un­der­stand some­thing when his salary de­pends upon his not un­der­stand­ing it,” or as Eliezer Yud­kowsky put it more re­cently, “poli­ti­cally mo­ti­vated in­com­pre­hen­sion makes peo­ple dumber than cas­sette tape recorders.”)

  If we may be per­mit­ted to bor­row some con­cepts from law (while be­ing wary of un­wanted trans­fer of puni­tive in­tu­tions), we may want con­cepts of willful blind­ness, or clar­ity to the “rea­son­able per­son”.

  poli­tics back­pro­pogates into truth­seek­ing, causes peo­ple to view truth­seek­ing norms as a poli­ti­cal weapon.

  Imag­ine that this had already hap­pened. How would you go about start­ing to fix it, other than by try­ing to de­scribe the prob­lem as clearly as pos­si­ble (that is, “in­vent[ing] truth­seek­ing-poli­tics-on-the-fly”)?

• Zack_M_Davis 13 Aug 2019 3:59 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Zack_M_Davis's comment on: Could we solve this email mess if we all moved to paid emails?

  3 karma in 21 votes (in­clud­ing a self-strong-up­vote)

  Ac­tu­ally, jeez, the great-grand­par­ent doesn’t de­serve that self-strong-up­vote; let me re­vise that to a no-self-vote.

• Zack_M_Davis 13 Aug 2019 3:52 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai's comment on: Could we solve this email mess if we all moved to paid emails?

  Thanks, the hob­by­horse/​de­railing con­cern makes sense. (I no­ticed that too, but only af­ter I posted the com­ment.) I think go­ing for­ward I should en­deavor to be much more re­served about im­pul­sively com­ment­ing in this equiv­alence class of situ­a­tion. A bet­ter plan: draft the im­pul­sive com­ment, but don’t post it, in­stead sav­ing it as raw ma­te­rial for the fu­ture top-level post I was plan­ning to even­tu­ally write any­way.

  Luck­ily the karma sys­tem was here to keep me ac­countable and pre­vent my bad blog com­ment from show­ing up too high on the page (3 karma in 21 votes (in­clud­ing a self-strong-up­vote), a poor show­ing for me).

• Zack_M_Davis 12 Aug 2019 3:28 UTC

  −1 points

  on: Could we solve this email mess if we all moved to paid emails?

  some­one in ra­tio­nal­ity [...] the com­mu­nity [...] many ra­tio­nal­ists [...] the col­lec­tive ac­tion prob­lem of how to al­lo­cate our at­ten­tion as a com­mu­nity. [...] within the ra­tio­nal­ity com­mu­nity [...] pos­i­tive effects on the community

  What com­mu­nity?

  The prob­lems with email that you men­tion are real and im­por­tant. I’m glad that peo­ple are try­ing to solve it. If you think one par­tic­u­lar solu­tion (such as earn.com) is un­usu­ally good and you want it to win, then it might make sense for you to do some mar­ket­ing work on their be­half, such as the post you just wrote.

  What I don’t un­der­stand (or rather, what I un­der­stand all too well and now wish to warn against af­ter re­al­iz­ing just how hor­ribly it’s fucked with my abil­ity to think in a way that I am only just now be­gin­ning to re­cover from) is this in­ces­tu­ous CliqueBot-like be­hav­ior that makes peo­ple think in terms of send­ing email to “some­one in ra­tio­nal­ity”, rather than just send­ing email to some­one.

  In the late ’aughts, Eliezer Yud­kowsky wrote a bunch of re­ally in­sight­ful blog posts about how to think. I think they got col­lected into a book? I can’t recom­mend that book enough—it’s re­ally great stuff. (“AI to Zom­bies” is lame sub­ti­tle, though.) Prob­a­bly there are some other good blog posts on the less­wrong.com web­site, too? (At least, I like mine.)

  But this doesn’t mean you should think of the vague cluster of peo­ple who have been in­fluenced by that book as a co­her­ent group, “ra­tio­nal­ists”, the al­lo­ca­tion of whose at­ten­tion is a col­lec­tive ac­tion prob­lem (more so than any other num­ber of similar clusters of peo­ple like “biol­o­gists”, or “en­trepreneurs”, or “peo­ple with IQs above 120″). Par­tic­u­larly since men­tally con­flat­ing ra­tio­nal­ity (the true struc­ture of sys­tem­at­i­cally cor­rect rea­son­ing) with the cen­tral so­cial ten­dency of so-called “ra­tio­nal­ists” (peo­ple who so­cially be­long to a par­tic­u­lar in­su­lar Bay Area-cen­tered sub­cul­ture) is likely to cause in­for­ma­tion cas­cades, as peo­ple who naïvely take the “ra­tio­nal­ist” brand name liter­ally tend to blindly trust the dom­i­nant “ra­tio­nal­ist” opinion as the cor­rect one, with­out ac­tu­ally check­ing whether “the com­mu­nity” is do­ing the kind of in­for­ma­tion pro­cess­ing that would re­sult in sys­tem­at­i­cally cor­rect opinions.

  And if you speak over­much of the Way you will not at­tain it.

• Zack_M_Davis 12 Aug 2019 0:11 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov's comment on: Power Buys You Dis­tance From The Crime

  In gen­eral, it shouldn’t be pos­si­ble to ex­pect well-known sys­tem­atic dis­tor­tions for any rea­son, be­cause they should’ve been re­cal­ibrated away im­me­di­ately.

  Hm. Is “well-known” good enough here, or do you ac­tu­ally need com­mon knowl­edge? (I ex­pect you to be bet­ter than me at work­ing out the math here.) If it’s liter­ally the case that ev­ery­body knows that we’re not talk­ing about con­flict the­o­ries, then I agree that ev­ery­one can just take that into ac­count and not be con­fused. But the func­tion of taboos, silenc­ing tac­tics, &c. among hu­mans would seem to be main­tain­ing a state where ev­ery­one doesn’t know.

• Zack_M_Davis 11 Aug 2019 19:25 UTC

  23 points

  in reply to: Ben Pace's comment on: Power Buys You Dis­tance From The Crime

  Con­flict the­o­ries tends to ex­plode and eat up com­mu­nal re­sources in com­mu­ni­ties and on the in­ter­net gen­er­ally, and are a limited (though nec­es­sary) re­source that I want to use with great cau­tion.

  But are the­o­ries that tend to ex­plode and eat up com­mu­nal re­sources there­fore less likely to be true? If not, then avoid­ing them for the sake of pre­serv­ing com­mu­nal re­sources is a sys­tem­atic dis­tor­tion on the com­mu­nity’s be­liefs.

  The dis­tor­tion is prob­a­bly fine for most hu­man com­mu­ni­ties: keep­ing the peace with your co-re­li­gion­ists is more im­por­tant than do­ing sys­tem­at­i­cally cor­rect rea­son­ing, be­cause re­li­gions aren’t try­ing to suc­ceed by means of do­ing sys­tem­at­i­cally cor­rect rea­son­ing. But if there is to be such a thing as a ra­tio­nal­ity com­mu­nity speci­fi­cally, maybe com­mu­nal re­sources that can be de­stroyed by the truth, should be.

  (You said this el­se­where in the thread: “the goal is to have one’s be­liefs cor­re­spond to re­al­ity—to use a con­flict the­ory when that’s true, a mis­take the­ory when that’s true”.)