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Absolute denial for atheists
This article is a deliberate meta-troll. To be successful I need your trolling cooperation. Now hear me out.
In The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You Eliezer talks about asognostics, who have one of their arm paralyzed, and what's most interesting are in absolute denial of this - in spite of overwhelming evidence that their arm is paralyzed they will just come with new and new rationalizations proving it's not.
Doesn't it sound like someone else we know? Yes, religious people! In spite of heaps of empirical evidence against existence of their particular flavour of the supernatural, internal inconsistency of their beliefs, and perfectly plausible alternative explanations being well known, something between 90% and 98% of humans believe in the supernatural world, and is in a state of absolute denial not too dissimilar to one of asognostics. Perhaps as many as billions of people in history have even been willing to die for their absurd beliefs.
We are mostly atheists here - we happen not to share this particular delusion. But please consider an outside view for a moment - how likely is it that unlike almost everyone else we don't have any other such delusions, for which we're in absolute denial of truth in spite of mounting heaps of evidence?
If the delusion is of the kind that all of us share it, we won't be able to find it without building an AI. We might have some of those - it's not too unlikely as we're a small and self-selected group.
What I want you to do is try to trigger absolute denial macro in your fellow rationalists! Is there anything that you consider proven beyond any possibility of doubt by both empirical evidence and pure logic, and yet saying it triggers automatic stream of rationalizations in other people? Yes, I pretty much ask you to troll, but it's a good kind of trolling, and I cannot think of any other way to find our delusions.
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Comments (571)
I find atheists reactive to a complex notion of self where there is no unified singular consistent self. This illusion is pervasive.
There is no rational argument against quantum suicide and the truth of it easily tested. The longer you live without knowing about quantum suicide, the less optimal your life will turn out. At the same time, you cannot look to anyone else's success as social proof for you to do it, you have to be the first.
If anything like Robin's Mangled Worlds theory is true, quantum suicide would be a bad idea. You would end up living only in worlds of small measure that get mangled by worlds with larger measure in which you are dead.
If you think you're going to have a net positive impact on the world, it makes sense to be present in all the Everett branches you can.
Especially if you consider your own alive-and-well presence a positive property of the world.
I don't know if this is a common counter-argument or not, but you have to be very careful with your suicide, so that the next most likely outcome is not to give you horrible permanent injuries. It seems to me that if the whole multi-universe theory is correct, then at the end of your life, the next most likely outcome to death is another painful last gasp. And another. And so forth..
Also, many people include the happiness of others in their utility function and a quantum suicide would do harm to your friends and family.
If you have worked out the suicide correctly, you should also make bets that you're going to survive. If you lose, you've lost nothing, and if quantum suicide works then you come out richer.
This idea feel a lot like manifesting/affirmations to me.
Wow, this is such an utterly terrible idea that I can't even tell if it's a terrible idea or pure genius. Or something in between. I wonder if it'll work...
Artificial Intelligence is impossible.
Everyone currently alive is going to die.
Humans are not more valuable or significant than other species on Earth. We have simply adapted our definition of success to contain the things we do anyway.
X-Rationalism is a signaling behavior by awkward, socially isolated nerds who've been raised by a diet of bad science fiction to think they're special. The reason why rationalists aren't ruling the world is because 'rationalism' consists of nothing but reading the works of smarter people, nodding sagely, and then stealing their vocabulary wholesale.
As elucidated by Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption and Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate, and completely contrary to our current cultural fad of attributing all neurosis to the failure of parents to properly nurture their children, parenting has close to zero effect on how children turn out. How our peers interact with us has a far greater impact on personality development than whatever our parents do or don't do, whether they abuse us, slather us with affection every day, ignore us, constantly berate us, constantly tell us we are wonderful, et cetera.
No, I'm pretty sure PTSD from parental abuse is a real phenomenon.
Wow. Well I see that my comment has been downvoted out of existence, which I'm pretty sure means that it is a perfect example of that the original post was looking for. FWIW, people hating on this would do well to at least LOOK at the books to which I linked in my comment. Harris' book in particular is beautifully and rigorously argued, and very useful. The chapter in Pinker is a nice encapsulation.
As I'm seeing it right after you made this comment, your comment has been downvoted to -1. That's certainly not "out of existence", nor even worth commenting on. On net, one out of the myriad readers here didn't think your comment was high-quality - wowzers.
Does this really count as our current culture? As an example, autism was being blamed on parenting style in 1950 but that blame has been successfully opposed by parent lobbies, to the point where I don't think it's the sort of thing that can be mentioned on public television without career damage. (It also appears that there may be some justification for the claim that parenting style causes or exacerbates autism, but that's not the sort of question people are willing to pay for the answer for.)
More of an empirical evidence thing, with some logic supporting it: For the vast majority of people, their fat percentage says nothing about their health or how well they're living their lives. The cultural opposition to fatness is status-driven, and should be viewed as signaling gone out of control.
The demand for leanness has made people's lives (including their health) generally worse rather than better.
This looks like evidence against that to me. See also this. (All that publicity for anorexic models is still a Bad Thing, but “opposition to fatness” needn't mean endorsement of emaciation; the latter is signalling gone out of control.)
ETA: FWIW, all other things being equal I feel better (e.g. more stamina) when I'm slimmer; YMMV.
Does anyone really deny this? Or is it simply not socially appropriate to say you want to look better?
There's really no chance that people are going to stop discussing "attractive women" (specifically, the sexual favors of attractive women) as objects that can and should be be attained under the right circumstances, is there? :(
I think it is unethical (not necessarily "irrational") to discuss and think of women (or men) as suitable objects of manipulation. If you had been actually talking about the production and sale of porn, I'd be more forgiving; porn (like purchasing the services of prostitutes, which I've also acknowledged as non-manipulative) is at least honest, in the sense that everybody knows what porn is for.
...Thought crime? Really? That's what you get from me saying that it's unethical to think of people as suitable objects of manipulation? Yes, I used the word "think", but the emphasis was really on "suitable". I could have used the phrasing "it's inappropriate to be disposed to manipulate people", or "the opinion that people are suitable targets of manipulation will tend to lead to manipulation, which is wrong" or "the ethically relevant belief that people are suitable targets of manipulation is false", or "to speak of people as suitable objects of manipulation reflects an ethically abhorrent facet of the speaker's personality" - and meant more or less the same thing. Is that clearer?
"it's inappropriate to be disposed to manipulate people" "the opinion that people are suitable targets of manipulation will tend to lead to manipulation, which is wrong" "the ethically relevant belief that people are suitable targets of manipulation is false"
Ahem... Why? To me, these claims seem baseless and to some great degree, false.
It would seem that you and I disagree on matters of ethics, then - probably on an awfully basic level.
I suspect you're using the word "manipulation" to mean different things.
For that matter, a lot of "manipulation" goes on in Brennan's world, it's expected on all sides, they don't think of themselves as immoral because of it, and I would go ahead and endorse that aspect of their fictional existence. I think that it's manipulation of someone who isn't expecting manipulation which is the main ethical problem.
I'd phrase it a little bit differently, but overall, yeah, I'd accept that position. That is, I basically agree with you here.
Alternately (probably a bit more general but, I think, capturing the main relevant offensive bits) "goal systems which do not assign inherent terminal value to persons, but only see them in terms of instrumental value are immoral goal systems."
No, it's OK. If you go off of his source, women want to be objectified, so it's no harm, no foul. You just don't know it yet. Brilliant, right?
Seriously, though, he's deriving his theory from someone who evaluates the worth of men by their ability to score with attractive women [Edit: phrase removed]. The theory is more complicated than that, but, really, it's not that much more complicated.
(In case it's not entirely clear from the above, I emphatically don't endorse this view.)
Barring full-scale banhammer wielding... probably not, I'm afraid.
Do please try to understand that for many men, lack of sex is sort of like missing your heroin dosage - at least that's the metaphor Spider Robinson used. Anyone in this condition is probably going to go on about it, and if you're not starving at the moment you should try to have a little sympathy.
(EDIT: Of course, blathering about "attractive women" on a rationalist website and thereby driving rationalist women away from your own hangouts, and ignoring the fact that what you do is ticking off particular women, is extremely counterproductive behavior in this circumstance; but that's probably meta-level thinking that's beyond most people missing a heroin dosage. Men missing sex seem remarkably insensitive to what actually drives away women, just as women missing men are remarkably insensitive to such considerations as "Where does demand exceed supply?")
There's a few important differences (for instance, heroin is not a person that can read this site and be made to feel unwelcome), but I'm sure you know that.
Why would you assume that? Is there some reason it seems more likely to you that I'm having regular sex and therefore am completely without the ability to sympathize, than that I just don't objectify people even if I haven't had a fix of person lately?
Would that matter if you were missing a heroin dosage? Would you be able to pause that long to think about it, even if the actual consequence of your actions were to drive the heroin dosages away?
To be blunt about this, human beings with XX chromosomes who experience equal or greater emotional pain for a given level of sex deprivation as the average human being with an XY chromosome are rare. Not nonexistent, but rare. A man experiencing or remembering the pain of sex deprivation is justified in assuming that the prior probabilities are strongly against a randomly selected woman being able to directly empathize with that pain.
How in the world would this be possible to know, unless you're using some kind of behaviorist account of pain?
I'd suggest reading the Hite Reports on Male / Female Sexuality, say. The number one complaint of married men, by far, is about insufficient frequency of sex.
Similarly: If the expression "After three days without sex, life becomes meaningless" doesn't seem to square with your experience...
Similarly: http://www.wetherobots.com/2008/01/07/youve-been-misinformed/
Similarly: The vast majority of people who pay money (the unit of caring) to alleviate sex deprivation are men.
Given the statistical evidence, the anecdotal evidence, and the obvious evo-psych rationale, I'm willing to draw conclusions about internal experience.
I'll see if I can find the Hite Reports. As for the other things you mention:
I have never heard that expression before. Do some people actually, seriously believe that life is literally meaningless after three days without sex [that involves another person, I assume, since if solo sex did the trick there would be no reason for anybody without a crippling disability to get to this point]? Why are there not more suicides, if this is the case?
I have read that comic before. I don't think this demonstrates anything other than that the male characters are less picky about how they satisfy their desires than the female character. Suppose you deprived me and some other person of food for 24 hours and then put us in a room with a lot of mint candy. The other person would probably eat some mints; I wouldn't, because eating mint causes me pain. Would you think this yielded information about how hunger felt to me and the other person? (Note: of course I would eat mint if I were starving or even about to suffer serious malnutrition, but you can't die of deprivation of sex with other people.)
Women who are willing to have sex with strangers (which comprise just about 100% of the class of prostitutes) can, for the most part, get it for free (or get paid to have it!) with trivial ease. Of course fewer women pay for it: the thing that is for sale (sex with a stranger) is not what women tend to want.
It seems to me that the conclusion to draw isn't (at least not necessarily) that men experience worse suffering when they don't have sex, but that "sex" does not just mean "friction with a warm human body" to women, and so it can't be had as easily as you think.
But drawing from this evidence that lack of sex for many (most?) men is emotionally equivalent to heroine withdraw seems a bit much.
In the very least if this were the case I would expect some direct evidence, rather than a list of things which could be chalked up to the differences in how men and women have been trained to spend money and words on the subject of sex.
So from evidence that men, on average, report/perform greater suffering from lack of sex, you can conclude that a specific woman has never felt as much sexual frustration as a specific man, or indeed, anything similar enough to allow for empathy? That seems far from airtight.
It's also worth noting that there are a great many men who seek physical and emotional intimacy from other men. So if your hypothesis is that men objectify their potential partners solely because their intimacy is temporarily unavailable, then a small but consistent portion of the partner-as-object-to-be-won rhetoric would be about men, which I have not observed.
You do realize, I hope, that there are more than 2 ways for sex to express itself in humans, and humans can have a chromosomal arrangement that is contrary to their phenotypic sex. See XX male syndrome and Androgen insensitivity syndrome for just a couple of the many examples. Admittedly, generalizing from about 99% of the population doesn't seem like too bad of an epistemic move, but it's something to keep in mind.
Of course it is well known that men on average have a higher sex drive than women on average, but I think the analogy to drug addiction or starving is ridiculous hyperbole. For just one thing, starving people and heroin addicts do not have the option of simply learning to masturbate.
Masturbation is not sex. If the only good thing about sex is having an orgasm, you're doing it wrong!
(That's not to say the analogy to heroin addiction is a reasonable one.)
No, but it should be similar enough to break the analogy to starvation or heroin deprivation.
Well, that seems right, but allow me to clarify.
To use the food analogy, masturbation is like subsisting on flavorless but nutritionally adequate food, the proverbial "bread and water." Sex with someone who finds you desirable is more like that rich, delicious dessert that advertisers hope you've been fantasizing about recently. (Note the with someone who finds you desirable. It's important.)
If we have to use the drug metaphor, masturbation is more like giving a heroin addict all the methadone he wants.
Pornography may reduce rape though I haven't investigated the methodology too thoroughly. If true, it is certainly another sign that lack of sexual satisfaction is a big problem.
The heroin metaphor certainly entails exaggeration, but I'm undecided as to whether that makes it inappropriate. Do you have a proposed substitute?
What I wish you meant by this: "...so of course we're warming up the banhammer now!"
What you seem by this: "...so we won't be doing a thing to make this a space any less toxic for an inexplicably underrepresented majority."
I was really hoping this would be a come-for-the-fan-fiction-stay-for-the-awesome-forum situation, but if this community's priorities are accurately reflected (and please, please do prove me wrong) by the response "Come back and ask us to respect your humanity once everyone else has gotten their rocks off," then that is...exceedingly disappointing.
If I were missing my heroin dosage, I weren't able to do all that smart discussion going on here.
May I make a suggestion:
In many contexts like this, we need to replace "sex" with "intimacy." Or simply "attention."
It's not very masculine to admit it, but we men want love, too, or to at least to feel like we're desired by somebody. From what I've read, a prostitute is someone who a man pays to pretend to desire him while he masturbates using her body, and a lot of men aren't interested in that sort of thing.
Actually, it's something of a cliche that the more a sex worker is paid, the less important sex is the interaction, such that it becomes a smaller portion of the time spent, or perhaps doesn't occur at all.
(Where my information comes from: my wife runs a "sex shop" (selling products, not people!), and I was once approached by one of her customers to do a website for a prostitute review service, and I looked over some of the review materials, as well as some existing review sites to understand the industry and its competition before I declined the job. A significant portion of what gets reviewed on these "hobbyist" sites (as they're called) relate to a prositute's personality and demeanor, not her physique or sexual proficiency per se. Certainly, this only correlates with what guys who post prostitute reviews on the internet want, but it's an interesting correlation, nonetheless.)
I've heard that, too. As I said earlier, as far as I can tell, men tend to want girlfriends more than they want sex toys that have a woman's body, and some women are better actors than others. If I were to hire an escort, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between someone who was genuinely interested in me and someone who was acting, and I don't want to pay someone to deceive me.
Incidentally, there's a disturbing similarity between hiring an escort and hiring a therapist - you're paying someone to act like they're interested in you, even if they're not.
The whole "must have sex with attractive women" thing is just a catch phrase used in the pick-up community. Actually, most of the people who read such forums/blogs, and even the PUAs themselves are normal people who just want a normal relationship with a normal girl. I think this is especially true of the "beta males". It's just that some of these people are full of cynicism and frustration, which explains why it may all sound like an insult to some women (women viewed as objects, etc).
I would suggest that every time you see women or sex being discussed here, just interpret it as a discussion on how to solve a problem one might have with women, or as a general discussion on how one can improve with women. Which is what it actually means. The exact words used shouldn't bother you as long as you understand what underlies them.
Since you've been so generous with advice about how I should read such conversations, I'll return the favor. I suggest that every time you see a woman complain about how her gender is being discussed, you interpret it as (most likely) an identification of an actual problem that actually hurts an actual person, which identification you were unable to make because you are not a member of the victimized group, and too insensitive to pick up on such issues when they don't apply to you. Also, when I call you insensitive, you should understand that I only mean that you don't have the capacity to pick up on this one thing and I'm not making a sweeping statement about your personality - the exact word I use shouldn't bother you as long as you understand what underlies it.
I'm surprised by this response. What I suggested is that most guys here don't really want to have random sex with random women, they don't view women as objects that they can just use, or anything to that effect. And that the pick up community jargon and writings generally do not reflect what the average guy wants either.
Does this strike you as wrong?
I realize now that my "suggestion" may have sounded as if I'm denying that there is a problem or that I'm ignoring it. I'm not, I was just pointing out the above.
If they don't really want that and don't really view women that way, why do they persist in talking as though they do? I'd chalk it up to a simple error of linguistic expression if they didn't get so defensive when called on it.
Men are not broken women, so the way we speak is not actually an "error".
Don't get me wrong, though: a man who thinks that women's language around mating matters is repulsive or in "error" is making exactly the same mistake: women aren't broken men either.
Both men and women are certainly better off trying to translate their language when specifically speaking to the other, as well as trying to translate the language of others when listening.
However, neither language has some sort of blessed status that makes the other one an "error", simply because someone is repulsed as a result of having mistaken what language an utterance was made in.
You're just not trying anymore, are you. Lightwave said that some people did not mean to say the things they appeared to be saying. I said that I would think that the disparity between the things said and the things meant was a simple mistake of expression if people did not consistently defend their statements as originally phrased. And now you're bringing in irrelevant nonsense about men not being broken women? What did I say that remotely resembled that?
You said:
and further referred to it as an "error of linguistic expression".
I am saying that it's not an error. That women would generally use different words to describe the same thing does not mean that the man was in error to use those words. Those are the most correct and concise words in male language for what was said.
Many things that are said by men in few words must be said in many words for a woman to understand them, just as the reverse is true for things that women can say briefly to each other but require a lengthier explanation for a man to understand. This is normal and expected, since each gender has different common reference experiences, and therefore different shorthand.
What doesn't make any bloody sense is to insist that men (OR women) translate their every utterance into the other gender's language in advance of any question, then treat it as some terrible faux pas or "ethical violation" to fail to do so, or to classify the (correct-in-its-own-langauge) utterance as "linguistic error".
(Because to do so is basically to take the position that men are broken women (or vice versa).)
Instead, the reasonable/rational thing to do is, if you understand what was meant, then leave it alone. If you don't understand, ask politely. If you accidentally misunderstand and get into an argument, stop when you do understand, instead of blaming the other person for not having thought to translate their language to use another gender's reference experiences.
Is that clearer now?
What. The. Heck. You do not get your own language. If people use language that is hurtful, objectifying, and sexist, they do not get the excuse that they have an idiolect in which those things are magically no longer hurtful, objectifying, and sexist (all of which are bad things to be). It just does not work that way.
Okay, I'll try it on you. I think I understand what you meant, so it's not okay for me to feel any way at all about how you said it, or to care if you were rude, or to think that it reflects on your character if you go about saying hurtful things... hm, that doesn't seem to be the right thing to do. Maybe I didn't understand you. But when I have tried in the past to ask you what you mean, you have not been helpful. Perhaps what happened was that I accidentally misunderstood you and got into an argument. I should chalk that up to you being male, even though I know plenty of males who do not say such things - wait, that doesn't make sense either. Do you have other, less patronizing recommendations in your bag of tricks?
That's funny, as about half of the comments on this thread that thought the language was inappropriate were by males. Hiding behind your gender is no excuse for being insensitive and offensive. Use "I support talking this way because I'm a rude person", not "I support talking this way because I am male". Leave the rest of us out of it.
You are always talking about NLP, so I expect you to know that the meaning of a statement is the reaction it gets in the person you are talking to. So if you are making statements that drive away women then either you mean to drive away women or you are making an error.
If, as you say, a man is unable to identify and insensitive to the problem reflected in his statement, and you point it out in a way that comes across primarily as an accusation of bad character (when his statement seems to be weak evidence that he has this form of bad character), it's not surprising that he would get defensive.
Alicorn writes,
I want you to continue to participate here, Alicorn. And I want to increase the female: male ratio in the rationalist/ altruistic/ selfless/ global-situation community. So if you [ever see me][1] using language that objectifies women or that alienates you, please let me know.
seconded.
How do you – or how does anyone – think Roko's sentiment could have been rephrased to not come across as objectifying? The only change obvious to me is making it clear that money and status are not sufficient conditions for sexual success, but I doubt that's a significant part of the problem.
See here.
The idea deserves some objective light shedding on it. It's easy to pick out cases where beautiful women and high-status (not necessarily rich) men choose to affiliate, but are the two groups really more likely to hang out together? Or is this a sort of male-evolutionary-psyche mirage, which is always over the next status hill?
Probably not.
(It might be worth noting that people often do talk this way about other classes of people. Employer-employee relations tend to be treated similarly; "How to get a job" discussion is as often as impersonal as "how to get laid" discussion. It's still a bigger problem when the topic is the sexual favors of women with conventionally attractive bodies, though.)
(You might want to ignore the preceding comment. I just feel compelled to nitpick everything I can. Assume good faith, and all that.)
Well, it's probably at least the same chance that Cosmo's covers are going to stop discussing men's love and commitment as "objects that can and should be attained under the right circumstances". ;-)
Or of course, we could just assume that when people talk about doing things in order to attract a mate, that:
It's hard to buy the idea that it's not supposed to have to do with objects or attainment when the phrasing looks like:
You could just as easily say the same thing about cars or a nice house or something else readily available for sale. I wouldn't mind if the mate-seeking potential of money and status was discussed indirectly in a way that didn't make it sound like there is a ChickMart where you can go out and buy attractive women. "If I were a millionaire I could easily support a family", "if I were a millionaire I would have more free time to spend on seeking a girlfriend" - even "if I were a millionaire I could afford the attention of really classy prostitutes", because at least the prostitutes are outright selling their services. It's probably not even crossing the line to say something like "if I were a millionaire I would be more attractive to women".
Depending on whether you and I have the same working definition of "substantive", the following:
In the first statement, but not the second, the women are not "gotten" as an open-and-shut act of obtainment. They are only attracted (and that's assuming that the empirical claim is true).
In the first statement but not the second, the improvement to the person's attractiveness is described only as an improvement, not as a binary switch from not having extremely attractive women to having them.
In the second statement but not the first, the women singled out are a particular narrow group selected for that are implied to be the only ones of interest or import.
How's this different from women's magazines having articles on how to "get" a man? Is this not idiomatically equivalent to "be more attractive to more-attractive men"? If so, then why the double standard?
Meanwhile, the reason that the phrasing was vague is because it's an appropriate level of detail for what was specified: men with more money have more access to mating opportunity for all of the reasons you mention, and possibly more besides. Why exhaustively catalog them in every mention of the fact, especially since different individuals likely differ in their specific routes or preferences for the "getting"? (Men and women alike.)
What double standard? Did anyone here claim that using language that teats men as objects is fine? Is Cosmo now supposed to be our standard of excellence?
Do you have some evidence that I approve of that feature of women's magazines, or are you just making it up? I find it equally repulsive, I just haven't found that particular behavior duplicated here so I haven't mentioned it.
If concision is all that was intended, there are still other, less repellent ways to say it ("If I were a millionaire, my money and status might influence people to think better of me", leaving it implied that some of these people will be women and some of these women might have sex with the millionaire.) Or it could have been left out.
So you find goal-oriented mating behavior offensive in both men and women. What's your reasoning for that? Does it enhance your life to find normal human behavior offensive? What rational benefit does it provide to you or others?
And we could call atheism agnosticism so as not to offend the religious. For what reason should we do that, instead of simply saying what is meant?
What kind of rationalism permits a mere truth to be offensive, and require it to be omitted from polite discussion? Truths we don't like are still truths.
I did not use the word "offensive" (or for that matter "goal-oriented mating behavior"), and I'd appreciate if you would refrain from substituting inexact synonyms when you interpret what I say. (You specifically; you seem bad at it. Other people have had better luck.)
There is a difference between upsetting people who hold a certain belief, and upsetting people who were born with a particular gender.
What "mere truth" do you mean to pick out here, anyway? I have made some ethical claims and announced that I am repelled by the failure to adhere to the standards I mentioned. I'm not "offended" by any facts, I'm repulsed by a behavior.
If I didn't do that, how would we know we weren't understanding each other? Now at least I can try to distinguish "offensive" from "repulsive", and ask what term you would use in place of "goal-oriented mating behavior" that applies to what you find repulsive about both men and women choosing their actions with an intent to influence attractive persons of an appropriate sex to engage in mating behaviors with them?
That men and women do stuff to "get" mates. This was what the original poster stated, that you appeared to object to the mere discussion of, and have further said that you wished people wouldn't mention directly, only by way of euphemism or substitution of more-specific phrases.
I guess I missed them. All I heard you saying was that it's bad to talk about men "getting" women by having money. Are you saying it's unethical that it happens, or that it's unethical to discuss it? I think I'm confused now.
Which behavior? Seeking mates, or talking about the fact that people do?
You seem to be implying that it's your gender that makes you repulsed, but that makes no sense to me. I assume the women's magazines that sell on the basis of "getting" men would not do so if the repulsion [that I understand you to be saying] you have were universal to your gender, AND it were not a sexist double standard.
I've been using "objectification" to label the set of behaviors of which I disapprove. (It isn't the only one, but it's the most important here.)
I claim that it is unethical to objectify people. By "objectify", I mean to think of, talk about as, or treat like a non-person. A good heuristic is to see how easily a given sentence could be reworked to have as a subject something inanimate instead of a person. For instance, if someone says, "If I were rich, I'd have a nice house and a sports car and girls falling over themselves to be with me", the fact that the girls appear as an item in a list along with a vehicle and a dwelling would be a giant red flag. The sample substitute, "If I were a millionaire, my money and status might influence people to think better of me", would not make sense if you changed "people" to "cars", because cars do not think. This heuristic is imperfect, and some statements may be objectifying even if their applicability is limited to persons. Likewise, there are statements that can be made about people that are not really objectifying even if you could say them about non-people (e.g. "So-and-so is five feet six inches tall"; "that bookshelf is five feet six inches tall".)
The behavior that I am repulsed by is the behavior of objectification. The fact that people objectify is simply true. The action of people actually objectifying causes me to castigate the objectifiers in question, whether they are doing so in the course of actively seeking mates or not.
pjeby: Can you subjectively discriminate brain states of yours with high medial prefrontal cortex activity and brain states of yours with low medial prefrontal cortex activity? What behavior is primed by each brain state?
Alicorn has intuited that brain states with low mPFC activity prime rationalization of oppression and collusion in oppression. Alicorn also intuits that that signals of social approval of intuitively distinguished brain states characterized by low mPFC activity, as well as absence of signals of social disapproval of intuitively distinguished brain states characterized by low mPFC activity, are signals of social approval of oppression and of willingness to collude in and rationalize oppression.
Also, Alicorn did not express these intuitions clearly.
(Also, on this subject: I think utilitarian moral theorizing and transhumanist moral theorizing are two other brain states that are, by most people, mainly intuitively distinguished as characterizable by low mPFC activity. This makes not signaling disapproval of utilitarianism or transhumanism feel like signaling approval of totalitarianism and slavery.)
[edit fix username capitalization]
Can I really be said to have intuited something that makes less than no sense to me?
I think you intuited that there are some states of mind that cause oppression of women when they are socially tolerated and approved. I also think you intuited that, if women see men in a forum saying things that might be expressions of those states of mind, and see that those things are tolerated, it will cause the women to feel uncomfortable in that forum. I think that your intuition does refer to a real difference between states of mind that can be objectively characterized. (I don't mean to say that you intuited that mPFC measurements were part of that objective characterization.)
I think you're mistaken. I'm not a consequentialist! I can complain about some thing X without necessarily thinking it causes anything bad, and especially without thinking that X is a problem because it causes something bad. I think objectifying people in thought, word or deed is wrong. I can still think that the "thought" and "word" varieties of objectification are wrong even if they don't lead to the "deed" kind, so it's not at all necessary for me to have intuited the leap you suggest. That doesn't make it false, it just means you're reading your own views into mine.
But... if objectification never caused oppression, would you still want to complain about it or think it was wrong? Causally? In that world, what would be the cause of your wish to complain about it or think it was wrong?
My ethical views are based on rights. I think that people have the right to be thought of and spoken about as people, not as objects. Therefore, thinking or speaking of people as objects is a violation of that right. Therefore, under my ethical system, it is wrong, even if it really never went any farther.
But... if violations of rights never caused oppression, would you still want to complain about them or think they were wrong? Causally? In that world, what would be the cause of your wish to complain about them or think they were wrong?
I'm happy enough to accept that people should be spoken of as people. But I can't get my head round the idea that we have a right to the contents of other people's heads being a certain way.
But what does the word right mean to you? To me, it mostly means "the state does or should guarantee this". But I'm guessing that can't be what you have in mind.
Can rights conflict in your understanding of the term? Can you have a right to someone not thinking certain thoughts, while at the same time they have a right to think them anyway?
It's not against consequentialism to see some things as bad in themselves, not because they cause something else to be bad. It's easy to see: for it to be possible for something else to be bad, that something else needs to be bad in itself.
Wow, that's an awful lot of projection in a tiny space - both your projection onto her, and the projection you're projecting she's making.
I don't think that you can treat the mere use of the word "get" to imply the sort of states you're talking about, for several reasons.
First, I think it's interesting that the study in question did not have men look at people -- they looked at photographs of people. Photographs of people do not have intentions, so it'd be a bit strange to try to figure out the intentions of a photograph. (Also, human beings' tendency to dehumanize faceless persons is well-known; that's why they put hoods on people before they torture them.)
Second, I don't think that a man responding to a woman's body as if it were an object -- it is one, after all -- is a problem in and of itself, any more than I think it's a problem when my wife admires, say, the body of Jean Claude van Damme when he's doing one of those "splits" moves in one of his action movies. Being able to admire something that's attractive, independent of the fact that there's a person inside it, is not a problem, IMO.
After all, even the study you mention notes that only the sexist men went on to deactivate their mPFC... so it actually demonstrates the independence of enjoyment from oppression or objectification in the negative sense.
So, I'm not going to signal social disapproval of such admiration and enjoyment experiences, whether they're engaged in by men OR women. It's a false dichotomy to assume that the presence of "objective" thought is equal to the absence of subjective/empathic thought.
After all, my wife and I are both perfectly capable of treating each other as sex objects, or telling one another we want to "get some of that" in reference to each other's body parts without it being depersonalizing in the least. (Quite the opposite, in fact.)
We can also refer to someone else (male or female) as needing to "get some" without any hostile or depersonalizing intent towards the unspecified and indeterminate party from whom they would hypothetically be getting "some".
In short, both your own projections and the projections you project Alicorn to be making, are incorrect generalizations: even the study you reference doesn't support a link between "objectification" and low mPFC, except in people who are already sexist. You can't therefore use even evidence of "object-oriented" thinking (and the word "get" is extremely low quality evidence of such, anyway!) as evidence of sexism. The study doesn't support it, and neither does common sense.
Yes. But when women like Alicorn intuitively solve the signaling and negotiation game represented in their heads, using their prior belief distributions about mens' hidden qualities and dispositions, their beliefs about mens' utility functions conditional on disposition, and their own utility functions, then their solutions predict high costs for any strategy of tolerating objectifying statements by unfamiliar men of unknown quality. It's not about whether or not objectification implies oppressiveness with certainty. It's about whether or not women think objectification is more convenient or useful to unfamiliar men who are disposed to depersonalization and oppression, compared with its convenience or usefulness to unfamiliar men who are not disposed to depersonalization and oppression. If you want to change this, you have to either change some quantity in womens' intuitive representation of this signaling game, improve their solution procedure, or argue for a norm that women should disregard this intuition.
Change what? Your massive projection onto what "women like Alicorn" do? I'd think that'd be up to you to change.
Similarly, if I don't like what Alicorn is doing, and I can't convince her to change that, then it's my problem... just as her not being able to convince men to speak the way she wants is hers.
At some point, all problems are our own problems. You can ask other people to change, but then you can either accept the world as it is, or suffer needlessly.
(To forestall the inevitable analogies and arguments: "accept" does not mean "not try to change" - it means, "not react with negative emotion to". If you took the previous paragraph to mean that nobody should fight racism or sexism, you are mistaken. It's easier to change a thing you accept as a fact, because your brain is not motivated to deny it or "should" it away, and you can then actually pay attention to the human being whose behavior you'd like to change. You can't yell a racist or sexist into actually changing, only into being quiet. You can, however, educate and accept some people into changing. As the religious people say, "love the sinner, hate the sin"... only I go one step further and say you don't have to hate something in order to change it... and that it's usually easier if you don't.)
Shouldn't Less Wrong have a bit more subtlety and detail than Cosmo?
Do you want me to stop seeking sex with attractive women or to stop signaling that I like sex with attractive women?
Neither. I'd like you to be thoughtful of the independent personhood of attractive women when you think or talk about them, which would affect the structure and phrasing of your desires but not make much of a substantive change in them.
He sees the shape of the mesh, you see the fish caught in it. "Attractive" is a selection criterion, not yet a group of persons.
Related:
Envy Up and Contempt Down: Neural and Emotional Signatures of Social Hierarchies, presented by Susan T. Fiske, co-authors Mina Cikara and Ann Marie Russell, in the "Social Emotion and the Brain" session of the 2009 AAAS Meeting in Chicago (The Independent, Scientific American podcast, The Guardian, The Daily Princetonian, National Geographic, CNN, The Neurocritic)
The Independent:
Scientific American:
The Independent:
Scientific American:
Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low: Neuroimaging Responses to Extreme Out-Groups, by Lasana T. Harris and Susan T. Fiske:
This is interesting, but I fear that the authors and the media are over-interpreting the data. There is a whole lot of research that basically goes from "the same area of the brain lights up!" to a shaky conclusion.
This sounds like highly motivated research. I'm curious about their test for scoring sexism, and how they established validity for that. Also, that isn't really how brain scanners work. It's not really possible to make those kinds of high-level determinations.
A slightly different angle-- it's not just that attractive women (or their sexual favors) are presented as objects, it's that this sort of discussion seems to be set in a world where people at the same level of attractiveness are fungible. It seems like a world where no one likes anyone, or at least no one likes anyone they're in a sexual relationship with enough to be interested in the difference between one person of equivalent attractiveness and another.
I think the problem is risk aversion. If people take on such goals, and fail (which is not uncommon), they will be worse off than if they never fully embraced the goals in the first place.
Only if the failure is permanent. If 9 out of 10 businesses go under, that just means you have to be prepared/willing to start 10, and learn from your mistakes each time. ;-)
I'm not convinced that financial success actually increases your success with women, although I'd love it if that were true. I suspect that appearance and behavior play a bigger role as soon as you have an apartment, a car, and a cell phone.
That "free will", at least as commonly defined, is largely illusory.
The notion "a common notion of 'free will' exists" is largely illusory.
Eh, what the heck. Pretty sure I have one, even if I'm not sure whether saying it helps in any way.
"Vegetarianism is morally required. Trivially so. Producing meat involves large amounts of harm, and we would recognize that in most other situations. Worse still, it is actually quite easy and safe for everyone in most cultures."
[Regardless of the truth of this, I have definitely seen people's ADM triggered by it. It's kind of scary, actually.]
ETA: Oh, and slavery - you know the type I mean - seems likeit was a very localized ADM-creator. But I expect any LW-ers who are in favor it are such for ... other reasons.
I'd expect that if you ask a lot of people to post things that are true but which others deny for spurious reasons, you'd get the occasional thing which is true and denied for spurious reasons, and a whole lot of things which are believed with utter certainly and sincerity by that one person and are just wrong.
In other words, any idea listed here, including vegetarianism, is one which we ought to be skeptical of just by virtue of it being listed here. It's a simple Bayseian update on the probability that any given idea is right, given that this thread will predominantly be used to post wrong ideas.
Assuming the moderation of "beyond any possibility of doubt" I suggested in an earlier comment, I've already seen an example on this forum. The claim I make is:
"Achieving an intended result is not a task that necessitates either having a model or making predictions. In some cases, neither having a model nor attempting predictions are of any practical use at all."
(NB. I have not reread my earlier post in composing the above; searching out minor differences to seize on would be to the point only in exemplifying another type of rationalisation to add to those listed below.)
One strong thread running through the responses was to interpret the word "model" so as to make the claim false by definition, a redefinition blatantly at variance with all previous uses of the word in this very forum and its parent OB. Responses of that form stopped the moment I pointed out the previous record of its use.
Another thread was to change the above claim to something stronger and argue against that instead: the claim that models and prediction are never useful.
A third was to point to models elsewhere than in the examples of systems achieving purposes without models.
These reactions are invariable. I was not surprised to encounter them here.
A fourth reaction I've encountered (I'm not going to reexamine the comments to see if anyone here committed this) is to claim that it works, so there must be a model. Yet when pressed, they cannot point to it, cannot even say what claim they are making about the system. It's like hearing a Christian say "even if you're an atheist, if you did something good it must have been by receiving the grace of God".
Oh geez.
Richard, responses of that form stopped because it takes a long time to explain. I even had a response written up but didn't post it because I thought it was long enough to merit a top-level post. I still have it saved, though I've done some reworking to make it more applicable than just as a response to your post. (I've just unhidden it so you guys can take a gander. What follows borrows heavily from it)
To everyone not familiar with what happened, let me explain. Richard claimed that many successful control systems don't have "models" of their environment. Most people disagreed with that, not because of a need to shoehorn everything successful into "having a model", but because those systems met enough of the criteria to count as "having a model" in any other context. It's just that the whole time, Richard believed people meant something narrower when they said "model" than they really did.
So how did the other commenters use the term "model"? And how did Richard's differ? Well, for one thing, Richard seemed to think that something has to "make predictions" to count as a model. But this is a confusion: the person using the model makes a prediction, not the model itself.
If I have a computer model of some aircraft, well, that's just computer hardware with some switches set. It doesn't make any prediction, yet is unambiguously a model. Rather, what happens is that the model has mutual information with the phenomenon in quesiton, and the computer apparatus applies a transformation (input/output devices) to the model that makes it meaningful to people, who then use that knowledge to explicitly specify a prediction.
All along, I suspect, people were using the "mutual information" criterion to determine whether something "has a model" of something else, and this is why I tried to rephrase Richard's point with that more precise terminology. I think that comment clarified matters, and it showed the "meat" or Richard's point, which I still thought was a good point, just a bit overhyped.
In contrast, Richard did not offer an equally precise definition of what he meant when he said that:
As Vladimir_Nesov noted, that definition just hides the ambiguity in the term "corresponding". We already have a term that very precisely describes what is meant for things to "correspond" to each other; it's called mutual information.
Note that in the time since Richard's post, it has been very common for me to have to rephrase his point in more precise terminology in order for others to be able to make sense of it.
And I don't think this is just an issue of arguing definitions. There's a broader issue about whether you can helpfully carve conceptspace in a way that captures Richard's definition of "model" but excludes things that "merely" have mutual information.
You are surprised? But obviously, any reply to the original post giving examples as sought will, by definition, raise contention.
That may have been your reason, but that does not imply that it's everyone else's reason -- no more than your distaste for alcohol is a reason for you to disbelieve other people's enjoyment of it.
This is flatly at variance with the uses of "model" I listed, drawn from OB/LW, and the way the word is defined in every book on model-based control. The only time people try to redefine "X is a model of Y" to mean "X has mutual information with Y" is when someone points out that systems of the sort that I described do not contain models. For some reason, people need to believe that those systems work by means of models, despite the clear lack of them, and immediately redefine the word as necessary to be able to say that. But having redefined the word, they are saying something different.
"X has mutual information with Y" is not a technical explanation of an informal concept labelled "model". It is a completely different concept. The concept of a model, as I and everyone else outside these threads uses it, is very clear, unambiguous, and far narrower than mere mutual information. Vladimir Nesov objected to the word "correspondence" as vague; but if you want a technical elaboration of that, look in the direction of "isomorphism", not "mutual information".
Well, you have my answer to that. Conceptspace is carved along one line called "model", and along another line called "mutual information". Both lines matter, both have their uses, and they are in very different places. You want to erase the former or move it to coincide with the latter, but I have seen no argument for doing this.
If you want to take this on, it is no small mountain that I would have to see climbed. What it would take would be a radical reconstruction of control theory based on the concept of mutual information which eschews the word "model" altogether (because it's taken, and there is already a perfectly good term for mutual informaation: "mutual information"), and which can be used directly for the design of control systems that are provably as good or better than those designed by existing techniques, both model-based and non-model-based. It should explain the real reason why those more primitive methods of design work (or don't work, when they don't), and provide better ways of making better designs.
Something like what Jaynes did for statistics. This is the level of isshokenmei at least. (ETA: no, one level higher: "extraordinary effort".)
I do not know if this is possible. Certainly, it has not been done. When I've looked for information-theoretic or Bayesian analyses of control, I have found nothing substantial. Of course, I'm aware of the use of Bayesian techniques within control theory, such as Kalman filters. This is asking for the reverse inclusion. That is the substantial issue here.
No, you just asserted that people were using "model" in your sense in some posts you cited; there was nothing clear in any of the examples that implied they meant it in your sense rather than mine. And you didn't quote from any book on model based control, and even if you did, you would still need to show how it's not equivalent to merely having mutual information.
No, as others pointed out, they normally use "model" to mean e.g.
or
So it's clear they would count a single value that attempts to capture all critical properties of another system as a "model" of that system.
I explained why this is false: it does not account for all the systems clearly labeled as "models" (aircraft finite element models, plastic toy models, etc.) yet only have mutual information with some phenomenon, and which the user must apply some transformation to, in order to make a prediction.
But (as I explained before), isomorphism is not what you want here. Everyone accepts that models don't have to be perfect representations. In contrast, "isomorphism" means a one-to-one mapping, which would indeed be a perfect model. "Mutual information" is more general than that: it includes isomorphisms, but also cases where the best mapping isn't always correct, and where the model doesn't include all aspects of the phenomenon.
Er, that's not how carving conceptspace works. The task of helpfully carving conceptspace is to show how your cuts don't split things with significant relevant similarities. I claim you do so when you say a model "must make predictions". This would count a computer model of an aircraft as "not a model".
You're missing the point of the problem when you say what you did here.
No, what I'm saying is that to be a model, something must have (nontrivial) mutual information with some other phenomenon. But "model" is most often used to connote a case where some human, with whom you can debate, will apply the necessary interpretation to the physical instantiation of model so as to tell you what its prediction is.
Still, something "has a model" whether or not some human is actually applying the necessary interpretation. The domino computer I linked contains a model of binary addition, even before someone realizes it. A computer's hardware can have a model of an aircraft, even if someone throws it in the trash. In fact, the whole field of computation is basically identifying which physical systems already contain models of some kind of computation, and which we can therefore rely on, given some interpretation, to consistently give us the correct answer.
I do not find it helpful to say, "this thing over here explicitly outputs a prediction, so it's a model, but this thing over here is just entangled with the phenomenon, so it doesn't have a model". Both are models, and the problem is on our end in the inability to harness the correlation to make what we consider a prediction.
Sorry, I don't see it. The only problem is your arbitrary distinction between model-based controllers vs. non-model based, when really, both are model-based. As I said when I rephrased your claim, the substantive issue is how much of a given system needs to be modeled, and I already accept your claim that a model needn't include everything about its environment, and that further, people typically overestimate how much must be modeled.
That is what we are really talking about, and I already agree with you there. All that remains is your arbitrary re-assignment of some things as "models" and others not, which is fruitless.
With respect to the links I provided to earlier postings on OB/LW I shall only say that I have reviewed them and stand by the characterisation I made of them at the time (which went beyond mere assertion that they agree with me). To amplify my claim regarding books on model-based control theory, the following notes are drawn from the books I have to hand which include an easily identified statement of what the authors mean by a model. All of them are talking about a system that is specifically similar in structure to and not merely entangled with the thing modelled. At this point I think it is up to you to show that these things are equivalent. As I said at the end of my last comment, this would be a highly non-trivial task, a complete reconstruction of the content of books such as these. (It is too large to do in the columns of Less Wrong, but I look forward to reading it, whoever writes it.)
1. Brosilow & Joseph "Techniques of Model-Based Control"
Page 10, Figure 1.6, "Generic form of the model-based control strategy." This is a block diagram in which one block is labelled "Process", and another "Model"; the Model is a subsystem of the control system, designed to have the same input-output behaviour as the Process which the control system is to control. Ding!
2. Marlin, "Process Control". Page 584, section 19.2, "The Model Predictive Control Structure".
Here the author introduces the eponymous control method, in which a model of the process to be controlled is constructed and used to predict its future behaviour, in order to overcome the problem that (in the motivating example) the process contains substantial transport lags (a common situation in process control). The model is, as in the previous reference, a mathematical scheme designed to have the same input-output-relation as the real process, and is used by the controller to predict the future values of some of the variables. Ding!
3. Goodwin, Graebe, and Salgado, "Control System Design".
Pages 29-30, section 2.5: (paraphrased slightly) "Let us also assume that the output is related to the input by a known functional relationship of the form y = f(u)+d, where f is a transformation that describes the input-output relations in the plant. We call a relationship of this type a model." Ding!
4. Astrom and Wittenmark, "Adaptive Control"
Page 20, Chapter 1, "Model-Reference Adaptive Systems"
Another block diagram as in Brosilow & Joseph. Ding!
5. Leigh, "Control Theory" (2nd. ed.)
Chapter 6, "Mathematical modelling".
Sorry, no nuggets to quote, you'll have to read it yourself. But it's a whole chapter about models in the above sense. This, in fact, is a book I'd recommend as an introduction to control theory in general, which is why I mention it, despite it not lending itself to concise quotation. Ding!
Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!
The example that comes to mind here is tumble-and-travel chemotaxis.
For those not familiar with it, it's how e coli (and many other bacteria) get to places where the chemical environment favors them. From an algorythmic perspective, it senses the current pleasantness of the chemical environment (more food, less poison) as a scalar, compares that pleasantness to its general happiness level (also a scalar), is more likely to go straight if the former is higher and more likely to tumble if the latter is, and updates its happiness in the direction of the pleasantness. The overall effect is that it goes straight when things are getting better and randomly turns when they're getting worse, which does a passable job of going toward food and away from danger. The environment consists of its location and an entire map, but its memory is a single scalar.
I'm not sure what you're saying about systems like this. That they exist? Of course. This one is well studied. That they outperform model-based systems? Certainly if you include the energy cost of building and running a more complex system. Probably not if you don't, though I can't prove it.
Or are you claiming that this sort of system can solve arbitrarily complex problems? Maybe, but you'll need to do more than assert that.
That global warming is an important issue.*
*This is not a claim that climate change isn't changing, or that it isn't man made, or that the changes will not have a net negative impact. Rather, even a superficial cost/benefit analysis will quickly show that the benefit or acting towards many other values will have a much higher payoff than any attempt to influence climate change. For example, adding iodine to salt is very cheap, but can save many millions of lives with a high degree of certainty and in a short time frame.
Bjorn Lomborg did some research on this: http://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_priorities.html
Bjørn Lomborg is with significant pobability a doofus who in Denmark were a known speaker for the governments opinion, which at the time was 'fuck the environment'.
I don't mean to confirm or deny that global warming is an important issue, but I disagree with the reasoning. Yes, there are lots of things more important than global warming. That doesn't mean that global warming isn't an important issue. It means that global warming isn't the most important issue. A more relevant question is, if you decreased funding to global warming, would the place the money ends up going be something more important or less important?
How exactly does iodine save lives? In my reading, most of the benefits seemed to stem from reduced cretinism & goiters. Which massively impact the economy and quality of life, but I don't see this as actual life & death.
I don't know how many people here suffer from this, but the Animation Age Ghetto, the SciFi Ghetto, and other examples of Public Medium Ignorance are really hard to get people to look past.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before less wrong found the "fnords". Although at moment we seem to be obsessed with the silly or superficial ones. There is an art, parallel to the core art of rationality, in learning to see the assumptions and deceptions we build up in order to function, the accretion of simplifications and half-answers which become unchallenged beliefs so basic that we forget we even believe them.
And as the saying goes once you see the fnords, you see them everywhere.
And there are so many to see, under a thin coat of fear or denial, an idea or a correction lies ready to be revealed. These are cheap, although filled with the thrill of danger, because they frighten and inspire in equal measure.
But deep underneath all that, are the big ones, looming, twisting things which have tunneled their way through our knowledge and practices. These are the ones you need to ignore because they don't just frighten or require accepting what others deny, they mean functionally shifting your entire reference frame. It is as though language itself conspires to make these deeply embedded assumptions and delusions into something inexpressible, weird at best, madness at worse.
If you search patiently and carefully enough you can start to find them. You can even catalog or map them, seeing how they unfold into each other. But that doesn't mean you've figured out how the express them. How do you show them in a way that provides nearly as much engagement as a stream of rationalizations? That's something I'm still working on.
There are limits to the degree to which fnords can be discussed with others. Without doing the hard work necessary to perceive them, others cannot receive benefit from having them pointed out to them - and that can even be harmful, as our mental immune systems will construct defensive rationalizations to protect fnords brought to our attention that we're not strong enough to abolish.
What's an example? [How about one small one and one big one?]
Okay, now for my attempt to actually answer the prompt:
Your supposed "taste" for alcoholic beverages is a lie.
Summary: I've never enjoyed the actual process of drinking alcohol in the way that I e.g. enjoy ice cream. (The effects on my mind are a different story, of course.)
So for a long time I thought that, hey, I just have weird taste buds. Other people really like beer/wine/etc., I don't. No biggie.
But then as time went by I saw all the data about how wine-tasting "experts" can't even agree on which is the best, the moment you start using scientific controls. And then I started asking people about the particulars of why they like alcohol. It turns out that when it comes any implications of "I like alcohol", I have the exact same characterstics as those who claim to like alcohol.
For example, there are people who insist that, yes, I must like alcohol, because, well, what about Drink X which has low alcohol content and is heavily loaded with flavoring I'd like anyway? And wine experts would tell me that, on taste alone, ice cream wins. And defenses of drinking one's favorite beverage always morph into "well, it helps to relax..."
So, I came to the conclusion that people have the very same taste for alcohol that I do, it's just that they need to cook up a rationlizations for getting high. Still trying to find counterevidence...
Your turn: convince me that you really, really like the taste of [alcoholic beverage that happens to also signal your social status].
Convincing people over internet in matters of taste is a lost cause X-D but I think I can unpack some of my alcohol preferences.
I'll leave all the psychoactive effects outside of this little exposition.
I drink a variety of alcohol -- mostly wine and beer, sometimes hard liquor, rarely cocktails -- and I rather doubt I do it for status signalling reasons since the majority of my drinking happens inside my home. I drink it for the taste.
Mostly I drink with food and that's a large part the taste synergy. Let me give specific examples. I prefer high-tannin high-acidity red wines with grilled meat. I find that this pairing works very well (note that my red wine varies but usually costs around $10/bottle, so it's not anything hoity-toity). In the summer I like green vine (vinho verde) from Portugal which is light and very acidic. It is precisely this high acidity that I want from it and it delivers.
My taste in beers changes over time. Some time ago I really liked double bocks and Belgian dubbels. Then they started to taste too sickly sweet to me, so I changed to IPAs for a bit. But then they became too hoppy and I went to English and Scottish ales. At the moment I am kinda in-between stages and mostly drink porters.
Do note that as far as I can see, all this is driven by taste -- I drink mostly at home and I have no idea what beer might or might not be in fashion at the moment (so no status signaling) and I don't care about alcohol content of the beer.
All in all, averaging over different situations, I probably drink 70% for the taste, 25% for the psychoactive effects, and 5% for status (I will decline all offers of Bud Light and such and may roll my eyes at the offer X-D)
I tried for a long time to find an alcoholic drink I like in the assumption that I was missing out on something everyone else was privy too. While I did find some drinks I liked, I decided that it was the high sugar or fat content (rum & coke or a white russian) that I liked, and not the alcohol. Since that is the only part I like, it is much cheaper and healthier to achieve the same taste with non-alcoholic drinks and artificial sweeteners.
I have a theory about alcohol consumption; I call people who like (or don't mind) the taste "tongue blind." My theory is that these people have such poor taste receptors that they need an overly strong stimulus to register anything other than bland. Under this theory, I would expect people that like alcohol to also like very spicy food, to put extra salt most things they eat, and to think that vanilla is a synonym for plain.
"Near-beer" is a immensely successful product. Under your theory, it would not be.
Sales of near-beer are not immense compared to regular beer, so it doesn't pose much trouble for my theory. And certainly the theory allows for cases of people partaking in the form of alcohol consumption without the substance, once society (or their own past history) has given them a positive affect toward beer. For example, if someone likes hanging out in bars but wants to quit drinking, bars oblige such people with drinks that resemble alcoholic drinks as much as possible without them being alcoholic.
Likewise, if you've associated the gross taste of beer with previous good experiences, but didn't want to get drunk, you might still want to drink alcohol, even despite the taste. The point is that it's not the taste, but something else, that is making people drink alcohol.
I completely agree with your assertion. As an avid drinker, I find that I don't like drinks that taste nice nearly as much as ones that don't. The taste seems to me to be a signal of alcoholic effect; alcopops (sweet and alcoholic) get it wrong one way, and <1% alcohol beer gets it wrong the other way.
That said, I do like some beers better than others. Hoppy rather than fruity is good, for instance.
I recall reading somewhere on LessWrong that a highly effective way to stop eating chocolate is to get a pound of M&Ms and put them in your mouth and chew them up and taste them, then spit them out, and after a while chocolate will taste awful. This would suggest there's a lot more to liking foods than just what your taste buds (and sense of smell) say.
Edit: And how could I forget coffee. Tastes terrible in itself - decaf is utterly missing the point - but taste+buzz is something one can have strong and even discussable personal preferences on, and I just had my morning cup of something awful and went "mmmm, coffee."
I wouldn't ever wanna stop eating chocolate, at least delicious 80+ percent cocoa chocolate. It has little sugar but plenty of quality fats and cardioprotective and anti-inflammatory polyphenols. It's still a bit addictive for some reason (flavor? phenylethylamine? theobromine? ) but if you eat quality chocolate daily, well, if you don't go really overboard I imagine it'd do you no harm.
It's a YMMV, sure. But I can see people who need to give the stuff up - though my internal model of other humans tells me they'd be horrified at the idea of doing something that would actually work to cut them off from chocolate.
Interesting. Btw, why did my old comment suddenly get two replies?
Well, I've been systematically (if desultorily) reading all of LW from the beginning. So I got to your comment and, given the local norm that it's just fine to respond to a comment or post from years ago, responded to it. I presume bcoburn saw my comment in "Recent Comments", went to your original and felt like responding too.
I am doing the same right now, BTW.
This is, indeed, exactly what happened.
I'm eagerly awaiting years-later responses to my own early comments :-D
waves
:-)
Is that part of what you have referred to as "internet as television", David?
Yep! Things to read while waiting for Tomcat to finish restarting ... if I'm going to use the Internet as a television, I want at least to be watching something good.
I got through the Sequences, and it occurred to me that I didn't really understand the history of the culture of LessWrong, let alone the history of the history. So I thought reading the lot would be a nice way to approximate that. And I'm finding some fantastic posts I would never have seen without doing this.
You claim that "experts" have been proven not to know the difference between expensive wine and non... but I sure can tell the difference between "wine I like" and "wine I would rather pour down the sink", and that distinction is all that matters when it comes to me choosing wine to drink (or not).
I also second InfinitelyThirsting - if it could come without the buzz (or even just at minimal buzz) I'd prefer it. The buzz (and I would not characterise it as euphoria for me) isn't the part that's fun for me.
Also - yay mead (I make mead) :)
http://amazingmead.wordpress.com - the loved one's mead blog, which I wrote the last two posts on.
Looks cool.
My main post for mead is this one: http://www.squidoo.com/mead-three-weekends which covers only basic mead-making... but fairly in-depth. I've been expanding the FAQs
I think you are not aware of research in acquired taste. It turns out that the effect of particular foods and drinks on psychological states create some deep subconscious associations. Take this as a clear and striking example:
"A study that investigated the effect of adding caffeine and theobromine (active compounds in chocolate) vs. a placebo to identically-flavored drinks that participants tasted several times, yielded the development of a strong preference for the drink with the compounds.[3]"
I think that's why I do enjoy beer now, even though I thought exactly as you did several years ago. I thought it was a huge collective rationalization. Which I still think is a big part of it, specially among teenagers and young adults who like to boast about being strong drinkers and how oh-dear they love alcohol so very much. But grown up people do drink, say, one beer alone and seem to enjoy it quite a bit. But without the pleasant relaxation that usually follows, though, the taste would not be agreeable. So we see a deep neurological change in the way we process taste.
As a young man raised on gourmet foods and interesting tastes, as well as reasonably sound in my general understanding of human evo-biology let's make two things clear:
Barring that, I like whisky. It has an interesting taste composition and the immediate kick and feel of the alcohol content is likewise momentarily envograting. That I afterwards get pleasantly intoxicated is merely a nice bonus.
A relatively simple way to test whether you actually like the taste of alcohol specifically: take a reasonable quantity of your favorite alcoholic beverage, beer/wine/mixed drink/whatever, and split it into two containers. Close one, and heat the other slightly to evaporate off most of the actual ethanol. Then just do a blind taste test. This does still require not lying to yourself about which you prefer, but it removes most of the other things that make knowing whether you like the taste hard.
I personally don't care enough to try this, but just the habit of thinking "how could I test this?" is good.
How do I know that the heating doesn't evaporate or otherwise affect stuff other than ethanol?
In my observation the 'lie' operates to a significant extent on the other side of that 'taste' line. Sure rationalizations play a part too but to some extent 'acquired taste' is literally accurate. The 'taste - status reward' pairing actually does change what tastes good.
This is completely the wrong way to go about finding our absolute denial macros. It is clearly not the advice we would offer to any other group.
We would not tell others to make up things they think are obviously true and see if any others in the group are irrational. If anything that's a recipe for cementing groupthink.
We would advise others to go outside the group, examine the evidence as directly as possible, and to study, basic logic, science, and current scientific knowledge.
Well, what if it is too hard?
Imagine that you knew for a fact, that for any person in a community whose beliefs you were poised to challenge, it would feel too dangerous, too boring, too uncomfortable or awkward to actually go outside and closely observe the territory which they have every reason (with the sole exception of your assurance) to model as utterly uninteresting. And yet imagine (it's a bit of a stretch, I know, but please play along for the sake of this exercise) that you care for them enough to try and help them discover truth, or maybe use them to improve your map by observing their struggle. How would you go about making them face the contradiction?
If the delusion is of the kind that all of us share it, we won't be able to find it without building an AI.
You're not understanding (or not believing) the power of such denial/delusion. If there's a delusion that universal and compelling, we won't be able to find it EVEN IF we build an AI.
I didn't comment on Elizer's post because it was equally misguided - if you're so committed to a belief that you ignore a ton of "normal" evidence, you're not going to be convinced by an AI, just because you read the source code. That's "just" evidence like everything else, and you can always find rationalizations like misunderstood terms, hardware error, or that generalizations don't apply to you.
There's no such thing as an absolute denial macro. And I sure hope this to trigger yours.
Absolute denial macro can be an artifact of being Bayesian-rational, and being absolutely convinced (P=1, or ridiculously close to it) about something that just happens to be false. If you use your brain's natural ability to generate most plausible hypotheses consistent with data, and P(arm is not paralyzed)=1, then P(it's daughter's arm) > P(arm is paralyzed), so this hypothesis wins. If it's disproved, you just go for the next hypothesis, and you have plenty of them before you have to go for one with P=0 that happens to be true.
Have you ever heard creationist talk ? For me that is proof of its existence.
It's very likely that your parents were abusive while you were growing up.
Also, there is no scientific method.
These are excellent examples. I don't see why they're being voted down.
The second, however, is much better than the first.
Shakespeare isn't the greatest writer ever.
Granted, it's likely he may have been innovative back then, and he may have left a trace on society. So what? The guy picked low-hanging fruits.
Furthermore, I find it difficult to believe no one ever did better since then, especially if considering all cultures and writers, in a span of 400 years. Especially since people's taste in literature and stories vary.
Revering Shakespeare seems like a cached thought and an applause light more than anything. It's like saying the Bible is the greatest book ever written. Both could only become so successful because of the appalling lack of any serious competition.
Seconded. I don't think you'll get too much disagreement in this community, interestingly enough. We're all neophiles. But say "modern writers are better than Shakespeare" to most English speakers and you won't even get an absolute denial macro, you'll get something more like <TYPE ERROR>, as though you'd claimed that apple > 6.
You probably shouldn't drive. It's dangerous, expensive, and should be left to professionals. Take the bus or ride a bike.
More widely, we should support policies that make individual car use prohibitively expensive, but public transit easy and cheap. Generally the only cars on the road should be service related (Ambulances, Fire, Police, Utilities,Buses, Delivery/shipping trucks, Taxi's, Limo's etc.)
This would save lots of money and energy, and tens of thousands of lives per year.
While the first part is borne out by statistics, the second is not.
To make a professionals-only drivng regimen feasible, you'd need a massive reorganization of urbanities. Suburbs would no longer be quite so desirable, etc etc. Take your politics out of rationality.
Take your politics out of rationality.
Yikes! can you explain how something that's a good idea for rationalists on lesswrong is bad for society? Should we keep our good ideas secret because if everyone did it the suburbs would be undesirable?
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt but so far this seems more like denial than reason.
It's dangerous, expensive, and therefore absolutely awesome. You're just jealous of all the normal people with cool cars, and that they don't let you drive due to your left arm paralysis.
I'd agree with all of that, except for the "ride a bike" part. If you think piloting a car in city traffic is dangerous, think about piloting a completely unprotected, human-powered device with a very narrow silhouette.
I actually do avoid driving whenever possible. But then I live in an urban area, and can do that.
My commute to school is about 30 miles, or 50 minutes. If I rode the bike to the nearest bus stop (10 miles, 50 minutes) and rode the buses to school (75 minutes, including 20 of walking and waiting), my commute would take two and a half times as long. It would also be free instead of costing $5.50 in gas each way, and I would burn an extra thousand Calories per day.
As a cyclist, I think biking is probably more dangerous than driving...
But... have you framed "danger" apprppriately?
"According to a study by the British Medical Association, the average gain in "life years" through improved fitness from cycling exceeds the average loss in “life years” through cycling fatalities by a factor of 20 to 1."
From http://davesbikeblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/cyclists-live-longer.html.
That's an interesting quote. There are probably other ways to achieve the same fitness benefits though.
If you read this site's definition of Epistemic Rationality, logically in order to achieve it you must pay attention to the reality which your map is intended to resemble. Meanwhile, there is ample research indicating that paying attention to people is a hugely powerful social tool for making friends, which translates to increasing the likelihood of finding, entering into, and maintaining romantic relationships (not to mention that paying attention to your significant others may be of some benefit too).
So perhaps the question isn't what should a rationalist be doing if their social / love life isn't so good, but rather are you really pursuing rationality effectively if you haven't seen some of these improvements as a matter of course?
Your rationality is just fine. You're just ugly.
(Now watch yourself go "No I'm not!" "Society's standards are out of whack!" "The opposite gender can't see my true beauty!")
I'm thinking of someone I work with, who is quite definitely less good looking than just "plain". Aesthetically awful. However, she dresses and does her makeup immaculately, and then projects through personality. And this seems to work for attraction.
And a short fat guy who is brilliantly witty and perceptive and dresses well will never be short of a girlfriend.
MendelSchmiedekamp's message is one of hope: this stuff is reducible and many have reduced it before, so get learning.
As a matter of fact, I am. I've done enough research on facial structure and body type to recognize subtleties that most people will miss consciously. Although I do have nice skin. But that comes from keeping hydrated and away from major sun damage, which may have something to do with rationality.
And, here's the interesting part, I have found major benefits by being rational, in exactly the way I'm describing.
On the other hand, if you want to treat other people as solved systems, and stop worrying about them, I suspect you are out of luck.
I can't think of any particular issues that I'm convinced I know the truth of, yet most people will reflexively deny that truth completely.
I can, however, think of issues that I think are uncertain, but that the uncertainty of said issue is denied reflexively and completely. I suppose they would be meta-issues rather than issues themselves - it's a subtle point I'm not interested in pursuing.
Probably the most obvious one that comes to my mind is circumcision. I've never seen so many normally-intelligent people make such stupid and clearly incorrect arguments, nor so much uncomfortable humor, nor trying desperately to avoid thinking, for any other issue I've discussed with others, even things like abortion, religion, and politics.
You're wrong about the religious issue. As I've stated many times, including in that discussion, the problem is that there are two meanings of "believe" and people unhelpfully equivocate between them. Here they are:
1) "I believe X" = "My internal predictive model of reality includes X."
2) "I believe X" = "I affiliate with people who profess, 'I believe X' " (no, it's not as circular as it looks)
Put simply, most people DO NOT believe(1) in the absurd claims of religions, they just believe(2) them. Or at least, they act very suspiciously like they believe(2) rather than believe(1). If they believed(1), they would spend every waking moment exactly as their religion instructs.
1) "I'm a rationalist" = "I honestly apply the art of rationality every waking moment"
2) "I'm a rationalist" = "I make comments on Less Wrong and think Eliezer Yudkowsky is pretty cool"
3) I put a lot of effort into number-crunching optimal ways of realising my values, and very little into worrying wether they are the right ones.
Hitler had a number of top-level skills, and we could learn (some) positive lessons from his example(s).
Eugenics would improve the human race (genepool).
Human "racial" groups may have differing average attributes (like IQ), and these may contribute to the explanation of historical outcomes of those groups.
(Perhaps these aren't exactly topics that Less Wrong readers (in particular) would run away from. I was attempting to answer the question by riffing off Paul Graham's idea of taboos. What is it "not appropriate" to talk about in ordinary society? Politeness might trigger the rationalization response...)
I'll grant you that they're all taboo, but they're not really useful, either. (I mean, some people claim these are true to justify their prejudices, but that's not what we're talking about.) In particular, the statement about Hitler is too vague to suggest what ought to be imitated, and the statement about racial groups focuses on an effect which is almost entirely obscured by historical facts about the distribution of resources.
That said, regarding eugenics: have you read any of David Brin's Uplift books?
Surely few would argue with that. The more controversial issue is the claim that such differences are genetic.
From Paul Graham's essay:
Maybe there is something I am missing, but I don't understand his last sentence. How do you take two people, and "subtract one from the other" ?
I think it roughly means to subtract the teenage girl's model for how the world works from the streetsmart guy's model for how the world works. You expect to get the subset of experience a sheltered upbringing would shelter people from.
1st one: Nope, don't think anyone here would dispute that, except on the grounds that it's rather nonspecific.
2nd one: Only if it were in the form of encouraging particularly valuable individuals to reproduce more. Removing even the bottom 50% would have fairly negligible effects compared to doubling the top 1%. Several countries already implement programs to encourage the most valuable members to reproduce more (with mixed success).
3rd one: I find it nearly impossible to find any good data on that either way. Pending evidence, it looks like most of the quality of life and education effects can basically be explained by looking at who got the industrial revolution first. Unless very large effect sizes were found, however, the policy implications would be minimal or nonexistent.
First one's just plain true.
Second one is probably true. The issue with eugenics isn't that it wouldn't work, it's that it would be unethical to try.
Third one seems to fail the evidence test. It's proposing a significant deficit in a measurable quantity that has not been observed to exist (after correcting for socio-economic status).
META: How should I vote claims that I think are true but I don't think would trigger absolute denial macros in that many atheists?
one sometimes hears someone say "you only use 10% of your brain." if you tell them this isn't true, you often get a stream of variations of this statement ("it's 10% of your potential...") instead of a simple acknowledgment that maybe they were told wrong.
This is more of a social status thing. Being contradicted and quickly agreeing with the person who contradicted you leads to a loss of social status that people try to avoid. A good way to dodge this barrier is to mention that it's a common misconception, talk about how wide-spread it is, and why it isn't true (evolution isn't THAT incompetent), then ask where they heard it. That lets them take the assertion back without much loss of status.
The earth's climate has gone through many large changes in the past and it is natural for it to continue to do so in the future and there is no reason these changes should be for the benefit of the human species.
By "should", do you mean "will" or maybe "should be expected to be", or do you really mean "should"?