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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)
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].
I will agree with you that a lot of alcohol is like that, in particular beer. But you can't say that acquiring a taste means forcing yourself to like something; we have to acquire almost all tastes. A kid who isn't fed a variety of foods will never like a variety of foods. There are people out there who don't like FRUIT, I mean, really. Not just like there's a fruit they don't particularly enjoy, they don't like any fruit.
But there are some alcoholic drinks that ARE delicious. I don't mean anything regular. My favourite drink has no substitute: mead. Honey wine. It's a beverage made from honey, and delectable (well, unless it's a dry wine). I don't like any dry wines, just sweet ones. Fuki plum wine is another favourite of mine, and again, there is no similar substitute. I would be careful of saying you don't like alcohol at all, because it's possible you've just had bad stuff (and each kind of alcohol is different, too). I've never liked eggplant, bleach--until someone actually cooked it properly for me, using the right gender pod. (For the record of anecdotal proof, my sister hates alcohol, but even she likes Fuki.)
And the "other" effects of alcohol have no bearing on me. I wish those drinks weren't alcoholic actually, because I'm pretty much straight edge. If I drink something, I make sure it's with food, and only a glass, and drunk slowly, so that I'm not mentally affected at all, not even a "buzz". Trust me, if I could get nonalcoholic versions, I would, but it isn't just the lack of a market that stops that. For example, St Germaine is a fantastic liquor created from elderflowers hand harvested from mountains in Europe. And it damned well tastes like FLOWERS, or like how flowers smell anyways. I've eaten flowers, they don't taste like flowersmell. And there are syrups available made from elderflowers, but none of them are any good. Alcohol can catch and preserve flavours that are lost in any other processing.
(Somewhat unfortunately, I also really enjoy the tastes of harder alcohols, like spiced rum and aged whiskey, but you can't really drink much of that before effects start happening, so I don't.)
But if you don't like alcohol, you may never acknowledge that there are some good things out there, amidst the muck. I have a nearly perfect analogy: I don't like mushrooms. To me, all those fancy dishes that toss in truffle oil or other mushroom-derived products are ruining good food, and just being pretentious. Sure, a part of my brain knows that people who like mushrooms enjoy the extra savoury flavour, but to me it's gross, and inexplicable why so many gourmet dishes have mushrooms in them--much like your confusion as to why someone would pay more for wine than a milkshake, I have no idea why someone would pay hundreds of dollars for a truffle. If it isn't savoury enough, add beefstock, or something. But that's just my irrational, self-centered brain. The rest of me knows people out there really do like mushrooms, and that to them, it makes the food better, just like I believe bananas make every baked good better, but my friend who hates bananas would disagree.
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.
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.
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.
This is, indeed, exactly what happened.
I'm eagerly awaiting years-later responses to my own early comments :-D
waves
:-)
I am doing the same right now, BTW.
I do not like the feeling of being intoxicated.
I very much like some wines, many beers, and a few harder liquors (rum, bailey's, mainly).
I used to think I disliked all beers, but then I tried some again (out of politeness) and discovered the problem wasn't that I didn't like beer, it was that I didn't like bad beer.
I would drink one beer with pizza whether alone or with others (though I would refrain in the presence of some people if I thought it would offend them). I hate bars.
Perhaps I'm subconsciously signaling "I am snobby," but I think that is inconsistent with the rest of my behavior (just ask my wife what she thinks of how I dress).
Do you find this convincing?
Just a general clarification: when I refer to the mind-altering effects of alcohol, I don't just mean intoxication, but also the relaxation effect, which usually kicks in even after just one drink.
Your situation definitely sounds more convincing, but then, you're not in the set of people who needs to find a fake reason to drink alcohol, since you don't seem like you'd miss much if you weren't allowed to drink.
Are you sure your insistence on drinking one beer with pizza isn't just force of habit though?
If all sources of alcohol spontaneously vanished, I would miss a good dark beer in much the same way I would miss any other food I enjoy. That said I would probably deal with such a hypothetical situation with less dismay than most people who like alcohol.
Just to be clear, if no beer is available (e.g., I haven't bought any recently (at the moment there is none in my fridge and I've been out of it for like a month)), and I make pizza, I won't be TOO distraught. :) It's also something I've picked up fairly recently; I read somewhere that beer went well with pizza, tried it, and found that beer goes very well with pizza. :)
To elaborate a little more, my parents rarely drank (rarely = maybe twice in my lifetime), I didn't try any alcohol until in my 20's, and did not like the first alcohol I tried. I definitely agree that wine and beer are acquired tastes, much like coffee. I would rather drink beer than a milkshake most of the time, but that might say more about what I think of milkshakes than what I think of beer.
EDIT: I forgot to add:
I do not personally drink alcohol for the relaxation effect. Perhaps if I were in a stressful social situation I would, but I can't say I've done so to date. I find the feeling of a buzz weird and interesting and do not particularly enjoy it. My skills in nearly everything I like to do are adversely affected by mental impairment, so I do not like to drink enough to cause one. Exception: if I'm with a group of friends I will drink more than I would on my own, as I know I won't be doing anything mentally demanding.
I enjoy a wide range of alcoholic beverages, especially beer, wine, rye whisky and spiced rum. When it comes to wine, my preference is red, particularly Cabernet Sauvignon and Malbec from Chile and Argentina. I like to drink red wine when I'm eating steak. They are perfect complements; I would not want to drink a milkshake with a steak, or a coffee, or a can of Coke. Often, when I have steak, I only drink a glass or two of wine, not enough to produce a significant alcoholic effect. Why drink, then? Well, as I said, wine is a perfect complement to the meal. It isn't sweet, and it can be bitter, but then steak isn't a donut, either. They both have complex flavours that light up my pleasure centres in different ways. The smell, taste, and texture all contribute to what I call "enjoyment". I can even take pleasure in the flavours that some people consider unpleasant. I like my steak bloody, while others won't touch meat that isn't charred.
The thing is, lots of people like things that other people consider negative. BDSM springs to mind; some people can't get pleasure unless they're being whipped, while others would actually consider it torture. Those others might say, "You don't actually enjoy being whipped, you just enjoy the endorphin release and elevated serotonin it causes." Well... isn't that the same thing? I get more pleasure than simply the effect of alcohol from drinking wine, even if there are aspects to wine which may be considered unpleasant. Do I enjoy wine or just the effects of wine? I don't see that as any different from asking whether I enjoy candy or the effects of candy, or ice cream or the effects of ice cream.
There really is a variety of experience in alcoholic beverages that one cannot get anywhere else. The argument that one would prefer a milkshake over wine is a weak one; even if that is universally the case, that doesn't entail that people really don't like wine.
Go ahead, try it with any two things. "Would you rather have an X or a Y? Oh, you'd rather have an X? Then why do you ever have Y? You must do it just for signaling, not because you really enjoy it". Say, "Watching Heroes" versus "Watching Battlestar Galctica". Or "Eating a cheeseburger" versus "Eating potato skins". Or "vacationing at Hakone" versus "vacationing in Gaeta".
Developing a taste for wine opens one up to a variety of experience not unlike developing an entirely new sense. Similarly for enjoying good beer. I admit that I first developed a taste for beer simply because no philosopher worth his salt doesn't enjoy beer, but it's now very enjoyable being able to distinguish between various craft styles.
How about this:
When I was a little kid, too young to know about or process the idea that alcohol gets you high, my mom and dad drank beer. Cheap beer no less. I asked for a taste and they gave me one, thinking I wouldn't like it. I liked it.
I remember it tasted interesting, and dazzling, like soda.
Rationalizing is still a big possibility - you wanted to drink what your parents drink.
"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.
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?
First of all, I like to get drugged by alcohol, and feel no need to deny this fact.
That said, hard hot chocolate is tasty. Raspberry juice with creme de cacao is excellent. Champagne's an acquired taste, but I'm fond of it -- I rather suspect this could just be my brain coming to associate the pleasurable effects of the drug with the taste of champagne though.
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) :)
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.
This doesn't explain why people drink beer.
To me beer tastes and smells Terrible. I'd rather have hard lemonade, or vodka mixed with almost anything but beer.
But up until a couple of years ago I also didn't like coffee. So I think that both beer and coffee are an acquired taste. (um, yeah and coffee isn't a drug at all...)
The taste of certain wines reminds me pleasantly of my catholic childhood.
But yeah, people like the taste of other things they use to mask and dilute the alcohol, otherwise they'd just take shots of high-proof vodka.
Possible counterpoint to that: Any flavoring would be nasty when concentrated. Perhaps water with a small amount of alcohol would have a noticeable pleasant flavor. (but be useless for intoxication)
Couple of thoughts upon reading this thread.
I, too, do not like the taste of alcohol and feel no real desire to seek it out as a tasty food. I'll admit, though, that I also don't like to consume things that reduce cognitive function, so it's possible I don't like the taste as a side effect, but I rather doubt it.
Now, I do like champagne, but usually only the stuff that costs $150 a bottle. I say this having found out the prices only after I tried the champagne and liked it: since I like it, I want to know what it is. There are probably also expensive champagnes that don't taste as good, I've just never looked for them, but high price does seem to be a necessary condition for good champagne. To be fair to the post's original request, though, I have to admit that I like these champagnes because they are "smooth": they have no alcohol burn and don't smell or taste like they have alcohol in them, so I might as well have sparkling cider.
Finally, note that until the 20th century people drank much larger quantities of alcohol than today because it was needed to make water safer to drink. If you could afford it, adding a little wine or grain alcohol to the water would go a long way towards reducing the chance of infection from water-borne illnesses. So in those times people probably enjoyed the taste because they became accustomed to it early in life, much the way Americans love tomato ketchup and coke although adults from other parts of the world, when introduced to these flavors, often do not.*
*I can't find a source for this, but I know I've heard it several places. Maybe it's just a modern myth?
This leads to one inescapable conclusion: for the vast proportion of human history, everyone in the world was completely hammered pretty much all the time. When you think about it in that light, most of history suddenly makes a great deal more sense.
A lot of the beer they drank throughout the day was 'small beer" - made from a second run of water through the mash... it was about as alcoholic as modern-day ginger beer. So - yeah, they did spend a lot of their time more intoxicated than us... but not totally smashed all the time.
Relevant.
I also don't have sources to hand, but I'm informed by my brewing+chemist friends that the amount of alcohol in beer is not sufficient to sterilise the liquid.
however the people of ancient times weren't wrong... beer is sterilised (and thus safe to drink) - it's because to make beer, you have to boil the mash. The boiling sterilises it quite effectively.
*I don't mention it here only because it would take a bit of digging for me to find out what it was; upon request I will, though.
I can't believe no one has asked for this yet. Please?
Isn't a lot of the appeal of Coke due to the caffeine? The fact that it's mostly drunk cold or with ice could suggest that the inherent flavor isn't ideal.
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.
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.
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...)
Those are excellent points, particularly the first. Adolf Hitler was one of the most effective rhetoricians in human history - his public speaking skills were simply astounding. Even the people who hated his message were stunned after attending rallies in which Hitler exercised his crowd-manipulation skills.
It struck me that "top-level" is ambiguous. Do you mean high quality or general-purpose?
I don't think that it is taboo to say that Hitler was a good orator or that he was good at mass psychology. But people don't admit to desiring to manipulate crowds; I don't think Hitler has to do with that. I've heard it suggested that a lot of people have the skills to be cult leaders, but they just don't want to be.
Film makers do study Leni Riefenstahl.
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).
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.
Related to: Mind-killer.
You are not living as much on the edge as you should optimally.
I estimate that most LW Readers are relatively young (i.e. < 40y old). The repair mechanism of your bodies can deal with a lot more than they currently have to handle. To increase your effectiveness multiple routes exist:
This reminded me of Umeshisms: "If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports."
Regarding polyphasic sleep: if you're under, say, 18, don't. The effects it has on the body's developmental processes are not known.
I see no reason for someone to take this advice. Polyphasic sleep has been the norm in many cultures and periods of history, and one might be more inclined to advise, "Regarding monophasic sleep: if you're under, say, 18, don't. The effects it has on the body's developmental processes are not known"
I have not heard this before, even on web sites touting it. Reference? A quick Google only turned up sceptical comments, and "segmented sleep", which isn't what I've understood by "polyphasic sleep".
Well, yes; biphasic sleep (noon siesta) is the natural sleeping pattern beyond infanthood. For extreme schedules like Uberman's, though, there have been lots of reports on odd cravings and the like — such as grape juice — that, e.g. contain elements the body would normally generate itself during sleep.
(Are you really saying that we don't know the effects of monophasic sleep?)
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"
I'd be a pretty sucky rationalist if I didn't get an itchy feeling when I hear a false dichotomy. Therefore, let's try some other options:
3) "I'm a rationalist" = "I earnestly try to be more rational than I would otherwise be."
4) "I'm a rationalist" = "I think that syllogisms are pretty neat, and I'm really good at proving that Socrates is mortal. ;-)"
Dude's dead. QED.
No, dude, the correct answer is "because he is a man!"
As a transhumanist, that does not follow.
I'm a rationalist(2). I'm just here because it's fun. ;)
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.
That's too strong a claim and doesn't factor akrasia in; you might as well say that you don't really believe in the seriousness of existential risks if you don't spend every waking moment working against them.
You can, however, make distinctions between people who will make decisions that they know would be extremely suboptimal if their professed belief was false, and people who only do just enough to signal their belief.
It's going to be a continuum from belief(1) to belief(2), not a binary attribute; but it's still a very important concept and not yet one that the English language groks.
Okay, fair point. My claim was too strong and I accept your modification. Still, existential risks still permit me finite remaining life, which still keeps its utility very very far from that of eternal torture espoused by some religions.
A related phenomenon - one which often motivates belief(2) - is belief in belief. </obviouslink>
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.
It's very likely that your parents were abusive while you were growing up.
Also, there is no scientific method.
Does circumcision count?
Yes, as a vestige from instrusive and early infanticidal childrearing modes.
Do you have evidence on that?
Day-um, that was sharp!
With regards to child abuse: would a comparison to hazing be appropriate at this juncture? Were the hypothesis correct, it would have a certain surface similarity.
Does your support for the first hinge on a strict definition of abuse, some generous interpretation of "very likely", or something else?
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!")
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'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.
The utility function is not up for grabs. Why should we care about "success" if the price of "success" is being a greedy, self-interested asshole? You know, maybe some of us care about deep insights and meaningful, genuine relationships, which we value for their own sake. Maybe we don't want to spend our days plotting how to grind the other guy's face into the dust. Maybe we want the other guy to be happy and successful, because life is not a zero-sum game and our happiness does not have to come at the expense of anyone else. Tell us how to optimize for that. Don't tell us that we're nerds; we already knew that!
Rationalists should win, full stop and in full generality. Not "triumph over others in some zero-sum primate pissing contest," win.
ADDENDUM: See my clarification below.
Why should we assume that financial success requires being a greedy, self-interested asshole?
Maybe some of us can do these things while still figuring out how to make ourselves sufficiently valuable to society to exchange those skills for significant wealth?
Maybe economic wealth isn't a zero-sum game?
Now I'm repeating myself. Maybe delivering sufficient value to society that society is willing to reward you richly for your contribution doesn't necessarily come at anyone else's expense?
You're assuming wealth is a zero-sum game. Most of the time, its not.
Oh, dear, I'm afraid I haven't expressed myself clearly. I agree with you on all of these points! It is honorable to create goods or services that people want and then to make money selling them. Wealth is not a zero-sum game; I totally, totally agree. To clarify my intentions, I was not objecting to the suggestion that nerdy male LessWrongers should make money; I was objecting to the suggestion that they should relinquish their allegedly "weak" personalities to better seek power and status and sex. Sorry this wasn't clearer in my original comment.
I wonder how much of your complaints should really be addressed to Roko (in the parent of Z. M. Davis's comment).
Roko's claims:
Z. M. Davis's claim:
Incidentally, while wealth acquisition is obviously not a zero-sum game, Robin Hanson has argued that status acquisition is in some sense a zero sum game: you can't have high status without there being someone having lower status than you.
ETA: This post was made redundant while I was writing it. Darn it.
I'm absolutely sure that at least some people here had sex with women more attractive than Melinda Gates and Monica Lewinsky.
I thought about this too, but both Bills were womanizers with attractive women as well.
I'm not going to argue about it, but I find it much more likely than not:
E(quality and quantity of women you can get | you know just basic PUA techniques) > E(quality and quantity of women you can get | you're in top 1% rich and/or powerful)
and definitely beyond any reasonable doubt:
E(quality and quantity of women you can get | you know just basic PUA techniques) P(you can learn basic PUA techniques) >>> E(quality and quantity of women you can get | you're in top 1% rich and/or powerful) P(you can get into top 1% rich and/or powerful)
It's even more drastic for percentiles narrower than top 1% - so even if you could get laid slightly more if you went that far, but your chances of getting that far are slim. Marginal laid-utility of money and power is very very small.
Here's another piece of data relevant to estimating the expected laid-utility of interventions designed to increase fame, wealth or power relative to the expected laid-utility of other interventions one might design.
Actress Dana Delany told an interviewer from People magazine or similar magazine that if you want her to kiss you, owning a jet plane and a condo on Bon Air does not make up for having bad breath because of gum disease. That suggest that making a point of never getting so strapped for cash that you cannot afford to pay a good dental hygenist might increase laid-utility more than starting your own company.
Parenthetically I might write a post explaining why according to my mental models, for a male scientist who is bad at getting laid to choose to work on an extinction-risky technology has significantly lower expected utility than for a male scientist good at getting laid to choose to do so where U (the human species goes extinct) = -1 and U (nonextinction) = 0. The effect might apply to female scientists, too, but I am currently almost completely confused about that -- except "confused" might be the wrong word because it might connote that I expect to gather additional evidence for or against the question. The effect stems from what has been called the crime-genius connection and from the cognitive benefits to the man of the love of a woman with strong "ego skills", "ego skills" being the term some psychotherapists use for some practical fragment of rationality.
Er... perhaps you would find different responses here from non-actresses not being interviewed in People magazine. Or not. Just sayin', the degree to which someone cares about something may have something to do with the degree to which they are ordinarily deprived of it. If you are not deprived of men owning jet planes, then you may feel free to weight it less than bad breath.
Do we have any serious evidence on how much more sexually successful rich people are?
I estimate wealth to have amazingly small effect compared to what most people believe.
Have you written such a post?
I just read something by someone who'd seen Lewinsky in person-- he said she had spectacular skin and a very sexy attitude. It's plausible that neither would necessarily come through in photographs.
It's not impossible, but if that person has met Lewinsky after Clinton thing became known that's way more easily explained by halo effect.
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? :(
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.
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?")
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.
I'm just questioning the idea that masturbation is to sex-starved people as food is to actually starving people.
(Course, that's not exactly what you said either.)
To someone who deeply disdains human society, it probably is equivalent. Suppose that it were possible to soothe your hunger by just rubbing your stomach - how many people would do it and forgo food completely?
Actually, if I didn't have to eat, I probably wouldn't.
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?
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.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Saying you could have expressed a proposition better isn't disagreeing with the proposition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If I were missing my heroin dosage, I weren't able to do all that smart discussion going on here.
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:
Shouldn't Less Wrong have a bit more subtlety and detail than Cosmo?
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]
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.)
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".
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
I don't think Roissy claims women want to be objectified. He agrees with the majority opinion that they like to be treated like human beings, appreciated for the qualities particular to them as individuals etc.
He just adds the coda that giving women what they like is a very poor strategy for sleeping with as many of them as possible, as quickly as possible*. Roissy doesn't really care what women want except insofar as knowing it furthers his aims, so this doesn't create a great deal of cognitive dissonance for him.
It was in fact reading him that inspired me to write this comment yesterday.
*In fact, he claims it makes women disdain you and calls it "supplication". The Roissy way is never explain, never apologise.
Folks here seem to buy into the folk anthropology notion that successful men become successful specifically in order to attract a mate, presumably the most conventionally attractive one. I'm not sure that idea is going to go away, regardless of how disgusting it sounds to those of us who married for love.
I'm quite sure that the idea won't go away, if only because in at least some cases, it'll be flagrantly true- season with a dash of confirmation bias and serve hot.
In particular, I think it's not going to go away as long as powerful politicians keep having extramarital affairs.
P(Accomplish goals given get really rich) > P (Accomplish goals given ~get really rich)
vs.
P[(Accomplish goals given try to get really rich & (get really rich or ~get really rich)] ?>=<? P(Accomplish goals given ~try to get really rich)
My symbols kind of suck in this format, but you seem to be arguing the former when the latter is the relevant consideration. It also ignores the goal of personal happiness; I would guess that most people in practice have very high coefficients for themselves and loved ones in their utility functions, regardless of what they profess to believe.
Oh, and the whole claim about not valuing social status enough and, in particular, not valuing sex with extremely attractive women is, well, unsupported, to put it extremely charitably. Unless people here have the goals of "showing people up" or "having sex with extremely attractive women whose interest in them is contingent on their wealth," adapting those values would not be conducive to accomplishing their current goals, so failing to adapt them is hardly an error.
More to the point, saying that people aren't pursuing wealth and claiming the specific cause of this is a lack of valuing social status is like saying people aren't buying a Mercedes because they don't adequately value an all-leather interior. There are many other values that would attain the ends, and there are many other ends that would fulfill the values. I'd go into this at length, but the post did explicitly condone trolling, so I won't take this too seriously.
This is not to say that you're wrong (about wealth being a rational goal for meeting our existing goals); I don't have the numbers to shut up and multiply. I'm just saying you may well not be right.
I have a very specific response.
I'm skeptical that money is very effective at making scientific discoveries. I'm extremely skeptical money is a good way of getting credit for science. If your goal is to get credit for science or to impress scientists, you probably should be a scientist. Who has recently used money to achieve scientific fame? Craig Ventnor is the only one I can name. and I suspect the money diluted the credit, but it was probably worth it. If your goal is to advance science, maybe money is a good tool. Bell Labs was good for the world (and for IBM). But it's pretty easy to waste money trying to duplicate it.
Also, successful scientists are greedy and self-interested.
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.
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.
There's no such thing as an absolute denial macro. And I sure hope this to trigger yours.
No, you wont!
Have you ever heard creationist talk ? For me that is proof of its existence.
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.
Bit of a tall order, taken literally.
Is this intended as hyperbole for: "Is there anything that you consider solidly established by both empirical evidence and pure logic, yet even the smart, rational people on Less Wrong will respond to it with obvious rationalisations?"
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.
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.
People's actions are heavily influenced by instinct for large parts of every day - perhaps all the time. Learned behaviors - such as speech, and driving - are patterns that interconnect various instinctive behaviors.
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.
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.
What's an example? [How about one small one and one big one?]
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?
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.
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
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.
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 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.
That "free will", at least as commonly defined, is largely illusory.
The notion "a common notion of 'free will' exists" is largely illusory.
What's the "common definition" you're drawing on?
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.
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.)
No, I'm pretty sure PTSD from parental abuse is a real phenomenon.
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?