= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
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.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (571)
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?"
Lucid dreaming is not a lie.
I actually expect you rationalists to believe me, but I don't believe that I would come up with something better if I were to think about it for a while.
A lie? It certainly is lucid...
You really don't think the best hypothesis is "its like regular dreaming but more lucid!"?
I must confess I'm having trouble understanding you.
I think it would help if you pointed out what part of the grandparent post you struggled on.
*fixed typo
Indeed.
What certainly is lucid?
The best hypothesis to explain what? What do you mean by "more lucid" in this case? Are you actually familiar with the term "lucid dreaming"?
The dreams are lucid! When you say "lucid dreaming is not a lie" I'm guessing you mean that an external reality is in some way represented within the dream... But I have to do a lot of work with your initial statement to get to that interpretation. I meant to point that out by agreeing that lucid dreaming is not a lie... it really is lucid. Which is surely not what you meant but is definitely the clearest interpretation of your comment.
In any case, A lucid dream is a dream in which you are aware you are dreaming, perhaps excercising some control of the dream and perhaps the dream is extraordinarily vivid... this is certainly a matter of degree. I routinely have dreams in which I am partially aware or have partial control. Vividness is also a matter of degree. In other words I have dreams that are just like regular dreams except more lucid. How are you defining "lucid" such that "lucid dreams" are so unique that they require our special consideration?
It's very likely that your parents were abusive while you were growing up.
Also, there is no scientific method.
Does your support for the first hinge on a strict definition of abuse, some generous interpretation of "very likely", or something else?
What I mean, roughly, is that if you raised in Western or Eastern Europe, any of the Americas, the Middle East, Asia or Africa, then you probably grew up under some abusive mode of childrearing (childrearing is much more advanced in the Nordic countries). The socializing mode is the most popular these days, although intrusive parenting can also be fairly common too depending on the region.
Try The History of Child Abuse if you're interested.
Read up on the basic archetypal childrearing modes (infanticidal, abandoning, ambivalent, intrusive, socializing, and helping) for a better idea of what I mean by abuse. You can find information about them in the above link, and even the wikipedia article isn't too bad.
I'd been operating under the assumption that when you phrased the original claim in the second person, you meant to make a statement about the readers of Less Wrong, who are not from the Middle Ages and most of whom are from developed Western countries, as opposed to the crosscultural, broadly historical swath of parenting strategies mentioned in your link. Even if I go by that (profoundly, deeply disturbing, gee thanks) article, the background common to most visitors to this site marks most of us as recipients of a "socializing" parenting style, and it's not obvious to me that that includes unambiguous abuse by the parents, although apparently it's supposed to involve turning a blind eye to abuse elsewhere by authority figures and peers.
It causes me to raise an eyebrow that all of the bibliographical citations are outsourced, so to speak, to four publications all by the same person. It makes it just a little too difficult for me to track down his primary sources (referenced in "over 600" footnotes.)
Edit: I see in another branch of the thread that you count circumcision, in which case unless I outright challenge your inclusion (I'm disinclined to do so) I haven't a leg to stand on: it's very common indeed, and most of the people here are male.
What would you consider the minimum threshold for 'unambiguous abuse'?
Deliberately or negligently injurious corporal punishment (e.g. anything that you can still see evidence of five minutes later that was intended to be that hard, or, after several occasions of "unintentionally" being that hard, is continued with no extra safeguards), sexual contact, protracted neglect (of physical needs like food, cultural needs like clothing, safety in the environment like not harboring a dangerous pet or leaving exposed electrical wires around, education [home or non], or of opportunities for social interaction), regular emotional/verbal abuse (I say "regular" because I wouldn't want to call parents abusive for merely being human and occasionally stooping to yelling or insults), or any combination of the above. I may have forgotten something.
I think only the last item (regular emotional abuse) should really count. But to some extent even that, and certainly everything else (battery of the child, molestation/rape, and neglecting to feed/protect/raise the child) goes way beyond the minimum threshold for abuse and into the territory of strictly evil and even savage parenting.
Corporal punishment is legal in all states. It's illegal to hit an adult, but it's legal to strike a child. Spanking, in particular is prevalent and has been linked to anxiety, depression, and other psychiatric disorders. And, basically, inducing that in a child is evil and abusive. The prevalence of spanking has been absurdly high throughout the 20th century - it obviously varies by region, but in the U.S. it was as high as 80-90% at times.
So the prevalence of spanking was certainly above 50% throughout the 20th century. And that's just spanking - it's fairly easy to find the other saddening statistics concerning the other forms of corporal punishment and physical abuse and their prevalence. Same goes for the disturbing frequency of sexual abuse.
As for emotional abuse, if your parents were socializing it's likely that you received it. The socializing parent will often withhold love and support for their child if he or she does not conform to their wants/wishes. The love is conditional upon their children reaching prescribed goals (e.g. grades, college, homosexuality, performance in sports, etc.) and that counts as abuse in my book because it diminishes free will, integrity and self esteem.
Most children are abused. And you don't have to think or know that you've been abused to actually have been abused, so just because most people who suffer this kind of abuse won't come out and admit it doesn't mean it wasn't really abuse.
Spanking is typically not injurious by the definition I gave. Non-injurious corporal punishment doesn't exactly make me want to award the offending parent stickers and Snickers, but I don't think it's "unambiguous abuse", which is what you asked me to define.
I'm willing to believe that unambiguous child abuse is sickeningly common - it would not be the first time I've been gravely disappointed in my species - but it's not down to you to define child abuse into the majority. "Withholding love and support" contingent on the failure to achieve certain desiderata isn't stellar parenting either, but just what are you expecting here? I think I'll be a great mother and I'm sure that there are things my kids could get up to that would grievously injure our relationship. Which things it's okay to react badly to and which things must be taken as neutral and effect-free with respect to the parent-child interactions is a very gray area... it's hard to label much in that department "unambiguous abuse".
You're right, it's very hard to raise a child completely abuse free. I'm not calling all parents evil (or didn't intend to anyway). What I'm saying is that we should recognize these practices as abusive maltreatment of children. A crucial part of that is coming to terms with the fact that they were abusive when they were done to you too.
Inevitably an argument over something like this will come to "my parents spanked me" or "my father hit me, and..." It's already happened in this thread. These people can't accept the fact that when their parents hit them, it was abuse (talk about absolute denial macro).
The point is to turn it off. It's not a contradiction to love your parents while also acknowledging the bad things they did, even calling it abuse. If they wielded their power as caregivers in anything less than a helpful way, then it was basically an instance of abusive parenting. That doesn't imply that in every case they were horrible people or that you can't love them. It just means you acknowledge it as an abusive practice, harmful to the development of the child.
Studies show a linear correlation between the frequency with which a child is spanked and the occurrence of several psychiatric disorders. Also, one in three parents who begin with legal corporal punishment (e.g. spanking) end up crossing the line into criminal abuse (e.g. battery).
The evidence shows that spanking is injurious. You can't just redefine the word.
I think one obstacle to having this conversation is that, as a society, we think that intervention is called for when a child is being abused. People are modus-tollensing away your declarations of abuse because they don't think the things you mention warrant bringing in Child Protective Services: if it's abuse, then it warrants calling CPS. It doesn't warrant calling CPS, therefore it is not abuse.
By your definitions, I think it would be next to impossible to find someone who was never once abused as a child. That means we have no information about any given sort of abuse relative to an absence of abuse altogether. We can only compare the results of abuse A with abuse B, or more of A with less of A, or A with both A and B, or whatever. There's no control group. That casts a shadow of a doubt over many of your claims.
I'm curious about how far your absolute intolerance of hitting kids goes. I was hit exactly once by each parent as I grew up. I don't remember the exact circumstances under which my mother struck me, but I know why my father did it: I was attacking my little sister over some childish upset. There was no way to get me off of her without causing me some pain; he smacked me and I was startled enough to stop. Would you consider that an act of abuse? Wouldn't letting me attack my sister be an act of abuse towards her?
Correlation is not causation. Have you read Judith Harris?
As you may have anticipated, I am... unimpressed, shall we say, by Lloyd deMause's writing; among other things, I simply don't believe some of his numbers. However, I will agree that, by his standards, I probably have endured at least some "child abuse". When, as a child, I would hit my father, he would "hit" back, and when I hit my mother, she would tried to immobilize me until I calmed down (which could take a long time, because being immobilized made me angry). I ended up hitting my father a lot less than I hit my mother. Incidentally, at the time, perhaps from watching too many cartoons, I believed that if I learned martial arts, I would be able to physically overpower my parents or teachers in a fight, so they couldn't drag me off to school or whatever.
Why are you putting child abuse in quotations? And hit? And how could I have anticipated your arrival in this thread, let alone your disapproval of my references?
Well, this is a thread on things people are not supposed to believe, isn't it?
Also, for why child abuse is in scare quotes, see this.
I still don't understand, but alright... I'm thinking either you're somewhat deranged, or that I've been the victim of a gag of some sort.
Sorry. Anyway, "child abuse" is in quotes because I don't think "honest, justifiable actions that nevertheless cause harm" should count as abuse. To quote from what I linked to:
...
Anyway, I don't think that the infrequent corporal punishment my father inflicted on me was, in the long run, particularly harmful (apart from the moments of pain I endured). It was also effective.
I won't defend my overall upbringing as "not harmful", though; the special education school I ended up attending for many years was an awful place, and I learned very little there. The fault lies more with the school system than with my parents, though.
It was effective at getting me to stop hitting my father. (I hit him far less than I hit anyone else.) I'm not claiming anything more than that.
To quote one of your links:
Seriously, though, if a 7-year-old attacks you in a furious rage, punching, kicking, and screaming, and continues to keep it up for hours at a time, what do you do?
I don't know if I actually do love them, but I do respect them. Or, at least, I respect them now that I've grown up.
I'm not saying they're blameless (good luck finding a single blameless individual anywhere over the age of one year) but, well, whatever you've heard about soul-destroying schooling, I had to live it. After not fitting in during elementary school (I threw a crayon at the principal once) I eventually wound up in special education. There were basically two kinds of children in the special education school I went to from third to seventh grade: those that were retards, and those that were evil. Guess which group I ended up hanging out with? My best friend was basically a young Hannibal Lecter. Once, we tried to kill our teacher with what we thought was a bomb.
To be frank, the only shot I would have had at a decent educational experience would have been if my mother decided to homeschool me. This was way before homeschooling became acceptable, and as the school system seemed bound and determined to find a way to blame my parents for the way I acted (which you can probably blame on my being born with a non-standard brain) to the point where it was like they ought to be bringing a lawyer with them to every meeting with school officials, they really didn't want to do anything weird.
Additionally, you might want to look into this.
When you take terms with vile connotations, like rape, murder, child abuse, and racism, and expand them beyond their conventional definition, people use scare quotes around them because they want to make it perfectly clear that they are unwilling to give your use of the term the really, really bad connotations that their use of the term carries. I'm willing to bet that's basically what's happening here: what you call "child abuse" is not actually bad enough in his mind to merit being called "child abuse."
Indeed.
This author makes me wish I had some way of making it clear my name was derived from Asimov and not something that seems so psuedo-scientific.
I am sceptical of some of the points in the linked text as well. The author mentions that there are cultures in which parents masturbate their children, but that isn't obviously harmful. Yes, an example was cited where the masturbation in question was done in a harmful and painful way, but that isn't to say that it must always be so. Young children have been documented to occasionaly masturbate even on their own, so why is it that adults helping is immeaditly abuse? And citing
as an example of "abuse" is getting us into the ludicrous territory. Embracing your child is abuse! The author also makes pretty big leaps of correlation and causation:
Of course, there are also plenty of valid points about real sexual abuse that does take place, or has historically taken place.
These are excellent examples. I don't see why they're being voted down.
The second, however, is much better than the first.
I'm blaming it having successfully triggered the "absolute denial macro" in at least a few people :D.
Why's that?
Clarity. The first depends on the interpretation of "abuse", and as such I think it's very likely that many people will agree with it to some degree.
The second is much more precise; although I think it is demonstrably untrue, I expect it will draw much reflexive denial.
I'm having trouble reconciling those two statements. I'm even having trouble trying to express just why they seem... inconsistent, or inharmonious? Could you elaborate a bit?
I think he means that it can be reliably argued (demonstrated) to not be true, but many denials will be by people who cannot adequately argue the point, it will just be reflexive for them.
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.
I'm not sure I understand what kind of comparison you're suggesting. I've heard numerous attempts to rationalize child abuse by analogy to hazing, I've even heard arguments by abusers to the effect that children are "weak" today because kids don't undergo the same "hazing" that their parents put them through. "It's nothing my parents didn't do to me," etc...
Or were you getting at something else?
...hmm, I see a cultural divide, here. I disapprove of hazing, and consider it to be perpetuated because the victims feel like they've earned the right to revenge - even though said revenge is enacted on the wrong parties (the next incoming group, rather than the previous group that abused them). Therefore - ironically, as it happens - I made the analogy to hazing to indicate a possible pattern in the rationalizations.
In my high school, one of my classmates offered pretty much this exact justification for hazing freshmen.
Does circumcision count?
Yes, as a vestige from instrusive and early infanticidal childrearing modes.
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.
That uncertainty is just a lie by the people who are wrong. :)
Wow, this is such an utterly terrible idea that I can't even tell if it's a terrible idea or pure genius. Or something in between. I wonder if it'll work...
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.
If I wanted to nitpick or argue, I'd nitpick based on the meaning of "intended". (I think I stayed silent during that discussion. On a side note, I suspect that human brains do have a built-in capacity to model the physics of ballistics, air resistance included, because we can throw objects to hit a target.)
Anyway, if we want a "model-free" designer and optimization process, we can always go point to our "friend" the alien god, which certainly doesn't have models or make predictions, yet it works.
As far as I can tell, only way to call evolution an intelligence, you have to add in the whole system in which the evolution works(The biosphere). If we take "mutual information" to be basis for "model", evolution actually has absolutely accurate model of the biosphere, the biosphere itself. It's just that evolution uses this model in a very very very suboptimal way.
The reason behind combining the process and the system it works in is quite simple, I believe. Evolution is simply a result of the biosphere doing the biosphere-thing, just as our intelligence is a result of our brain doing the brain-thing, all according to the laws of physics. Take the biosphere(or the brain) away, and that "intelligence" is gone.
As a moderate modeler I'm going to admit that I would prefer if it turned out there's a simple way to prove that thermostats and such can be convincingly reinterpreted as having a model, but I'm not going to lose any sleep if it turns out not to be true.
That summarizes exactly why I tried to unearth the actual substance of the claim that a system "has no model", i.e. what testable implication did his claim have? And that I think I successfully did in the comment I linked.
The implication was that, basically, you don't need to know everything about your environment to build a working controller, and so you probably overestimate how much you have to know about it.
There was such strong reaction to Richard's claim because people associated different concepts with models than Richard did. Like with the "tree falling makes a sound?" debate, the correct approach is to identify the substance of the dispute, and that's exactly what I did.
I don't think this post counts as 'trolling'. Certainly the desired responses to it could be used to troll, but that's not at all the same thing.
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.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/xc/the_uses_of_fun_theory/
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.
A related phenomenon - one which often motivates belief(2) - is belief in belief. </obviouslink>
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'm a rationalist(2). I'm just here because it's fun. ;)
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. ;-)"
I'm pretty sure I'm a rationalist(4). I am really good at that.
Dude's dead. QED.
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.
I think the problem is risk aversion. If people take on such goals, and fail (which is not uncommon), they will be worse off than if they never fully embraced the goals in the first place.
Only if the failure is permanent. If 9 out of 10 businesses go under, that just means you have to be prepared/willing to start 10, and learn from your mistakes each time. ;-)
This is only significant if you, well, have long-term goals that involve changing the world.
I don't.
Not really, unless you count things like "avoid feeling bad due to boredom, hunger, cold, etc."
I do usually want to finish whatever video game I'm playing at any given time, though, but that's not something you need to be a millionaire to do.
Do you have any interest in acquiring goals?
If you could figure out what makes you enjoy video games and duplicate it in some other task that had more external value, would you do that?
I dunno, really. If getting goals means I have to do ::shudder:: work, then I don't think I want goals. Also, one important thing that I like about video games is that failure has no meaningful consequences; if you fail at a job, you could be in trouble for a while, but if you fail at a game, you can just try again or even do something else.
Some other things I like about video games:
There's probably more things I could list...
I don't know if you'd be good at it or not, and I don't know if your circle of friends lends itself to discussions on other topics, but apart from "exciting and intense" (and the specific applicability of GameFAQs.com), most of those criteria apply to many forms of artwork. Drawing, for instance, is cheap, can be pursued at any time and with any amount of delay between putting one down and picking it up, putting things up on the Internet or showing them to friends yields prompt feedback, persistence pays off no matter how much initial talent you have, and many people find it very absorbing. Unlike playing video games, there is some chance of art netting an income, although it would probably take a while for such an enterprise to take off.
I find many "creative" pursuits, such as writing and computer programming, to be both extremely difficult and rather exhausting. I'm often good at them, but they're so much harder than anything that's merely a matter of mastering and executing specific algorithms. In other words, I can't brute force my way through writing a story the way I can brute force my way through a video game, by trying over and over again until I finally get it right. If I get stuck, I'm really, really stuck, and there's no FAQ I can go read which will tell me what my next sentence or line of code ought to be. (Which is why I mentioned GameFAQs.com as one of the things I like about video games.)
I don't know much about drawing, though. I never had much interest in it before...
I recommend it, personally, but that's my hobby, and won't be universal. There are lots of drawing tutorials available for all levels of expertise and assorted styles and at varying levels of step-by-step detail, and it's more than a little easier to assess a ballpark of objective quality in drawing than it is with writing. If you like to write, you could do your own webcomic (although I don't know how well you'd react to keeping an update schedule, you'd be in good company if you didn't stick to one); that's a good way to get in regular practice and improve. If you don't like to write and have halfway decent art, it's not hard to find a writer willing to collaborate.
Playing a musical instrument is quite amenable to brute-forcing techniques* (as you might guess from the multitude of musical-instrument-simulating videogames).
*You would still need instruction to get started, and for specialized tricks, however.
Indeed it is! I can play the piano at the "talented amateur" level. I enjoy it, and like performing, but it's damn hard to make money doing it.
I recommend drawing from real life. I don't think people get stuck like writer's block. You may get stuck at a plateau of ability, but that might be OK, depending on the level.
I think this is a good suggestion. CronoDAS, you might also like to look into web design, or just design in general. I'm learning it right now - in an amateurish, inconsistent way - because it'll help my website programming work. I'm really enjoying it even though my current skill level could be regarded as "terrible". It involves learning tools like Photoshop (or GIMP if you like Linux), CSS and the principles of design. It helps me make things that appeal to my aesthetic sense and give me a sense of accomplishment, and I get satisfaction from improving a skill. As a self-directed exploration of this skill, it should be low-stress and there's not really a way to fail.
It sounds like you have programming talent but don't like getting stuck (I sympathize), but it's hard to get actually stuck when your tools just include HTML, CSS and Photoshop.
This is an instrumental equivalent to believing something for a reason other than that it is true. The goals are a first step, setting stage for the planning. The best available plan wins, even if it's a "bad" plan, that is even if it doesn't exactly "achieve" any of the goals.
For example, you may want to jump from a cliff, but not want to die (from hitting the ground). The plans not involving a parachute may dissuade this intention, prompting one to give an answer immediately, and declare the task undesirable, placing a curiosity stopper of this line of investigation. The correct approach is to keep your goals, not to stop considering them, and wait for a better plan: maybe the idea of a parachute will come, given time and careful study.
If you fail at a job, you don't have a job. If you currently are happy about not having a job, then this shouldn't be so bad. Yeah, maybe someone will yell at you before firing you, but I simply reject that complaint. I can imagine months of stress when you believe you'll be fired, but I think that it is possible to accept a job as transitory and avoid this stress. I think that I would find this stressful mainly because the uncertainty of what I would do when the job is over. If I knew that I'd go home and play video games for a few months, I think I could avoid the stress. But, maybe I'm wrong; and maybe you're different. I'm probably more sympathetic to your other complaints.
I'm in a similar boat as CronoDAS. I had actually stopped playing video-games over a year ago (and stopped reading fiction months ago), though I just recently downloaded Daggerfall. I did feel really good when I got a job, though I am anxious that I could screw up and lose it (especially in this economy, as we've had the first layoffs in the company's history).
Back to the issue of automatic-denial: Thought some of you might be interested in this from Mind Hacks on bias blind spot.
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.
What kind of numbers do you think you would need to shut up and multiply? No trolling, just an honest question. To clarify, I support Roko here -- I've been thinking along the same lines for some time.
You'd need to know the goals in question. Then you'd need to know how much great wealth would benefit these goals. Then the odds of becoming wealthy. Then the benefits if you try to get wealthy but fail. Then you'd need to compare that to the benefits of just doing what you're doing. It's not really quantifiable enough to fit into the shut-up-and-multiply, especially since it varies based on goals and individuals.
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.
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 taking that proverb as "rationalists should win everything at everything everywhere all the time forever" lest I risk redefining success and deluding myself. Real life's lack of predefined win conditions is actually a bad thing.
Maybe people say they like these things for the same reason they say they like alcohol.
Not buying the analogy. In a big world full of six billion people, all of whom have their own interests and desires, and a universe still larger than this, it's not even clear to me what it means to be high-status or significant. Think of all those precious moments in your life---every book and every insight and every song and every adventure. Is all of this to be considered as dust because someone somewhere in the depths of space and time has had more books, greater adventures?
Small is beautiful, if only because large is incomprehensible.
I feel a gut reaction to upvote your comment because it seems both right and profound, and yet I cannot relate what you're saying to the comment's parent.
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? :(
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.)
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.
In particular, I think it's not going to go away as long as powerful politicians keep having extramarital affairs.
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.
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.)
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2007/09/19/defining-the-alpha-male/
Note that number of affairs is a descriptor of all alphas and no betas, and it increases with rank. Thus, infidelity reflects a man's worth positively.
If you're not going off Roissy, I apologize for misinterpreting you, but your language and his matched up almost exactly, and I've seen him linked a bit here and on OB, so I figured that's where the ideas came from.
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.
Well, it's probably at least the same chance that Cosmo's covers are going to stop discussing men's love and commitment as "objects that can and should be attained under the right circumstances". ;-)
Or of course, we could just assume that when people talk about doing things in order to attract a mate, that:
It's hard to buy the idea that it's not supposed to have to do with objects or attainment when the phrasing looks like:
You could just as easily say the same thing about cars or a nice house or something else readily available for sale. I wouldn't mind if the mate-seeking potential of money and status was discussed indirectly in a way that didn't make it sound like there is a ChickMart where you can go out and buy attractive women. "If I were a millionaire I could easily support a family", "if I were a millionaire I would have more free time to spend on seeking a girlfriend" - even "if I were a millionaire I could afford the attention of really classy prostitutes", because at least the prostitutes are outright selling their services. It's probably not even crossing the line to say something like "if I were a millionaire I would be more attractive to women".
How's this different from women's magazines having articles on how to "get" a man? Is this not idiomatically equivalent to "be more attractive to more-attractive men"? If so, then why the double standard?
Meanwhile, the reason that the phrasing was vague is because it's an appropriate level of detail for what was specified: men with more money have more access to mating opportunity for all of the reasons you mention, and possibly more besides. Why exhaustively catalog them in every mention of the fact, especially since different individuals likely differ in their specific routes or preferences for the "getting"? (Men and women alike.)
What double standard? Did anyone here claim that using language that teats men as objects is fine? Is Cosmo now supposed to be our standard of excellence?
Do you have some evidence that I approve of that feature of women's magazines, or are you just making it up? I find it equally repulsive, I just haven't found that particular behavior duplicated here so I haven't mentioned it.
If concision is all that was intended, there are still other, less repellent ways to say it ("If I were a millionaire, my money and status might influence people to think better of me", leaving it implied that some of these people will be women and some of these women might have sex with the millionaire.) Or it could have been left out.
The idea deserves some objective light shedding on it. It's easy to pick out cases where beautiful women and high-status (not necessarily rich) men choose to affiliate, but are the two groups really more likely to hang out together? Or is this a sort of male-evolutionary-psyche mirage, which is always over the next status hill?
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 think it is unethical (not necessarily "irrational") to discuss and think of women (or men) as suitable objects of manipulation. If you had been actually talking about the production and sale of porn, I'd be more forgiving; porn (like purchasing the services of prostitutes, which I've also acknowledged as non-manipulative) is at least honest, in the sense that everybody knows what porn is for.
Barring full-scale banhammer wielding... probably not, I'm afraid.
Do please try to understand that for many men, lack of sex is sort of like missing your heroin dosage - at least that's the metaphor Spider Robinson used. Anyone in this condition is probably going to go on about it, and if you're not starving at the moment you should try to have a little sympathy.
(EDIT: Of course, blathering about "attractive women" on a rationalist website and thereby driving rationalist women away from your own hangouts, and ignoring the fact that what you do is ticking off particular women, is extremely counterproductive behavior in this circumstance; but that's probably meta-level thinking that's beyond most people missing a heroin dosage. Men missing sex seem remarkably insensitive to what actually drives away women, just as women missing men are remarkably insensitive to such considerations as "Where does demand exceed supply?")
There's a few important differences (for instance, heroin is not a person that can read this site and be made to feel unwelcome), but I'm sure you know that.
Why would you assume that? Is there some reason it seems more likely to you that I'm having regular sex and therefore am completely without the ability to sympathize, than that I just don't objectify people even if I haven't had a fix of person lately?
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 suspect that prizes are good for spurring technological progress. I'm thinking of the X Prize Foundation and the DARPA Grand Challenge for robotic cars. One reason I'd like to have more money is so I could donate it to prizes that would spur technological progress.
INCLUDING YOU!!!
What counts as extreme steps?
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].
"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.
Noted.
I like sour and bitter drinks, so I would drink Strongbow (hard apple cider) even if it contained no alcohol. In fact, I'd rather it contained no alcohol (ETA: but tasted the same) -- I would drink more of it at one sitting. (I also like tonic water straight up, beer, and de-alcoholized beer.)
Two questions:
1) Why do you think the taste of Strongbow is so hard to mimic in a non-alcoholic version? Is it a hard problem for chemistry, or something no one wants to try?
2) Would you be able to distinguish alcoholic vs. non-alcoholic versions in a blind test?
1) I don't know if the taste is hard to mimic in a non-alcoholic version. I think the most likely reason no non-alcoholic version is available is because it wouldn't make enough money.
2) It's hard to say, but I'd put my chances at better than 50%. I base this on my strong confidence that I can tell beer and de-alcoholized beer apart.
1) Bingo. People don't see the alcohol as a downside the way they see fat/sugar/carbs as a downside, so there's no multibillion dollar industry trying to find the perfect mimic, because that fundamentally misunderstands people's motivations in drinking alcohol.
2) As per 1), your experience has only been with meager attempts to create the perfect mimic. I'd be interested in hearing the results of you doing a blind test.
But just to clarify: as in all cases dealing with large populations, certainly a non-trivial fraction of people really does enjoy the taste, in and of itself, and you could be one of them. It's just that people who genuinely enjoy the taste per se cannot be common enough to generate the observed data.
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.
Pleasure is pleasure, whether it comes from a taste you naturally enjoy or from your brain associating alcohol intoxication with Champagne drinking. I think much of my taste for wine (preferably red and "dry") also comes from the knowledge that I'm putting some alcohol into my system, but it tastes decent and it's a pleasant experience for me, so what of it?
I have a theory about alcohol consumption; I call people who like (or don't mind) the taste "tongue blind." My theory is that these people have such poor taste receptors that they need an overly strong stimulus to register anything other than bland. Under this theory, I would expect people that like alcohol to also like very spicy food, to put extra salt most things they eat, and to think that vanilla is a synonym for plain.
I'm afraid that doesn't mesh well with my experiences. I would actually suspect the opposite; it seems like people who "don't like wine" are missing the nuances between different wine flavors and so I would have guessed they have a worse sense of taste.
For reference, I like some alcohol, do not like lots of salt, and sometimes take violent offense to calling vanilla 'plain'.
You seem to have stumbled onto the existence of supertasters. As a supertaster myself, I find tonic water extremely bitter, must overly sweeten my coffee and can't stand grapefruit juice or spinach. I delight in the sharp sting of a good beer, though. Conversely, there are "nontasters" who have a greater tolerance for strong tastes.
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.
*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.
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.
I rather enjoy the taste of a Brown Cow, which is Creme de Cacoa in Milk. Then again, I'm sure I'd prefer a proper milkshake. Generally, if I drink an alcoholic beverage its for the side effects.
I have to agree! For a while, I was also puzzled by the same thing. I thought alcohol tastes gross, so why are so many people into it?
That its other effects could be such a big deal I came to realize much later.
To me, alcohol has neither taste or smell, but does have a definite tactile experience in the mouth; I like beer; the first glass of wine is ok but after the second it all tastes to me like bad wine; vanilla is *V*A*N*I*L*L*A*, not plain at all; I don't seek out ferociously hot curries.
Now cheese, that's gross.
Conclusion: people vary.
And of course people use alcohol to get high. What they put up with is not the taste, but the hangover the next day. And, er, this.
I would drink white russians if they were non-alcoholic. I almost never have more than one because I don't actually want to feel any of the effects of alcohol, I just want a white russian. I also drink them alone.
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?
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.
I guess I forgot to mention the other premise the argument uses: Y is a lot more expensive (per unit mass or volume). Given that alcoholic drinks cost a lot more, you would think that people would only pay the premium if they thought there were something better about it.
I claim that it cannot be the taste, because the taste is clearly dominated by cheaper alternatives
Except that my other issue with alcohol is that, within a given drink class, I can't distinguish the taste very much. All beers, for example, taste to me like sourness and bitterness that stings as it goes down. To the extent that I do discern a difference, it's that some aren't as painful or gross to drink. And what really perplexes me is that the least bad, most tolerable beer I've found is ... Guiness.
Over the years, I have not noticed these wonderful subtleties. There are differences, sure, but the overwhelming bitterness and sting dominates them.
(ETA: The sting of carbonated beverages also dominated my experience when I first tried them out, which is why I didn't regularly want them until I was about 10 and found one with enough of the right sweetness to outweigh the pain. Today, I still experience that sting.)
By the way, if want to give yourself a sixth sense, I would recommend echolocation or magnetism, which humans have been able to pick up, and which seem to have a lot more practical use.
And you prove my point. I think what happened is that you recongized a social benefit to voicing appreciation for beer, and learned all the right code words to use, and now can pattern-match beers to the right description well enough for social purposes.
The 'deli' down the hall from where I work sells single-serving pizzas. Crappy pizzas - nowhere near as tasty as the burritos from the co-op two blocks away, and more than twice the price. And yet, sometimes I buy them, even when the walk is not a concern.
I think you underestimate the desire for variety.
Variety would explain different drinks. It would not explain significantly-more-expensive, bad-tasting drinks.
But yes, there are many factors that go into a decision. My claim is just that the one typically given -- that people like the taste of alcoholic drinks -- cannot be correct.
Except that they don't taste bad. All the milkshake question shows is that they don't taste as good as milkshakes. Your insistence on this is puzzling.
It seems like the simplest hypothesis here is that people who claim to like the taste of alcoholic drinks are for the most part doing so because they like the taste of alcoholic drinks.
I like pepsi more than beer, and drink more pepsi than beer. I also like chicken mcnuggets more than snackwraps, and buy mcnuggets more often than snackwraps. But I still get snackwraps sometimes, even though they're more expensive. Does it make more sense to chalk that up to signaling, or liking variety?
But my point was, this can't account for how I describe my liking of alcohol the same way as other people, except that I conclude I don't like the taste of alcohol, while others conclude it means they like the taste. In other words, other people AND I meet the following characteristics:
-Think milkshakes are better tasting than the best alcoholic drink.
-Enjoy the taste of alcoholic drinks when it is drowned out with some other flavor.
-Believe it changes our mental states in a good way.
-Could not comfortably chug down a alcoholic drink the way we might a milkshake.
I classify all of that as "not liking the taste of alcohol, but liking to consume it anyway". Other people classify all of that as "liking alcohol, including its taste". Hence the dilemma.
All that your variety examples show is that if you have too much of one thing, you'll "tire" of it temporarily and want something else. But that's not what people claim makes them want alcohol. They really claim it's the taste. They really claim they spend lots of money to get that taste (think about how expensive some wines/liquors are). And they claim it can't match the taste of milkshakes, which, contrary to your example, people don't regularly have and aren't tired of.
People could have all the variety they wanted, and still alcohol wouldn't be in the top 30 drinks by taste, and people still claim they like the taste. This doesn't make sense.
I'm pretty sure some alcoholic drinks would make it into my top 30, actually.
And yes, even if alcohol doesn't make it into the top 30, it still makes sense. It's entirely possible to like more than 30 things. Something not making it into my 'top 30' (or 'top X' for whatever X) doesn't mean I don't like it.
Also, I don't see your list above logically implying not liking alcoholic drinks (though I couldn't 'chug' a milkshake, so that might be relevant). If you add 'I like the taste of alcoholic drinks' I don't see any contradiction, or even a tension, with the things you list.
Given the variety of counterarguments you have been exposed to, I would think that re-examining the claim with stricter scientific controls would be appropriate.
Really? The quality of the counterarguments doesn't matter, just their variety?
I'm going to refer back to Science isn't Strict Enough. The observations I've made simply shouldn't happen if the predominant theory, ("People accurately describe how much they like the taste of alcohol") were true. The fact that I didn't set up scientific controls doesn't change this.
If wine were really so great tasting, worth analyzing all the subtle nuances, worth paying obscene amounts for the best wines, there simply shouldn't be a wine expert who prefers the taste of milkshakes to the taste of the best wine. That observation forces an huge update in beliefs, even before an official experiement.
If anything, the ones who should be updating are those who are suprised to see people coming out of the woodwork and admitting they actually don't like the taste of alcohol.
I can't believe you're still making this case. While I don't personally much value the opinions of 'wine experts', I see no contradiction in:
In fact, I would be surprised if there were no wine experts who preferred the taste of milkshakes, even if it were the case that most people prefer the taste of wine. People like many things, all at the same time, to different degrees.
I so far haven't observed anyone acting surprised that there are people who don't like the taste of alcohol. Straw man?
I guess you haven't met anyone I've talked to in person about this...
Well, this is where we disagree. I can't imagine there being something with such exquisite taste that I'd be willing to pay $100 just to experience that taste, when it's not even better than a milkshake. (I have paid more than $100 for food/drinks before, I'm sure, but obviously the scenario gave me more than the taste of something delicious.)
Well clearly alcohol also gives you something more than the taste of something delicious. But your claim is that practically no one likes the taste of alcohol, and I don't think you really have enough evidence to support that.
And yes, that is clearly where we differ. I've in the past paid hundreds or thousands of dollars mostly just for particular sensory experiences, and could see much wealthier people being willing to pay a lot more.
ETA: Also, I'm skeptical of a monocausal explanation of anything. It seems much more likely to me that people like both the taste and intoxicating effects of alcohol, than that they just like the effects and erroneously report liking the taste.
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)
Indeed. There's a drink called a "White Rain" some friends of mine invented in college:
It's pretty good, and tastes mostly like really refreshing water. Note: the measurements above are best guesses, as the original recipe is based on the cups at Conn Hall at SCSU. If it tastes like cough syurp, you did something wrong.
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.
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 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.
I tried for a long time to find an alcoholic drink I like in the assumption that I was missing out on something everyone else was privy too. While I did find some drinks I liked, I decided that it was the high sugar or fat content (rum & coke or a white russian) that I liked, and not the alcohol. Since that is the only part I like, it is much cheaper and healthier to achieve the same taste with non-alcoholic drinks and artificial sweeteners.
There's no such thing as an absolute denial macro. And I sure hope this to trigger yours.
No, you wont!
Absolute denial macro can be an artifact of being Bayesian-rational, and being absolutely convinced (P=1, or ridiculously close to it) about something that just happens to be false. If you use your brain's natural ability to generate most plausible hypotheses consistent with data, and P(arm is not paralyzed)=1, then P(it's daughter's arm) > P(arm is paralyzed), so this hypothesis wins. If it's disproved, you just go for the next hypothesis, and you have plenty of them before you have to go for one with P=0 that happens to be true.
Well, I think the only reason we as atheists ask this question is to feel as if we are being scientifically rigorous, although we do know, with very good reason, that atheism is true.
But it's good to be sure, isn't it?
For every supernatural explanation it is possible to conceive an explanation whose claims are just as unfalsifiable and yet contradict and refute the claims of the first. Science, naturalism, is the only belief system that actually works on the grounds of evidence and incessant self-scepticism.
Life on other planets will have its own parochial religions, but we can see pretty easily that every species, on every conceivable world will have the atheists. Atheism and science are objective, religion is subjective.
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:
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"
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?)
Yes, we really don't know the effects of monophasic sleep compared to polyphasic sleep.
Erm, yeah, what Douglas_Knight said.
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 I don't have a reference handy, but the page you just linked to identified "segmented sleep" as a synonym for "polyphasic sleep". It seems to be along the lines I was thinking.
This reminded me of Umeshisms: "If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports."
physically maybe but with all the distractions dramas and bad language on the internets im overloaded to the point of periodic anxiety and depression
I find atheists reactive to a complex notion of self where there is no unified singular consistent self. This illusion is pervasive.
I don't understand what you're trying to get across. The word "reactive" is especially ambiguous.
That "free will", at least as commonly defined, is largely illusory.
What's the "common definition" you're drawing on?
That doesn't make life any less enjoyable.
Hitler had a number of top-level skills, and we could learn (some) positive lessons from his example(s).
Eugenics would improve the human race (genepool).
Human "racial" groups may have differing average attributes (like IQ), and these may contribute to the explanation of historical outcomes of those groups.
(Perhaps these aren't exactly topics that Less Wrong readers (in particular) would run away from. I was attempting to answer the question by riffing off Paul Graham's idea of taboos. What is it "not appropriate" to talk about in ordinary society? Politeness might trigger the rationalization response...)
I'll grant you that they're all taboo, but they're not really useful, either. (I mean, some people claim these are true to justify their prejudices, but that's not what we're talking about.) In particular, the statement about Hitler is too vague to suggest what ought to be imitated, and the statement about racial groups focuses on an effect which is almost entirely obscured by historical facts about the distribution of resources.
That said, regarding eugenics: have you read any of David Brin's Uplift books?
Related to: Mind-killer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think slightly overweight people use the rationale for losing weight to be more healthy. They know they want to do it to just look better.
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
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.