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Open Thread: November 2009
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Comments (539)
Our House, My Rules reminded me of this other article which I saw today: teach your child to argue. This seems to me to be somewhat relevant to the subject of promoting rationality.
In My house I would also teach that the difference between 'argument' and 'fight' is quite distinct from the difference between 'good' and 'bad'. I'd also teach them that a good response to a persuasive and audience swaying argument that they should give territory to another is "No. I want it."
Another danger of unfriendly AI: It doesn't invite you to the orgy.
I feel like this particular danger should be the primary research topic for FAI researchers.
Intermediate discoveries might be a good source of funding.
Sorry if this is getting annoying, but I recently thought of two new ideas that might make interesting video games, and I couldn't resist posting them here:
The first idea I had is an adventure game where you have a reality-distorting device that you must use before you try to do anything that wouldn't work in real life, but that you must not use before you do anything that would work in real life.
If you fail to use the device before doing something that wouldn't work in real life, then the consequences will be realistic, and disastrous. For example, if you try to leap off a cliff wearing an aesthetically pleasing but aerodynamically unsound pair of wings you made out of bird feathers, then you will just fall and go splat instead of gliding safely to the ground.
If you use the device before doing something that would work in real life, then the consequences will be unrealistic, and disastrous. For example, if you try to use a small amount of gunpowder, placed very carefully in just the right spot to knock over a pillar, then instead of there being a small explosion that knocks over the pillar, there will be a huge explosion that shatters the pillar into tiny pieces, one of which hits you in the head with perfect aim, arcing or ricocheting as necessary to reach you behind your carefully chosen barrier.
The purpose of this game is of course to test the player's grip on reality, and their ability to rationally think about the consequences of their actions, though the system is simple enough that the players could easily win just by trial and error.
The second idea I had is a game where you play as a stereotypical hollywood villain, but the objective is not to win, but to lose. In the game you are presented with a series of decisions where you can either make the rational choice, or the cliched villain choice. The rational choice will lead to you easily defeating the good guys, and the cliche choice will lead to the good guys succeeding - not in the traditional hollywood way, but in the way that would happen if the heros were familiar with all of the cliches.
The list of choices would of course be based on the Evil Overlord List
(and in case anyone here doesn't already know, Warning: TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life )
The purpose of this game is of course to test the player's ability to detect blatant stupidity, though unfortunately the game is set up so that they must always deliberately make the stupid choice. Also, the system is simple enough that players could win just by trial and error, or by memorizing the Evil Overlord list. One way to reduce this is to have choices whose consequences aren't seen until much later in the game.
Another idea is to play as the hero, and have to avoid the cliches instead of follow them.
Another idea would be to alternate between playing the hero and the villain, winning only if the hero avoids all of the cliches and other stupid decisions, and the villain follows all of them. This could also teach the player a more realistic picture of what really happens when the odds are stacked overwhelmingly against the hero.
If anyone likes any of these ideas, or any of my previous ideas enough to write a script for the game, then I would volunteer to code this into a simple text adventure game, probably implemented in PHP. Feel free to make the script nonlinear, or do other interesting things with it. If someone likes the text version enough to do artwork for it, then maybe we could even turn it into a Flash game, and submit it to the various Flash game portals around the internet.
I am mentally cringing at the idea of being forced to guess the game developer's password. The first time I am punished for something that should work but doesn't I would have to discard the game. For a game of any significant depth or breadth I would be shocked if I couldn't come up with a strategy that the developer hadn't considered and is penalised inappropriately.
I suspect I would find a more conventional game a more useful (and enjoyable) challenge to my rational thinking. Not that a game designed to teach some chemistry (gunpowder, etc) and engineering (what happens with the gunpowder takes out that post?) is useless. I just think it is an inferior tool for training rationality specifically than, say ADOM is.
Perhaps I didn't explain clearly: In the game, whenever you make any significant action, you must choose whether to do so with the reality-distorting device on or off. You make this decision based on whether you expect that the plan would work in real life or not. This means that if there is a "game developer's password", then it's only one bit long for each decision, and can be guessed by trial and error. Perhaps this is a feature, rather than a bug. If you save your game before making the decision, then you don't even lose any time. Perhaps the game could have an "easy mode" where the game just shows you the results of your choice, and then continues as if you had made the right choice, rather than forcing you to restart or reload from a saved game.
And I agree that the game shouldn't require advanced knowledge of chemistry and engineering. The gunpowder/pillar thing was just the first example I thought of.
Anyway, this game was just a random idea I had, and your criticism is welcome.
And is this the ADOM you're referring to? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Domains_of_Mystery
I suppose that pretty much any game (not just video games) can be better for training rationality than more passive forms of entertainment, like watching TV. Pretty much any game is based on objective criteria that tell you when you made a bad decision. Though it's not always easy to figure out what the bad decision was, or what you should have done instead, or even if there was anything you could have done better.
I'll go ahead and predict here that the Higgs boson will not be showing up. As best I can put the reason into words: I don't think the modern field of physics has its act sufficiently together to predict that a hitherto undetected quantum field is responsible for mass. They are welcome to prove me wrong.
(I'll also predict that the LHC will never actually run, but that prediction is (almost entirely) a joke, whereas the first prediction is not.)
Anyone challenging me to bet on the above is welcome to offer odds.
Well, the Standard Model hasn't been wrong yet. If you want to bet against it, I'll take you up on it.
I assert that the LHC will not establish the non-existence of the Higgs boson. Will you wager $20 at even odds on against that proposition?
I'll bet that the LHC will not establish existence. It's not clear to me what would count as establishing non-existence.
There are papers that establish upper bounds on the energy of the higgs boson,
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9212305
If the LHC can make particles up to those energy bounds (I don't know and don't have the time to figure it out), and it can be run for sufficient time to make it very unlikely that one wouldn't be created. Then you could establish probable non-existence.
Intrade has market for Higgs boson.
The market, unfortunately, is only through the end of next year; does anybody know whether all the relevant experiments are slated to be performed by then?
I'd like to unwind P(Find Higgs|LHC runs and does the tests) down to just P(Find Higgs) or some approximation thereof.
There are markets for further years, but have almost no activity, so I didn't link to them.
Too thinly traded, deadline too soon, rules for what counts as "confirmation" too narrow given the deadline.
I guess hardly anybody here knows even what the question means, exactly, so all a bead jar guess.
Semi-OT: It's discussions like these that remind me: Whenever physicists remark about how the laws of nature are wonderfully simple, they mean simple to physicists or compared to most computer programs. For most people, just looking at the list of elementary particles is enough to make their heads blow up.
Heck, it nearly does that for me!
Seriously? Dude, it's a list of names. It should no more make your head asplode than the table of the elements does, and nobody thinks that memorising those is a great feat of intellect. Are you sure you're not allowing modesty-signalling to overcome your actual ability?
Now, if you want to get into the math of the actual Lagrangians that describe the interactions, I'll admit that this is a teeny bit difficult. But come on, a list of particles?
I followed the link Silas provided. Rather than seeing a list to be memorised my brain started throwing up all sorts of related facts. The pieces of physics I have acquired from various sources over the years reasserted themselves and I tried to piece together just how charm antiquarks fit into things. And try to remember just why it was that if I finally meet my intergalactic hominid pen pal and she tries to shake hands with her left hand I can be sure that shaking would be a cataclysmic-ally bad idea. I seem to recall being able to test symmetry with cobalt or something. But I think it's about time I listened to Feynman again.
Point is, being able to find the list of elementary particles more overwhelming than, say, a list of the world's countries requires a certain amount of knowledge and a desire for a complete intuitive grasp. That's not modesty-signalling in my book.
Everyone knows what a country is. Few people know what the term "elementary particle" means. (It's not a billiard ball.)
It's not a billiard balls from the movie they showed? Then surely 'elementary particles' must refer to those things on the Table of the Elements that was on the wall!
I have a metaphorical near-head-explosion for different reasons than the average person that I was referring to. For me, it's mainly a matter of the properties shown on the chart being more abstract and not knowing what observations they would map to (as wedrifid noted in his signaling analysis...).
Compared to the Periodic Table, elementary particle chart also has significantly less order. With the PT, I may not know each atomic mass number, but I know in which direction it increases, and I know the significance of its arrangement into rows and columns. The values in the EPC seem more random.
Granted, but there are also nowhere near as many of them. Besides, fermion mass increases to the right, same as in the PT; charge depends only on the row; and spin is 1/2 for all fermions and 1 for all bosons. This is not very complicated.
I would also suggest that the seeming randomness is a sign you're getting closer to the genuinely fundamental stuff: The order in the periodic table is due to (using loose language) repeated interactions of only a few underlying rules - basically just combinations of up and down quarks, with electrons, and electromagnetic interactions only.
Nu, mass and charge are hardly abstract for someone who has done basic physics; that leaves spin, which just maps to the observation that a beam of electrons in a magnetic field will split into two. (Although admittedly things then get a bit counter-intuitive if you put one of the split beams through a further magnetic field at a different angle, but that's more the usual QM confusion.)
Oh, a bit off topic, but mind clarifying something for me? My QFT knowledge is very limited at the moment, and I'm certainly not (yet) up to the task of actually trying to really grasp the Standard Model, but...
Is it correct to say that in a sense the force carriers are, in a sense, illusory? That is, the gauge bosons are kind of an illusion in the same sense that the "force of gravity" is? From what little I managed to pick up, the idea is that instead one starts without them, but assigns certain special kinds of symmetries to the configuration space. These local (aka) gauge symmetries allow interference effects that basically amount to the forces of interaction. One can then "rephrase" those effects in a way that more looks like another quantum field interacting with, well, whatever it's interacting with?
ie, can the electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces (as forces) be made to go away and turn into symmetries in configuration space in the same sense that in GR, the force of gravity goes away and all that's left is geometry of spacetime?
Or have I rolled a critical fail with regards to attempting to comprehending the notion of gauge fields/bosons?
Thanks. Again, I know it's a slight tangent, but since the subject of the Standard Model came up anyways...
Ok, I'm not touching the ECE thing; as noted, I'm not a theorist. I just measure stuff. I've taken classes in formal QFT, but I don't use it day-to-day, so it's a weak point for me. However, it seems a bit odd to describe things that can be produced in collisions and (at least in principle) fired at your enemies to kill them by radiation poisoning as 'illusory'. If you bang two electrons together, measuring the cross-section as a function of the center-of-mass energy, you will observe a classic 1/s decline interrupted by equally classic resonance bumps. That is, at certain energies the electrons are much more likely to interact with each other; that's because those are the energies that are just right for producing other particles. Increase the CM energy through 80 GeV or so, and you'll find a Breit-Wigner shape like any other particle; that's the W, and if it weren't so short-lived you could make a beam of them to kill your enemies. (With asymmetric electron energies you can produce a relativistic-speed W and get arbitrarily long lifetimes in the lab frame, but that gets on for being difficult engineering. In fact, just colliding two electrons at these energies is difficult, they're too light; that's why CERN used an electron and a proton in LEP.)
Now, returning to the math, my memory of this is that particles appear as creation and annihilation operators when field theories with particular gauge symmetries are quantized. If you want to call the virtual particles that appear in Feynmann diagrams illusory, I won't necessarily argue with you; they are just a convenient way of expressing a huge path integral. But the math doesn't spring fully-formed from Feynmann's brow; the particular gauge symmetry that is quantised is chosen such that it describes particles or forces already known to exist. (Historically, forces, since the theory ran ahead of the experiments in the sixties - we saw beta decay long before we saw actual W bosons.) If the forces were different, the theorists would have chosen a different gauge symmetry and got out a different set of particles.
I'm not sure if I'm answering your question, here? My basic approach to QFT has always been "shut up and calculate", not because of QM confusion but because I find it very confusing when someone says that a particular mathematical operation is "causing" something. I prefer to think of the causality as flowing from the observations, so that the sequence is thus:
I wasn't bringing up the ECE thing.
I meant illusory in the same sense that "sure, the force of gravity can cause me to fall down and get ouchies... but by a bit of a coordinate change and so on, we can see that there really is no 'force', but instead that it's all just geometry and curvature and such. Gravity is real, but the 'force' of gravity is an illusion. There's a deeper physical principle that gives rise to the effect, and the regular 'force' more or less amounts to summing up all the curvature between here and there."
My understanding was that gauge bosons are similar "we observe this forces/fields/etc... but actually, we don't need to explicitly postulate those fields as existing. Instead, we can simply state that these other fields obey these symmetries, and that produces the same results. Obviously, to figure out which symmetries are the ones that actually are valid, we have to look at how the universe actually behaves"
ie, my understanding is that if you deleted from your mind the knowledge of the electromagnetic and nuclear forces and instead just knew about the quark and lepton fields and the symmetries they obeyed, then the forces of interaction would automatically "pop out". One would then see behaviors that looks like photons, gluons, etc, but the total behavior can be described without explicitly adding them to the theory, but simply taking all the symmetries of the other stuff into account when doing the calculations.
That's what I was asking about. Is this notion correct, or did I manage to critically fail to comprehend something?
And thanks for taking the time to explain this, btw. :) (I'm just trying to figure out if I've got a serious misconception here, and if so, to clear it up)
What is the difference between saying gravity is a force and saying it's a curvature of spacetime?
What is your definition of "a force" that makes it inapplicable to gravity? Is electromagnetism a force, or is it a curvature in the universe's phase space?
I don't know much about physics, please enlighten me...
To say that gravity is a curvature of spacetime means that gravity "falls out of" the geometry of spacetime. To say that gravity is something else (e.g., a force) means that, even after you have a complete description of the geometry of spacetime, you can't yet explain the behavior of gravity.
I guess you can think of it that way, but I don't quite see what it gains you. Ultimately the math is the only description that matters. Whether you think of gravity as being a force or a curvature is just words. When you say "there is no force, falling is caused by the curvature of space-time" you haven't explained either falling or forces, you've substituted different passwords, suitable for a more advanced classroom. The math doesn't explain anything either, but at least it describes accurately. At some point - and in physics you can reach that point surprisingly fast - you're going to have to press Ignore (being careful to avoid Worship, thanks), at least for the time being, and concentrate on description rather than explanation.
Well, my question could be viewed as about the math. ie: "does the math of the standard model have the property that if you removed any explicit mention of electromagnetism, strong force, or weak force and just kept the quark and lepton fields + the math of the symmetries for those, would that be sufficient for it to effectively already contain EM, strong, and weak forces?"
And as far as gravity being force or geometry, uh... there's plenty of math associated with that. I mean, how would one even begin to talk about the meaning of the Einstein field equation without interpreting it in terms of geometry?
Perhaps there is a deeper underlying principle that gives rise to it, but the Einstein field equation is an equation about how matter shapes the geometry of spacetime. There's no way really (that I know of) to reasonably interpret it as a force equation, although one can effectively solve it and eventually get behaviors that Newtonian gravity approximates (at low energies/etc...)
(EDIT: to clarify, I'm trying to figure out how to semivisualize this. ie, with gravity and curvature, I can sorta "see" and get the idea of everything's just moving in geodesics and the behavior of stuff is due to how matter affects the geometry. (though I still can only semi "grasp" what precisely G is. I get the idea of curvature (the R tensor), I get the idea of metric, but the I currently only have a semigrasp on what G actually means. (Although I think I now have a bit of a better notion than I used to). Anyways, loosely similar, am trying to understand if the fundamental forces arise similarly, rather than being "forces", they're more an effect of what sorts of symmetries there are, what bits of configuration space count as equivalent to other bits, etc...)
Alright! Point taken! The chart is less daunting than I thought. You mind loosening your grip on my, um, neck? ;-)
An especially good point -- maximally compressed data looks like random noise, so at the fundamental level, there should be no regularity left that allows one entry to tell you something about another.
"Antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium..."
I will take up the bet on the Higgs field, with a couple of caveats:
You use the phrase "the Higgs boson", when several theories predict more than one. If more than one are found, I want that to count as a win for me.
If the LHC doesn't run, the bet is off.
Time limit: I suggest that if observation of the Higgs does not appear in the 2014 edition of "Review of Particle Physics", I've lost. "Observation" should be a five-sigma signal, as is standard, either in one channel or smaller observations in several channels.
25 dollars, even odds.
As a side note, this is more of a hedge position than a belief in the Higgs: I'm a particle physicist, and if we don't find the Higgs that will be very interesting and well worth the trivial pain of 25 dollars and even the not-so-trivial pain of losing a public bet. (I'm not a theorist, so strictly speaking it's not my theory on the chopping block.) While if we do find it, I will (assuming Eliezer takes up this offer) have the consolation of having demonstrated the superior understanding and status of my field against outsiders. (It's one thing for me to say "Death to theorists" and laugh at their heads-in-the-clouds attitude and incomprehensible math. It's quite another for one who has not done the apprenticeship to do so.) And 25 dollars, of course.
I was hoping to make some more money on this :) in a shorter time and hence greater implied interest rate :) but sure, it's a bet.
Sorry, graduate students can't afford to be flinging around the big bucks. :) If I get the postdoc I'm hoping for, we can up the stakes, if you like.
This is a side issue but I'm curious as to what people's reactions are: I'm kind-of hoping that dark matter turns out to be massive neutrinos. Of the various candidates, it seems like the most familiar and comforting. We've even seen neutrinos interact in particle detectors, which is way more than you can say for most of the other alternatives... Compared to axions or supersymmetric particles, or WIMPs, massive neutrinos have have more of the comfort of home. Anyone feel similarly?
As I understand it, there is a known upper bound on neutrino mass that is large enough to allow them to account for some of the dark matter, but too small to allow them to account for all or most of it.
That is correct as far as the known neutrinos go. If there is a fourth generation of matter, however, all bets are off. (I'm too lazy to look up the limits on that search at the moment.) On the other hand, since neutrinos oscillate and the sun flux is one-third what we expect rather than one-fourth, you need some mechanism to explain why this fourth generation doesn't show up in the oscillations. A large mass is probably helpful for that, though, if I remember correctly.
Point of order! A massive neutrino is a WIMP. "Weakly Interacting" - that's neutrino to you - "Massive Particle".
I've just learned that Stephen Hawking has bet against the Higgs showing up.
Here's my argument against Higgs boson(s) showing up:
The Higgs boson was just the first good idea we had about how to generate mass. Theory does not say anything about how massive the Higgs itself it is, just that there is an upper bound. The years have passed, it hasn't shown up, and the LHC will finally take us into the last remaining region of parameter space. So Higgs believers say "hallelujah, the Higgs will finally show up". But a Higgs skeptic just says this is the end of the line. It's just one idea, it hasn't been confirmed so far, why would we expect it to be confirmed at the last possible chance?
Two years ago:
I wrote to him at the time expressing interest in the bet, but asking for more details. (No reply.) The rather bold statement that QM itself implies a Higgs "or something like it" I think must be a reference to the breakdown in unitarity of the Standard Model that should occur at 1 TeV - which implies that the Standard Model is incomplete, so something will show up. But does it have to be a new scalar boson? There are Higgsless models of mass generation in string theory.
This all leads me to think anew about what's going to happen. The LHC will collide protons and detectors will pick up some of the shrapnel. I think no-one expects new types of particle to be detected directly. They are expected to be heavy and to decay quickly into known particles; the evidence of their existence will be in the shrapnel.
The Standard Model makes predictions about the distribution of shrapnel, but breaks down at 1 TeV. So one may predict that what will be observed is a deviation in shrapnel distributions from SM predictions and that is all. Can we infer from this, and from the existing range of physics models, what the likely developments in theory are going to be, even before the experiment is performed?
Although I said that totally new particles will not be observed directly, my understanding is that the next best thing is certainly possible, namely a very sharp and unanticipated change in the distribution of decay products at a specific energy. That would mean that you had a new particle at that energy.
The alternative would seem to be a sort of gentle deviation of decay statistics away from SM predictions. Unfortunately I don't know enough about the theoretical options to really predict how this might be interpreted. However, the Higgsless models involve extra dimensions. So if we have the dull outcome, it will probably be interpreted by some as our first evidence of extra dimensions.
Also, particle physics is very complex and there are many possible mechanisms of interaction. I think that, if no Higgs shows up, many theorists will go back to their theorems and question the assumptions which tell us that this is the last chance for a Higgs to show up.
My prediction, then, is that if we get the dull outcome - no unambiguous signal of a new particle - we will see both even more interest in extra dimensions, and a new generation of "heavy Higgs" models which explain why we can, after all, have a heavier-than-1-TeV Higgs without screwing up observed low-energy physics.
I'm currently writing a science fiction story set around the time of the singularity. What newsworthy events might you expect in the weeks, days, or hours prior to the singularity. (and in particular prior to friendly AI)
This story is from the perspective of someone not directly involved with any research.
Example: For the purpose of the story, I'm having the FAI team release to the public a 'visualization of human morality' a few days before they go live with it.
I would expect astute but untrusting parties to hit the FAI team with every weapon and resource they have at their disposal.
Interesting... most technology is gets around only slowly, with the impact becoming clear only after a while. The biggest exception must be the atomic bomb - at least for the outside world. That's one way to think of it: what would have happened if they'd announced the A-bomb a few months in advance.
Alternatively, if the development is done by some relatively unknown group, the reception may be more like what you'd get if you'd announce that you built a machine that will solve the world's energy problem -- disbelief and skepticism.
So, I'm having one of those I-don't-want-to-go-to-school moments again. I'm in my first year at a university, and, as often happens, I feel like it's not worth my time.
As far as math goes, I feel like I could learn all the facts my classes teach on Wikipedia in a tenth of the time--though procedural knowledge is another matter, of course. I have had the occasional fun chat with a professor, but the lecture was never it.
As far as other subjects go, I think forces conspired to make me not succeed. I had a single non-math class, though it was twice the length of a normal class and officially two classes. It was about ancient Greece and Rome, and we had to read things like Works and Days and the Iliad. Afterwards, we were supposed to write a paper about depictions of society in the two works or something. I never wrote the paper, and I dropped the class.
Is school worth it for the learning? How about for the little piece of paper I get at the end?
In as much as most people require the motivational structure and then if you consider the material worth learning.
Yes.
Well... that isn't the answer I wanted. I wanted "no".
The correct answer should have been "It depends". Mostly on what you might want to do with that paper. I would mostly say "No". Unless you want a fairly boring, routine job working for someone else.
In general, the answer is:
If you intend to always work for yourself, owning your own companies, being your own boss, then a diploma is a waste of time.
Diplomas are for people who want to work for others.
But if you want to work for others, then get a degree, by all means.
If you work for yourself, your customers are generally going to be moved by most other factors prior to being moved by the owner's formal education.
Bosses and owners, however, are going to be moved by degrees.
Owners like to see their underlings to have degrees because it demonstrates a certain irrational loyalty, and a lack of business savvy. This assures the owner that he will remain in charge - that you won't negotiate too hard for your benefits, or run away with his business plans and start a competitive company, etc.
Bosses like to see their underlings to have degrees because they had to get one as well, so why shouldn't you suffer at least as much.
By getting a degree, you signal your acceptance of your humble status in the pecking order. This is a prerequisite if you want to find your place in the hierarchy, but pointless if you want to be at the top.
There are some people who prefer to work for others, and some who prefer to work for themselves; however, the vast majority of people prefer neither, and for them college is neither a waste of time nor a means to signal: it is a stay of execution.
I reservedly second Wedrifid's comment that the little piece of paper at the end is worth it. I know people who have gone far in life without one, and I don't mean amazing genius-savants either, just folks who spent time in industry, the military, etc. and progressed along. But I've also seen a number who got stuck at some point for lacking a degree. This was more a lack of signaling cred that smarts or ability. The statistics show that people with degrees on average earn more than those who don't, if that's of interest to you. But degrees don't instantly grant jobs, and some degrees are better preparation than others for the real world. It sounds like you're interested in a degree in math, which carries over into a lot of different fields.
I think it's great that your taking stock of what your education experience is giving you. As Wedifrid mentioned, the motivation is an important part of schooling, and if you're in a program that is known to be rigorous, the credentials are definitely worth it. But those have to be weighed against current employment options. I'd encourage you to consider working with professors on research, investigating internships, etc., so that you get the full educational experience that you're looking for, and not be one of those graduates that only took classes and then expected a job to be waiting for them when they graduated.
Correlation is not causation. Graduates as a group are smarter and more ambitious than nongraduates. The question is not whether people with a degree do better; the question is what the degree itself is buying you, if you're already a smart ambitious person who knows how to study.
I recall some studies (I hate not remembering authors or links) that tried to control for the effect of the degree itself by comparing those who got into a particular school but graduated from somewhere else to those who graduated from that school. Controls for the general "graduate" characteristic, but still misses the reasons for the choice.
Upshot was that there wasn't much difference in income, though I believe that was in part because the highest-level schools send a substantial part of their undergraduates on to become academics.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200810/reasons-consider-less-selective-less-expensive-college-saving-money-is-jus
Thanks for that link. I had wondered.
There it is. Thanks!
That quote asserts that SAT scores are the same as prestige. The 1998 and 1999 drafts of the paper looked at both, with different results, finding that average SAT score didn't matter, but various measures of prestige did. They have three versions of prestige: variance of SAT scores, Barron's ratings, and tuition. Variance is dropped in the 2002 published version. Tuition still predicts income. The most direct measure of prestige, rankings, seems to be quietly dropped in the few months between the 1998 and 1999 versions (am I missing something?). The final version seems to say on 1515, in a weirdly off-hand manner, that it doesn't matter, but I'm not sure if it's the same measure.
I remember reading about that study in the New York Times. I think that they said that they only found evidence of an income effect for black students...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/business/19money.html
I suppose black students do tend to be poorer...
What do you plan on spending your time on if you don't go to school? Most jobs largely consist of being forced to do some assignment that you feel isn't worth your time. - you're not going to be escaping that by dropping out. And I'd wager that a college degree is one of the best ways to snag a job that you DO actually enjoy.
I suspect the REAL value of a college degree, aside from the basic intelligence indication, is that it says you can handle 4 years doing largely unpleasant work.
Letting your future employer know you're willing to do all the unpleasant stuff you feel isn't worth your time.
If you did it for a piece of paper, then surely you'll do it for a paycheck... right?
I can't speak for all people or all jobs, but in my experience, there's a certain dignity and autonomy in paid work that I never got out of school. After quitting University, I worked in a supermarket for nineteen months. Sure, it was low-paying, low-status, and largely boring, but I was much happier at the store, and I think a big reason for this was that I had a function other than simply to obey. At University, I had spent a lot of time worrying that I wasn't following the professor's instructions exactly to the letter, and being terrified that this made me a bad person. Whereas at the store, it didn't matter so much if I incidentally broke a dozen company rules in the course of doing my job, because what mattered was that the books were balanced and the customers were happy. It's not so bad, nominally having a boss, as long as there's some optimization criterion other than garnering the boss's approval: you can tell if you couldn't solve a customer's problem, or if the safe is fifty dollars short, or if the latte you made is too foamy. And when the time comes, you can clock out, and walk to the library, with no one to tell you what to study. Kind of idyllic, really.
I worked at a supermarket for three days, and was fired for insubordination. (I wanted to read a book when there were no customers coming to my register, and the boss told me not to...)
I have a similar story; except in my case I was fired because my shirt was insufficiently black.
Could you elaborate? Were you fired for once not having a black shirt, or for not being able to acquire / evaluate black shirts? or, if it's possible to tell, having a bad attitude about the shirt rule?
I had a shirt I felt was black & meet the dress code; the manager felt that it didn't. I felt that since I had already spent something like 60$ on new clothes to meet the dress code, and since I didn't interact with the customers at all, I wasn't going to go and buy a new black shirt. The manager felt I no longer needed to work there.
In the comment section of this post, "Doug S." gives the most salient analysis I have seen. After stating, "the job of a university professor is to do research and bring in grant money for said research, not to teach! Teaching is incidental," he was asked why parents would pay upward of $40,000 annually for such a service. His parsimonious reply: "In most cases, it’s not the education that’s worth $40,000+. It’s the diploma. Earning a diploma demonstrates that you are willing to suffer in exchange for vague promises of future reward, which is a trait that employers value."
This is going to sound horrible but here goes:
In my experience schools value depends on how smart you are. For example if you can teach yourself math you can often test out of classes. If your really smart you may be able to get out of everything but grad-school. Depending on what you want to do you may or may not need grad school.
Do you have a preferred career path? If so have you tried getting into it without further schooling? The other question is what have you done outside of school? Have you started any businesses or published papers?
With a little more detail I think the question can be better answered.
Off-topic*:
Someone recently made the suggestion that it should standard practice to link the Welcome Thread in the body of all Open Thread posts going forward, and I think that's a great idea.
* ...but made as a reply to Warrigal to bring it to the attention of the owner of this open thread; not a PM so as to throw it open to general comment.
Before I started college, I read this professor's speech, which attempted to explain, given your concerns, why an education may nevertheless be valuable. It's biased towards its audience (UChicago students) but I think its relevant point can be summarized as: few jobs allow you to continue practicing the diversity of skills employed by academic work, and having a degree keeps your options wide open for a longer period. However, the real thesis of the speech is that university is uniquely a place to devote oneself to practicing the Art, broadly construed, of generating knowledge and beauty from everything.
Other considerations:
Hope something in there helps!
Take it from me (as a dropout-cum-autodidact in a world where personal identity is not ontologically fundamental, I'm fractionally one of your future selves), that procedural knowledge is really, really important. It's just too easy to fall into the trap of "Oh, I'm a smart person who reads books and Wikipedia; I'm fine just the way I am." Maybe you can do better than most college grads, simply by virtue of being smart and continuing to read things, but life (unlike many schools) is not graded on a curve. There are so many levels above you, that you're in mortal danger of missing out on entirely if you think you can get it all from Wikipedia, if you ever let yourself believe that you're safe at your current level. If you think school isn't worth your time, that's great, quit. But know that you don't have to be just another dropout who likes to read; you can quit and hold yourself to a higher standard.
You want to learn math? Here's what I do. Get textbooks. Get out a piece of paper, and divide it into two columns. Read or skim the textbooks. Take notes; feel free to copy down large passages verbatim (I have a special form of quotation marks for verbatim quotes). If a statement seems confusing, maybe try to work it out yourself. Work exercises. If you get curious about something, make up your own problem and try to work it out yourself. Four-hundred ninety-three pieces of paper later, I can say with confidence that my past self knew nothing about math. I didn't know what I was missing, could not have known in advance what it would feel like, to not just accept as a brute fact a linear transformation is invertible iff its determinant is nonzero, but to start to see these as manifestations of the same thing. (Because---obviously---since the determinant is the product of the eigenvalues, it serves as a measure of how the transformation distorts area; if the determinant is zero, it means you've lost a dimension in the mapping, so you can't reverse it. But it wouldn't have been "obvious" if I had only read the Wikipedia article.)
Forces don't conspire; they're not that smart.
I up voted this but I just wanted to follow this tangent.
This isn't true in all worlds where personal identity is not ontologically fundamental. It is a reasonable thing to say if certain versions of the psychological continuity theory are true. But, those theories don't exhaust the set of theories in which personal identity isn't ontologically fundamental. For example, if personal identity supervenes on human animal identity than you are not one of Warrigal's future selves, even fractionally.
It's amazing how rarely people -- including textbook authors -- actually bother to point this out. (Admittedly, it's only true over an algebraically closed field such as the complex numbers.) Were you by any chance using Axler?
While I certainly agree with the main point of your comment, I nevertheless think that this particular comparison illustrates mainly that the mathematical Wikipedia articles still have a way to go. (Indeed, the property of determinants mentioned above is buried in the middle of the "Further Properties" section of the article, whereas I think it ought to be prominently mentioned in the introduction; in Axler it's the definition of the determinant [in the complex case]!)
Mostly Bretscher, but checking out Axler's vicious anti-deteminant screed the other month certainly influenced my comment.
This depends on a lot of things: How much debt will you be in at the end? If you press on now, will you actually finish? Do you have the personality to make money without a diploma?
I made the mistake of pressing on early and incurring extra debt, but not pushing through to get a diploma.
Not having a diploma is hard if you want the kinds of jobs that often require one arbitrarily. Doing something freelance or taking a non-degree job are hard in other ways. Fortunately you can test this with some time away from college.
There's also a difference between what you CAN learn on your own and what you will actually take the time to learn. I know there are things that I would have been forced to learn which I have neglected to.
If you're probably not going to finish, then cut your losses now, but make a clean break that will make it easy to go back. Finish the semester well.
Oh god, this is still an issue for people in college? And here I was assuming that after I got out of high school I wouldn't think along these tempting-yet-ultimately-ruinous lines ever again.
It depends. The first few years may be like this as you take a bunch of classes in areas your probably aren't interested in, but if you choose a major you like, it gets better as you schedule becomes dominated by those classes. Your own personality is another important factor here.
Ach, I had not realized that required classes in college might feel as useless as required classes in high school. But perhaps college classes will be more rigorous and less likely to induce I-Could-Learn-This-On-Wikpedia Syndrome. I can but hope.
My two cents:
If you're excelling in math, move up to a higher level. Math departments are usually very flexible in this regard (engineering departments not always so). My freshman year I signed up for a couple of graduate level math classes, and believe me, the knowledge I gained is not to be found in Wikipedia, or any other written form. You have to struggle for an understanding of higher math, and the setup for the struggle is greatly helped by having fellow students, a professor to guide you, and hard deadlines to motivate you.
I also felt a lot of classes I was forced to take were incredibly lame. I dropped a few classes throughout my undergrad, including two English classes. All I cared about was math as an undergrad, and because of that the education I got was incredibly impoverished. Looking back, I think this was simply a defense mechanism. I knew I was a hot shot at math, so whenever I felt challenged in another subject it was easier to simply say, "This is trivial, I just can't be bothered! I'm clearly intelligent anyway." Don't let the knowledge of your own intelligence prevent you from undertaking things that challenge your supposed intelligence! In particular, writing papers is hard, but is often misidentified by science oriented people as being lame or stupid.
Now, as a graduate student, I fantasize about being an undergrad again and having the luxury of being coerced into studying a variety of different topics. Yes, there are still lame aspects to many classes, but that is largely a factor in lower division work. If you can teach yourself then do so! Leverage your intelligence, learn more, and get yourself into upper division classes in multiple subjects where you can interact with intelligent people who are passionate about the subject, and where the professor will treat you like a valuable resource to be developed rather than simply a chore.
I think you should ask yourself this: if you drop out, what realistically are you going to do with your time? If you don't have a very good answer to that question, stay where you are.
View university in the same way as you would view a long lap-swimming workout. Boring as hell, maybe, but you'll be better off and feel better when you're done. Sure, you could skip your pool workout and go do something Really Important, but most people skip their workouts and then go watch TV instead.
Suppose you have an idea or desire for something to do instead of university. You should create a gradual, reversible transition. For instance if you want to work and earn some money, find a job first (telling them you've dropped out), work for a couple of weeks, make sure you like it, and only then actually drop out. Or if you want to study alone at home, start doing it for 10 hours every week, then 20, drop just one or two classes to free the time, and when you see it's working out, go all out.
That non-math class sounds dreadful. Are you really in to classics or something? Also, I don't know where you go to school but a lot of places allow students to do independent-study in an area with the guidance of a professor. This is a really good option if the best non-math course you can find involves reading the Iliad.
Also, I'm really just replying to this so that I can congratulate you on this sentence:
This is maybe the best sentence I have read in the last few months.
Well, there's a choice of nine "Arts & Humanities" sequences I could be taking. Each one covers a single civilization (e.g. ancient Greece and Rome, early Europe, the Islamic Middle East) in detail, including history and paper-writing. Each consists of one double class each semester for a year. This sequence is the biggest component of the general education requirements here. Perhaps dreadfulness is mandatory.
Awesome! Now, if only I could figure out why.
Perhaps some is. But that requirement sounds especially bad. It definitely isn't a universal requirement. Any particular reason you are at this university? I know some schools have gotten rid of core requirements altogether (though if you aren't in the US you probably have fewer options).
It is simple. And the notion that we should celebrate unwieldy discussions (and do so by expanding them!) perfectly encapsulates the culture of Less Wrong. But celebrating and unwieldy are two words that are never related in this way which makes the sentence seem fresh and counter to prevailing custom.
I've been trying to ease some friends into basic rationality materials but am running into a few obstacles. Is there a quick and dirty way to deal with the "but I don't want to be rational" argument without seeming like Mr. Spock? Also, what's a good source on the rational use of emotions?
I suggest the same techniques that work with any kind of evangelism. Convey that you are extremely sexually attractive and otherwise high in status by virtue of your rationalist identity. Let there be an unspoken threat in the background that if they don't come to share your beliefs someone out there somewhere may just kill them or limit their mating potential.
Sad thought, but that explains what makes evangelism successful.
To whoever modded wedrifid down: was it because of the implicit endorsement of bad behavior, or because you have some reason to believe this is not how evangelism often works?
I also implied a similarity between the in-group and out-groups, in particular a similarity to the out-group 'religious believers'.
Then there is the fact that my suggestions just don't really help Bindbreaker in a practical actionable way. Not that my suggestions weren't an effective recipe for influence. It's just that they are too general to be useful. Of course, I could be more specific about just what techniques Bindbreaker could use to generate the social dominance and influence he desires but that is just asking for trouble! ;)
Don't sell yourself short! The first part (about conveying sexual attractiveness) might not be actionable, since people are generally already doing whatever they know how to do to maximize this or are okay with its current level.
But the second part (about the implied threat of not joining) certainly converts easily into actionable advice. At least, it's far more specific and usable than most dating advice I've seen!
Interesting. My intuition would be that the 'convey sexual attractiveness' part is more actionable than the implied threat part. I think the amount of influence that can be gained by increasing personal status is greater per unit of effort than that that can be expected from attempting to socially engineer an infrastructure that coercively penalises irrationality. Maybe that is just because I haven't spent as much time researching the latter!
To achieve this:
it's only necessary that to convincingly give the impression that failure to join will have those negative consequences. You don't need to actually move society in this direction!
What I had in mind for Bindbreaker's case was something like, "If you're not familiar with rationality, you leave yourself open for being turned into a money pump. I know a ton of people who know exactly how to do this [probably a lie], and I'd really hate for one of them to take advantage of you like that [truth]! I'd never forgive myself for not doing more to teach you about being a rationalist! [half-truth]"
Not that I'd advocate lying like that, of course :-(
Danger, Will Robinson:
"If you're not familiar with [Jesus], you leave yourself open for [going to hell]. I know [the devil] knows exactly how to [send you there], and I'd really hate for [the devil] to take advantage of you like that. I'd never forgive myself for not doing more to teach you about [Jesus]!"
At least the argument for rationalism would be in terms they are familiar with, I suppose.
I said it would be more convincing, not that it would necessarily be a better argument. And I think the money pump is just a little more demonstrable than the devil.
In any case, the way that you would achieve the subtle threats when evangelizing standard, popular religions wouldn't be with any kind of direct argument like that one. Rather, you would innocently drop references to how popular it already is, how the social connections provided by the religion help its members, how they have strength in numbers and strength members' fanaticism (hinting how it can be deployed against those it deems a threat) ... you get the idea.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I think. Until rationalists start showing tangible social benefits like the ones backing the subtle threats you mentioned, it will be hard to get people in the door who aren't already predisposed.
Though I have had trouble developing a demonstrable money pump that can't be averted by saying "I would simply be too suspicious of somebody who offered me repeated deals to allow them to continually take my money." Of course, the standard retort might be "you play the lottery," but then that's not a great way to make people like rationalists/rationalism.
I've asked this before: Why don't rationalist run money pumps?
As far as I know, none of us are exploiting biases or irrationality for profit in any systematic way, which is itself irrational if we really believe this is an option.
We're either an incredibly ethical group, or money pumping isn't as easy as it would seem from reading the research.
The comparison I'm concerned with is "people who don't conform to the beliefs of the orthodoxy are burned as heretics".
That's an interesting proposition you have going. In order to convey the superior sexual attractiveness of rationality we need some sexy rationalists to proselytize. Thank you Carl Sagan! But seriously, the problem might be that basic rationality doesn't translate easily into sexuality, threat, or other emotional appeal. Those things need to be brought in from other skill sets. Rationality can help apply skills and techniques to a given end, but it doesn't give you those techniques or skills.
"Implicit" endorsement?
If it is given that I think evangelising rational culture is possibly a net negative to the culture itself even the implication is gone.
Could you rephrase that? I'm not sure what you think I should assume or what that assumption implies with regards to your original statement. My objection was similar to jimmy's, if that helps.
I think it's worth distinguishing between two possible reasons to be against endorsement.
One is that this is bad epistemic hygiene.
The other is the possibility of lost purpose so that the person ends up trying to "act" rational rather than be rational.
In response to the former, epistemic hygiene is good and should be practiced when when possible, but is not necessary. Bullets kill good guys just as easily as bad guys, but guns remain a valuable tool if you're sufficiently careful. I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion of when usage of the 'dark arts' is acceptable.
In response to the latter, how might we make sure we achieve the wrong goal here?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/hp/feeling_rational/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/go/why_truth_and/
http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues
Are they saying that they don't want to be rational, or just not emotionless? I think that people do want to be rational, in some sense, when dealing with emotions, but they're just never going to have interest in, say, Kahneman and Tversky , or other formal theory. I've noticed that some women I know have read "He's Just Not That Into You", which from how they describe it, sounds like strategies on rationally dealing with strong emotions. I know it sounds hokey, but people have read that book and were able to put their emotions in a different light when it comes to romantic relationships. I couldn't tell you if the advice was good or not, but I think it does sound like there's at least an audience for what you're talking about.
Usually they seem to think that being rational is the same as being emotionless, despite my efforts to convince them otherwise. I think this may again be thanks largely to that dreaded Mr. Spock.
Just keep saying (with your voice clearly pained, no need to hide the feeling) "ugh... Spock, or vulcans in general, are NOT rational. They are what silly not so rational scriptwriters imagine rationality to be", I guess?
I'd try playing taboo with the word "rational".
You both agree that being spocklike is bad, so instead of fighting with those connotations, just try to point out that theres a third alternative and why it's better.
People don't want to go through the formal processes of being rational in many emotional situations (and they are often right not to). I think letting people know that sometimes its rational not to go through the formal routes, because the outcome will be better if they don't (and it's rational to want the best outcome). For example, if you just met a person you might want a relationship with, don't make said person fill out a questionairre and subject them to a pros-cons list of starting said relationship (I know this sounds absurd, but I know someone who did just this to all her boyfriends. Perhaps fittingly she ended up engaged to an impotent Husserlian phenomenologist twice her age.)
To Eliezer's list, I would add "Something To Protect" and the very end of "Circular Altruism". When a friend of mine said something similar during a discussion of health care about not really wanting to be rational, I linked him to those two and summarized them like this (goes off and finds the discussion):
If you're using a different example with something less important than saving lives, maybe switch to something more important in the cosmic scheme of things. I'm very sympathetic to people who say good feelings are more important to them than a few extra bucks, and I don't even think they're being irrational most of the time. The more important the outcome, the more proportionately important rationality becomes than happy feelings.
I thought that this may be of interest to some. There was an IAMA posted on reddit from a person that suffers from alexithmia or lack of emotions recently. Check it out.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9xea8/i_am_unable_to_feel_most_emotion_i_have/
At it's height this poll registered 66 upvotes. As it is meta, no longer useful and not interesting enough for the top comments page please down vote it. Upvote the attached karma dump to compensate.
(It looks like CannibalSmith hasn't been on lately so I'll post this) This post tests how much exposure comments to open threads posted "not late" get. If you are reading this then please either comment or upvote. Please don't do both and don't downvote. The exposure count to this comment will then be compared to that of previous comment made "late". I won't link to the other comment and please don't go finding it yourself.
If the difference is insignificant, a LW forum is not warranted, and open threads are entirely sufficient (unless there are reasons other than exposure for having a forum).
I will post another comment in reply to this one which you can downvote if you don't want to give me karma for the post.
Down vote this comment if you upvoted the above and want to neutralize the karma I get.
I see it.
see/saw
Huh?
Thanks. :)
龘
Glad to see something like this.
Ack.
On the subject of creating a function/predicate able to identify a person. It seems that it is another non-localiseable function. My reasoning goes something like this.
1) We want the predicate to be able to identify paused humans (cryostasis), so that the FAI doesn't destroy them accidentally.
2) With sufficient scanning technology we could make a digital scan of a human that has the same value as a frozen head, and encrypt with a one time pad, making it indistinguishable from the output of /dev/rng.
From 1 and 2 it follows that the AI will have to look at the environment (to see if people are encrypting people with one-time pads), before making a decision on what is a human or not. How much of the AI needs to encompass before making that decision seems a non-trivial question to answer.
Poorly labeled encrypted persons may well be destroyed. I'm not sure this matters too much.
It depends when the singularity occurs. It is also indicative that there might be other problems. Let us say that an AI might be able to recreate some (famous) people from their work/habitation and memories in other people, along with a thorough understanding of human biology.
If an AI can it should preserve as much of the human environment as possible (no turning it into computronium), until it gains that ability. However it doesn't know whether a bit of the world will be useful for that purpose (hardened footprints in mud), until it has lots of computronium.
If it's that concerned, it can just blast off into space, couldn't it? Might slow down development, but the hypothetical mud footprints out to be fine... No harm done by computronium in the sun.
The question is should we program it to be that concerned? The human predicate is necessary for CEV if I remember correctly, you would want to extrapolate the volition of everyone currently informationally smeared across the planet as well as the more concentrated humans. I can't find the citation at the moment, I'll hunt tomorrow.
I think the (non)person predicate is necessary for CEV only to avoid stomping on persons while running it. It may not be essential to try to make the initial dynamic as expansive as possible, since a less-expansive one can always output "learn enough to do a broader CEV, and do so superseding this".
Hmm, I think you are right.
We still need to have some estimate of what it will do though so we can predict its speed somewhat.
Besides what gwern said, it could just scan and save at appropriate resolution everything that gets turned into computronium. This seems desirable even before you get into possibly reconstructing people.
Every qubit might be precious so you would need more matter than the earth to do it (if you wanted to accurately simulate things like when/how volcanos/typhoons happened, so that the memories would be correct).
Possibly the rest of the solar system would be useful as well so you can rewind the clock on solar flares etc.
I wonder what a non-disruptive biosphere scan would look like.
This problem just looks like the usual question of how much of our resources should be conserved and how much should be used. There is some optimal combination of physical conservation and virtual conservation that leaves enough memory and computronium for other things. We're always deciding between immediate economic growth and long term access to resources (fossil fuels, clean air, biodiversity, fish). In this case the resource is famous person memorabilia/ human environment. But this isn't a tricky conceptual issue, just a utility calculation, and the AI will get better at making this calculation the more information it has. The only programming question is how much we value recreating famous people relative to other goods.
I also don't see how this issue is indicated by the 'functional definition of a person' issue.
Millennial Challenges:
Millennial Challenges / Goals
What should we have accomplished by 3010?
/a long term iteration of the Shadow Question
Extinction or, well, just about everything.
I was wondering if Eliezer could post some details on his current progress towards the problem of FAI? Specifically details as to where he is in the process of designing and building FAI. Also maybe some detailed technical work on TDT would be cool.
This email by Eliezer from 2006 addresses your question about FAI. I'm extremely skeptical that he has accomplished or will accomplish anything at all in that direction, but if he does, we shouldn't expect the intermediate results to be openly published, because half of a friendly AI is a complete unfriendly AI.
Just another example of a otherwise-respectable (though not by me) economist spouting nonsense. I thought you guys might find it interesting, and it seemed short for a top-level post.
Steven Landsburg has a new book out and a blog for it. In a post about arguments for/against God, he says this:
So how many whoppers is that? Let's see: the max-compressed encoding of the human genome is insufficient data to describe the working of human life. The natural numbers and operations thereon are extremely simple because it takes very little to describe how they work. This complexity is not the same as the complexity of a specific model implemented with the natural numbers.
His description of it as emerging all at once is just confused: yes, people use natural numbers to describe nature, but this is not the same as saying that the modeling usefulness emerged all at once, which is the sense in which he was originally using the term.
What's scary is he supposedly teaches more math than economics.
Disclosure: Landsburg's wife banned me from econlog.econlib.org a few years ago.
I'm probably exposing my ignorance here, but didn't zero have a historical evolution, so to speak? I'm going off vague memories of past reading and a current quick glance at wikipedia, but it seems like there were separate developments of using place holders, the concept of nothing, and the use of a symbol, which all eventually converges onto the current zero. Seems like the evolution of a number to me. And it may be a just so story, but I see it as eminently plausible that humans primarily work in base 10 because, for the most part, we have 10 digits, which again would be dictated by the evolutionary process.
On his human life, point, if DNA encoding encompasses all of complex numbers (being that it needs that system in order to be described), isn't it then necessarily <i>more</i> complex, since it requires all of complex numbers plus it's own set of rules and knowledge base as well?
The ban was probably for the best Silas, you were probably confusing everyone with the facts.
It sounds like a true story (note etymology of the word "digit"). But lots of human cultures used other bases (some of them still exist). Wikipedia lists examples of bases 4, 5, 8, 12, 15, 20, 24, 27, 32 and 60. Many of these have a long history and are (or were) fully integrated into their originating language and culture. So the claim that "humans work in base 10 because we have 10 digits" is rather too broad - it's at least partly a historical accident that base 10 came to be used by European cultures which later conquered most of the world.
That's a good point, Dan. I guess we'd have to check what the number of base 10 systems were vs. overall systems. Though I would continue to see that as again demonstrating an evolution of complex number theory, as multiple strands joined together as systems interacted with one another. There were probably plenty of historical accidents at work, like you mention, to help bring about the current system of natural numbers.
Your recollection is correct: the understanding of math developed gradually. My criticism of Landsburg was mainly that he's not even using a consistent definition of math.
And as you note, under reasonable definitions of math, it did develop gradually.
Yes, exactly. That's why human life is more complex than the string representing the genome: you also have to know what that (compressed) genome specification refers to, the chemical interactions involved, etc.
:-)
Why does DNA encoding need complex numbers? I'm pretty sure simple integers are enough... Maybe you meant the "complexity of natural numbers" as quoted?
Sounds good to me (that's what I get for typing quickly at work).
Singularity Summit 2009 videos - http://www.vimeo.com/siai/videos
I recommend Anna Salamon's presentation How Much it Matters to Know What Matters: A Back of the Envelope Calculation. She did a good job of showing just how important existential risk research is.
I thought it would be nice to be able to plug in my own numbers for the calculation, so I quickly threw this together.
Interesting. You can do similar calculations for things like asteroid prevention, I wonder which would win out. It also gave me a sickly feeling when you could use the vast numbers to justify killing a few people to guarantee a safe singularity. In effect that is what we do when we divert resources away from efficient charities we know work towards singularity research.
To resurrect the Pascal's mugging problem:
This seems like a hack around the problem.
What if we are told there's an infinite number of people, so everybody could affect 3^^^^3 other people (per Hilbert's Hotel)?
What consequences would this prior lead to - assuming that the odds of us making a successful AI are 1/some-very-large-number, because a successful AI could go on to control everything within our light cone and for the rest of history affect the lives of some-very-large-number of beings?
(For that matter, wouldn't this solution have us bite the bullet of the Doomsday argument in general, and assume that we and our creations will expire soon because otherwise, how likely was it that we would just happen to exist near the beginning of the universe/humanity and thus be in a position to affect the yawning eons after us?)
I'm working through Jaynes' /Probability Theory/ (the online version). My math has apparently gotten a bit rusty and I'm getting stuck on exercise 3.2, "probability of a full set" (Google that exact phrase for the pdf). I'd appreciate if anyone who's been through it before, or finds this stuff easy, would drop a tiny hint, rot13'd if necessary.
V'ir pbafvqrerq jbexvat bhg gur cebonovyvgl bs "abg trggvat n shyy frg", ohg gung qbrfa'g frrz gb yrnq naljurer.
V unir jbexrq bhg gung jura z=x (gur ahzore bs qenjf = gur ahzore bs pbybef) gur shyy frg cebonovyvgl vf tvira ol gur trarenyvmrq ulcretrbzrgevp qvfgevohgvba jvgu nyy e'f=1. V'z gelvat gb svther bhg ubj gung cebonovyvgl vapernfrf nf lbh nqq zber qenjf. Vg frrzf gb zr gung ol rkpunatrnovyvgl, gur cebonovyvgl bs n shyy frg jvgu x+1 qenjf vf gur fnzr nf gur cebonovyvgl bs n shyy frg jvgu x, naq bar rkgen qenj juvpu pna or nal pbybe: SF(P1+P2+..+Px) juvpu vf SF.P1+SF.P2+..+SF.Px, juvpu ner zhghnyyl rkpyhfvir gurersber nqq hc.
Nz V ba gur evtug genpx ng nyy ?
How many people here would be interested in forming a virtual book study group, to work through Jaynes ? Some programmer colleagues of mine have done that for SICP and it turns out to be a nice way to study. Strength in numbers and all that.
Yes! I've been wanting a virtual place to help me learn probabilistic reasoning in general; a group focued on Jaynes would be a good start.
There already exists (an extremely low-traffic) mailing list with that mission: etjaynesstudy@yahoogroups.com
Note that the objection that an existing mailing list would be populated by people who have not been exposed to Eliezer's writings on rationality does not apply here because (1) the current population consists of only a handful of people and (2) what I have seen of the current population over the last 3 or 4 years is that it consists mostly of a few people posting (relevant) faculty positions and conference announcements and experts in Bayesian statistics.
Thanks for the info !
I'd like to start talking about scientific explanation here. This is the particular problem I have been working on recently:
A plausible hypothesis is that scientific explanations are answers to "why" questions about phenomena. If I hear a "cawing" noise and I ask my friend why I hear this cawing. This is a familiar enough situation that most of us would have our curiosity satisfied by an answer as simple as "there is a crow". But say the situation was unfamiliar (perhaps the question is asked by a child). In that case "there is a crow" is unsatisfactory. It is unsatisfactory even if "Sometimes, crows caw" is a universal regularity of nature. All we've done is conjoined a noise (cawing) to an object (the crow). One reason we might not find this to be a good explanation is that it is a "curiosity stopper", like answering "electricity!" to the question of "Why does flipping a switch turn a light bulb on?". But the problem is worse than that because "Sometimes, crows caw" actually does allow you to make predictions in the way "electricity!" does not. We could even posit as true the law that "Crows always caw and only crows caw" and get extremely firm predictions-- but because we are still just conjoining objects and events we aren't really understanding anything.
Of course we can say more about crows and cawing. We can talk about the crow's voice box and vibrations in the air which vibrate hair fibers which we process as sound. But of course this explanation is just like the first one. We are conjoining objects and events (lungs, blowing air, voice box shape structuring vibrations, vibrations moving throw the air, air vibrating in the cochleae). For almost everyone this explanation (written out less haphazardly than I have) would appear to be a fairly complete explanation. But it has exactly the same problems as the first explanation (though it is longer and perhaps includes more generally applicable laws).
Now obviously this explanation can be extended further, right down to quantum theory. But even this explanation (if it could ever be written out) would include unreduced terms that are just conjoined to each other through natural laws. And we can still ask why questions about fundamental particles and their behavior. Yet we want to say that a quantum based explanation of crow cawing would be complete (or at least that there is some theory sufficiently fundamental that it could be used to give a complete explanation of the cawing noise).
Yet it looks to me like even the most fundamental explanation will still be just a list of conjoined events and that we will still be able to ask why questions about these events and their relations. We either need to be able to point to a special class of "complete" explanations and say why they qualify for this class OR we need to give an account of non-complete explanations that tells us why we really are understanding events better when we get them.
Great topic. I would enjoy seeing this as a top level post.
So what is the answer that would satisfy the child?
For an adult, saying "that was a crow, and crows sometimes caw" seems like a fairly complete answer because we already possess a lot of contextual information about animals and why they make noises.
A lot of the lower-level 'explanation' you described above was really about how the crow cawed (lungs, vibrations, etc.) With this information, you could build a mechanical crow that did in fact crow -- but the mechanism for how the mechanical crow caws would have nothing to do with why the organic crow caws.
The real explanation for the crow's caw is in the biology of the crow. The crow caws to communicate something to other crows, because it is part of a social group.
As reductionists, we all accept that biology would be reducible to interacting layers of complicated physics, but this example about the crow really gives us a concrete example to see that it may not be immediately straight-forward how reductionism is supposed to work. No amount of detail regarding how the crow caws is going to get at why it does, because we can build the mechanical crow that caws for no reason. On the other hand, we can make a little mechanical gadget that beeps for the same reason that the crow caws -- to let other gadgets know it's around or needs something. The gadget and the crow don't have to have much of anything in common material-wise in order to have the same 'why'. What they do have in common is something more abstract, a type of relational identity as a member of a group that exchanges information.
Later edit: I think we could inflate 'physics' to include this type of information, because physics has mathematics (and algebra). So we'll be able to define things that really depend on relationships and interactions, rather than actual material properties, but I wonder to some extent if this is what was envisioned as going to be eliminated by reductionism?
Why is this the privileged "real explanation"? For example, the real explanation is that evolution produces complex social assemblies in need of signaling mechanisms. Or the real explanation is that an asteroid or comet disrupted the previous biological configuration, allowing crow-like birds to evolve. Etc...
We don't expect that reductionist approaches have the magical potential to successfully answer all possible questions. It's possible (and necessary) for information to be irretrievably lost. So how it's supposed to work is actually straight-forward: seek evidence that distinguishes between different causal hypotheses for the crow's caw.
Depending on what you're looking for, there may be no meaningful explanation, as in the case of chaotic systems. For example, the most concise explanation for a particular cloud being of a particular shape may just be the entire mountain of data comprising the positions and velocities of the air and water particles involved.
I think this is an overstatement. The only hard upper bound we have on how much information might be contained in a crow's vocal system is the number of possible states in the physical system comprising it, which is huge. It even seems conceivable that significant portions of a crow's DNA might be reconstructible from a detailed enough understanding of its vocal system.
I'd say the mechanical crow caws because it was built that way. Then you're faced with the question of how something can possibly be built for no reason.
But "this type of information" is stated in terms of physically observable phenomena. We can reason logically and mathematically about the things we observe without new physics, as long as the observations themselves have believable reductions to known physics. I don't see what you're looking for that isn't captured by a reductionist model of the crows, their communication mechanisms, their brains, and their evolutionary history.
Ok, but what is the form that contextual information takes? I'm skeptical that most adults actually have a well-formed set of beliefs about the causes or biophysics of animal behavior. I think my mind includes a function that tells me what sorts of things are acceptable hypotheses about animal behavior and I have on hand a few particular facts about why particular animals do particular things. But I don't think anyone can actually proceed along the different levels of abstraction I outlined. I'm worried that what actually makes us think "there is a crow and crows caw" is that it just connects the observation to something we're familiar with. We're used to animals and the things that they do and probably have a few norms that guide our expectations with animals. But at rarely if ever are we reducing or explaining things in terms of concepts we already already fully understand. Rather, we we just render familiar the unfamiliar. Think of explanations as translations, for example. If I say "a plude is what a voom does" no one will have any idea what I mean. But if I tell you that a plude is a mind and a voom is a brain suddenly people will think they understand what I mean even if they don't actually know what a mind is or anything about a brain.
I wonder if a taxonomy of explanations would be worth while. We have physical reduction, token history explanation (how that crow got outside my window and what lead it to caw at that moment), type historical explanation (the evolutionary explanation for why crows caw)... I'm sure we can come up with more. Note though that any historical explanation is going to be incomplete in the way explain above because it will appeal to concepts and entities that need to be reduced. Anyway, the "explanation" in my above comment was never for "why do crows caw" but why do I hear cawing. And I posited that there was a crow and that crows caw. These assumptions are sufficient to predict the possibility of cawing. But even though they are predictively sufficient they don't actually explain what happened. It is also true that the assumptions themselves are unexplained (as you say, we need biology to tell us why crows caw) but even if we knew all this we still wouldn't have explained the cawing.
This example has the unfortunate quality of being true. But say we posit that astrological configurations control the movement of cows. Obviously this isn't true, but pretend that it is. Pretend the movement of the planets could predict, with 100% confidence, where and how cows moved in a given field. Say I prove this to everyone tomorrow. Would anyone here be satisfied with "Planets control cows" as a fundamental law of nature? Would this explain anything? I take it a lot of people would set about trying to figure out how and why the planets affect cows and we'd look at magnetic and gravitational fields and find which bovine organs were most sensitive to such fields etc. But these explanations would be similarly unsatisfying and we would look deeper.
The problem is every individual explanation is just like the "Planets control cows" explanation. So we have to explain what is special about fundamental laws or why this doesn't matter.
Hi, I have never posted on this forum, but I believe that some Less Wrong readers read my blog, FeministX.blogspot.com.
Since this at least started out as an open thread, I have a request of all who read this comment, and an idea for a future post topic.
On my blog, I have a topic about why some men hate feminism. The answers are varied, but they include a string of comments back and forth between anti feminists and me. The anti feminists accuse me of fallacies, and one says that he "clearly" refuted my argument. My interpretation is that my arguments were more logically cogent that the anti feminists and that they did not correctly identify logical fallacies in my comments, nor did they comprehensivly refute anything I said. They merely decided that they won the debate.
Now, the issue is that when there is an argument between feminists and anti feminists on the internet, the feminists will believe that other feminists arguments include more truth and reason while anti-feminists will believe that anti-feminist arguments include more truth and reason. The internet is not a place where people are good at discussing feminism with measured equanimity.
But I wondered, who could be the objective arbiter of a discussion between feminists and anti feminists? Almost anyone has a bias when it comes to this issue. Everyone has a gender, and gender affects a person's thinking style, desires and determination of fairness in assessing behaviors between genders. Where in the world could I find intelligent entities that would not be swayed by gender bias and would instead attempt to seek out objective truth in a "battle of sexes" style discussion.
Well, I am not sure if unbiased people can exist regarding the issue but the closest thing I could think of was Less Wrong. Thus, I invite readers of Less Wrong to contribute to the admittedly inane thread on my blog, Why so much hate?
http://feministx.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-so-much-hate.html
I hate to say it, but your analysis seems rather thin. I think a productive discussion of social attitudes toward feminism would have to start with a more comprehensive survey of the facts of the matter on the ground - discussion of poll results, interviews, and the like. Even if the conclusion is correct, it is not supported in your post, and there are no clues in your post as to where to find evidence either way.
Agreed. The post is almost without content (or badly needed variation in sentence structure, but that's another point altogether) - there's no offered reason to believe any of the claims about what anti-feminists say or what justifications they have. No definition of terms - what kind of feminism do you mean, for instance? Maybe these problems are obviated with a little more background knowledge of your blog, but if that's what you're relying on to help people understand you, then it was a poor choice to send us to this post and not another.
I'm tickled that Less Wrong came to mind as a place to go for unbiased input, though.
Oh, sorry. To clarify, I know my original post was never substantiated with any evidence based analysis for the true motivations behind anti-feminism. What I was referring to was the latter part of the comment thread between a commenter, Sabril and a few other commenters and me.
I think their attacks on my capacity for objective reasoning are a bit hypocritical.
And I should add that it was foolish of me to present that post, which was possibly my most biased, as an introduction to my blog. Actually, my blog gets more insightful than this. Please don't dismiss my entire blog based on the content of that post about the motivations for a visceral reaction against feminists as indicative of what my blog is usually about. That particular post was designed to spur emotional reactions from a specific set of readers I have.
*finds name "sabril" and reads from there*
This first comment, and the later ones, betray a repulsive attitude, and I wouldn't blame you for being furious and therefore slightly off your game thereafter. That said, Sabril makes several moderately cogent points - the numbered items in particular are things I've noticed with disapproval before. I'm about to go to bed, so I'm not going to delve too deeply into the history of your blog to find an exhaustive list or lots of context, but it looks like he also has a legitimate complaint or three about your data regarding the Conservative Party in the UK, your failure to cite some data, the apparently undefended implication about war, the anecdote-based unfavorable comparison of arranged marriage versus non-arranged, and your tendency to cite... uh... nothing that I've run across so far.
Also, this seems to beg your own question:
And now I've gotten to this part of the page and I've decided I don't want to read anything else you have to say:
"And now I've gotten to this part of the page and I've decided I don't want to read anything else you have to say:
I am a female supremacist, not a true feminist "
Why does this bother you so much? Why would it invalidate everything I have to say or render everything I say uninteresting?
It is indeed impossible to find someone who will remain detatched from the issue of feminism.
May I ask the moral difference between a female supremacist and a male supremacist?
Your pre-existing bias against males calls into doubt everything you say afterward. If you have already decided that men are oppressive pigs and women are heroic repressed figures who would be able to run the world better (I assume that is what female supremacist means, correct me if I'm wrong), you will search for arguments in favor your view and dismiss those contrary to your opinion. Have you ever seen an academic article discussing gender and dismissed it as "typical of the male dominated academic community?"
These articles might explain further:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/js/the_bottom_line/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ju/rationalization/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/iw/positive_bias_look_into_the_dark/
"May I ask the moral difference between a female supremacist and a male supremacist?"
What I call female supremacism does not mean that females should rule. I feel that the concept of needing a ruler is one based on male status hierarchies where an alpha rules over a group or has the highest status and most priviliges in a group.
To me, female supremacism means that female social hierarchies should determine overall status differences between all people. In my mind, female social hierarchies involve less power/resource differentials between the most and least advantaged persons. A "leader' is a person who organically grows into a position of more responsibility, but this person isn't seen as better, richer, more powerful or particularly enviable. They are not seen as an authority figure to be venerated and obeyed. I associated those characteristics with male hierarchies.
I think you overestimate the differences between male and female interpretations of status. Can you provide an example of one your female social hierarchies?
Also, what is a leader other than an authority figure to be obeyed?
"
Also, what is a leader other than an authority figure to be obeyed? "
In our world, that is what a leader must be. In the general human concept of an ideal world, I do not know if this is the case. I actually think that humans have some basic agreement about what an ideal world would be like. The ideal world is based on priorities from our instincts as mortal animals, but it is not subjected to the confines of natural experience. I think the concept of heaven illustrates the general human fantasy of the ideal world.
I get the impression that almost everyone's concept of heaven includes that there are no rich and poor- everyone has plenty. There is no battle of the sexes, and perhaps even no gendered personalities. There is no unhappiness, pain, sickness or death. I personally think there are no humans that hold authority over other humans in heaven (to clarify, I know that a theological heaven cannot actually exist). What this means to me is that to have a more ideal world, the power differential between leaders and the led should be minimized. I understand that humans with their propensities for various follies aren't as they are necessarily suited for the ideal world they'd like to inhabit, but striving for an ideal world would to me mean that human nature would in some ways be corrected so that the ideal world became more in tune with human desires for that state.
" Can you provide an example of one your female social hierarchies?"
Say a nursing floor. There is such a thing as a nurse with the most authority, but the status differential between head nurse and other floor nurses is sometimes imperceptible to all but the nurses that work there. The pay difference is not that great either. Sometimes the nurse who makes the most decisions is the one that chooses to invest the most time and has the longest experience, not necessarily one who is chosen to be obeyed. This is entirely unlike a traditionaly male structure like an army where the difference between general and a corporal.
You should rectify that as soon as possible.
Hypocrisy doesn't make one wrong. An assertion that murder is wrong is not falsified by it being said by a murderer.
Especially if you catch a hint of a sinister, sadistic pleasure in his eyes.
tu quoque, it's like ad hominem light.
Also, the irony of a feminist coming to an overwhelmingly male community for advice. :)
Indeed. And even more so that she seems to be getting it.
I now have a wonderful and terrible vision of the future in which less wrong posters are hired guns, brought in to resolve disagreements in every weird and obscure corner of the internets.
We should really be getting paid.
Did Robin make a post on how free market judicial systems could work or am I just pattern matching on what I would expect him to say, if he got around to it?
I don't know if Robin has said anything on this but it is a well-tread issue in anarcho-capitalist/individualist literature. Also, there already are pseudo-free market judicial systems. Like this. And this!
How would you stop this from degenerating into a lawyer system? Rationality is only a tool. The hired guns will use their master rationalist skills to argue for the side that hired them.
More or less, because both sides have to agree to the process. Then the market favours those arbiters that manage to maintain a reputation for being unbiased and fair.
This still doesn't select for rationality precisely. But it degenerates into a different system to that of a lawyer system.
*winces* So, I agree that no one is competent and everyone has an agenda, but it's not as if everyone sides with "their" sex.
No, historically we suck at this, too. Got any decision theory questions?
"winces* So, I agree that no one is competent and everyone has an agenda, but it's not as if everyone sides with "their" sex."
I didn't mean to imply that they did always side with their physical sex.
Why do you think of the discussion of gender roles and gender equality to necessary break down into a camp for men and a camp for women? By creating two groups you have engaged mental circuitry that will predispose you to dismissing their arguments when they are correct and supporting your own sides' even when they are wrong.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/lt/the_robbers_cave_experiment/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/
"Why do you think of the discussion of gender roles and gender equality to necessary break down into a camp for men and a camp for women?"
I don't personally think this. I don't think there are two genders. There are technically more than two physical sexes even if we categorize the intersexed as separate. I feel that either out of cultural conditioning or instincts, the bulk of people push a discussion about gender into a discussion about steryotypical behaviors by men and by women. This then devolves into a "battle of the sexes" issue where the "male" perspective and "female" perspective are constructed so that they must clash.
However, on my thread, there are a number of people that seem to have no qualms with the idea of barring female voting and such things. I think that sort of opinion goes beyond the point where one could say that an issue was framed to set up a camp for men and a camp for women. Once we are talking about denying functioning adults sufferage, then we are talking about an attitude which should be properly labelled as anti-female.
Yes, those who would deny women suffrage are anti-female. But in order to feel they deserve suffrage, one need not be pro-female. One only need be in favor of human rights.
On the internet, emotional charge attracts intellectual lint, and there are plenty of awful people to go around. If you came here looking for a rational basis for your moral outrage, you will probably leave empty-handed.
But I don't think you're actually concerned that the person arguing against suffrage is making any claims with objective content, so this isn't so much the domain of rational debate as it is politics, wherein you explain the virtue of your values and the vice of your opponents'. Such debates are beyond salvage.
I saw that Eliezer posts that politics are a poor field to hone rational discussion skills. It is unfortunate that anyone should see a domain such as politics as a place where discussions are inherantly beyond salvage. It's a strange limitation to place on the utility of reason to say that it should be relegated to domains which have less immediate affect on human life. Poltiics are immensely important. Should it not be priority to structure rational discussion so that there are effective ways for correcting for the propensity to rely on bias, partisanship and other impulses which get in the way of determining truth or the best available course?
If rational discussion only works effectively in certain domains, perhaps it is not well developed enough to succeed in ideologically charged domains where it is badly needed. Is there definitely nothing to be gained from attempting to reason objectively through a subject where your own biases are most intense?
One of the points of Eliezer's article, IIRC, is that politics when discussed by ordinary people indeed tends not to affect anything except the discussion itself. Political instincts evolved from small communities where publicly siding with one contending leader, or with one policy option, and then going and telling the whole 100-strong tribe about it really made a difference. But today's rulers of nations of hundreds of millions of people can't be influenced by what any one ordinary individual says or does. So our political instinct devolves into empty posturing and us-vs-them mentality.
Politics are important, sure, but only in the sense that what our rulers do is important to us. The relationship is one-way most of the time. If you're arguing about things that depend on what ordinary people do - such as "shall we respect women equally in our daily lives?" - then it's not politics. But if you're arguing about "should women have legal suffrage?" - and you're not actually discussing a useful means of bringing that about, like a political party (of men) - then the discussion will tend to engage political instincts and get out of hand.
There's a lot to be gained from rationally working out your own thoughts and feelings on the issue. But if you're arguing with other people, and they aren't being rational, then it won't help you to have a so-called rational debate with them. If you're looking for rationality to help you in such arguments - the help would probably take the form of rationally understanding your opponents' thinking, and then constructing a convincing argument which is totally "irrational", like publicly shaming them, or blackmailing, or anything else that works.
Remember - rationality means Winning. It's not the same as having "rational arguments" - you can only have those with other rationalists.
It's not so strange if you believe that reason isn't a sufficient basis for determining values. It allows for arguments of the form, "if you value X, then you should value Y, because of causal relation Z", but not simply "you should value Y".
Debates fueled by ideology are the antithesis of rational discussion, so I consider its "ineffectiveness" in such circumstances a feature, not a bug. These are beyond salvage because the participants aren't seeking to increase their understanding, they're simply fielding "arguments as soldiers". Tossing carefully chosen evidence and logical arguments around is simply part of the persuasion game. Being too openly rational or honest can be counter-productive to such goals.
That depends on what you gain from a solid understanding of the subject versus what you lose in sanity if you fail to correct for your biases as you continue to accumulate "evidence" and beliefs, along with the respective chances of each outcome. As far as I can tell, political involvement tends to make people believe crazy things, and "accurate" political opinions (those well-aligned with your actual values) are not that useful or effective, except for signaling your status to a group of like-minded peers. Politics isn't about policy.
The discussion here helped me reanalyze my own attitude towards this kind of issue.
I don't think I ever had a serious intention to back up my arguments or win a debate when I posted on the issue of why men hate feminism. I am not sure what to do when faced the extreme anti feminism that I commonly find on the internet. I have a number of readers on my blog who will make totalizing comments about all women or all feminists. Ex, one commenter said that women have no ability to sustain interest in topics that don't pertain to relationships between individuals. Other commenters say that feminsm will lead to the downfall of civilization for reasons including that it lets women pursue their fleeting sexual impulses, which are destructive.
i suppose I do not really know how to handle this attitude. Ordinarily, I ignore them since I operate under the assumption that people that expouse such viewpoints are not prone to being swayed by any argument. They are attached to their bias, in a sense. I am not sure if it is possible for a feminist to have a reasonable discussion with a person that is anti feminist and that hates nearly all aspects of feminism in the western world.
It's almost certainly not possible for you to have a discussion about feminism with such a person.
I haven't read your blog, but perhaps you should reconsider the kind of community of readers you're trying to build there. If you tend to attract antifeminist posters, and you don't also attract profeminist ones who help you argue your position in the comments, that sounds like a totally unproductive community and you might want to take explicit steps to remodel it, e.g. by changing your posts, controlling the allowed posters, or starting from scratch if you have to.
Ban them.
Let me be the first to say: welcome to Less Wrong! Please explore the site and stay with us - we need more girls.
Hi! Feel free to introduce yourself here.
There are a couple general reasons for disagreement.
I think that is more or less complete. As you can see, some disagreements can be resolved, others can't. Talk to the people you can make progress with but don't go in assuming that you're going to convince everyone of your view.
Edit: Formating.
What exactly is an anti-feminist? I've never actually met someone who identified as one. Is this more of a label that others apply to them and if so, what do you mean when you apply it? Is it a manner of 'Feminism, Boo!' vs 'Yay! Feminism!' or is it the objection to one (or more) ideals that are of particular import?
Does 'anti-feminist' apply to beliefs about the objective state of the universe, such as the impact of certain biological differences on psychology or social dynamics? Or is it more suitably applied to normative claims about how things should be, including those about the relative status of groups or individuals?