JoshuaZ comments on What is missing from rationality? - Less Wrong

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 28 April 2010 03:00:45AM 9 points [-]

Downvoting you isn't committing scientific fraud. That sort of hyperbolic claim is why you are getting downvoted. You got downvoted repeatedly because you made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and your attempts to marshal evidence for your claims relied on very poor fact checking. Downvoting for such reasons isn't "scientific fraud."

Moreover, science isn't the process of comments threads. Even in as an educated/intelligent group as the commentators on LessWrong, these are still blog comments threads. Science is not conducted in blog comments threads. We can update our probability estimates in threads and even discuss interesting or new ideas. But to call this science is to vastly overestimate the gravity of these discussion threads. Maybe lightening up might help matters slightly.

Comment author: roland comment score below threshold [+] (84 children)

Comment author: RobinZ 28 April 2010 03:58:34AM 9 points [-]

You decided to go off on an ad hominem attack [...]

You're not having a good day today.

And you're getting even more off-topic - it doesn't matter what you call it, you have to either make your case on an object level or shut up. Complaining that people aren't listening to you doesn't work.

Comment author: roland comment score below threshold [+] (3 children)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 28 April 2010 05:15:42AM 2 points [-]

Yes, but there's no ad hominem in explaining to someone that historical comments were downvoted because of specific flaws. Incidentally, the ad hominem abusive is only a fallacy in the limited sense that there's an implicit "and therefore the argument is wrong" attached to it. That's more due to general human convention. Consider for example if one said to someone "you're a drunk idiot who couldn't factor a 2 digit integer given a caculator and your statement X is correct." That would be an ad hominem abusive but wouldn't in any way be an ad hominem in a logically rude fashion. So this seems to miss the point at two levels.

Comment author: roland 28 April 2010 06:04:30AM * 0 points [-]

Yes, but there's no ad hominem in explaining to someone that historical comments were downvoted because of specific flaws.

Sigh, I'll have to quote myself again: "involve pointing out factual but ostensible character flaws or actions which are irrelevant to the opponent's argument."(emphasis mine)

It is ad hominem because it is completely irrelevant to my arguments. I might have been downvoted years ago by making wrong claims about Teddy Bear, so what? Why would you want to bring that up in a discussion?

How come you even knew about my other comments in the past? Is it because you are a long time member here and remember past discussions and remember what I wrote in them? Maybe this is what caused you to argue based on the past history, based on what you knew about me and my past comments instead of sticking to the present comment and facts stated therein. If you argued based on what you knew about me, e.g. past comments, other than the one that was specifically mentioned this constitutes an ad hominem in the latin sense (meaning directed towards the person). You didn't manage to stick to what was written but brought in your personal judgment about me about other comments I have written in the past. And that is totally irrelevant to my point. I've never claimed that all my comments in the past were correct. So other comments of mine in the past, be they correct or wrong are totally irrelevant to the point in question. I was very careful in choosing one specific comment which doesn't even contain a single word of mine. I said this 3 times at least now. I was making my point with this comment, why couldn't you stick to that one? We are now writing a lot of words that have nothing to do with my argument.

Btw, to make it simpler imagine that the Roland of today is another person than the Roland who wrote the past comments, lets call him "RolandPast". Now I'll paraphrase you: "RolandPast got downvoted repeatedly because RolandPast made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and hist attempts to marshal evidence for his claims relied on very poor fact checking. Downvoting for such reasons isn't "scientific fraud."

I hope this makes things clearer. If not, I'll paraphrase again this time using "X":

"X got downvoted repeatedly because X made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and his attempts to marshal evidence for hist claims relied on very poor fact checking. Downvoting for such reasons isn't "scientific fraud."

ad hominem abusive is only a fallacy in the limited sense that there's an implicit "and therefore the argument is wrong" attached to it.

No, on the contrary, read the wikipedia section.: "This tactic is logically fallacious because insults and even true negative facts about the opponent's personal character have nothing to do with the logical merits of the opponent's arguments or assertions."

So it seems that you are the one who missed it in two levels at least.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 28 April 2010 05:38:33PM 1 point [-]

The ad hominem abusive would be a problem if I were trying to explain why your comment as you've said it is wrong. That's not what has been happening. What has happened is that I've explained that your comments were downvoted because they were wrong.

Btw, to make it simpler imagine that the Roland of today is another person than the Roland who wrote the past comments, lets call him "RolandPast". Now I'll paraphrase you: "RolandPast got downvoted repeatedly because RolandPast made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and hist attempts to marshal evidence for his claims relied on very poor fact checking. Downvoting for > such reasons isn't "scientific fraud."

Right. And if Roland made a claim about why RolandPast got downvoted then giving an alternative explanation for why RolandPast gotdownvoted (essentially exactly what you said above) isn't an ad hominem of any form.

Comment author: roland comment score below threshold [+] (1 child)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 28 April 2010 03:43:42AM 2 points [-]

Is it possible that I'm not parsing what you've said correctly?

You wrote "if you downvote any evidence in support of my theory(edit: and that contradicts your theory) you are committing scientific fraud." When I replied that edit was not yet present but it doesn't actually add any information (since were on LessWrong I'm not going to bother dealing with the basic Bayesianism at work). So, can you explain how the statement " "if you downvote any evidence in support of my theory you are committing scientific fraud." is not a claim that downvoting you is committing scientific fraud?

I'm also curious where you think I engaged in an ad hominem attack. I don't see it above.

I'm also curious as to how you classify downvoting as suppressing evidence. If I linked to a claimed set of pages about UFOs and psi that relied on personal evidence would downvoting that claim constitute "suppressing evidence"? If not, why not? If it would, is there any circumstance where you consider downvoting to be acceptable when the comment has non-spam content? If so, where do you draw the line and how?

You incidentally seem to be confusing science with rationality. They are not the same thing. Roughly speaking, science is a set of restricted methodologies that happens to include a lot of aspects of rationality. Rationality is what happens in that broader context. (Frankly, the "science is not what happens inside the lab" meme is annoying in that it oversimplifies a lot of very complicated stuff. Aside from the valid points it makes about how to reason, it ignores the fact that lots of even what is traditionally labeled science happens outside lab environments (this seems to be part of a general problem on LW of using physics as the representative for science as a whole.))

Comment author: roland 28 April 2010 04:21:43AM * -2 points [-]

So, can you explain how the statement " "if you downvote any evidence in support of my theory you are committing scientific fraud." is not a claim that downvoting you is committing scientific fraud?

I would like to argue based on the specific comment of mine that I linked to in the comment above. As I said before this comment didn't contain a single word of mine but just a video with eye-witness testimony. In my eyes, this is evidence. Not every comment of mine I regard as evidence, but this specific one, yes, and some others where evidence is linked(which might be scientific articles, pictures, videos, audios, etc...) Again, not every comment I write on LW is evidence but some are because they contain links to hard facts. If you downvote one of those, you are suppressing evidence. So I never made the point that downvoting me is fraud, but downvoting evidence is and some comments are or contain links to evidence, specifically the one I mentioned in my previous comment.

Regarding the ad hominem attack:

You got downvoted repeatedly because you made claims that were demonstrably extremely unlikely and your attempts to marshal evidence for your claims relied on very poor fact checking.

In my previous comment I had linked to one, exactly one comment that didn't contain a single word of mine(except in the edits that were added later and clearly marked as such). Instead of basing your arguments on what I wrote you go onto a general attack where you accuse me of making shaky claims in my past comments. That I consider ad hominem. Please now don't lets get started with a long enumeration of comments and pointing out supposed mistakes in each of them. I'm not bothering wasting time on it.

I'm also curious as to how you classify downvoting as suppressing evidence. If I linked to a claimed set of pages about UFOs and psi that relied on personal evidence would downvoting that claim constitute "suppressing evidence"? If not, why not? If it would, is there any circumstance where you consider downvoting to be acceptable when the comment has non-spam content? If so, where do you draw the line and how?

I think it is ok to downvote when the content of the comment is wrong because it breaks certain rules of rationality like ad hominem attacks or self-contradictory comments, etc... It becomes hard if the comment is just a link to some outside evidence, lets say an eye-witness testimony. What then? Should you downvote based on the supposition that the testimony is probably wrong or forged? It's a tough call, I don't know if I can give a fully general answer in one comment and I won't even try to do so. I think this is one topic that deserves to be discussed in a top level post. Btw, I'm not planning to do so.

The history of flight is one of Eliezer's preferred themes here, so imagine if LW was a community in Europe in the beginning of the 20th century and there is one post by Lord Kelvin claiming "No balloon and no aeroplane will ever be practically successful.". One guy has the audacity to link to an eye-witness testimony in his comment: "I saw two bicycle mechanics in the USA flying in a self-made airplane." Is this evidence or not? Would it be justified to downvote this comment into oblivion?

In 1906, skeptics in the European aviation community had converted the press to an anti-Wright brothers stance. European newspapers, especially in France, were openly derisive, calling them bluffeurs (bluffers).

You incidentally seem to be confusing science with rationality.

What is science? This is a never ending discussion. I was thinking primarily in terms of belief update via evidence. I guess regardless of your definition of science you will agree that suppressing evidence is anti-scientific. Am I right?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 28 April 2010 04:53:34AM * 2 points [-]

I would like to argue based on the specific comment of mine that I linked to in the comment above.

Ok. There may be a minor miscomunication here. When I made my comment about why you were downvoted on some of your comments regarding 9/11 I was talking about the general history of comments not this specific comment. This made sense to me given that the context you seemed to be talking about was the general pattern of 9/11 comments you made being downvoted in the past.

Regarding eyewitness testimony, I believe that this has already been explained to you (although a click glance through doesn't find the relevant comments) but eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable. This is especially the case in extreme situations. (I'm actually surprised there isn't something in any of the sequences specifically devoted to this issue.) See This article for a short discussion of many of the issues in the context of criminal trials. Part of the point you seem to be possibly using a non-standard definition of suppression. Downvoting a comment doesn't suppress anything in the sense that we normally use that term for (destroying evidence, refusing to publish results you don't like etc.) . It simply sends a signal to the LessWrong readers that reading the statement is not likely to do anything useful and so that they will be less likely to click through to read the remarks. And given the unreliability of eye-witnesses testimony in crisis situations, most rationalists are going to give such evidence very low reliability. So in so far as this is a signal to the LW community, it is an accurate one.

To move to the flight example, flying didn't occur during a crisis situation. People were not claiming that the Wright Brothers flew once briefly during an earthquake or a volcanic eruption or the middle of a pitched firefight. They demonstrated it repeatedly to different people. So such evidence is in fact the more reliable sort of eye witness evidence. The evidence is not by itself at all convincing of flight (magicians can do some pretty neat stuff and even there's also the issue of the reliability of the witnesses), but it would make me stand up and take notice. That's a very different claim then that a single or even a large group of eyewitnesses reported hearing something which isn't even necessarily inconsistent with the standard hypothesis.

Edit: Also regarding the ad hominem issue. I think you should reread RobinZ linked remark about what an ad hominem is. Explaining to someone why their comments were historically downvoted isn't an ad hominem. It may make one feel uncomfortable, it may come across as condescending or patronizing. It may be deeply damaging to one's ego. But that's not an ad hominem attack. In this particular case, the response was an attempt at explaining why your comments have been downvoted. Interpreting that as an ad hominem attack requires some degree of abuse of the term "ad hominem."

Comment author: roland comment score below threshold [+] (73 children)

Comment author: Jack 28 April 2010 05:47:13AM * 4 points [-]

The real reason why it was downvoted was because it contradicts the prevailing view here.

Here is a comment that contradicts the prevailing view here. Seriously, there are maybe one or two other posters here who are sympathetic to your conspiracy mongering but no one agrees with Alicorn about ethics. It was at +6 (though of course it is by a woman so that's probably why people upvoted).

Here is why your comment was voted into oblivion:

You linked to evidence that wasn't anywhere close to the magnitude it needed to be given the extreme unlikelihood of the proposition it was marshaled to support. It is rather like linking to a video of someone recounting a religious experience or an alien abduction. It was clear from the context that you took yourself to be offering powerful evidence in favor the proposition that the 9/11 attacks were a government plot. The downvoters were telling you this wasn't good enough evidence to justify a link and to stop wasting their time with noise.
Your past forays into this topic and subsequent inability to update when people rebut your position left people with no patience for that crap.
It was off-topic and flame bait.
You kept drawing attention to it, making sure everyone on the site saw it ensuring even more downvotes.

(Incidentally, I never bothered to downvote that particular comment)

Comment author: mattnewport 28 April 2010 06:02:39AM * 1 point [-]

no one agrees with Alicorn about ethics.

I wouldn't say I agree with her exactly but I disagree with her less than I disagree with the utilitarians who seem to be so common around here. I'm not sure you're justified in your confidence about the absoluteness of disagreement with her ethics.

Comment author: Jack 28 April 2010 06:04:38AM 0 points [-]

It was a bit of hyperbole to make my point.

Comment author: roland comment score below threshold [+] (66 children)

Comment author: roland 28 April 2010 06:33:53AM -4 points [-]

Here is a comment that contradicts the prevailing view here

I'll admit that I just read a few words but I guess it is about philosophy and I think that people are much more willing to admit dissenting views, unlike in the realm of politics.

though of course it is by a woman so that's probably why people upvoted.

Is this another ad hominem?

You linked to evidence that wasn't anywhere close to the magnitude it needed to be given the extreme unlikelihood of the proposition it was marshaled to support.

The proposition was "Explosives were planted in the WTC." The probability that the proposition is true is fairly high given the fact that the buildings collapsed in a manner consistent with the use of explosives. There is of course much more evidence besides this one eye witness, but lets not start another 9/11 thread.

It was clear from the context that you took yourself to be offering powerful evidence in favor the proposition that the 9/11 attacks were a government plot.

Well, I'd rather you evaluate the comment by its contents, regardless of what other things I might believe or not. The comment was just addressing the question of explosives. Interestingly a lot of people, you included, seem to conflate the two issues, explosives implying government involvement. Why is this the case, and does it have something to do with the fact that there is so much resistance towards this proposition?

Your past forays into this topic and subsequent inability to update when people rebut your position left people with no patience for that crap.

I've yet to see a good rebuttal. Btw, I've read a lot about this subject so I think I know what I'm talking about.

It was off-topic and flame bait.

Eliezer wrote:

I don't believe there were explosives planted in the World Trade Center.

And I brought up evidence against it.

You kept drawing attention to it, making sure everyone on the site saw it ensuring even more downvotes.

Well, it's certainly not my fault if people want to downvote evidence.

Comment author: mattnewport 28 April 2010 06:42:40AM 0 points [-]

I still put a pretty low probability on 9/11 being some kind of conspiracy but I have to admit that seeing this linked to this recently did make my head spin a bit and raised my probability estimate a little.

Comment author: Jack 28 April 2010 06:48:27AM 0 points [-]

Whats the connection?

continue this thread »

Comment author: roland comment score below threshold [+] (46 children)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 28 April 2010 05:35:52AM 2 points [-]

No. I was very specific on purpose pinpointing exactly one comment.

I really am not inclined to argue about intended communication issues because that simply isn't a productive (or even amusing use of time) so I'm going to only address this issue once. You wrote:

Hahahahahaha. Ok I'll bite. Yes, I was thinking about 9/11 related posts. But the fact that I couldn't convince anyone doesn't bother me that much. What bothers me > is that just pointing to evidence that contradicts the established view on 9/11 here > is downvoted. See the following comment:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1r5v

You used the phrase "9/11 related posts" and then made a generalization about posts with "evidence." In standard discourse this would likely have been read as talking about a general problem and giving a specific example of that. This seems further supported by the fact that your previous comment had the remark that

I've also witnessed a certain disrespect for dissenters, comments that contradicted certain established views where downvoted

There may be a communication issue here. Let me ask then, are you only arguing that this single post in question was downvoted when it should not have been?

if you listened to the eye-witness testimony in question, the guy was trapped inside the building because the stairs were blown away and the electricity was turned off(so he couldn't use the elevator). If you claim that his testimony is wrong > you would have to explain why he was trapped inside the building and btw this happened before any of the main towers collapsed so you can't say "he was in shock" or what not.

I'm a bit confused by this claim. Trapped inside the building works perfectly well after the airplane crash without any explosion from a pre-planted device. Regarding your last remark, do you mean to imply that someone trapped without electricity in a burning building isn't going to have any shock issues or issues contributing to reliability simply because the building hasn't collapsed?

Ohhhh, please, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suppressing here is a > whole list of definitions. If a comment gets downvoted to -3 it no longer appears on > the comment page(you have to specifically click to make it appear again). If that is > not supression we are speaking a different language here.

Well, it seems empirically that a lot of people click through on this thread (most obviously one can look at the karma scores within this subthread to verify that people are clicking through). We may in this case be speaking different languages in that I have trouble seeing how requiring an extra click constitutes suppression. The linked to dictionary seems to agree with me (with the usual caveats about dictionaries being descriptive not proscriptive objects).

The definitions listed are:

1 : to put down by authority or force : subdue <suppress a riot>

Doesn't seem relevant.

2 : to keep from public knowledge: as a : to keep secret b : to stop or prohibit the publication or revelation of <suppress the test results>

2b could very weakly maybe apply if you stretched it (is requiring an extra click prohibiting publication? I'd think not).

3 a : to exclude from consciousness b : to keep from giving vent to

Irrelevant. 4,5,6 are also irrelevant.

Finally yes, eye-witness testimonies are unreliable but this doesn't mean that you can discard them, that they are not evidence. So my point still stands.

No it really doesn't. You don't seem to have actually responded to any of my points about why we have a downvoting system. If evidence is sufficiently weak (such as this evidence where it isn't even obvious that it actually favors an alternative hypothesis over the currently judged as most likely hypothesis) then downgrading lets LW readers know that the comment is likely to not be useful for improving the correspondence between their map and the territory.

The remainder of your remark is contentless repetition of what you've already said.

Comment author: roland 28 April 2010 07:06:02AM -2 points [-]

There may be a communication issue here. Let me ask then, are you only arguing that this single post in question was downvoted when it should not have been?

No. I'm arguing that this is a general problem. However in order to make my point I chose one specific comment which hopefully portrays the problem very clearly. What could be better than a comment whose only content is a link to outside evidence? If the comment contained personal arguments I would have a much harder time defending it.

I'm a bit confused by this claim. Trapped inside the building works perfectly well after the airplane crash without any explosion from a pre-planted device. Regarding your last remark, do you mean to imply that someone trapped without electricity in a burning building isn't going to have any shock issues or issues contributing to reliability simply because the building hasn't collapsed?

Ohhh, sorry, I think that I get your point now. The eye witness in question was trapped inside WTC 7 which was not hit by any plane(it is not one of the twin towers). All this happened before the collapse of either twin tower and according to the official version there was no damage to WTC7 before their collapse, only afterwards did WTC7 catch fire that lead to a later collapse of itself. I guess that was the origin of the confusion, I hope this makes it clearer. Btw, if that really was the origin of the confusion and you weren't aware of the facts that I just cited shouldn't this ring an alarm bell, that maybe you know less about this particular testimony than you thought you knew?

As for the definition of suppress: the original meaning was "to press down" and a synonym is "to check" which among other things means: "to restrain or diminish the action or force of ". Other than that I don't think it makes much sense to fight over definitions.

If evidence is sufficiently weak (such as this evidence where it isn't even obvious that it actually favors an alternative hypothesis over the currently judged as most likely hypothesis)

I've shortly addressed this in the following comment: http://lesswrong.com/lw/218/what_is_missing_from_rationality/1xnz

then downgrading lets LW readers know that the comment is likely to not be useful for improving the correspondence between their map and the territory.

Sure, there are cases where downvoting is justified. But when isn't it, and how do you distinguish between these cases? That's the hard question. And if you are downvoting evidence as opposed to normal comments you better be very sure about what you are doing.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 28 April 2010 05:34:16PM 1 point [-]

Ok. If you are arguing about a general problem, then my remarks clearly stand even if a single other comment was poorly voted on. But, I've already explained why even in that individual case the voting was reasonable.

Ohhh, sorry, I think that I get your point now. The eye witness in question was trapped inside WTC 7 which was not hit by any plane(it is not one of the twin towers). All this happened before the collapse of either twin tower and according to the official version there was no damage to WTC7 before their collapse, only afterwards did WTC7 catch fire that lead to a later collapse of itself. I guess that was the origin of the confusion, I hope this makes it clearer. Btw, if that really was > the origin of the confusion and you weren't aware of the facts that I just cited shouldn't this ring an alarm bell, that maybe you know less about this particular testimony than you thought you knew?

You have a valid point. I saw this testimony a while ago and must not have remembered it as well as I thought. If the witnesses testimony is accurate it presents problems with the standard account of events. The notion however that someone in that situation would be keeping very good track of timelines and the like isn't at all obvious(yes less traumatic than being in one of the two towers but that's not saying that much). Also, structural damage to WTC 7 is not by itself fatal to the standard account nor for that matter is it terribly strong evidence for conspiracy. So this doesn't change the situation a lot.

Sure, there are cases where downvoting is justified. But when isn't it, and how do > you distinguish between these cases? That's the hard question. And if you are downvoting evidence as opposed to normal comments you better be very sure about what you are doing.

I don't share your conviction that comments that claim to have evidence should somehow be privileged over comments that are more analytical. Moreover, even if I don't have a perfect method for deciding when to downvote or upvote, that's not an argument against any specific downvote or upvote. The general rule of thumb that comments with extremely weak evidentiary issues should be downvoted is not an unreasonable standard. Moreover, given how little this matters, the notion that I must "better be very sure" simply doesn't hold. People can easily click through to read a comment if they want to. You seem to be taking the karma system much more seriously than necessary.

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