Do you suggest that people should be epistemically charitable even towards others (and you specifically) who they don't think are careful thinkers?
Not in general, no. It's pretty context-sensitive. I think they should do so on Less Wrong where we should aim to have insanely exceptionally high standards of group epistemology. I do think that applies doubly for folk like me who have a decent chunk of karma and have spent a lot of time with a lot of very smart people, but I am not sure how many such people contribute to LW, so it's probably not a worthwhile norm to promote. If LW was somewhat saner perhaps they would, though, so it's unclear.
I am a significantly better rationalist than the LW average and I'm on the verge of leaving which says a whole bunch about my lack of ability to communicate, but also some non-negligible amount about LW's ability to understand humans who don't want to engage in the negative sum signalling game of kow-towing to largely-unreflected-upon local norms. (I'm kind of ranting here and maybe even trolling slightly, it's very possible that my evaluations aren't themselves stable under reflection. (But at least I can recognize that...))
How come you don't consider that to be a very important skill?
Right, so your comment unfortunately assumes something incorrect about my psychology, i.e. that it is motivationally possible for me to make my contributions to LW clearer. I once put a passive-aggressive apology at the bottom of one of my comments; perhaps if I continue to contribute to LW I'll clean it up and put it at the bottom of every comment.
Point being, this isn't the should world, and I do not have the necessary energy (or writing skills) to pull an Eliezer and communicate across years' worth of inferential distance. Other humans who could teach what I would teach are busy saving the world, as I try to be. That said, I'm 19 years old and am learning skills at a pretty fast rate. A few years from now I'll definitely have a solid grasp of a lot of the technical knowledge that I currently only informally (if mildly skillfully despite that) know how to play with, and I will also have put a lot more effort into learning to write (or learning to bother to want to communicate effectively). If the rationalist community hasn't entirely disintegrated by then, then perhaps I'll be able to actually explain things for once. That'd be nice.
Back to the question: I consider signalling credibility to be an important skill. I also try to be principled. If I did have the necessary motivation I would probably just pull an Eliezer and painstakingly explain every little detail with its own 15 paragraph post. But there is also some chance that I would just say "I refuse to kow tow to people who are unwilling to put the necessary effort into understanding the subtleties of what I am trying to say, and I doubly refuse to kow tow to people who assume I am being irrational in completely obvious ways simply because I am saying something that sounds unreasonable without filling in all of the gaps for them". But not if I'd spent a lot of time really hammering into my head that this isn't the should world, or if I learned to truly empathize with the psychology of the kind of human that thinks that way, which is pretty much every human ever.
(Not having done these things might be the source of my inability to feel motivated to explain things. Despair at how everyone including LW is batshit insane and because of that everyone I love is going to die, maybe? And there's nothing I can do to change that? That sounds vaguely plausible. Hard to motivate oneself in that kind of situation, hard to expect that anything can actually have a substantial impact. Generalized frustration. I just have to remember, this isn't the should world, it is only delusion that would cause me to expect anything else but this, people do what they have incentive and affordance to do, there is no such thing as magical free will, I am surely contemptible in a thousand similar ways, I implicitly endorse a thousand negative sum games because I've implicitly chosen to not reflect on whether or not they're justified, if anyone can be seen as evil then surely I can, because I actually do have the necessary knowledge to do better, if I am to optimize anyone I may as well start with myself... ad nauseum.)
There's some counterfactual world where I could have written this comment so as to be in less violation of local norms of epistemology and communication, and it is expected of me that I acknowledge that a tradeoff has been made which keeps this world from looking like that slightly-more-optimized world, and feel sorry about that necessity, or something, so I do. I consequently apologize.
I think they should do so on Less Wrong where we should aim to have insanely exceptionally high standards of group epistemology.
One of the ways we do this is by telling people when they are writing things that are batshit insane. Because you were. It wasn't deep. It was obfuscated, scattered and generally poor quality thought. You may happen to be personally aweseome. Your recent comments, however, sucked. Not "were truly enlightened but the readers were not able to appreciate it". They just sucked.
Anyone who does not believe mental states are ontologically fundamental - ie anyone who denies the reality of something like a soul - has two choices about where to go next. They can try reducing mental states to smaller components, or they can stop talking about them entirely.
In a utility-maximizing AI, mental states can be reduced to smaller components. The AI will have goals, and those goals, upon closer examination, will be lines in a computer program.
But in the blue-minimizing robot, its "goal" isn't even a line in its program. There's nothing that looks remotely like a goal in its programming, and goals appear only when you make rough generalizations from its behavior in limited cases.
Philosophers are still very much arguing about whether this applies to humans; the two schools call themselves reductionists and eliminativists (with a third school of wishy-washy half-and-half people calling themselves revisionists). Reductionists want to reduce things like goals and preferences to the appropriate neurons in the brain; eliminativists want to prove that humans, like the blue-minimizing robot, don't have anything of the sort until you start looking at high level abstractions.
I took a similar tack asking ksvanhorn's question in yesterday's post - how can you get a more accurate picture of what your true preferences are? I said:
A more practical example: when people discuss cryonics or anti-aging, the following argument usually comes up in one form or another: if you were in a burning building, you would try pretty hard to get out. Therefore, you must strongly dislike death and want to avoid it. But if you strongly dislike death and want to avoid it, you must be lying when you say you accept death as a natural part of life and think it's crass and selfish to try to cheat the Reaper. And therefore your reluctance to sign up for cryonics violates your own revealed preferences! You must just be trying to signal conformity or something.
The problem is that not signing up for cryonics is also a "revealed preference". "You wouldn't sign up for cryonics, which means you don't really fear death so much, so why bother running from a burning building?" is an equally good argument, although no one except maybe Marcus Aurelius would take it seriously.
Both these arguments assume that somewhere, deep down, there's a utility function with a single term for "death" in it, and all decisions just call upon this particular level of death or anti-death preference.
More explanatory of the way people actually behave is that there's no unified preference for or against death, but rather a set of behaviors. Being in a burning building activates fleeing behavior; contemplating death from old age does not activate cryonics-buying behavior. People guess at their opinions about death by analyzing these behaviors, usually with a bit of signalling thrown in. If they desire consistency - and most people do - maybe they'll change some of their other behaviors to conform to their hypothesized opinion.
One more example. I've previously brought up the case of a rationalist who knows there's no such thing as ghosts, but is still uncomfortable in a haunted house. So does he believe in ghosts or not? If you insist on there being a variable somewhere in his head marked $belief_in_ghosts = (0,1) then it's going to be pretty mysterious when that variable looks like zero when he's talking to the Skeptics Association, and one when he's running away from a creaky staircase at midnight.
But it's not at all mysterious that the thought "I don't believe in ghosts" gets reinforced because it makes him feel intelligent and modern, and staying around a creaky staircase at midnight gets punished because it makes him afraid.
Behaviorism was one of the first and most successful eliminationist theories. I've so far ignored the most modern and exciting eliminationist theory, connectionism, because it involves a lot of math and is very hard to process on an intuitive level. In the next post, I want to try to explain the very basics of connectionism, why it's so exciting, and why it helps justify discussion of behaviorist principles.