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Video: Skepticon talks
The talks from Skepticon IV are being posted to YouTube.
So far we have:
- Richard Carrier on Bayes (my favorite)
- Julia Galef on the Straw Vulcan
- Greta Christina on angry atheists
- Hermant Mehta on math education
- David Fitzgerald on Mormonism
- J.T. Eberhard on mental illness (a dramatic end to the conference)
- an "atheist revival" by Sam Singleton (on the lighter side)
ADDED:
- "Death Panel" featuring Julia Galef, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Greta Christina, and James Croft
- Darrel Ray on secularism and sex
- Eliezer Yudkowsky on heuristics and biases (really more like a crash course in the core LW sequences)
- Joe Nickell on paranormal investigations (I missed this at the conference; and even more regrettably, missed the chance to ask Joe Nickell what he thinks of many-worlds.)
- Jen McCreight on "skeptical genetics" (the other talk I missed)
- Rebecca Watson on the religious right
- Spencer Greenberg on self-skepticism
- Dan Barker on atheist clergy
More to come soon, hopefully...
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Comments (89)
Expect the next batch on Monday, including the panel on death (lovingly dubbed the atheist death panel by the moderator, Jesse Galef) featuring Eliezer Yudkowsky, Greta Christina, Julia Galef, and James Croft!
It's possible that they'll be up sooner, but as far as I understand it, our videographer (Rob Lehr) is taking a well-deserved break.
Yay, the "death panel" was my favorite. I had a great time, thanks for organizing the event!
Thanks for coming!
Seconding the thanks for organizing; I also had a great time!
Suggestion for next year: invite Luke to talk about why he takes the Singularity seriously.
Could not agree more! I'm suggesting Luke to the new team - they're not particularly interested in the LW crowd, but I think I can probably tempt them by providing some of Luke's atheism-related writings/works.
Katie, is there any place where the slides are posted for these?
No, not at the moment. I've passed Skepticon off to next year's crew (just successfully moved out of the area and on to new things), but I'll suggest that they contact speakers about making the slides public.
Can't wait to see this!
Eliezer from the Death panel talk:
This made me want to get up and cheer.
I felt depressed through the first part but by the end I felt the same :) "Its just evil"
The videos I've seen so far have all been great! If there are any videos you'd like transcribed, post a request as a comment to this. If the request is already posted, upvote it. (If you say "all of them" I will scowl menacingly in your general direction)
I'm about a third of the way through transcribing Straw Vulcan. It will be up Monday at the latest, but probably earlier. If there are any other Skepticon videos that have at least 3 people wanting them, I'll transcribe them next, starting with the most popular.
I'll commit to doing the 4 most popular. (I don't want to commit to doing all the vids with 3+ votes, because for all I know that would be all of them, lol!)
As would this.
I'm most curious about the death panel.
This is relevant to my interests.
Also, thank you very much for your many transcripts; they are very helpful.
Would be neat.
The comments on the place of anger in a "social change movement" at 35:40 just got me laughing. Yes let's cherry pick all the social change movements that won or at least haven't yet been clearly defeated and the audience happens to mostly agree with! Hm I really can't imagine any angry "social change" movements that failed or I didn't like in the ... oh ... past 200 years.
Nope.
Getting a blank here.
She also really annoyed me in the death talk. She kept mentioning advantages atheists have over religious people, like that when it comes down to it we're less afraid of death. It seemed like she was just cheering for her (and my) team. But I'm not an atheist because it has social benefits or might be better for my mental heath. I'm an atheist because I think the religions are wrong. If there are benefits to being an atheist that doesn't make it more right to be one; the social benefits of religions certainly don't make them more true.
42:20 seems to be almost offering itself as a pedagogical example, lets do an exercise together:
angry [demographic X here]
Think of 10 examples by yourself. Now think about the implications. Overall my assessment is that this is a good pro-atheist pep talk, a neat catalogue of applause lights but it has very little if any rationalist value. Now you might ask me: "But Konkvistador was it supposed to have rationalist value?"
Why, yes. Yes it was.
Or rather it should have been a good source of tips to help improve our instrumental rationality to promote a sane beliefs (which happens to be atheism). I understand the need to do politics and rallies, the value of such a talk is basically purely entertainment, an ingroup ritual to keep people around for some boring stuff.
Too bad, lots of people can do that. In the long run a serious analysis of "angry atheism" would do the spread of atheist beliefs (though not necessarily the movement of atheism) more good.
Note: By which I don't mean to imply it is necessarily the wrong approach, just that rational analysis of it is practically non-existant, due to rational religious people being unreliable due to tribal loyalties and activist atheist being unreliable due to ... tribal loyalties.
It may be a good pep talk for her co-ideologists, but from the outside it looks like straight-out ideological warfare, which of course it actually is. Unsurprisingly, like nearly all such material, its reasoning is full of holes big enough to drive a truck through. (The stuff you pointed out is only the tip of the iceberg.)
If anything, this should be evident from the fact that she makes a number of highly controversial ideological statements about current issues -- which I'm sure many people here would in fact dispute or at least consider as lacking in evidence -- as plain and common-sense truth, to an enthusiastic response by the audience.
I think it's indicative of some deep biases that this stuff, unlike ideological rants in general, can be posted on LW with general approval.
I should have made it more clear that I was using "pro-atheist" in the sense of the organized atheist movement. And yes obviously that movement is ideological. Worse for quality of thinking, it is political, in the sense that it has some clearly defined political allies (and also enemies).
Remember it wasn't posted separately, just as a batch of stuff from Skepticon. I doubt that many people from LW have seen it.
But yes some blatantly ideological material gets a free pass or at least much less scrutiny than is warranted (such threads show up in discussion once every week or two) because of the demographics of Lesswrong. Like any group of people we bring our politics with us at least implicitly (even if it is explicitly banished), which translates into ideological sympathies and the vocabulary of applause lights we use and recognize.
In addition most users here have a warm fuzzy feeling when they hear atheism, which might mean they misidentify to which contrarian cluster someone actually belongs to.
Also, another bias (or rather, a whole huge complex of biases) that I see as even more problematic is the choice of targets of these "skeptic" luminaries. Looking through the website of their conference and the list of speakers, I see people who attack traditional religion and various low-status folk superstitions, many of whom also promote ideological positions of the sorts that tend to have high status among academics and other respectable intellectuals. I haven't see anything, however, about skepticism towards various falsities and biases that enjoy high status and official approval under the present academic system. Unless we are so lucky nowadays that no such things exist -- a proposition that seems plainly false to me -- I can't help but conclude that the whole enterprise ends up as a farcical parody of "skepticism."
Two potential counterexamples to keep in mind: (1) Yudkowsky's pro-cryonics and generally anti-death stance, as evidenced in the "death panel" discussion (which hasn't been posted yet, but his views are anyway familiar to regular readers of LW); and (2) J.T. Eberhard's (very personal) discussion of mental illness, which (except for certain fashionable exceptions, and despite occasional rhetoric you may hear from time to time) actually remains quite low-status virtually everywhere, elite intellectual communities included.
The organized skeptical movement is aimed primarily at improving critical thinking among the general public. In LW terminology, this is about raising the sanity waterline about things like religion, astrology, and homeopathy. Given how much money is spent on such things, that's a useful goal even from a simple naive utilitarian perspective.
Can you give an example of these falsities or biases?
Meta-note: I'm watching out for confirmation bias here because I'm strongly inclined to agree with you. I'm requesting specifics to better understand you, but I'm wary of it turning into a case of asking for confirming evidence.
As always there's a bias against anything that might be considered to give aid and succour to the enemy. Since the time of Hitler, there's therefore a politically motivated bias in favor of egalitarianism, in all its forms, and against the strong linking of aptitudes, especially mental aptitudes, to genetics. And especially when statistically linked to politically relevant groups and politically relevant aptitudes. E.g nobody cares that Irish have red hair more commonly than Greeks, but to link average IQ and racial groups causes political shitstorms.
Why? Because Politics is the Mindkiller. Once a belief is identified as a belief of the enemies, defending it makes you perceived as defending the enemies.
I don't think it's useful to steer the discussion towards such extremely charged issues, as if there were no other ones pertinent for the topic. Even if the whole class of biases you describe were absent, there would still be plenty of questions where (in my opinion, at least) a consistent skeptic would have to take up issue with the consensus of the academic institutions. (By "consensus" I also mean situations where there exist significant disagreements within the academic mainstream, but all the positions acceptable within the respectable mainstream share some underlying assumptions, which it is not possible to dispute without consigning oneself to an unacceptable contrarian status.)
In many of these areas, contrarian opinions aren't particularly scandalous, and one doesn't have to fear any serious repercussions for voicing them. (Unless one aims for an academic career in a field under direct bureaucratic control by the purveyors of the disputed official truth, of course.) The problem is that contrarian statements tend to sound just laughably wacky, like the rants of a physics crackpot, unless one accompanies them with lengthy and careful arguments in order to bridge the inferential distances. (And finds an audience willing to give them a fair hearing instead of just laughing them off, of course.) This is often just too time-consuming, and possibly also too demanding on one's interlocutors.
However, the existence of such topics is, in my opinion, particularly damning for the selective skeptics of the sort I've been criticizing. Here they don't even have the excuse that contrarian opinions would be too offensive and inflammatory to bring up. Their silence betrays either complete lack of critical thinking about such topics or the unwillingness to take even a minor status hit by dissenting from the highest-status purveyors of respectable opinion -- in any case making their self-designation farcical.
Can you name one or two, then?
For example, in economics and in all kinds of fields related to health and lifestyle, there are many issues where the academic mainstream appears to be seriously detached from reality, and the falsities and delusions purveyed by it cause very real damage in practice. Attacking these is unlikely to be dangerous, but it will put you in a position where you're presumed to be a crackpot until proven otherwise (and likely even after that), since the word of the accredited experts is against you.
Now, if some people speak up against one sort of delusion and falsity, I certainly don't think that they are obliged to speak against all of them. However, if there is mass gathering where purported skeptics and free-thinkers assemble to discuss a broad agenda of topics where, according to them, skeptics must speak up because dangerous delusions and falsities are rampant, then their choice of included and omitted topics sends a message by itself.
I didn't choose it for being charged, I chose it for being the clearest and simplest example IMO.
In contrast, I read your three paragraphs above, and I don't know what in the name of Cthulhu you're actually talking about.
It does not seem to make much difference, whether examples are charged or uncharged: When I give, as an example, the seemingly uncharged mechanisms of speciation, the reaction is every bit as hostile, as when I give, as an example, the obviously highly charged female incapacity in science and maths.
People are happy with your criticism of academia in the abstract - but are unhappy with any particular example whatsoever. Indeed if there was a particular example that they were not unhappy with, then it would not be an example. Academia would be able to handle it OK.
Certain elsewhere controversial criticisms of academia are ok here sam, if one sticks to LW standards. Let me demonstrate, by what would be in many less reasonable place cause a blow up, even though its pretty obvious to be true:
Academia is biased against hereditary explanation of group differences.
While I will refuse to speculate on how good the hereditarian explanation is in this thread (anyone reading my comment history can figure out where I stand on that), I don't think this post will get me downvoted. Recall a similar response I gave you on matters of gender relations.
But, you are obviously right in the sense of many more LWers thinking they are open minded to such criticism than they actually are. Despite your previous perceived norm violations, note that this particular comment isn't downvoted below -1, despite basically Eliezer Yudkowsky himself branding you generally a troll or disruptive element. I'm actually quite sure the exact same post made by someone else would be in the +1 to +4 range.
Aaaaaaaaaaand because espousing such a belief probably means you are "the enemy", that you're a reasonable person who came to the same conclusion (and didn't have the sense to introduce it in a more effective way) is probably much less likely.
That's pretty much the same point I made in a different thread
By correlating X with Y (where e.g. X=race and Y=average intelligence), other people end up correlating "People who correlate X with Y" with Z (Z=people who are evil racist bastards).
That's a proper correlation, but it's still a epistemological bias to prejudice against the idea, just because the speakers of that idea are often evil.
Well said!
The trouble is that by the very nature of the problem, concrete examples are bound to provoke controversy, at least if stated bluntly and without careful explanation. See my comments in this thread, where I presented my views on this issue at length, and especially this subthread.
Don't you see a blatant inconsistency between you criticizing others for not putting their faces and names on a public attack to such high-status biases, and yet you hesitate to speak clearly even when you are anonymous through the Internet?
Right now religion is arguably still killing more people than any other bias in the modern world - and unless one defeats it and its accompanying delusions of a just, designed, meant-to-be world, one has little chance of defeating deathist or other biases as well. Because most of them stem from the idea that what is was also meant to be. Inshallah and stuff.
I don't think people have any obligation to speak publicly against anything, and I am not criticizing anyone for mere failure to do so. What I am criticizing is when people claim to be skeptics, free-thinkers, etc. loudly and proudly, while at the same time effectively demonstrating this skepticism and free-thinking only on issues where it's safe and easy to do so. (Safe in the sense that it won't result in a controversy dangerous for one's status, reputation, or career, and easy in the sense of sticking to topics where the existing official intellectual institutions provide reliable guidance -- as opposed to those where they are unreliable, or worse, and one needs genuine skepticism and independent thinking to discern the truth. Unless you deny that any such topics exist, would you not agree that they are the ones that represent a real test of whether one deserves to be called a "skeptic," "free-thinker," etc.?)
This is a complex and difficult topic in its own right, but in my opinion, if you operate with "religion" as a special category of metaphysical beliefs and accept the customary distinctions applied to this category in the contemporary ideological debates, you have likely already fallen prey to some deep and widespread biases. The main difference between ideologies and religions is, in my view, principally in the way that the former masquerade their metaphysical beliefs, instead of declaring them explicitly, in order to misrepresent themselves as commonsensical or even scientific. It shouldn't be hard to see that this introduces only greater problems and dangers, and recent history, in my opinion, readily confirms this. (If you don't think this position is reasonable, I can provide arguments for it at greater length.)
Moreover, if one engages in selective skepticism that consistently refrains from targeting high-status and official institutions, one can't avoid sending off the implicit message that these institutions are fundamentally sound and trustworthy, that we shouldn't be reluctant to put our destiny in their hands, and that people who have deep disagreements with them should be immediately written off as crackpots. Even if nothing of the sort is stated explicitly, such a message is clearly implied, willingly or not, and I don't consider it a positive contribution to public discourse under any reasonable criteria.
Perhaps the metaphysical beliefs aren't that much important. They are almost always free-floating, not tied in any significant way to expectations and experiences, and serve as a group identification sign. (After all, it doesn't seem to me that, say, Rand's Objectivism is less explicit with its assumptions than Zoroastrianism. That ideologies don't refer to gods doesn't imply that they masquerade their basic beliefs.) Putting too much attention to these beliefs is itself a mistake, since it diverts attention from the real mechanisms of harm, which are related to biases and shared among ideologies and religions.
Upvoted for concreteness.
The outside view is that angry people don't think as clearly as non-angry people. I don't think I'll be watching that video.
Wow, James Croft singing excerpts from Rent...what the fuck was that about?
A lot of people (judging exclusively by this comment) didn't like Eliezer's talk at the Singularity Summit, but I thought this one was good. I don't think any of it will be new most LW-ers, but it was interesting, and funny, and probably introduced a lot of new ideas to the audience there. The only other talk I've watched so far was the Dan Barker one, which I also thought was good.
Added to post.
We're still missing PZ Myers, and the first speaker (the president of American Atheists, whose name temporarily escapes me). I think that may be all, but I can't be sure since the Skepticon website is down.
Eliezer's talk has been posted.
I liked it, but there are a number of things that could have been a lot better:
There were way too many digressions. Though subsequences work well in writing, it's hard to follow a chain of reasoning that jumps between levels. Though the stories about peoples' strange opinions at dinner parties were illustrative, some of them go on for way too long. Likewise, recursing into reductionism then recursing into Bayesian Judo and then popping back out into the discussion of Occam's Razor was a bit confusing because so much time was spent on those topics that I forgot it was a digression.
There was a little too much meta. Talking about the talk, and talking about how Richard Carrier's talk should have come first, is off-putting and not useful.
More cognitive science examples might have helped. One of the most interesting and engaging parts of the talk was the beginning, in which the audience was given the red/green die test. More "DIY" examples of cognitive biases may have helped stress that skeptics are also prone to these errors. For example, the hindsight bias test from David Meyers might have helped to drive home that part of the talk. (On that note, why is the talk called "Heuristics and Biases"? It was really about Occam's Razor.)
And for the love of Cthulhu, beta-test the jokes. A lot of them just aren't funny, the most awkward one being "Good thing I'm not a god...yet." The "Bayesian Hell" joke also went on way too long, i.e. well past the point where the audience stopped laughing. In addition, there was a little too much arrogance in some of the jokes. For example: "I must have been divinely inspired, because I said, without any forethought whatsoever, I said..."
I saw it in person and agree with all the above.
Additionally, it could have used more structure, e.g., "I'm going to talk about X, Y, and get to Z" before talking about X, Y and Z-- it's possible to do so much of that that it becomes redundant and annoying, but a small amount would have greatly improved the talk. I followed it (and enjoyed it), but I think a fair amount of the audience was pretty lost.
The contrast was particularly jarring because he spoke immediately after David Silverman, who was a very polished speaker.
Agreed, more structure would have been good, because I had no idea where he was going with each chain of reasoning.
Reasonably fun to watch the presenter is kind of likeable, if a bit nerdy. However it is darkartsy and I disagree with a few minor points.
I disagreed with the bit at 27:40 about the supposed unique badness of religion since any free floating that's basically a tribal marker is similarly insulated, especially anything that's extensively used by a professional class who basically make a living of reinterpreting it and do so from a position of authority. To take the most extreme case, there is no reason North Korean ideology needs ever show any results or proof in favour of its tenets, all that one needs for it to persist is to be self-sustaining. She does partially address this later at 29:40, but I don't think she's ever been faced with the best possible version of that argument.
I think you're being much too charitable here. The critical assumption in her argument is that ideological delusions can normally be successfully confronted by pointing to empirical evidence of their practical failures. However, this is completely wrong. In practice, it is very rare that we have clear enough natural experiments that enable us to present such evidence in a clear and convincing form. Even when such natural experiments exist in a striking form, as it was in the case of communism, ideological partisans usually have little difficulty rationalizing them away in practice.
When they don't exist, as is typically the case, it is normally impossible to move the public opinion towards greater accuracy with empirical evidence of failure, since any such evidence can be discounted by disputing the counterfactual. For example, disasters brought by irresponsible government guided by crackpot economic theories are easily excused by arguing that things would have been even worse without the enlightened guidance of these theories, and the cause of the problems is the insufficient purity of our sticking to them (perhaps along with some regrettable mistakes in execution).
The speaker herself confirms this with her concrete examples. To me it seems pretty clear that she responds to some evident failures of ideology in recent times by (pretty much) doubling down on the ideology, and she's nowhere close to examining its problematic fundamental tenets -- such examination being simply unthinkable for her.
(I understand that this last statement is controversial, and normally I would not open such topics here, but I think it's justified given that this talk has already been made the subject of discussion.)
Which statement? That she doesn't examine the most fundamental downsides of ideological thinking?
My claim is stronger than that. Take for example her views on economics. She presents the current economic crisis (as well as longer-term negative economic trends) as an example where ideology is evidently conflicting with reality, so that more and more people are now rejecting these ideological falsities and adopting more accurate views. She gives the OWS movement as a concrete example of such people, and from that and her other more vague statements, it's pretty clear which positions in general she sees as a step away from ideological biases and towards greater accuracy on economic issues. (Looking at her blog confirms this.)
Yet in my (controversial) opinion, she completely fails to understand the actual ideological delusions and pseudoscience that are rampant in modern economics, both in hands-on government policy and in the academia (and everywhere in-between). What's more, the views that she sees as getting closer to reality in fact represent an amplification of some of the worst of these delusions. Thus, she provides a counterexample for her own thesis: the ongoing clash between ideology and reality leads to a vicious circle of doubling down on the ideology, not a rejection of it.
And contrary to her thesis, in practice this tailspin of almost monotonically worsening ideological delusions usually ends up with utter, and often violent, disaster. (Which I think indeed threatens us unless technological progress and the surprising resilience of various informal institutions keep saving the day.) Such disasters are, by any reasonable metric, certainly no better than the worst historical disasters she can bill on traditional religion.
Do you think this is controversial (within LW)? Given the average karma gain of similar comments and general lack of expressed disagreement, controversiality doesn't seem to be a reasonable hypothesis. Personally I wouldn't like you being less controversial; but I certainly would like you being more specific.
(This comment of yours was more specific than the grand-parent, but still: what are the actual delusions and pseudoscience in modern economics, what are GC's ideological delusions, what sort of disaster is likely to result from them? Of course I can imagine plausible answers, but not unique answers. Being a bit vague in order to not offend anyone, or not introduce explicit political debate is useful, but a bit dark-artish.)
By "controversial," I don't mean that it will provoke hostility, or even widespread disagreement here. I'm just making it known that I'm aware that this opinion is a matter of significant disagreement in the general public, with otherwise smart and reasonable people taking different sides. Also that I don't expect people to accept my claims based on a comment that provides no supporting arguments and uses them only for illustrative purposes.
(The above also holds for the text below.)
Clearly, these would be topics suitable for long books, not short blog comments!
But to give you some idea of what I'm talking about, my criticism of economics would be roughly along the lines of Hayek's "Pretence of Knowledge" speech. (My criticism would likely be harsher -- to me the pseudoscience seems even more scandalous, the damage done even more extensive, and the threats for the future even more severe.) I also think that the intellectual standards are abysmal, and ideological biases rampant, even in areas that don't fall under this general criticism.
(Also, to avoid potential confusion due to citing Hayek, I am not a principled libertarian in any way. My concern is with irresponsible, corrupt, and destructive government, and with all the ideology and pseudoscience that motivate and excuse it.)
If I am not incorrect, Amanda Marcotte was a speaker at last year's Skepticon? The skepticism movement creates some strange alliances.
Also, on an unrelated note, the Yudkowsky pony is quite nice:
http://johnnykaje.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/skepticon-ponies-the-final-hour/
Transcript of Julia's talk.
Link to Carrier's Bayes Calculator.