You accused me of employing one of the most basic (and in my opinion the most dire) logical fallacies---when I most certainly didn't, either denotatively or connotatively. Of course I'm going to reply. It's personally offensive to me as well as false
I asked "what is the term for X?" and you (or, strictly, another commenter, whose comment you endorsed) replied "Fictional!". You know perfectly well that that was nothing but a wisecrack reply. To state the freaking obvious, the meaning of "fictional" is "not real" and is thus much, much, broader than what I was looking for. For one thing, the term includes heroes as well as villains! There are plenty, plenty of fictional characters who do not meet the description I provided (a description which was not even intended to be taken literally, but merely as a pointer to the closest empirical cluster -- as is the standard convention in ordinary human conversation, which this was intended as an instance of, because [newsflash!] the original comment was an offhand remark!)
And no, I did not in that instance mean to accuse you of a fallacy. The "non sequitur fallacy" is only one of two commonly used senses of the term "non sequitur". The other is a remark which is inappropriate in the context. For example, if I say "The moon is made of green cheese", and you, instead of saying "What?! No it isn't", say instead, "I wonder whether my uncle Harry would like to buy a new car", that could be described as a "non sequitur" -- an utterance which isn't an appropriate way to follow the previous one. That is what I meant to accuse you of. Maybe it was an ill-considered accusation, maybe there is a better, more precise term for a wisecrack remark that superficially appears to answer the question but actually doesn't and is merely a rhetorical way to dismiss the question and cause the asker to lose status....but I didn't think of it in time -- I was too busy acting quickly to fend off what I expected would be an onslaught of upvotes for you (or, rather, your confederate), maybe even accompanied by downvotes for me.
I'm not a psychiatrist and The Joker isn't real ....the Joker, being the creation of cartoon writers not remotely trying to be realistic
Anybody trying to be charitable would realize, would assume, that the fictional character was cited only for the sake of convenience. Now, evidently we have a substantive disagreement about whether the traits in question are actually possessed by any real humans, but the reference was made before that disagreement was revealed. Had I known your and JoshuaZ's beliefs about the matter, I never would have used a fictional example.
JoshuaZ gave you substance too, including a reference to resources that explain what sociopathy is actually like.
I don't actually care, in this context, about what sociopathy is "actually like" if the word refers to a phenomenon other than the one I intended to refer to. If you and JoshuaZ believe the phenomenon I had in mind doesn't exist, that would have been enough of a nontrivial point to make without going into the tangential subject of the separate, unrelated phenomenon that (apparently) receives the label in standard clinical discourse.
I will simply note my disagreement and move on.
And I will note that you have chosen to do so in a manner that I evaluate as a rather significant interpersonal defection
Well, I'm sorry to hear that -- but I felt under attack from your comments, which seemed rhetorically excessive and out of proportion to my own. I was merely seeking to "tap out" without conceding anything.
And no, I did not in that instance mean to accuse you of a fallacy. The "non sequitur fallacy" is only one of two commonly used senses of the term "non sequitur". The other is a remark which is inappropriate in the context.
To be sure, I expressed disagreement regarding the inappropriateness too but the difference in interpretation regarding whether the 'fallacy' sense applies is interesting (well, slightly, anyhow). By my reading both senses apply. The first ("WTF? That's completely irrelevant.") is obviously there. While ...
Previously in series: Whining-Based Communities
Among the failure modes of martial arts dojos, I suspect, is that a sufficiently dedicated martial arts student, will dream of...
...becoming a teacher and having their own martial arts dojo someday.
To see what's wrong with this, imagine going to a class on literary criticism, falling in love with it, and dreaming of someday becoming a famous literary critic just like your professor, but never actually writing anything. Writers tend to look down on literary critics' understanding of the art form itself, for just this reason. (Orson Scott Card uses the analogy of a wine critic who listens to a wine-taster saying "This wine has a great bouquet", and goes off to tell their students "You've got to make sure your wine has a great bouquet". When the student asks, "How? Does it have anything to do with grapes?" the critic replies disdainfully, "That's for grape-growers! I teach wine.")
Similarly, I propose, no student of rationality should study with the purpose of becoming a rationality instructor in turn. You do that on Sundays, or full-time after you retire.
And to place a go stone blocking this failure mode, I propose a requirement that all rationality instructors must have secret identities. They must have a life outside the Bayesian Conspiracy, which would be worthy of respect even if they were not rationality instructors. And to enforce this, I suggest the rule:
Rationality_Respect1(Instructor) = min(Rationality_Respect0(Instructor), Non_Rationality_Respect0(Instructor))
That is, you can't respect someone as a rationality instructor, more than you would respect them if they were not rationality instructors.
Some notes:
• This doesn't set Rationality_Respect1 equal to Non_Rationality_Respect0. It establishes an upper bound. This doesn't mean you can find random awesome people and expect them to be able to teach you. Explicit, abstract, cross-domain understanding of rationality and the ability to teach it to others is, unfortunately, an additional discipline on top of domain-specific life success. Newton was a Christian etcetera. I'd rather hear what Laplace had to say about rationality—Laplace wasn't as famous as Newton, but Laplace was a great mathematician, physicist, and astronomer in his own right, and he was the one who said "I have no need of that hypothesis" (when Napoleon asked why Laplace's works on celestial mechanics did not mention God). So I would respect Laplace as a rationality instructor well above Newton, by the min() function given above.
• We should be generous about what counts as a secret identity outside the Bayesian Conspiracy. If it's something that outsiders do in fact see as impressive, then it's "outside" regardless of how much Bayesian content is in the job. An experimental psychologist who writes good papers on heuristics and biases, a successful trader who uses Bayesian algorithms, a well-selling author of a general-audiences popular book on atheism—all of these have worthy secret identities. None of this contradicts the spirit of being good at something besides rationality—no, not even the last, because writing books that sell is a further difficult skill! At the same time, you don't want to be too lax and start respecting the instructor's ability to put up probability-theory equations on the blackboard—it has to be visibly outside the walls of the dojo and nothing that could be systematized within the Conspiracy as a token requirement.
• Apart from this, I shall not try to specify what exactly is worthy of respect. A creative mind may have good reason to depart from any criterion I care to describe. I'll just stick with the idea that "Nice rationality instructor" should be bounded above by "Nice secret identity".
• But if the Bayesian Conspiracy is ever to populate itself with instructors, this criterion should not be too strict. A simple test to see whether you live inside an elite bubble is to ask yourself whether the percentage of PhD-bearers in your apparent world exceeds the 0.25% rate at which they are found in the general population. Being a math professor at a small university who has published a few original proofs, or a successful day trader who retired after five years to become an organic farmer, or a serial entrepreneur who lived through three failed startups before going back to a more ordinary job as a senior programmer—that's nothing to sneeze at. The vast majority of people go through their whole lives without being that interesting. Any of these three would have some tales to tell of real-world use, on Sundays at the small rationality dojo where they were instructors. What I'm trying to say here is: don't demand that everyone be Robin Hanson in their secret identity, that is setting the bar too high. Selective reporting makes it seem that fantastically high-achieving people have a far higher relative frequency than their real occurrence. So if you ask for your rationality instructor to be as interesting as the sort of people you read about in the newspapers—and a master rationalist on top of that—and a good teacher on top of that—then you're going to have to join one of three famous dojos in New York, or something. But you don't want to be too lax and start respecting things that others wouldn't respect if they weren't specially looking for reasons to praise the instructor. "Having a good secret identity" should require way more effort than anything that could become a token requirement.
Now I put to you: If the instructors all have real-world anecdotes to tell of using their knowledge, and all of the students know that the desirable career path can't just be to become a rationality instructor, doesn't that sound healthier?
Part of the sequence The Craft and the Community
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