= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
orthonormal comments on How can we get more and better LW contrarians? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (328)
It took me much longer than it should have to mentally move you from the "troll" category to the "contrarian" one. That's my fault, but it makes for an interesting case study:
I quickly got irritated that you made the same criticisms again and again, without acknowledging the points people had argued against you each time. To a reader who disagrees with you, that style looks like the work of a troll or crank; to a reader who agrees with you, it's the best that you can do when arguing against someone more eloquent, with a bigger platform, who's gone wrong at some key step.
It should be noted that I don't instinctively think any more highly of contrarians who constantly change their line of attack; it seems to be a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" tribal response.
The way I changed my mind was that you made an incisive comment about something that wasn't part of your big disagreement with the Less Wrong community, and I was forced to update. For any would-be respected contrarians out there, this might be a good tactic to circumvent our natural impulse towards closing ranks.
I still find it tricky to distinguish if timtyler realizes what he's saying is going to be misinterpreted but just doesn't care (e.g. doesn't want to cave into the general resource-intensive norm of rephrasing things so as not to set off politics detectors), or if he doesn't realize what he's saying is going to be misinterpreted. E.g. he makes a lot of descriptive claims that look suspiciously like political claims and thus gets downvoted even when upon being queried he says they were intended purely as descriptive claims. I've started to think he generally just doesn't notice when he's making claims that could easily be interpreted as unnecessarily political.
Politics? This might, perhaps, be to do with the whole plan of unilaterally taking over the world? If so, that is a plan with a few politicical implications, and maybe it's hard to discuss it while avoiding seeming political.
Yes, and because the Eliezerian doom/world-takeover position is somewhat marginalized by the mainstream, people around here are quick to assume that stating simple facts or predictions about it, unless the facts are implicitly in favor of the marginalized position, is instead implicitly a vote in favor of further marginalization, and thus readers react politically even to simple observations or predictions. E.g., your anti-doom predictions are taken as a political move with the intent of further marginalizing the fund-us-to-help-fight-doom political position, even in the absence of explicit evidence that that's your intent, and so people downvote you. That's my model anyway.
Of course, from my point of view, the "doom exaggeration" looks like a crude funding move based on exploiting people by using superstimulii - or, at best, a source of low-relevance noise from a bunch of self-selected doom enthusiasts who have clubbed together.
You do have a valid point about my intentions. I derive some value from the existence of the SI, but the overall effect seems to be negative. I'm not on "your side". I think "your side" currently sucks - and I don't see much sign of reform. I plan to join another group.
Me too. Probably the Catholics.
Is there a Dominican community blog I should watch? Also, would you surreptitiously palm some small dry ice granules right before you dip your fingers in the water during confirmation? I've always wanted to see that.
I know basically nothing about modern Catholics, actually, which is a big reason why I haven't yet converted. E.g. I have serious doubts about the goodness of the Second Vatican Council. If the Devil has seriously tainted the temporal Church then I want no part in it.
That would be really cool. But I think God would be displeased. ...I'm not sure about that, I'll ask Him. (FWIW I rather doubt He'll give an unambiguous answer.)
If you had to specify a historical year in which Catholicism seems most correct to you which would it be?
I think it depends somewhat on a subquestion I'm confused about. How much culpability should we assign the Church as an institution for the Reformation? On the one hand they were getting pretty corrupt, on the other hand that's like blaming someone who lived a vigorous, moral life, but who is now dying of cancer, for harboring cancer. Should we blame the man for not having already discovered the cure to cancer? Anyway, my intuition says the answer is about 1200 or 1300 A.D., but I really don't know. How close or far before the Reformation is dependent on how culpability should be assigned to the Church for the Reformation. Jayson_Virissimo or Vladimir_M would have better answers.
There is no such thing as "modern Catholics". There are a number of subgroups, but I don't know enough to be usefully more specific.
Why do you think the Devil might have tainted the temporal Church through the Second Vatican Council?
So this is getting into really crazy conspiracy theories, but I notice Vatican II came soon after the Church's failure to release the Third Secret of Fatima, which given the way Church authorities reacted to it IMO seems to indicate that it did indeed predict something like ongoing or imminent Satanic infiltration, or something similarly potentially disruptive to the termporal Church. FWIW I'm pretty sure this conspiracy theory only sounds even halfway plausible if you already accept as legitimate the various prophecies and miracles of Fatima.
ETA: Not sure what to make of the fact that if I was in a Dan Brown novel this is definitely a hypothesis I should keep to myself. I fear I'm not being very genre savvy.
Upon reflection I remembered reading that there was serious cause for concern years before Vatican II. (N.B.: Linked blog seems to be generally epistemically careful but is big on conspiracy theories.)
How do you go about asking God, and how do you experience His answers?
That doesn't sound great! Was I right? If you think there's a case where I should have updated - but didn't - perhaps it can be revisited? Of course, I don't mean to put pressure on you to trawl through my comments - but it would be nice for me to know if you have any specific cases in mind.
I couldn't find them in a quick search, but the gist of the argument that got me frustrated was a cluster of arguments that you've stated a lot but never written up at length. Let me summarize roughly:
All new technological developments are just continuations of evolution; there are no relevant differences between evolution of genes, memes, corporations, etc; and therefore the Singularity couldn't be an existential crisis, just a faster continuation of evolution.
(Apologies if I've mangled it.) It seemed to me that every time a relevant topic was mentioned, back in the days of the Sequences, you merely stated one of these opinions rather than argued for it. But again, it's difficult for me to recognize good arguments when I disagree with their conclusions.
Hmm. Thanks. I did write a whole book about that one - I think.
Your objection also makes me think of this material:
Even with regular evolution there can still be existence "failures" - for particular species.
Also, I do think one of these is coming: http://alife.co.uk/essays/memetic_takeover/
...leading to this: http://alife.co.uk/essays/engineered_future/ - apparently a future where humans as we know them play a pretty insignificant role.
I do think that the trend towards increased destructive power needs to be considered in the light of the simultaneous trend towards greater levels of cooperation, moral behaviour, and peacefulness.
Ah— you have written it up at great length, just not in Less Wrong posts.
I think you claim too strong a predictive power for the patterns you see, but that's a discussion for a different thread. (One particular objection: the fact that evolution has gotten us here contains a fair bit of anthropic bias. We don't know exactly how narrow are the bottlenecks we've survived already.)
We can estimate this for a lot of the major bottlenecks. For example, we can look at how likely other intelligent species are to survive and in what contexts. We have a fair bit of data for that. We also now have detailed genetic data so we can look at historical genetic bottlenecks in the technical sense for humans and for other species.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans
User:timtyler himself has brought up the dinosaurs' semi-extinction, for example, which was a local decrease in "moral progress" even if it might have been globally necessary or whatever.
Well, I don't want to appear to endorse the thesis that you associated me with - but it appears that while we don't know much about the past exactly, we do have some idea about past risks to our own existence. We can look at the distribution of smaller risks among our ancestors, and gather data from a range of other species. What Joshua Zelinsky said about genetic data is also a guide to recent bottleneck narrowness.
Occam's razor also weighs against some anthropic scenarios that imply a high risk to our existence. The idea that we have luckily escaped 1000 asteroid strikes by chance has to compete with the explanation that these asteroids were never out there in the first place. The higher the supposed risk, the bigger the number of "lucky misses" that are needed - and the lower the chances are of that being the correct explanation.
Not that the past is necessarily a good guide - but rather we can account for anthropic effects quite well.
What's the current state of memetics in science (universities, journals, and so on)? I thought it turned out to be a dead end.
Susan Blackmore recently described the current state of memetics as a science as being "pathetic".
A few pages on the general topic:
What we do have is a lot of modern work on "cultural evolution". It's not quite the same - but it's close, and it has many of the basics down.
Statistically, memetics may not be doing too well - but memes are going crazy - through the roof. It bodes well for the subject, I think.
Nice, I was impressed by the video and your page on the criticisms of memetics. But I think you'd be more agreeable to more prejudicial people (i.e., most everyone) if you made some stylistic changes; would you care to see some criticisms?
Any feedback you care to offer would be more than welcome.