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TimS comments on Rationality Quotes September 2012 - Less Wrong
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Comments (1088)
Do I understand you to be saying that you avoid "the struggle between 'for' and 'against'" to an unusual degree compared to the average person? Compared to the average LWer?
The claim looks narrower: repeating the poem makes Konkvistador more likely to avoid the struggle.
I like his contributions, but Konkvistador is not avoiding the struggle, when compared to the average LWer.
Sick people for some reason use up more medicine and may end up talking a lot about various kind of treatments.
No. I'm claiming this helps me avoid it more than I otherwise could. Much for the same reason I try as hard as I can to maintain an apolitical identity. From my personal experience (mere anecdotal evidence) both improve my thinking.
Respectfully, your success at being apolitical is poor.
Further, I disagree with the quote to extent that it implies that taking strong positions is never appropriate. So I'm not sure that your goal of being "apolitical" is a good goal.
Since we've already had exchanges on how I use "being apolitical", could you please clarify your feedback. Are you saying I display motivated cognition when it comes to politically charged subjects or behave tribally in discussions? Or are you just saying I adopt stances that are associated with certain political clusters on the site?
Also like I said it is something I struggle with.
My impression that you are unusually NOT-mindkilled compared to the average person with political positions/terminal values as far from the "mainstream" as your positions are.
You seem extremely sensitive to the facts and the nuances of opposing positions.
Now I feel embarrassed by such flattery. But if you think this an accurate description then perhaps me trying evicting "the struggle between 'for' and 'against'" from my brain might have something to do with it?
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this then. Let's taboo apolitical. To rephrase my original statement: "I try as hard as I can to maintain an identity, a self-conception that doesn't include political tribal affiliations."
You certainly seem to have succeeded in maintaining a self-identity that does not include a partisan political affiliation. I don't know whether you consider yourself Moldbuggian (a political identity) or simply think Moldbug's ideas are very interesting. (someday, we should hash out better what interests you in Moldbug).
My point when I've challenged your self-label "apolitical" is that you've sometime used the label to suggest that you don't have preferences about how society should be changed to better reflect how you think it should be organized. At the very least, there's been some ambiguity in your usage.
There's nothing wrong with having opinions and advocating for particular social changes. But sometimes you act like you aren't doing that, which I think is empirically false.
I disagree with the quote too. On the other hand, the idea of keeping one's identity small is not the same as being apolitical. It means you have opinions on political issues, but you keep them out of your self-definition so that (a) changing those opinions is relatively painless, (b) their correlations with other opinions don't influence you as much.
(Caricatured example of the latter: "I think public health care is a good idea. That's a liberal position, so I must be a liberal. What do I think about building more nuclear plants, you ask? It appears liberals are against nuclear power, so since I am a liberal I guess I am also against nuclear power.")
I agree with everything you just said - keeping one's identity small does not imply that one cannot be extremely active trying to create some kind of social/political change.
I understand how a position can be correct or incorrect. I don't understand how a position can be strong or weak.
In a world of uncertainty, numbers between 0 and 1 find quite a bit of use.
I understand what it means to believe that an outcome will occur with probability p. I don't know what it means to believe this very strongly.
It means that many kinds of observation that you could make will tend to cause you to update that probability less.
Concretely: Beta(1,2) and Beta(400,800) have the same mean.
I don't understand K to be arguing in favor of high-entropy priors, or T to be arguing in favor of low-entropy priors. My guess is that TimS would call a position a "strong position" if it was accompanied by some kind of political activism.
I think of a strong position as a low-entropy posterior, but rereading I am not confident that's what TimS meant, and I also don't see the connection to politics.
E.T. Jaynes' Probability Theory goes into some detail about that in the chapter about what he calls the A_p distribution.
A possible interpretation is that the "strength" of a belief reflects the importance one attaches to acting upon that belief. Two people might both believe with 99% confidence that a new nuclear power plant is a bad idea, yet one of the two might go to a protest about the power plant and the other might not, and you might try to express what is going on there by saying that one holds that belief strongly and the other weakly.
You could of course also try to express it in terms of the two people's confidence in related propositions like "protests are effective" or "I am the sort of person who goes to protests". In that case strength would be referring to the existence or nonexistence of related beliefs which together are likely to be action-driving.
They might also differ in just how bad an idea they think it is.
As I was using the term, "strong" is a measure of how far one's political positions/terminal values are from the "mainstream."
I'm very aware that distance from mainstream is not particularly good evidence of the correctness of one's political positions/terminal values.