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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
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The belief that someone is epiphenomenally a p-zombie, or belief in consubstantiality can also have behavioral consequences. Classifying some author as an "X" can, too.
If an author actually being X has no consequences apart from the professor believing that the author is "X", all consequences accrue to quoted beliefs and we have no reason to believe the unquoted form is meaningful or important. As for p-zombieness, it's not clear at this point in the sequence that this belief is meaningless rather than being false; and the negation of the statement, "people are not p-zombies", has phrasings that make no mention of zombiehood (i.e., "there is a physical explanation of consciousness") and can hence have behavioral consequences by virtue of being meaningful even if its intuitive "counterargument" has a meaningless term in it.
Can someone please explain to me what is bad or undesirable about the parent? I thought it made sense, even if on a topic I don't much care about. Others evidently didn't. While we are at it, what is so insightful about the grandparent? I just thought it kind of missed the point of the quoted paragraph.
My guess? "Behavorial consequences" is not really the touchstone of truth under the Correspondence Theory, so EY's use of the phrase when trying to persuade us of the Correspondence Theory of Truth leaves him open to criticism. EY's response is to deny any mistake.
My guess? People are more or less randomly downvoting me these days, for standard fear and hatred of the admin. I suppose somebody's going to say that this is an excuse not to update, but it could also be, y'know, true. It takes a pretty baroque viewpoint to think that I was talking deliberate nonsense in that paragraph, and if anyone hadn't understood what I meant, they could've just asked.
To clarify in response to your particular reply:
Generally speaking but not always, for our belief about something to have behavioral consequences, we have to believe it has consequences which our utility function can run over, meaning it's probably linked into our beliefs about the rest of the universe, which is a good sign. There's all kinds of exceptions to this for meaningless beliefs that have behavioral consequences anyway, and a very large class of exceptions is the class where somebody else is judging what you believe, like the example someone not-Carl-who-Carl-probably-talked-to recently gave me for "Consubstantiality has the consequence that if it's true and you don't believe in it, God will send you to hell", which involves just "consubstantiality" and not consubstantiality, similarly with the tests being graded (my attempt to find a non-religious conjugate of something for which the religious examples are much more obvious).
A review of your recent comments page puts most of the comments upvoted and some of them to stellar levels---not least of which this post. This would suggest that aversion to your admin-related commenting hasn't generalized to your on topic commenting just yet. Either that or all your upvoted comments are so amazingly baddass that they overcome the hatred while the few that get net downvotes were merely outstanding and couldn't compensate.
Or the downvoters are fast and early, the upvoters arrive later, which is what I've observed. I'm actually a bit worried about random downvoting of other users as well.
Or it's just more memorable when this happens.
Ahh, those kind of downvotes. I get those patterns from time to time---not as many or fast as you are able to I'm sure since I'm a mere commenter. I remind myself to review my comments a day or two later so that some of the contempt for voter judgement can bleed away after I see the correction.
I've noticed the same thing once or twice--less often than you, and far less often than EY, but my (human, therefore lousy) memory says it's more likely for a comment of mine to go to -1 and then +1 than the reverse.
I think smart statistical analysis of the voting records should reveal hate-voting if it occurs, which I agree with you that it probably does.
Ok, I think both you and Carl read more of an implied argument into Eliezer's mention of that particular fact than I did.
How do you infer "there is a physical explanation of consciousness" from "people are not p-zombies"?