Rationality Quotes November 2012

Comment author: cmessinger 27 November 2012 10:31:45PM 6 points [-]

"His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it." - Lois McMaster Bujold, writer (b. 1949)

Comment author: lukeprog 27 November 2012 06:00:09AM 4 points [-]

When I am speaking to people about rationality or AI, and they ask something incomprehensibly bizarre and incoherent, I am often tempted to give the reply that Charles Babbage gave to those who asked him whether a machine that was given bad data would produce the right answers anyway:

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

But instead I say, "Yes, that's an important question..." and then I steel-man their question, or I replace it with a question on an entirely different subject that happens to share some of the words from their original question, and I answer that question instead.

Comment author: RobinZ 27 November 2012 03:33:28PM 1 point [-]

and then I steel-man their question

What does this mean?

Comment author: DaFranker 27 November 2012 03:43:21PM * 5 points [-]

Steel man

See also.

Comment author: RobinZ 27 November 2012 11:53:01PM 0 points [-]

Thank you!

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 24 November 2012 07:55:40AM * 7 points [-]

What does Magritte mean when he says "This is not a pipe"? It sure looks like a pipe. But step back for a moment: what is the definition of the thing you are looking at? The thing you are looking at is not a pipe. The thing you are looking at is a picture. ... You see, if it were actually a pipe, you could stuff tobacco in it, smoke it, etc. But you cannot do anything like that with it. This is not a pipe. It's a picture.

We generally figure this out when we're growing up. You have a Teddy Bear. When you're a child, perhaps you very adorably treat Rupert as if he were "Bear: Subtype Stuffed". But that isn't really true! Rupert is not any kind of a bear at all, and has no actual connection to Ursus. In reality, the amusing childhood mistake is an inversion of the true state of affairs... Rupert is really a "Stuffed Toy: Subtype Bear".

Likewise, Magritte's treacherous pipe is not a "Pipe: Subtype Picture". Rather, it is a "Picture: Subtype Pipe".

Here's another fine example: consider trips to Rome. You can have an expensive trip to Rome, a long trip to Rome, a pious trip to Rome, etc. Some trips to Rome can be several of these at once. There are all sorts of trips to Rome: religious trips, business trips, sightseeing trips, etc. But what about "imaginary" trips to Rome. You don't need a passport for those, do you? That's because an imaginary trip to Rome is not a kind of a trip to Rome! It's a kind of flight of fancy, one about Rome as opposed to being about something else.

http://forums.catholic.com/showpost.php?s=911f001b47b040ac5997321714c0244b&p=7081969&postcount=8

Comment author: [deleted] 24 November 2012 11:20:51AM 2 points [-]

has no actual connection to Ursus

“It was designed to look like one” does sound like a connection to me.

Comment author: Username 28 November 2012 07:04:42AM 0 points [-]

On the level of an abstraction, yes. But as a physical object or basic function? No. I think that what this quote is getting at, though I'm not sure what the point is as I find all this extremely self evident.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 November 2012 03:18:50AM 6 points [-]

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

-Epicurus

I need help on this: I'm torn between finding this argument to be preposterous, and being unable to deny the premises or call the argument invalid.

Comment author: BerryPick6 30 November 2012 06:23:06PM 0 points [-]

Death should still concern you very much. Even though you should not necessarily 'care' about your own death, certainly you should try to eliminate those horrible occasions of your loved ones dying.

Comment author: Jay_Schweikert 30 November 2012 06:15:57PM 2 points [-]

At the very least, even assuming there's no reason to worry about your own death, you would probably still care about the deaths of others -- at least your friends and family. Given a group of people who mutually value having each other in their lives, death should still be a subject of enormous concern. I don't grant the premise that we shouldn't be concerned about death even for ourselves, but I don't think that premise is enough to justify Epicurus's attitude here.

Of course, for most of human history, there genuinely wasn't much of anything that could be done about death, and there's value in recognizing that death doesn't render life meaningless, even if it's a tragedy. But today, when there actually are solutions on the table, this quote sounds more in complacency than acceptance. Upvoted though, because it points to an important cluster of questions that's worth untangling.

Comment author: Alicorn 24 November 2012 03:42:03AM 9 points [-]

You are allowed to have preferences about things that don't coexist with you.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 November 2012 05:27:15AM 1 point [-]

Fair enough, but I think Epicurus' point might be rephrased thus:

I grant that we seem to have very good empirical evidence of the possibility of death. Overwhelming evidence, by most standards. The trouble is, the very idea of death is incoherent. So whatever we call death must be a feature of a faulty map. It's simply impossible for it to be in the territory: in order for someone to be dead, they both have to exist (insofar as they have a property, namely 'being dead') and not exist (because they're dead!). No amount of empirical evidence can support a theory which entails a contradiction.

-not really Epicurus

If that's right, it's not so much a question of being concerned about things you don't coexist with. He's saying that it's irrational to be concerned about things which are impossible and inconceivable.

That's stupid, of course. Of course, people die. But I have a hard time seeing where the argument actually goes wrong. I am regrettably susceptible to philosophical nonsense of every kind.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 24 November 2012 06:57:54PM 1 point [-]

This argument implicitly assumes that we can't meaningfully talk about things not in the present.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 November 2012 08:54:13PM 0 points [-]

The argument asserts that 'death' (which we might taboo as 'a change, the result of which is not existing') is an incoherent concept. It's not claiming that death is always in the future, it's claiming that there is just no such thing as death.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 November 2012 08:06:52PM * 2 points [-]

I wasn't referring to death not being in the present. Rather, the problem with the statement

in order for someone to be dead, they both have to exist (insofar as they have a property, namely 'being dead') and not exist (because they're dead!).

is that it assumes that because the person doesn't exist in the present, it isn't meaningful to talk about that person existing at all.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 November 2012 08:31:35PM 0 points [-]

Ahh, I see, that's a very good point. So you would say that Socrates, despite being dead, nevertheless exists now as someone who is dead.

I suppose if we've got a block-time view of things anyway, existence wouldn't have much of anything to do with presentness.

I like that answer.

Comment author: Nominull 24 November 2012 06:39:43AM 7 points [-]

It's linguistic trickery, like saying prisoners can't escape because if they escape they're not really prisoners now are they?

Comment author: [deleted] 24 November 2012 03:48:28PM 1 point [-]

That's a good point, but it's not a solution (so much as a repitition) of the problem. How is it possible that prisoners can escape? Or that ships can sink?

I'm not saying I actually doubt that ships can sink, prisoners can escape, and people can die. That would be insane. My problem is that I have a hard time denying the force of the argument.

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 24 November 2012 07:34:06AM 2 points [-]

I don't think that's the kind of linguistic trickery it is. It's more like:

The dead person's body exists, but the dead person's mind/consciousness no longer does. If you equivocate by calling both of those things "the person", then they seem to simultaneously be dead and not dead. If you stop equivocating, the problem goes away.

Comment author: Nisan 24 November 2012 05:45:04AM * 3 points [-]

I am regrettably susceptible to philosophical nonsense of every kind.

Try this one:

Premise: Imaginary cheese is cheese that is imaginary.
In particular, imaginary cheese is cheese.
Therefore, some cheese is imaginary.
Premise: Invisible cheese is imaginary.
Therefore, some imaginary cheese is invisible.
By (3) and (5), some cheese is invisible.
Where can I get some of that.

EDIT: Changed some details because they were distracting.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 November 2012 03:50:25PM 2 points [-]

Yes, I think I also just deny premise 2. Some words work like that: former presidents, for example, are not presidents.

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 24 November 2012 07:34:59AM * 3 points [-]

The problem is in #2. Imaginary cheese is not a kind of cheese.

Edit: I'm not entirely sure this is where I saw it first, but this forum post (ironically, on a Catholic forum of some sort, apparently discussing whether certain games such as Magic are evil...) makes the argument excellently.

Edit2: In fact, I daresay an excerpt from said post is good enough to post as a rationality quote on its own, which I will now do.

Comment author: thomblake 30 November 2012 06:52:07PM 1 point [-]

Wonder what the author of that post was banned for.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 24 November 2012 03:52:52PM 2 points [-]

Imaginary cheese is not a kind of cheese.

I'm not sure I like this phrasing although the essential point is correct. I'd say rather that generally when one uses a word one implicitly has "actual" or "real" in front of it. Adding the word "actual" at the relevant points in the argument makes the problem more clear.

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 24 November 2012 06:31:09PM * 2 points [-]

What is the position of imaginary cheese in thingspace, relative to the position of the cheese similarity cluster?

Along most dimensions (those relating to physical properties, most causal properties, etc.), imaginary cheese is quite far removed from actual cheeses. Along a couple of dimensions (verbal description, perhaps something like "what sorts of neutral firings are involved in perceiving it"), imaginary cheese is closer to actual cheeses.

To take a two-dimensional example, perhaps gouda is at (4,6), cheddar is (5,3), mozarella is (3,7), provolone is (3,5)... and imaginary cheese is, say, (100,4). Within the cluster if you look only at the y dimension, quite distant from it if you look at all dimensions. And if we actually plotted cheese and imaginary cheese in some suitably higher-dimensional space, there'd be a lot of dimensions like x in my toy example (along which imaginary cheese is far from actual cheeses), and few like y (along which imaginary cheese is close to actual cheeses). Out of those dimensions in which cheeses form a cluster, most would be like x, few like y.

Edit: the basic issue is that things cluster in thingspace; categories into which we place things are reflections of that clustering. What things do not, in fact, do is fall neatly into classes and subclasses that might seem natural to us, like objects in Java, where if you have e.g. ImaginaryCheese extends Cheese (i.e. the ImaginaryCheese class is a subclass of the Cheese class), then ImaginaryCheese is guaranteed to inherit any and all properties of its superclass Cheese. All we really have is approximations of this behavior, to a lesser or greater extent, e.g.:

GoudaCheese behaves more or less like a subclass of Cheese; most relevant properties of Cheese (that is, properties shared by all things within the main body of the Cheese similarity cluster) are in fact inherited by GoudaCheese... because, of course, GoudaCheese is within the main body of the Cheese similarity cluster.

Conversely, ImaginaryCheese is not within the main body of the Cheese similarity cluster, so we shouldn't expect it to behave like a subclass of Cheese... and it doesn't.

So an alternate response to the logic in the great-grandparent (Nisan's comment) might be:

Yes, some cheese is imaginary. You can't get it anywhere because, unlike most cheeses, imaginary cheese isn't "a thing you can get". This is not a problem because reality doesn't (apparently!) feature strict class hierarchies.

In fact, the problem with the reasoning is that while you could construct a strict class hierarchy, the properties you could assign to the Cheese superclass would be only those shared by all cheeses... and if you're drawing the boundary around the similarity cluster such that ImaginaryCheese is within the boundary, then "existence outside of minds, and therefore ability to be 'gotten'" would not be one of those shared properties.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 November 2012 06:38:26AM 1 point [-]

In your imagination.

Look! I made a pretty picture to help!

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 24 November 2012 07:36:31AM 0 points [-]

As I said here, imaginary cheese doesn't belong in the Cheese circle. Imaginary cheese is not a kind of cheese.

Comment author: Manfred 24 November 2012 05:31:59AM * 0 points [-]

Try playing Taboo.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 November 2012 04:30:40PM * 0 points [-]

So 'ceasing to exist' would replace 'dying'. The argument would then be that nothing can cease to exist, and an implicit premise would be that the referent of the subject of a true sentence must exist. Is that true?

I guess the reason it's tempting to think it's true in the case of death is that dying is a change in which some particular thing goes from existing to not existing. Yet in the moment the change is complete, there is nothing undergoing any change. So as long as the changing thing (and thus the change) exists, it has not yet died, and if it has died, there is neither a changing thing nor a change.

At the very least, this makes death a very weird kind of change.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 November 2012 03:25:27AM 3 points [-]

It's pretty much correct, as far as I can see. One should avoid death because s/he values life, rather than cling to life because s/he fears death.

Comment author: MixedNuts 24 November 2012 05:52:33PM 1 point [-]

Doing the latter helps sustain ability to do the former.

Comment author: cousin_it 24 November 2012 03:24:44AM * 6 points [-]

I can think of two possible things Epicurus could have meant, one correct and the other incorrect. We don't need to fear the experience of being dead, because there's no experience of being dead. But if we care about saving wild geese, then we should avoid dying, because our dying leads to fewer saved geese.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 November 2012 03:35:40AM 0 points [-]

Which of those ('no experience' or 'wild geese') is correct, and which is incorrect? Both seem plausible to me.

Comment author: cousin_it 24 November 2012 03:42:08AM * 4 points [-]

Yeah, sorry, my comment was poorly written. Both statements seem correct to me, but the second one contradicts a certain interpretation of the Epicurus quote, thus making that interpretation incorrect.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 23 November 2012 10:53:06AM 5 points [-]

Romana: You mean you didn't believe his story?

The Doctor: No.

Romana: But he had such an honest face.

The Doctor: Romana, you can't be a successful crook with a dishonest face, can you?

Doctor Who

Comment author: lukeprog 21 November 2012 11:22:50AM 13 points [-]

Philosophy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat. Metaphysics is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there. Theology is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there and shouting "I found it!" Science is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat using a flashlight.

Anonymous

Comment author: Bruno_Coelho 19 November 2012 09:38:36PM 5 points [-]

The most astonishingly incredible coincidence imaginable would be the complete absence of all coincidences.

-- John Allen Paulos(from Beyond Numeracy)

Comment author: roland 19 November 2012 07:59:00PM 3 points [-]

So the first lesson about trusting your senses is: don't. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it's true, that doesn't mean it is true. The most important maxim for fighter pilots is "Trust your instruments."

--David Eagleman

Comment author: TimS 19 November 2012 08:10:35PM 0 points [-]

The final sentence of that quote is true whether the first two sentences are there or not. Thus, I could make the same assertion by saying:

Although generally trustworthy, your senses can mislead you when used outside of their normal contexts. The most important maxim for fighter pilots is "Trust your instruments."

Comment author: arborealhominid 19 November 2012 01:57:30AM * 3 points [-]

In fact, we come to associate having to expend effort and do things with our work, and associate relaxing and not doing anything with leisure time. So, because many of us don't like our jobs, we tend to associate having to do things with being unhappy, while happiness, as far as we ever know it, means... not doing anything. We never act for ourselves, because we spend our whole days acting for other people, and we think that acting and working hard always leads to unhappiness; our idea of happiness is not having to act, being on permanent vacation.

And this is ultimately why so many of us are so unhappy: because happiness is not doing nothing, happiness is acting creatively, doing things, working hard on things you care about. Happiness is becoming an excellent long-distance runner, falling in love, cooking an original recipe for people you care about, building a bookshelf, writing a song. There is no happiness to be found in merely lying on a couch—happiness is something that we must pursue. We are not unhappy because we have to do things, we are unhappy because all the things we do are things we don't care about. And because our jobs exhaust us and mislead us about what we want, they are the source of much of our unhappiness.

CrimethInc (Not exactly a bastion of rationality, but they do have some good stuff now and again.)

Comment author: arborealhominid 19 November 2012 01:49:02AM 18 points [-]

If I have a Grand Unified Theory Of Everything, it's this: I believe that people always do things that make sense to them. Hard as it is to believe with all the hurting out there, almost nobody hurts others just to be a jerk. So if you want to change human behavior on a grand scale, you can't tell people "stop being a jerk." You have to dissect and then recreate their models of the world until being a jerk doesn't make sense.

Cliff Pervocracy

Comment author: tgb 19 November 2012 03:10:31AM 7 points [-]

While I think there's some truth to this, it's easy for me to come up with examples of things I've done that never made sense to myself.

Comment author: arborealhominid 19 November 2012 03:42:29AM 0 points [-]

Fair point. I can't really think of anything I've done that didn't make at least some sort of sense at the time, but I can think of at least one thing I've done where I seriously have to strain to see how it ever could have made sense to me (though I remember feeling like it did). Looking back on it, I feel like I was carrying the idiot ball.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 November 2012 03:35:07PM * 2 points [-]

I think analogies are really only useful for explaining the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. This kind of bizzare analogy, explaining the familiar in terms of the unfamiliar, is only useful for amusement purposes.

-- George Weinberg commenting on Mencius Moldbug, “The magic of symmetric sovereignty”

(Not that I think that's a valid general principle, but I do feel that way about many of the thought experiments I see proposed on LW.)

Comment author: [deleted] 18 November 2012 03:29:58PM 2 points [-]

What do I mean by “generally correct but overly simple”? Imagine a physicist who says, if he drops a sheet of paper and a bag of bricks from the top of a high tower, they'll both hit the ground at the same time. When the local villagers tell him he must be mad, he scoffs, and declares they must not understand gravity, for which (as Galileo proved) the rate of an object's downward acceleration is independent of its mass. When the villagers continue to doubt him, he writes angry pamphlets expressing his disappointment that everyone is too foolish to accept perfectly simple principles of physics.

However, in this case the physicist is wrong and the populace is correct. Sheets of paper really do fall more slowly than bags of brick, and an experiment would have confirmed that fact. Although the physicist was correct in saying that Galileo proved gravity operated independent of mass, he didn't realize that this general principle wasn't enough to determine at what times the paper and bricks would hit the ground. The villagers, who knew less about gravity but were willing to trust their experience, ended up doing better, even though they might not have been able to explain the principles at work. If the physicist had understood air resistance as well as gravity, he would have been able to match the villagers' success and even exceed them, but until he admitted that the problem wasn't as simple as taking his favorite physics equation and applying it to the exclusion of all else, he would never have an incentive to study it.

-- Yvain, “Why I Hate Your Freedom”

Comment author: Spectral_Dragon 17 November 2012 12:20:40PM * 0 points [-]

Transitional species, Winston Rowntree

I couldn't just quote a part of this, as any one good quote would drag half the comic with it. It deserves reading, though.

Comment author: Spectral_Dragon 17 November 2012 12:24:16PM * 1 point [-]

Misclicking like a madman today, Transitional species, Winston Rowntree is one massive, awesome quote. Only one part wouldn't do it justice, unfortunately.

Comment author: roland 16 November 2012 06:08:58PM 18 points [-]

In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many ways consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.

--Carl Sagan

Comment author: [deleted] 15 November 2012 09:48:31PM 4 points [-]

The Last Psychiatrist bats another one out of the park:

So start with an interesting hypothetical: does everybody need to work anymore? I understand work from an ethical/character perspective, this is not here my point. Since we no longer need e.g. manufacturing jobs-- cheaper elsewhere or with robots-- since those labor costs have evaporated, could that surplus go towards paying people simply to stay out of trouble? [...] Let me be explicit: my question is not should we do this, my question is that since this is precisely what's happening already, is it sustainable? What is the cost? I don't have to run the numbers, someone already has: it's $150/mo for a college grads, i.e. the price of food stamps. Other correct responses would be $700/mo for "some high school" (SSI) or $1500/mo for "previous work experience" (unemployment). I would have accepted $2000/mo for "minorities" (jail) for partial credit.

Comment author: mwengler 16 November 2012 04:15:35PM 1 point [-]

the meaning or source of the $ amounts if very unclear to me. Is there more on it somewhere?

Comment author: [deleted] 16 November 2012 05:57:54PM * 3 points [-]

$150/mo for SNAP (i.e., food stamps) is in the right ballpark; the average in 2011 was $133.85/mo.
$700/mo for SSI is an overestimate; the average benefit for those under 18 (i.e., "some high school") was $621.30/mo.
I couldn't find an average benefit estimate from the department of labor for unemployment insurance, but sufficiently many sources claim on the order of $300-500/week, possibly before taxes. $1500/mo is perhaps reasonable.
I don't know where he's getting the jail number from, but some random googling suggests that the average cost per inmate of American prisons is something like $20k-40k/year. Presumably he means minimum security prisons (as he uses the example of an incarcerated marijuana user later).

Comment author: RichardKennaway 15 November 2012 12:42:33PM 7 points [-]

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

John Maynard Keynes

Previously quoted on LW, but not in a quotes thread. I was reminded of it by this exchange.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 November 2012 05:12:14AM 12 points [-]

It is neither desirable nor any longer effective to try bullying people into accepting the authority of science. Instead, all members of the educated public can be invited to participate in science, in order to experience the true nature and value of scientific inquiry. This does not mean listening to professional scientists tell condescending stories about how they have discovered wonderful things, which you should believe for reasons that are too difficult for you to understand in real depth and detail. Doing science ought to mean asking your own questions, making your own investigations, and drawing your own conclusions for your own reasons. Of course it will not be feasible to advance the "cutting edge" or "frontier" of modern science without first acquiring years of specialist training. However, the cutting edge is not all there is to science, nor is it necessarily the most valuable part of science. Questions that have been answered are still worth asking again, so you can understand for yourself how to arrive at the standard answers, and possibly discover new answers or recover forgotten answers that are valuable.

Hasok Chang, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 November 2012 02:14:07AM 20 points [-]

As the philosopher David Schmidtz says, if your main goal is to show that your heart is in the right place, then your heart is not in the right place.

Jason Brennan, Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know

Comment author: aausch 14 November 2012 10:44:16PM 0 points [-]

Bokonon: One day the enhanced humans of the future will dig through their code, until they come to the core of their own minds. And there they will find a mass of what appears to be the most poorly written mess of spaghetti code ever devised, its flaws patched over by a massive series of hacks.

Koheleth: And then they will attempt to rewrite that code, destroying the last of their humanity in the process.

The Dialogues Between Bokonon and Koheleth

Comment author: MugaSofer 16 November 2012 11:33:53PM 0 points [-]

Why would you judge your morality by the quality of it's coding?

Comment author: Nornagest 15 November 2012 01:57:51AM * 3 points [-]

If we're using "humanity" to mean human values, this quote seems simply false (presuming that value stability is a solved problem by then).

If we're using the word to mean the architecture of baseline humans, it seems somewhere between false and irrelevant depending on what features of that architecture we care about.

If we're using it to mean some kind of metaphysical quality of human nature, it seems entirely unverifiable.

Comment author: aausch 03 December 2012 07:45:34AM 1 point [-]

I found the quote amusing specifically because of this ambiguity (modulus your first point - the question of values seems tangential to me).

I found the mix of optimism (ie. the assumptions that no extinction type events will occur, and that there will be a continuous descendant type relationship between generations far into our future, etc...) and pessimism (ie, the assumption that, on a large enough time scale, most architectural components traceable to now-humans will become obsolete) poignant.

Comment author: chaosmosis 16 November 2012 09:20:24PM 1 point [-]

(presuming that value stability is a solved problem by then)

That seems like the presumption that the quote is challenging.

Comment author: Nornagest 16 November 2012 10:17:41PM 0 points [-]

Even if that's true (which I'm not convinced it is; as I implied, "humanity" covers a lot of ground before it stops working in context), I'm uncomfortable with the implications of the quote. It seems to be treating value stability less as a (difficult) problem and more as an insurmountable obstacle, the sort where the only way to win is not to play. Then there's the "alas, Babylon" overtones.

Suppose I should expect as much from someone taking the name of a Kurt Vonnegut character, though.

Comment author: mwengler 16 November 2012 04:31:47PM 0 points [-]

Even if you think the essence of the quote is wrong, that "we" would be better off if all the poets and street performers were making good livings in the white economy, don't you think the quote is valuable for pointing up an important question that many of us working on coding intelligence may need to answer some day?

Comment author: Nornagest 16 November 2012 07:54:03PM 2 points [-]

that "we" would be better off if all the poets and street performers were making good livings in the white economy,

Wait, what? I was talking about self-modification, not social normativity. It might be a point about the latter in context, but it isn't out of context; I was responding to the words you presented, not the ones in the source.

And my objection isn't that it raises the wrong question, but that it closes that question with a wrong answer.

Comment author: alex_zag_al 16 November 2012 05:24:48PM 0 points [-]

What's the quote have to do with whether we want to be street performers? Do you think that self-modifying humans would try to make themselves want to work in offices instead of street performance, or something?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2012 02:59:32AM 1 point [-]

You can make a lot more money per unit time working in an office rather than as a street performer.

Comment author: alex_zag_al 20 November 2012 01:09:40AM 1 point [-]

Is that what you would do if you could self-modify better? Do you use your limited capacity to change how your mind functions to make yourself into a more efficient money-making machine? I don't.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 November 2012 11:24:21PM 1 point [-]

Is the point of being a street performer to make money or artistic fulfillment? It seems like there are better ways to achieve either one of these goals.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 November 2012 01:18:10AM 4 points [-]

Do you do any instrumental things? Like say, eat? Practice? Learn? Self modify?

Making more money happens to be a very effective way to achieve most goals.

You should use your "limited capacity to change how your mind functions " to become more capable of doing whatever it is you want to do, in the most effective way possible.

If you find that making money is not instrumental to your goals, say so, but don't just make fun of it and imply that the people who do (try to make money) are doing something wrong.

Comment author: alex_zag_al 20 November 2012 04:03:26AM 1 point [-]

yeah. Sorry. The tone I was using was totally wrong for the kind of discussions we want to have here.

Comment author: TimS 15 November 2012 01:46:53AM * 2 points [-]

We shouldn't edit humanity to remove depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and other mental illness?

No thanks - instead, let's avoiding totally pointless wasting of human capability.

Comment author: mwengler 16 November 2012 04:27:13PM * 4 points [-]

I think the questions relevant to the quote would be should we avoid editing out crying at cute kitten videos, sitting with your grandmother while she tells you the same story for the 21st time, wearing a "kiss me I'm Polish" pin on st. patrick's day, laughing at three stooges movies, and swooning when a nice boy writes you doggerel or gives you an "Oh Henry" candy bar.

In rewriting the part of the code that evolution put in, all sorts of idiosyncratic behavior will be written out. The fact that the root idio means self, personal, private will not make it any easier to replace the evolved code with rationalized, readable, maintainable code without losing all sorts of behaviors whos purpose is nearly unknowable when looking at the existing code.

Since anxiety, depression, and especially schizophrenia are features of humanity which exist to a negative degree only in some of us, it will probably be possible to fix these by writing patches that operate on the relevant minds that have these features, and will not reqiure touching the evoluion-written code.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 15 November 2012 11:42:45AM 7 points [-]

You shouldn't carelessly think you are necessarily wise enough to edit humanity without destroying it in the process. Things like "depression" "anxiety" "schizophrenia" are probably not neatly packed away in tidy little boxes you can remove from your brain without any side-effects at all.

This has been somewhat discussed at Devil's offers

Comment author: TimS 15 November 2012 02:48:42PM 1 point [-]

I'm not saying that disentangling what we want to preserve will be easy. But the quote speaks in absolutes - fixing the code that causes schizophrenia or Capgras syndrone is prohibited because that would destroy our humanity.

It's conflating the problem of Hidden Complexity of Wishes with Justification-for-being-hit-on-the-head-every-day.

Comment author: mwengler 17 November 2012 01:41:59PM 0 points [-]

The quote neither speaks in absolutes nor does it prohibit anything.

Quotes must be compact and pithy to be quotable. If a quote refers to "advanced humans of the future," it is quite reasonable to expect they are talking about healthy, typical humans, and not referring to the repair of defects that only occur in some humans.

The quote expresses a wistful sense of loss at a choice to clean out the evelved code that makes up our kernel. It doesn't prohibit anything.

Comment author: Plubbingworth 14 November 2012 10:40:05PM * 1 point [-]

King Kai: It’s…. It’s over.
Yamcha: What?
King Kai: Goku could not escape the explosion. Namek is gone, and so is he.
Yamcha: No. Goku no. NOOOOOOOOO! [Cries]
Tien: Why do you care?
Yamcha: Ah, wha?
Tien: Why do any of you care? Are you forgetting the whole reason they went to Namek in the first place? Now we have two sets of Dragon Balls.
Yamcha: Well…. yeah but you make it sound like death has no consequence.
Tien: It really doesn’t. We’re literally waiting to go back. Hell, this is Chiaotzu’s second time.
Chiaotzu: Next time I get a free sundae!
Yamcha: Huh.
King Kai: Huh.
Tien: Yeah.

DBZ Abridged on the lack of consequence concerning death in the series. Tien's supposed to be the only serious character in the series. That's the joke.

Edit: Perhaps I should explain this quote... I simply thought that Yamcha served as a good representation of most people's reactions... and Tien as a representation of "Um. It's no biggie." The rest of this series finale went off without a hitch as all characters realized "Wait. There are almost no consequences here. There may never be? What's the use in grieving!"

Comment author: [deleted] comment score below threshold [+] (62 children)

Comment author: mwengler 17 November 2012 01:50:31PM 0 points [-]

Should morality reflect reality or should our reality be frozen in time, immune from technical advances, so that it stays relevant to an old morality? Yah... if children are a technically unavoidable result of sex, then one set of policies is optimum, if children are avoidable, another set of policies will optimize.

Women in modern societies have violence of various sorts much less often perpetrated against them, and have many fewer life choices precluded to them than in the past. It would be an odd definition of respect indeed which rated women less respected now than they were in the days of less effective birth control.

Comment author: DanArmak 18 November 2012 04:54:53PM 1 point [-]

if children are a technically unavoidable result of sex, then one set of policies is optimum, if children are avoidable, another set of policies will optimize.

And if you're Roman Catholic, having children is the goal you're optimizing for.

Comment author: Bugmaster 17 November 2012 03:56:26AM 4 points [-]

it would lower standards of morality

That rather depends on which moral standards you're using to start with. For example, modern humans -- men as well as women -- are often seen in public wearing nothing but shorts and a T-shirt. Pope Paul VI may or may not have seen this as normal, but his predecessors surely would've condemned the practice as supremely immoral. Does this mean that moral standards had fallen during the past 500 or so years ?

Comment author: ChristianKl 14 November 2012 07:37:22PM 0 points [-]

If you define morality the way the catholic church does, I'm not sure whether it's true. There are all sorts of developments that you could call a lowering of moral standards from the perspective of the church.

The last decades saw a rise in pornography that you could call "men disrespecting women".

Having numbers on infidelity would be nice.

Some governments who have problems with overpopulation do encourage their citizens to use birthcontrol. China even goes as far as forcing them.

Could you provide a reasonend argument as to the evidence that Pope Paul VI predictions are false?

Comment author: mwengler 17 November 2012 01:55:59PM 1 point [-]

Could you provide a reasonend argument as to the evidence that Pope Paul VI predictions are false?

Violence against women is way down. Laws limiting the occupations of women and the rights to own property of women are way down. If by respect you mean "keep them barefoot and in the kitchen and punish them if they go out and risk their precious lady parts" then I won't be able to convince you, because by respect I mean "acknowledge the autonomy and independence of independent agents and provide societal protections against coercion by abuse or threats of abuse."

Your welcome.

Comment author: ChristianKl 17 November 2012 02:46:23PM 0 points [-]

If you want to understand what someone else is saying it makes sense to look past the way you yourself define terms.

If you want to say Pope Paul VI's prediction is wrong it would make sense to use a definition of respect of Pope Paul VI. To me the claim that Pope Paul VI would define respect for woman as "acknowledge the autonomy and independence of independent agents and provide societal protections against coercion by abuse or threats of abuse" seems wrong.

Do you really believe that's Pope Paul VI definition?

Comment author: mwengler 18 November 2012 12:02:08PM 0 points [-]

I suppose if you were asking me "do you think Pope Paul VI thinks he is wrong when he makes these four predictions" it might make sense to use definitions of these terms common among Catholics.

Do you really believe that Pope Paul VI believes when he refers to respecting women or morality that it is his personal definition of morality or respect he is speaking of, or do you suppose he thinks and would claim he is really talking about something real and external to him in discussing Morality and Respect? Since Catholic is a Latin word meaning Universal, I'd bet that he, like most other Catholic dogmatists in history, would not accept that his statements are just true for him and are not also true for people who disagree with him. What do you think about that?

In any case, the original quote speaks of the cool people being wrong, so wouldn't it make at least as much sense to use the terms respect and morality in ways that the cool people would agree with in examining these questions?

In light of the above questions, arrogating the words Respect and Morality to only their papal definitions will not be fruitful for you, either in this discussion or in your own thinking on these issues.

Comment author: ChristianKl 18 November 2012 04:26:42PM 0 points [-]

Do you really believe that Pope Paul VI believes when he refers to respecting women or morality that it is his personal definition of morality or respect he is speaking of

I didn't use the word "personal". Of course he speaks about the position of the catholic church. In this case the position that the catholic church had in 1968 when he made his prediction.

Part of the idea of catholic faith is that something like the meaning of "respecting women" get's defined top-down.

In any case, the original quote speaks of the cool people being wrong, so wouldn't it make at least as much sense to use the terms respect and morality in ways that the cool people would agree with in examining these questions?

In light of the above questions, arrogating the words Respect and Morality to only their papal definitions will not be fruitful for you

That's not what I'm doing. I have no problem with using different definitions of terms depending on the text I'm reading. If you can only use one defnition and try to interpret what everyone is saying through that definition you are likely to misunderstand the position of people who disagree with you.

It's bad to have habits that make it hard to understand what people with different mindsets are saying. It allows you to have all those tribal beliefs of the cool people crowd without spending any conscious thought in rationally examining your beliefs.

Comment author: chaosmosis 16 November 2012 09:27:41PM * 1 point [-]

Honestly, I think there's a fairly tenable argument that all of those things have happened (not 4, but...).

I think the better objection is that there's no causal connection between those things and birth control.

Comment author: Peterdjones 14 November 2012 07:53:03PM -1 points [-]

Hmmm. If you define morality as having less sex rather than more sex, then morality has declined. If you see the reason for advising chastitiy as avoiding unwanted pregnancy..that no longer makes sense.

I don't see why govennets would want to reduce the number of future taxpayers

Respect for women...please...hugely increased by the "cool people" within living memory. The RC's still don't respect women enough to allow them to dispense the sacrament.

Comment author: sam0345 15 November 2012 11:19:02PM -2 points [-]

Modern morality is anti sex, and has been ever since the Victorians, for example "date rape", "marital rape", and the ever rising age of consent, all of which started culturally or legally with the Victorians, and has become every more extreme ever since.

Obviously a society in which women generally do not marry until their fertility is about to expire has less sex than a society where women generally marry during their most fertile years.

The New Testament position was that most people are entirely incapable of celibacy, and therefore upholding sexual morality meant maximizing monogamous sex.

(I notice I got downvoted for endorsing the New Testament position that fertile age people are incapable of celibacy, and it is just not going to happen.)

According to the New Testament:

let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.

Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband.

The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.

Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time,

And, from the start of Christianity to the early nineteenth century, that was Christian sexual morality. Today's sexual morality is Victorianism on steroids.

From the restoration to the early nineteenth century, they deviated from Christian morality by being OK with men having sex with sluts, but not OK with women being sluts. Victorians cried "hypocrisy" after the fashion of Alinsky, cracked down on men having sex with sluts (rising age of consent, ever more expansive rape laws requiring ever less evidence, etc) and eased up on women being sluts. Compare treatment of Petraeus with treatment of Monica.

Comment author: Peterdjones 15 November 2012 11:30:45PM * 2 points [-]

for example "date rape", "marital rape",

Are you quite sure that's not being pro-consent?

Comment author: MixedNuts 14 November 2012 08:10:16PM 7 points [-]

Do y'all genuinely not understand why some people like chastity?

Part of morality is interacting with sacred things only in highly ritualized contexts and focusing on strong emotions appropriate to the thing. Sex is sacred. If people have sex because of pious zeal to follow the first of all commandments, of deep hope for a child to birth and raise and love, and of overwhelming, passionate, committed romantic love that they have freely chosen to be bound by for life, then it's moral. If they have sex because it sounds like fun right now, then it's profanation and therefore gross/evil.

Sacredness looks like a cultural universal. I like the theory that we have a general sense of things being in the wrong place that causes revulsion because it's a disease prevention mechanism, but it seems too narrow to hold water; it's good for avoiding dangerous food and contamination, but I can't see why it could affect sex, unless it was specifically triggered by STDs or something.

(Now if someone could explain to me why so many people find gay kisses gross...)

Comment author: mwengler 17 November 2012 02:04:46PM 3 points [-]

I'd say "respect" for individuals, women or otherwise, would be that those who buy in to your ideas about chastity get to do what they find consistent with that in their lives, those who have other ideas about sex get to do something different, and that both choices when made without coercion are essentially protected by law.

It is not "respect" of an intelligent entity to constrain THEIR behavior to fit YOUR ideas about sex. And such constraint is the policy of the Roman Catholic church (where popes come from), even in modern day where we see Roman Catholic support for laws against the use of birth control in Italy, and Ireland (two countries where the Roman Catholics have a lot of influence.).

Comment author: Peterdjones 14 November 2012 08:17:24PM * 0 points [-]

Sex is sacred.

That's the preaching-to-the-converted version. When preaching to the unconverted, more pragmatic arguments tend to be brought forward

but I can't see why it could affect sex,

Unwanted pregnancy would have been as disastrous as disease in the econiomcally constrained socieites of our ancestors. .

(Now if someone could explain to me why so many people find gay kisses gross...)

Or interacial kisses? Depends where y'all come from, I figure. Old chap.

Short answer: conditioning.

Comment author: MixedNuts 14 November 2012 09:01:48PM 2 points [-]

I'm not sure hunter-gatherers typically avoid pregnancy - they're much more free-lovey and screw-it-let's-just-kill-excess-kids-ey than low-tech farmers.

Sex aversion in cultures I'm most familiar with seems to have to do with proof of paternity (individual, small set of individuals, or even just the local band) than with pregnancy avoidance. Sex when you have too many kids to raise is stupid but not gross; sex out of wedlock when you could totally raise a kid is. Don't know if it's because many cultures have incentives to condition for that or if it's innate.

But that's not quite my question. What I'm asking about is why physical and moral disgust have so much overlap. Touching poop then eating is gross, but I don't feel it's morally repugnant. Killing your neighbor is evil, but not gross. So why does disgust leak into morality? I don't think we ever do in/outgroup or fairness or harm/care without a moral element. Most emotions (joy and curiosity and the like) affect moral judgement, but they're not fundamental bases.

And why do we have such specific emotions for the sacred? It's a weird-ass intersection of cleanliness, morality, ingroup bonding mechanisms, appeasing the high-status, and aesthetic appreciation. Who ordered that?

I'm not sure why disgust can be conditioned at all, but we can do that for all emotions anyway and cultures that learn win.

Or interacial kisses?

No, that one's easy. The proper place for a person is among their race, leaking out is matter out of place - impurity, dirt. Plus, whites are better than blacks, so mixing black with white is disgusting corruption, like mixing dirt with food.

Whereas I'd expect basically the Ancient Greek stance on homosexuality: doing men is More Purer, and men are better than women so they're nobler in the sack. (And two women can't have sex, silly.)

Comment author: Nornagest 15 November 2012 04:49:40PM 3 points [-]

I'm not sure hunter-gatherers typically avoid pregnancy - they're much more free-lovey and screw-it-let's-just-kill-excess-kids-ey than low-tech farmers.

Where are you getting this from? It does match my model, but it's a controversial-sounding enough point that I think a cite would be beneficial.

Comment author: Peterdjones comment score below threshold [+] (7 children)

Comment author: DaFranker 14 November 2012 08:44:28PM 0 points [-]

Short answer: conditioning.

I stand by this answer.

I used to find gay man-man kissing (or any form of intimate touching between males, really) very gross despite a very strong conscious understanding and notion that it was just as "right" for them as between a man and a woman.

Then, as I noticed and saw more of it, it got normal.

Now I don't find any of it the least bit gross or off-putting anymore, except in rare cases that evoke specific memories.

The just-so hindsight explanation that makes the most sense is that I believed-by-default everything I was told as a child about such things being "bad", "gross" and "disgusting" or even outright "evil" by my peers. However, that's only the slightly-more-likely out of many possible explanations, and I don't have real data.

Comment author: sam0345 comment score below threshold [+] (0 children)

Comment author: ErikM 14 November 2012 06:58:50PM * 6 points [-]

I think this is the source you want.

See the section Consequences of Artificial Methods, subheading 17.

Comment author: [deleted] 14 November 2012 07:11:11PM * 3 points [-]

I was just going to edit it in after you mentioned it on IRC. Thank you!

Comment author: MixedNuts 14 November 2012 06:36:24PM 2 points [-]

I'd like the original wording for the last prediction; the government subsidizes and promotes it but only China forces everyone to use it. Also I have doubts about the causation in prediction two.

Also, right above what you quoted:

Margaret Sanger, George Bernard Shaw, and all of the other cool people promised that free love and artificial contraception would make society so much better. Instead, we have good-for-nothings breeding like…well…good-for-nothings and the hard-working smart people barely have children at all.

That's pretty vague. Like, if they predicted "Smart hard workers will be able to do their stuff without wasting time with kids", that's a win for them.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2012 03:03:08AM 1 point [-]

Like, if they predicted "Smart hard workers will be able to do their stuff without wasting time with kids", that's a win for them.

As a result children are raised by people how are neither smart nor hard-working.

Comment author: DanArmak 18 November 2012 04:49:32PM 0 points [-]

But those children would have been raised by those parents regardless of what the smart hard workers did.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 November 2012 08:22:55PM 1 point [-]

On the other hand, it affects what the average member of the next generation is like.

Comment author: Multiheaded 15 November 2012 04:40:47PM * 1 point [-]

Also I have doubts about the causation in prediction two.

<Bile-spewing rad-fem mode ON! Be warned, I'm not sure I quite get radical feminist thought, so this is a test run.>

I have few doubts here. Indeed this perverse logic looks simple to me, as I am habitually terribly disrespectful to my ideological opponents - so I automatically assumed that the "Dude" above, who presumably counts himself among the savvy "Bigots", went for as much cynicism as possible. So the phrase "disrespect women" should not be taken as a decent modern person would, at face value - "treat them worse than their character and behavior could justly warrant".

Instead, you should assume that our oh-so-savvy Dude considers men to be entirely sex-driven, and indifferent/hostile towards the Other that is a woman's personality, individuality, etc, and so a woman is an entirely commodified barrier (a walking, talking tax) to a rare and precious resource - Consequence-Controlled Sex.

"Risky" sex is more available but the patriarchal society taxes/fines it with a whole lot of potential troubles, so such selfish and casually misogynistic men must go for the safer option, which is bundled with the sacred function of childbirth. So by such a roundabout way the women as a group can get the "respect" of the patriarchal society - it trickles down from the market value of their bodies, and that's it - men aren't taught to seek anything else, instead they're just given the carrot of "proper" sex and the stick of unintended pregnancies of STD.

Gotta love them old good traditional values! They're full of such harmony and beauty, and are totally not quick, dirty, cynical hacks!

P.S.: (looks up and finally notices MixedNuts' username) - might I be preaching to the choir with this?

<Switching rad-fem mode to SLEEP.>

Comment author: TimS 17 November 2012 03:30:20AM * 0 points [-]

I think the reasoning under "disrespect woman" is as follows:

1) Increased availability of birth control leads to an increased frequency of non-marital sex.
2) Increased non-marital sex must be caused by social pressure on women to have non-marital sex.
3) Social pressure on women to have non-marital sex at a higher frequency than the women "naturally" desire is not respectful to women.

From most feminist perspectives, (1) and (3) seem like reasonable predictions / moral assertions. Step 2 is filled with some noteworthy implicit assertions about how sexual relations are and should be negotiated - for one thing, there's not much female agency in that story.

I'm not sure how much, if at all, that my interpretation differs from yours, except that it doesn't directly require different understandings of words (i.e. "disrespect") than a feminist might use.

Comment author: Multiheaded 17 November 2012 03:46:25AM * 0 points [-]

I'd add that the "patriarchal" thinking can get perverse enough that 2) might be replaced with "the disappearance of the risk of pregnancy removes the barrier to women's naturally wanton and irresponsible sexuality", so that 3) becomes "if men see the woman's true, uncontrolled sexual nature, they'll disrespect her much as if they saw her uncovered, naked body; both states are savage and animal."

But your interpretation might work too - it's just that mine seems crazy and perverse enough to be the product of cultural adaptation/rationalization while yours is more logical. And damn, I swear I could see my version implied/assumed in the wording of some angry MRA/PUA rants I've read.

(Dear downvoters, what exactly are you opposing here?)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2012 03:55:01AM 1 point [-]

it's just that mine seems crazy and perverse enough to be the product of cultural adaptation/rationalization while yours is more logical.

In other words, "I prefer mine because it makes a better strawman".

BTW, see here for a good description of the actual catholic position.

Comment author: Multiheaded 17 November 2012 04:15:28AM * 0 points [-]

Strawman or not, TimS' version is still very problematic to a modern view of gender, as he says.

And more importantly, why do you believe that most people - especially in a traditional society - even care to apply logic and reflection when thinking about sex? So many other popular beliefs (on drugs, religion, etc) both then and now are full of cached thoughts, inherited memes etc. and lack rigorous reflection!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2012 04:25:41AM * 2 points [-]

is still very problematic to a modern view of gender,

What does this have to do with it being or not being true?

And more importantly, why do you believe that most people - especially in a traditional society - even care to apply logic and reflection when thinking about sex?

You seam to be conflating the progressive/traditional distinction intellectual/popular distinction. There were a lot of smart people in the past (who would today be considered traditional) who thought about these things.

So many other popular beliefs (on drugs, religion, etc) both then and now are full of cached thoughts, inherited memes etc. and lack rigorous reflection!

This is equally true in non-traditional societies.

Comment author: Multiheaded 17 November 2012 04:37:07AM * 1 point [-]

What does this have to do with it being or not being true?

It's a response to the charge of me intentionally picking the more strawman-like answer.

This is equally true in non-traditional societies.

Sure, but in traditional societies reflection on sacred matters is officially discouraged, whereas in modern ones there's just the silent pressure to come to the approved conclusion - but many still decide not to! There are more patriarchally oriented people now in the 1st world than there were liberal people in the past.

If neither position is obviously insane and they just stem from different moral instincts, then there must be slightly more freedom of thought today along these axes.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2012 04:45:49AM 4 points [-]

Sure, but in traditional societies reflection on sacred matters is officially discouraged

That some didn't stop Christian theologians from doing an awful lot of reflection on sacred matters.

continue this thread »

Comment author: Multiheaded 16 November 2012 02:39:55PM -1 points [-]

Would anyone please challenge this? Are there other ways to construe the "disrespect women" line?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2012 03:04:39AM 2 points [-]

I took disrespect woman to mean "treat them worse than their character and behavior could justly warrant".

Comment author: TimS 17 November 2012 03:19:40AM * 1 point [-]

That's a reasonable definition of "disrespect."

Why should one believe that freely available birth control is likely to cause disrespect towards women?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2012 03:46:53AM 2 points [-]

Freely available birth control -> Fewer direct consequences to having sex -> Men have sex with more women -> Men more likely to think of women only as sexual objects

Comment author: mwengler 17 November 2012 02:16:51PM * 2 points [-]

Men more likely to think of women only as sexual objects

Modern western societies have women integrated with men in most professions, whereas societies that highly limit sexual behavior with women seem to be the ones who turn women into something other than humans primarily.

Reqiuring women to be coevered head to toe if they appear in public, requiring them to only appear in public when they are with a man from their family who can protect them, and limiting their rights to own property, work, drive, and attend schools are all features of "highly moral" societies and essentially absent from "immoral" societies.

Comment author: TimS 17 November 2012 04:00:05AM 3 points [-]

Fewer direct consequences to having sex -> Men have sex with more women

Why not state the conclusion here as: People have more sex. Just as men have more sexual partners, why wouldn't women have more sexual partners.

When phrased like that, the next conclusion (Women increasingly thought of as sex objects) requires a bit more justification. One could assert that women naturally have fewer partners than men, but surely some or most of that is explained by the relative ease of avoiding the consequences of pregnancy.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2012 04:04:33AM 1 point [-]

I was presenting a possible causal mechanism, not an argument. The argument is that the Pope's prediction did in fact come true.

Comment author: TimS 17 November 2012 04:07:29AM 2 points [-]

In case it isn't clear, there is not agreement that the second prediction did come true.

(or the fourth. And the first is simply argument by definition).

continue this thread »

Comment author: Bugmaster 17 November 2012 03:59:18AM 2 points [-]

Doesn't this explanation rather rob women of agency ?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2012 04:05:59AM -1 points [-]

If you feel annoyed at the universe for robbing women of agency in this instance, go ahead. The universe doesn't care.

Comment author: Bugmaster 20 November 2012 07:05:07PM -1 points [-]

I was complaining about you, not the Universe. If your model of reality includes "women are automatons" as a feature, your model is not very likely to be correct.

Comment author: Multiheaded 18 November 2012 05:06:54AM -1 points [-]

"Agency" in this sense (social and moral agency, I'd call it) obviously =/= "Libertarian free will".

continue this thread »

Comment author: Abd 14 November 2012 07:17:58PM * 4 points [-]

China forces everyone to use it.

Oversimplified. One-child policy. I have an adopted Chinese daughter, I went to China for the adoption in 2002, and I talked about the policy with Chinese working for the adoption agency.

"Artificial birth control" is one method by which Chinese might avoid unwanted children, but if anyone is forced to use it, that's not official by the government. However, there were isolated, unofficial actions taken by local officials, sometimes, cases of forced abortion.

See also Two-child policy.

Normal enforcement of the policy is through fines on excess children, the definition of excess varies by region, ethnic group, and, sometimes, the sex of already-born children. The most stringent requirements are on the Han majority

The situation is much more complex than most in the West might imagine..

Comment author: [deleted] 14 November 2012 06:18:34PM * 3 points [-]

Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."

--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Rationality challenge: Understand why I posted it here.

Bonsu Rationality Challenge: Reinvent the meaning of "God" I used to ironman the position. Start by ironmaning it yourself.

Comment author: yli 18 November 2012 05:28:51PM 4 points [-]

For decision-theoric reasons, the dark lords of the matrix give superhumanly good advice about social organization to religious people in ways that look from inside the simulation like supernatural revelations; non-religious people don't have access to these revelations so when they try to do social organization it ends in disaster.

Obviously.

Comment author: MugaSofer 18 November 2012 08:50:28PM 2 points [-]

Seems legit.

Comment author: simplicio 17 November 2012 09:55:53PM 6 points [-]

In abandoning one's religion, one also abandons an ethical system. If this lacuna is not filled in by another ethical system that works at least passably well, the consequences for personal and political behaviour can be dire.

Comment author: Multiheaded 17 November 2012 02:12:19PM * 5 points [-]

Bonus challenge accepted, blind mode - no peeking at comments, take my word.

"God" = the objectively present, difficult-to-disentangle historical trends of the West, and the memetic strains that caused those trends, chiefly Universalism and its Christianity section. So here, a Universalist culture has violated Universalism's own naturally-evolved barriers and safety measures, and suffered for it by landing in a shallow circle of Hell. But Solzhenitsyn wasn't very Universalist, I'd say - not like Zizek and Moldbug and yours truly take it - so he couldn't see that Universalism can only stay alive while moving ever onwards and unfolding itself.

Also: this quote should be way way up there! And the Obamas of today shouldn't be quoted so much - all is dust, and all will be dust. But history will sort its Right and Left... in due course.

(help help will newsome is taking me over with his computational theology konkvistador you know you saw it help)

Comment author: TimS 15 November 2012 05:17:04PM 3 points [-]

Meta-level point: It is possible to steel-man someone's position into an argument that they would not actually endorse. I think that might be what you are doing here.

Rationality challenge: Understand why I posted it here.

I'm trying to be more whimsical in my posting on LW, but I'm not sure that "rationality," "optimization," or any other special virtue in this community is advanced by this provocative post or its religious-language framing.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 November 2012 02:21:50AM 4 points [-]

For a more detailed discussion go here.

Comment author: ChristianKl 14 November 2012 07:51:32PM * -2 points [-]

A key of Marxist thought is the rejection of the idea of God. The Marxist morality that drove the Russian revolutionaries was different than Christian morality.

I don't the an inherent problem with blaming the Russian revolution on that change in morality. It's a bit like putting the blame that the crusades happened on Christianity.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 November 2012 01:46:03AM 4 points [-]

It's a bit like putting the blame that the crusades happened on Christianity.

I'd say that's like putting the blame for the battle of Normandy on democracy.

Comment author: Multiheaded 17 November 2012 02:15:32PM * -1 points [-]

Very, very well put! (FYI, Eugine_Nier appears to be pro-democracy)

Uru uru uru... ur'f nyernql trggvat zber Znekvfg, abj gb nqq fbzr Ynpna sbe znkvzhz cbgrapl... qnza, Mvmrx unfa'g jevggra nalguvat nobhg ubj gb fcvxr crbcyr'f qvfphffvbaf jvgu Ynpnavna Serhqvfz! Tnu, guvf Serhqb-Znekvfz qnex fbeprel vf pbzcyvpngrq!

^ looks just right in rot13, too! Black Speech!

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2012 11:19:04PM 2 points [-]

I can't tell whether you understood my point, or completely misunderstood it. I don't see where I was "thinking like a Marxist".

Comment author: Multiheaded 17 November 2012 11:25:45PM * 0 points [-]

Not in this comment specifically - just a general thing about your view of economics' relation to social structures having similar focus (determinism etc) to the Marxist view. TimS has called you out on it recently, no?

But still, "moral fashion doesn't ever cause revolutions on its own" is a statement any Marxist would sign under. So in this regard you ironically proved closer to Marxism than the view you kinda-opposed as insufficiently strongly worded ("causal link about as evident as for crusades and Christianity"). See?

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 19 November 2012 12:01:08PM * 0 points [-]

Not in this comment specifically - just a general thing about your view of economics' relation to social structures having similar focus (determinism etc) to the Marxist view. TimS has called you out on it recently, no?

But still, "moral fashion doesn't ever cause revolutions on its own" is a statement any Marxist would sign under. So in this regard you ironically proved closer to Marxism than the view you kinda-opposed as insufficiently strongly worded ("causal link about as evident as for crusades and Christianity"). See?

TGGP defends economic determinism here.

Comment author: Multiheaded 19 November 2012 01:18:20PM 0 points [-]

Heh! Cool, thanks.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 November 2012 11:37:25PM 1 point [-]

But still, "moral fashion doesn't ever cause revolutions on its own" is a statement any Marxist would sign under.

Ok, so you did misunderstand my intent.

My point, was mainly that the Crusades are not a good example of "religion causes people to do something evil".

Comment author: bbleeker 18 November 2012 06:39:18PM 4 points [-]

Wait, why are the Crusades not a good example of religion causing people to do evil things? Do you think they weren't evil, or that religion wasn't to blame?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 November 2012 08:19:44PM 1 point [-]

That depends on what you mean by those terms. Was the battle of Normandy a good thing?

Comment author: TimS 18 November 2012 08:29:58PM 2 points [-]

I'm confused. Yes, D-Day was a good thing. Yes, D-Day was violence in service of democracy.

What does this have to do with whether (1) the Crusades were a good thing, or (2) whether religion (particularly Catholicism) was a substantial cause of the Crusades?

continue this thread »

Comment author: MugaSofer 18 November 2012 08:10:39PM * -1 points [-]

That religion wasn't to blame. Read the grandparents, most notably this.

EDIT: Wait, no. I had that backwards.

Comment author: shminux 14 November 2012 08:23:58PM 5 points [-]

The Marxist morality that drove the Russian revolutionaries was different than Christian morality.

Was it really? For example, "the meek shall inherit the earth" transfers basically unchanged.

Comment author: ChristianKl 14 November 2012 11:28:53PM 5 points [-]

In Christianity the meek somehow inherent the earth while staying meek. In Marxism they do it through running a revolution and overthrowing the old order.

Comment author: thomblake 14 November 2012 08:35:39PM * 1 point [-]

the meek shall inherit the earth

That sounds like an empirical prediction, not a moral claim.

Comment author: ChristianKl 14 November 2012 11:25:57PM 2 points [-]

In Marxism there's no difference between empirical predictions about the far future and moral claims. Marx basically got the idea that you can make empirical predictions about how moral standards will be at the end of history. According to Marx all actions that move the world in the direction of being more in line with the moral standards at the end of history are morally good.

Comment author: thomblake 15 November 2012 04:19:51PM 0 points [-]

In Marxism there's no difference between empirical predictions about the far future and moral claims.

That's not completely relevant, as "the meek shall inherit the earth" was a Christian claim.

Comment author: Oligopsony 14 November 2012 11:43:53PM -1 points [-]

You're making a category error. Historical materialism just doesn't have anything to say on the subject of morality, certainly nothing so silly as that. At the end of history the universe will be dirt and dust, but I haven't seen any Marxist who cares (though I think I did once encounter someone who concluded from this and Aristotelian teleology that morality is whatever maximizes entropy, lol.)

More generally, even if we can make reasonable claims about what Marxists' and Christians' effective moralities, asking whether these are the same moralities or not is a confused question, for entirely different reasons.

Comment author: thomblake 15 November 2012 04:18:39PM 0 points [-]

I think I did once encounter someone who concluded from this and Aristotelian teleology that morality is whatever maximizes entropy

I've seen several compelling arguments along similar lines.

Comment author: wedrifid 15 November 2012 04:43:51PM 0 points [-]

I've seen several compelling arguments along similar lines.

Compelling? Do you mean compelled to reject the premises or compelled to accept the conclusion?

Comment author: thomblake 15 November 2012 05:02:45PM 2 points [-]

Mostly, I was compelled to author the grandparent comment. So not very compelling.

Comment author: thomblake 15 November 2012 04:17:47PM 1 point [-]

At the end of history the universe will be dirt and dust

You're misreading the Marxist "end of history". To Marx, history is the story of class struggle, and so once there are no more classes there is no more history.

Comment author: Multiheaded 15 November 2012 04:50:33PM 0 points [-]

You might both be confusing Marxist and Marxian thought.

Adherents of Marxian economics, particularly in academia, distinguish it from Marxism as a political ideology and sociological theory, arguing that Marx's approach to understanding the economy is intellectually independent of his advocacy of revolutionary socialism or his support of proletarian revolution.

Comment author: thomblake 15 November 2012 05:05:20PM 1 point [-]

I'm certainly not confused, but those trying to make that distinction might be. His political and sociological theories followed directly from his economic theories - refuting the labor theory of value is really sufficient to defeat Marx entirely, or at least eliminate anything that wasn't already said better by Hegel.

Comment author: Multiheaded 15 November 2012 05:14:21PM 0 points [-]

OK, sorry for the superfluous advice then. I have only had a cursory glance at your discussion.

Comment author: ChristianKl 15 November 2012 12:30:12AM 1 point [-]

Marx burrowed the idea of history from Hegel.

For Marx history is the process of social changes. When that process of changes reaches it's end, you have Marx's end of history. For Marx that's a communist society in which all workers get equal pay and life happily ever after. Afterwards there are no social changes, therefore there's no history.

Marx makes a prediction that this communist society will come about. Things that move the world closer to that prediction are morally good for Marx.

Comment author: Peterdjones 14 November 2012 07:55:08PM * -2 points [-]

Did the (nominal) Christians who did violent and terrible things forget God too?

Comment author: ChristianKl 14 November 2012 07:58:12PM 1 point [-]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn doesn't speak about "why people do violent things?" in the quote but about why the Russian revolution happened.

Comment author: Peterdjones comment score below threshold [+] (6 children)

Comment author: ChristianKl 14 November 2012 11:29:42PM 0 points [-]

I think that question is illformed.

If I look into (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nominal)[webster] the definition of 'norminal' that applies here seems to be: "3a : existing or being something in name or form only <nominal head of his party>"

I think according to this definition 'norminal' Christians as a whole are people who forgot God. Therefore those who don't forget God aren't 'norminal' Christians. As all 'norminal' Christians forgot God, that should also be true for those 'norminal' Christians that do violent things are also "forgetting God".

Does that help you? I don't think so.

In case you care, I'm no Christian even when my surname is Christian. When forced to label I choose ignostic.

A lot of self proclaimed atheists who get blinded by their faith. They think that the meme they identify with God is the thing that most people mean when they say God. Very often that leads to misunderstanding of arguments such as the argument made by Solzhenitsyn. It gets reduced to the question "did God intervene to punish people who forget him" and "will Christian's always act moral?".

You lose a lot of details. What changes in a society if people socialize in workers unions instead of going to church?

Comment author: Peterdjones comment score below threshold [+] (4 children)

Comment author: ChristianKl 15 November 2012 12:26:10PM 3 points [-]

Re: nominal. Could be a True Scotsman fallacy. Discuss.

I think you are trying to set up a true scotsman as a strawman.

People generally do neither where I come from. So what?

You live in the 21st century. It doesn't make much sense to analyse events from the early 20st century by imposing your 21st century perspective.

In our times the average person didn't replace the social enviroment that churchs provide and is more lonely than his ancestors were. He's postmodern in the sense that he doesn't have a strong loyality to a single framework. A lot of atheists do have some loyality to academic science and spokespeople like Richard Dawkins but that loyality isn't strong enough to die for. In Willpower Roy Baumeister (who's no theist) argues that partly as a result of not believing in God willpower is now lower than it was in the past.

Debating Church v. nothing to replace it is different than debating Church v. early 20st century Marxism (and the institutions that got created after the revolution was "successful"). Answering a question about the effects of believing in God is depends a lot on the zeitgeist of the time you are speaking about.

But to get back to the issue of "true Christian's", the people who go to church because their parents went to church are different than the people who have spiritual experiences and believe in God because of those experiences.

A few days ago I was debating a Christian theology student. He follows in the foodsteps of his father who's a priest. He had to admit to me that he has no good argument for why he prefers Christianity is more true than Islam. He believed that everybody get's to heaven regardless of how he lives his life. According to him there are a lot of people in his faculty who see things similarly. On the other hand those fellow students with spiritual experiences have racidally different views than him.

If you want to speak about the effect of being Christian, self labeling as Christian isn't necessarily the best criteria. Spirtiual religious experiences or spending a lot of time in Christian rituals are likely to be more important than self labling.

Comment author: Peterdjones comment score below threshold [+] (1 child)

Comment author: RichardKennaway 15 November 2012 02:18:58PM 2 points [-]

A few days ago I was debating a Christian theology student. He follows in the foodsteps of his father who's a priest.

It gets him his daily bread, then? :-)

He had to admit to me that he has no good argument for why he prefers Christianity is more true than Islam. He believed that everybody get's to heaven regardless of how he lives his life.

To some Christians, that is outright heresy. Does he have any arguments for why he prefers his Christianity to any other Christianities?

According to him there are a lot of people in his faculty who see things similarly. On the other hand those fellow students with spiritual experiences have racidally different views than him.

Do they all differ from him in the same way?

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 14 November 2012 06:39:11PM * 17 points [-]

"Men have forgotten God" -> "Men have lost certain beliefs and practices that strengthened social stability, and thus provided (despite their actual falsehood or even ridiculousness) a certain local optimum." ?

Comment author: Grif 14 November 2012 06:23:18PM 4 points [-]

It's an example of how even absurd amounts of research can fail to move a religious thought. I think too many people will fail to get the joke and the potential for abuse is too high.

Comment author: [deleted] 14 November 2012 06:17:59PM 3 points [-]

Two, you can use this corpus to conduct a very interesting exercise: you can triangulate. This is an essential skill in defensive historiography. If you like UR, you like defensive historiography.

Historiographic triangulation is the art of taking two or more opposing positions from the past, and using hindsight to decide who was right and who was wrong. The simplest way to play the game is to imagine that the opponents in the debate were reanimated in 2008, informed of present conditions, and reunited for a friendly panel discussion. I'm afraid often the only conceivable result is that one side simply surrenders to the other.

--Mencius Moldbug on an experiment that has interesting results

Comment author: shminux comment score below threshold [+] (0 children)

Comment author: arborealhominid 13 November 2012 10:34:25PM * 5 points [-]

Be more than good; be good for something

Henry David Thoreau

Comment author: roland 13 November 2012 07:06:12PM 9 points [-]

By the time one is consciously aware of something, the brain has already done the work.

--Michael Gazzaniga

Comment author: roland 13 November 2012 05:53:35PM * 3 points [-]

From moment to moment, different modules or systems compete for attention and the winner serves as the neural system underlying that moment of conscious experience.

--Michael Gazzaniga

Regarding brain architecture.

Comment author: DaFranker 13 November 2012 07:27:50PM 0 points [-]

I like these. Has he written papers or books that might be of particular interest or value if I'm interested in the gritty bits of what-we-don't-know about neurobiology, brain architecture and general brain-related stuffs?

Comment author: Kawoomba 13 November 2012 08:28:02PM * 1 point [-]

You may be interested in chapter 14 by Christof Koch (the one and only) in an anthology on Consciousness, the whole chapter is available for free at google books here.

In general, Koch's the go-to guy for these kinds of questions.

Comment author: roland 13 November 2012 08:10:53PM * 0 points [-]

I have these from the youtube lectures he has given, very accessible and interesting(thanks to lukeprog for the tip):

Comment author: beoShaffer 12 November 2012 05:17:09AM 15 points [-]

I've never heard more different explanations for anything parents tell kids than why they shouldn't swear. Every parent I know forbids their children to swear, and yet no two of them have the same justification. It's clear most start with not wanting kids to swear, then make up the reason afterward.

-Paul Graham in The Lies We Tell Kids

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 15 November 2012 03:02:49PM 4 points [-]

This sounds like a challenge. Would you prefer your children to not swear; and if yes, why?

My reasoning would be that I want my children to be successful (for both altruistic and selfish reasons), and I believe that a habit of swearing is on average harmful to social skills.

Disclaimer: There are situations where swearing is the right thing to do, so it would be optimal to swear exactly in these situations. But it would be difficult for a child to determine these situations precisely; and from the simple strategies, "never swear" (which often develops towards "don't swear in presence of adult people or someone who would inform them") seems very good.

Comment author: Nornagest 23 November 2012 09:20:30PM * 4 points [-]

Would you prefer your children to not swear; and if yes, why?

I'm almost sure this is mainly a status thing. Frequent swearing is perceived as crass, a lower-class practice, and so aspirational parents encourage their children not to. This intent then proceeds to backfire when children develop their own social networks: status relations among children and young teenagers are quite different from adult ones, and swearing in this context is often a marker of independence and perceived maturity. This gradually unwinds during the teenage years as swearing in the presence of adults becomes more socially acceptable and adult-style status relations start to assert themselves.

The only thing that confuses me about this model is the lack of countersignaling, but perhaps children of that age can't reliably parse signaling at that level of indirection. Or maybe I just don't remember enough childhood social dynamics.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 23 November 2012 08:43:29PM 8 points [-]

I like to be around people who don't constantly emphasize their every word, making it hard to tell when something is actually important. Since swearing is a verbal marker of importance, its casual overuse is like shouting all the time; it's very wearying. And, lest I be accused of rationalising, I do not only apply this to children, but have also asked my wife to cut back on swearing.

As a side note, Americans are very loud, both in the literal sense of putting more decibels behind their voices, and in their over-reliance on swearing. I think you've fallen into the bad equilibrium that comes about when everyone has an incentive to be a little louder than the next guy, and there's no cost to being so.

Comment author: Username 28 November 2012 07:16:03AM 3 points [-]

I like to be around people who don't constantly emphasize their every word, making it hard to tell when something is actually important. Since swearing is a verbal marker of importance, its casual overuse is like shouting all the time; it's very wearying. And, lest I be accused of rationalising, I do not only apply this to children, but have also asked my wife to cut back on swearing.

Thank you for this. I've been wondering reflectively why I've been swearing more frequently lately, and I just realized that it's to make sure my voice is heard. I'll try to attack the root of this and instead get my attention-validation from having good things to say rather than saying them most crassly.

Comment author: DaFranker 15 November 2012 03:58:53PM 3 points [-]

Or you could, y'know, try to think of a better way.

That you know what a policy of punishing swearing develops into ("don't swear in presence of adult people or someone who would inform them") shows that you have the ability to think forwards into the consequences, but also hints at some sort of stopping, perhaps motivated (because hey, finding better solutions is hard).

Clearly, you also have the ability to reason a bit further: What sort of microsociety does the above behavior encourage once they get into high school, where the majority of their perceivable world is a miniature scheduled wildland?

When I was six and used swear words in front of my school principal (hey, when you spend half the day in the principal's office for the 13th time, you kinda get used to someone), he later brought it up with my parents (though I vaguely recall it wasn't in any negative manner). My parents immediately started reprimanding me, naturally, but he stopped them, and afterwards they changed strategies based on his advice and some insight they gained from reading more research and books on related topics.

I'm certainly glad they did, in retrospect, because in the twisted social environment that high schools are, a good swearing strategy can be extremely effective. I don't know how widely this'd work, YMMV and all that, but a "leave me alone" usually didn't get prospective bullies off my back. If I then followed up with a steady gaze and a "leave me the fuck alone" (yes, I know, but that's how 14-year-olds talked when I was there), now suddenly they'd grow much more cautious and start re-evaluating whether they should still try to play their little status game and get their cheap fun, when someone who rarely ever swears had just signaled to them that shit got serious.

All in all, "never swear" seems to me like it never actually works, and takes much more effort to attempt (by punishing every single instance of swearing that you can find, even though you know you can only find a small fraction of them) than other strategies like teaching "swearing gets less useful and powerful each time you use it, so if you always keep it as a reserve it'll be that much more effective".

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 16 November 2012 08:33:04AM 4 points [-]

Oh, I was not specific enough. What I wanted to write is that a habit of swearing is harmful to your social skills after you leave the school. Imagine a person at a job interview saying: "Yeah, I know the fucking Java, but NetBeans is gay, and if you ain't doing unit tests like all the time, you are seriously retarded, man." ;-)

Probably no one would do this intentionally, but the problem is, if you get a habit of swearing, then sometimes a word or two slips through, often unnoticed (by you; but your audience is shocked). At some moment this happened to me (no, not at a job interview, at least I think so), and after getting a feedback I decided to be extra careful. Which I would want to teach my children. I was very lucky to get that feedback, because most people assume that others are well aware of all the words they use.

Comment author: beoShaffer 15 November 2012 03:32:57PM * 0 points [-]

Since I don't have nor plan on having children I actually haven't given it much thought. I posted this because it gives a good example of rationalization in action.

Comment author: The_Duck 12 November 2012 04:43:23AM * 0 points [-]

"Tell me," the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the sun went around the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?"

His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going around the Earth."

Wittgenstein responded, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?"

-related by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion

Comment author: tut 16 November 2012 04:11:45PM 1 point [-]

... what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?

Like I was standing still and the earth was rotating.

Comment author: gwern 12 November 2012 04:50:07AM 3 points [-]

Versions of this quote have been posted twice before; the best version of the quote includes the friend's reply to Wittgenstein: http://lesswrong.com/lw/94r/rationality_quotes_january_2012/5kib

Comment author: The_Duck 12 November 2012 06:43:47AM 0 points [-]

Thanks; I thought it was likely to have been posted, but I tried to search for it and didn't find it.

Comment author: gwern 12 November 2012 06:46:58AM 1 point [-]

Mm. If you had googled for 'wittgenstein earth', which seems to me to be the most obvious search phrase, you would've found 2 links on the first page...

Comment author: The_Duck 12 November 2012 08:22:03AM 1 point [-]

Yes, clearly my Google-fu is lacking. I think I searched for phrases like "sun went around the Earth," which fails because your quote has "sun went round the Earth."

Comment author: gwern 12 November 2012 04:30:41PM * 4 points [-]

There's your problem, you got overly specific. When you're formulating a search, you want to balance how many hits you get - the broader your formulation, the more likely the hits will include your target (if it exists) but the more hits you'll return.

In this case, my reasoning would go something like this, laid out explicitly: '"Wittgenstein" is almost guaranteed to be on the same page as any instance of this quote, since the quote is about Wittgenstein; LW, however, doesn't discuss Wittgenstein very much, so there won't be many hits in the first place; to find this quote, I only need to narrow down those hits a little, and after "Wittgenstein", the most fundamental core word to this quote is "Earth" or "sun", so I'll toss one of them in and... ah, there's the quote.'

If I were searching the general Internet, my reasoning would go more like "'Wittgenstein' will be on like a million websites; I need to narrow that down a lot more to hope to find it; so maybe 'Wittgenstein' and 'Earth' and 'Sun'... nope nothing on the first page, toss in 'goes around' OR 'go around', ah there it is!"

(Actually, for the general Internet, just 'Wittgenstein earth sun' turns up a first page mostly about this quote, several of which include all the details one could need aside from Dawkins's truncated version.)

Comment author: lukeprog 12 November 2012 03:39:32AM 15 points [-]

Slogans like “practice random acts of kindness” feel good and are easy to put into practice. But if we don’t take our activism more seriously than that, our motive is probably a desire to feel good about ourselves, to help ourselves or those close to us, or to act out our self-identity. The endpoint of authentic compassion is a desire to do the most good that one can, to be as effective as possible in creating a world with less suffering and destruction and more joy. Figuring out how we can do the most good takes careful thought over a long period of time, and it means moving into new and possibly uncomfortable areas of advocacy. But the importance of taking our activism seriously and approaching it from this utilitarian perspective cannot be overstated. It will mean a difference between life and death, between happiness and suffering, for thousands of people, for thousands of acres of the ecosystem, and for tens of thousands of animals.

Nick Cooney, Change of Heart

Comment author: chaosmosis 12 November 2012 03:17:08AM * 11 points [-]

'At my funeral, I don't want people to wear bright colors and smile and laugh fondly at the wonderful memories of the precious time we spent together on Earth. Tell them to wear black and cover their faces with ash. Tell them to weep bitter tears and rail angrily against the cruel God who took me at so young an age. Do this for me, my beloved.'

http://www.theonion.com/articles/loved-ones-recall-local-mans-cowardly-battle-with,772/

I find both the ironic and straightforward meaning of this quote to be meaningful.

Comment author: VincentYu 11 November 2012 01:45:03PM * 29 points [-]

Often a person uses some folk proverb to explain a behavioral event even though, on an earlier occasion, this same person used a directly contradictory folk proverb to explain the same type of event. For example, most of us have heard or said, “look before you leap.” Now there’s a useful, straightforward bit of behavioral advice—except that I vaguely remember admonishing on occasion, “he who hesitates is lost.” And “absence makes the heart grow fonder” is a pretty clear prediction of an emotional reaction to environmental events. But then what about “out of sight, out of mind”? And if “haste makes waste,” why do we sometimes hear that “time waits for no man”? How could the saying “two heads are better than one” not be true? Except that “too many cooks spoil the broth.” If I think “it’s better to be safe than sorry,” why do I also believe “nothing ventured, nothing gained”? And if “opposites attract,” why do “birds of a feather flock together”? I have counseled many students to “never to put off until tomorrow what you can do today.” But I hope my last advisee has never heard me say this, because I just told him, “cross that bridge when you come to it.”

The enormous appeal of clichés like these is that, taken together as implicit “explanations” of behavior, they cannot be refuted. No matter what happens, one of these explanations will be cited to cover it. No wonder we all think we are such excellent judges of human behavior and personality. We have an explanation for anything and everything that happens. Folk wisdom is cowardly in the sense that it takes no risk that it might be refuted.

Keith E. Stanovich, How to Think Straight About Psychology, 10th ed. (2013), 14.

ETA: Should have included the subsequent paragraph:

That folk wisdom is “after the fact” wisdom, and that it actually is useless in a truly predictive sense, is why sociologist Duncan Watts titled one of his books: Everything Is Obvious—Once You Know the Answer (2011). Watts discusses a classic paper by Lazarsfeld (1949) in which, over 60 years ago, he was dealing with the common criticism that “social science doesn’t tell us anything that we don’t already know.” Lazarsfeld listed a series of findings from a massive survey of 600,000 soldiers who had served during World War II; for example, that men from rural backgrounds were in better spirits during their time of service than soldiers from city backgrounds. People tend to find all of the survey results to be pretty obvious. In this example, for instance, people tend to think it obvious that rural men would have been used to harsher physical conditions and thus would have adapted better to the conditions of military life. It is likewise with all of the other findings—people find them pretty obvious. Lazarsfeld then reveals his punchline: All of the findings were the opposite of what was originally stated. For example, it was actually the case that men from city backgrounds were in better spirits during their time of service than soldiers from rural backgrounds. The last part of the learning exercise is for people to realize how easily they would have explained just the opposite finding. In the case of the actual outcome, people tend to explain it (when told of it first) by saying that they expected it because city men are used to working in crowded conditions and under hierarchical authority. They never realize how easily they would have concocted an explanation for exactly the opposite finding.

Comment author: gwern 02 August 2013 02:59:34AM 1 point [-]

Lazarsfeld is also discussed here under http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 16 November 2012 07:15:10PM 2 points [-]

... “absence makes the heart grow fonder” is a pretty clear prediction of an emotional reaction to environmental events. But then what about “out of sight, out of mind”?

These aren't exactly opposed - 'out of sight, out of mind' is generally applied to things and problems, not, say, warm relationships.

Some of the others aren't exactly opposed either - I've generally heard not crossing a bridge before you get to it referring to trying to solve a problem you anticipate before it's possible to actually start solving the problem.

Comment author: DaFranker 16 November 2012 07:37:42PM 4 points [-]

'out of sight, out of mind' is generally applied to things and problems, not, say, warm relationships.

Really? I've seen it used twice for non-relationship contexts, but too many times to care to count (on the order of 50-80) in the context of long-distance relationships, usually as a warning that a couple should not hope to remain steady and trust eachother if they become far apart for a long period of time (months or more) for the first time since entering a relationship.

In fiction, this either turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy or becomes the whole reason the main character can complete the main quest.

In reality, the causal influence doesn't seem to be there, but anecdotally I observe that the drifting-apart usually happens regardless of whether any such prediction was made. Knowledge of this leads a significant fraction of couples to break-up preemptively when they're about to enter such a situation.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 17 November 2012 04:13:18AM 1 point [-]

That's interesting. I'd more seen it used with annoyances. Maybe because I haven't seen much of LD relationships, and those that I did see, worked. And it was clear they were going to work from the outset because they were really serious about each other.

Absence diminishes weak passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out candles and fans fire.

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