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knb comments on Open thread, September 16-22, 2013 - Less Wrong
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A few years ago, in my introductory psych class in college, the instructor was running through possible explanations for consciousness. He got to Roger Penrose's theory of quantum computations in the microtubules being where consciousness came from (replacing another black box with another black box, oh joy). I burst out laughing, loudly, because it was just so absurd that someone would seriously propose that, and that other scientists would even give such an explanation the time of day.
The instructor stopped midsentence, and looked at me. So did 200-odd other students.
I kept laughing.
In hindsight, I think the instructor expected more solemnity.
You should be embarrassed by this story. Behaving this way comes across as very smug and disrespectful because it is disruptive and wastes the time of hundreds of people.
I'm honestly not embarrassed by this story because it's "smug and disrespectful", I'm embarrassed because the more I stare at it the more it looks like a LWy applause light (which I had not originally intended).
For your next act, you should take physics and start guffawing at a professor's description of the Copenhagen interpretation.
Upvoted for mention of "applause lights".
It's an applause light for actual working neuroscientists too. One which richly deserves its status. Seriously you will get eye rolls and chuckles if you mentioned something like that at a neuroscience talk where I work.
Behaving like this in classroom is probably not a good way to communicate knowledge to one's classmates or to the instructor. (Although sometimes the first signal of disrespect communicates an important fact.)
But if the instructor told the quantum mysteriousness hypothesis as one worth considering (as opposed to: "you know, here is a silly idea some people happen to believe"), then the instructor was wasting the time of hundreds of people. (What's next? Horoscopes as a serious hypothesis explaining human traits?)
He 'should' feel embarassment if the if interfered with his social goals in the context. All things considered it most likely did not, (assuming he did not immediately signal humiliation and submission, which it appears he didn't). He 'should' laugh at your attempt to shame him and treat the parent as he would any other social attack by a (social distant and non threatening) rival.
Your causal explanation is incorrect---it is a justification not a cause. Signalling implications other than disruption and time wasting account for the smug and disrespectful perception.
Right, assuming he doesn't care about the fact that hundreds of his peers now think he's the kind of person who bursts into loud, inappropriate laughter apropos of nothing. (i.e. assuming he isn't human.)
Ignoring that that is not what happened (and that he probably explained the laughter to anyone there that he actually cared about, like friends), you are entirely too eager to designate someone who lacks this property as 'not human'.
My model of the expected consequences of the signal given differs from yours. That kind of attention probably does more good than harm, again assuming that the description of the scene is not too dishonest. It'd certainly raise his expected chance of getting laid (which serves as something of a decent measure of relevant social consequences in that environment.)
Incidentally, completely absurd nonsense does not qualify as 'nothing' for the purpose of evaluating humor potential. Nerds tend to love that. Any 'inappropriateness' is a matter of social affiliation. That is, those who consider it inappropriate do so because they believe that the person laughing does not have enough social status to be permitted to show disrespect to someone to whom the authority figure assigns high status, regardless of the merit of the positions described.
In the very short term maybe, but in the longer term not pissing professors off is also useful.
I don't think Penrose's hypothesis is so obviously-to-everybody absurd (for any value of “everybody” that includes freshmen) that you can just laugh it off expecting no inferential distances. (You made a similar point about something else here.)
Sometimes. I was drawing assuming that in a first year philosophy subject the class sizes are huge, largely anonymous, not often directly graded by the lecturer and a mix of students from a large number of different majors. This may differ for different countries or even between universities.
As a rule of thumb I found that a social relationship with the professor was relevant in later year subjects with smaller class sizes, more specialised subject matter and greater chance of repeat exposure to the same professor. For example I got research assistant work and scholarship for my postgrad studies by impressing my AI lecturer. Such considerations were largely irrelevant for first year generic subjects where I could safely consider myself to be a Student No. with legs.
You are right that the inferential distance will make most students not get the humour or understand the implied reasoning. I expect that even then the behaviour described (laughing with genuine amusement at something and showing no shame if given attention) to be a net positive. Even a large subset of the peers who find it obnoxious or annoying will also intuitively consider the individual to be somewhat higher status (or 'more powerful' or 'more significant', take your pick of terminology) even if they don't necessarily approve of them.
[re-reads thread, and notices the OP mentioned there were more than 200 students in the classroom] Good point.
That kind of status is structural power, not social power in Yvain's terminology, and I guess there are more people in the world who wish to sleep with Rebecca Black than with Donald Trump. [googles for Rebecca Black (barely knew she was a singer) and realizes she's not the best example for the point; but still] And probably there's also a large chunk of people who would just think the student is a dork with little ability to abide by social customs. But yeah, I guess the total chance for them to get laid would go up -- high-variance strategies and all that.
This sort of utilitarian thinking focused entirely on ones own goals without considering the goals of others is what leads people to believe that they should cheat on all of their tests as much as they want. If tests in school are only for signalling and the knowledge is unimportant, then you should do as little work as possible to maximize your test scores, including buying essays, looking over shoulders, paying others to take tests for you, the whole works.
Edit: I am not saying I totally disagree with this sort of thinking. I would describe myself presently as on the fence over whether one should just go ahead and be a sociopath in favor of utilitarian goals. It makes me a little bit uncomfortable, but on the other hand it seems to be the logical result. Many people bring in other considerations to try to bring it back to moral "normalcy" but they generally strike me as ad hoc and not very convincing.
At least it woke up everyone who was sleeping in the lecture.