LESSWRONG
LW

by katydee
2 min read
76

47

Making fun of things is actually really easy if you try even a little bit. Nearly anything can be made fun of, and in practice nearly anything is made fun of. This is concerning for several reasons.

First, if you are trying to do something, whether or not people are making fun of it is not necessarily a good signal as to whether or not it's actually good. A lot of good things get made fun of. A lot of bad things get made fun of. Thus, whether or not something gets made fun of is not necessarily a good indicator of whether or not it's actually good.[1] Optimally, only bad things would get made fun of, making it easy to determine what is good and bad - but this doesn't appear to be the case.

Second, if you want to make something sound bad, it's really easy. If you don't believe this, just take a politician or organization that you like and search for some criticism of it. It should generally be trivial to find people that are making fun of it for reasons that would sound compelling to a casual observer - even if those reasons aren't actually good. But a casual observer doesn't know that and thus can easily be fooled.[2]

Further, the fact that it's easy to make fun of things makes it so that a clever person can find themselves unnecessarily contemptuous of anything and everything. This sort of premature cynicism tends to be a failure mode I've noticed in many otherwise very intelligent people. Finding faults with things is pretty trivial, but you can quickly go from "it's easy to find faults with everything" to "everything is bad." This tends to be an undesirable mode of thinking - even if true, it's not particularly helpful.

[1] Whether or not something gets made fun of by the right people is a better indicator. That said, if you know who the right people are you usually have access to much more reliable methods.

[2] If you're still not convinced, take a politician or organization that you do like and really truly try to write an argument against that politician or organization. Note that this might actually change your opinion, so be warned.

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[-]Kaj_Sotala270

Related on LW: Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale.

I changed my mind in a Cairo cafe, talking to a young Muslim woman. I let it slip during the conversation that I was an atheist, and she seemed genuinely curious why. You've all probably been in such a situation, and you probably know how hard it is to choose just one reason, but I'd been reading about Biblical contradictions at the time and I mentioned the myriad errors and atrocities and contradictions in all the Holy Books.

Her response? "Oh, thank goodness it's that. I was afraid you were one of those crazies who believed that monkeys transformed into humans."

I admitted that um, well, maybe I sorta kinda might in fact believe that.

It is hard for me to describe exactly the look of shock on her face, but I have no doubt that her horror was genuine. I may have been the first flesh-and-blood evolutionist she ever met. "But..." she looked at me as if I was an idiot. "Monkeys don't change into humans. What on Earth makes you think monkeys can change into humans?"

Also, on Yvain's old blog:

On r/atheism, a Christian-turned-atheist once described an "apologetics" group at his old church. The pas

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[-]fubarobfusco190

The other day, I asked a close friend of mine who's active in feminist organizations to read Yvain's post on bingo cards so we could discuss it. Some things that came out of that discussion:

It's actually useful to recognize repeated themes in opposing arguments. We have to pattern-match in order to understand things. (See this comment for a similar point — "[P]eople need heuristics that allow them to terminate cognition, because cognition is a limited resource") Even if mocking or dismissing opposing arguments is bad, we shouldn't throw out categorization as a tool.

One reason feminists make bingo cards is to say to other feminists, "You're not alone in your frustration at hearing these arguments all the time." Bingo cards function as an expression of support for others in the movement. This seems to me to be a big part of what feminists get out of feminism: "No, you're not alone in feeling crappy about gender relations. So do I, and so do all these other people, too. So let's work on it together." For that matter, a lot of what secularists get out of the secularist movement seems to be "No, you're not alone in thinking this god stuff is bogus. Let... (read more)

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5Moss_Piglet
You've made a lot of really good points about how these kinds of copy-paste responses can help identify trolls and build community solidarity, many of which hadn't really occurred to me. I hope you'll forgive me for not spending more space laying out where we agree; I don't like posts which could be summed up entirely with an upvote. I do have to quibble with one point though; The issue here isn't whether feminists (or anyone else for that matter) are morally/emotionally justified in using these sorts of thought-terminating cliches, but whether these types of cliches lower the quality of discourse and make their users more resistant to genuine counter-argument/counter-evidence. In that vein, I'd have to say that thick skin is not always an asset; you can "win" arguments by endurance, but you'll never find truth or allies that way. Most of the discussions I've had with feminists online could be mapped 1:1 to arguments I've had with fundamentalist Christians IRL, where you realize halfway through that you're speaking to someone who is scanning everything you say for keywords without ever actually thinking about it. It's exhausting and in the end both people are angrier without having achieved anything. I realize it's much easier to say "be rational" than to do it when your back is up, and I certainly don't want to dismiss anyone's emotional pain, but ultimately giving in to the urge to irrationality is not something to be celebrated. Not everyone is a Sage with pure Apatheia, able to resist any temptation through will alone, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to be reasonably objective. Objectivity is a dirty word in some circles, but if we don't at least try to overcome our biases we are ruled by them.
[-]fubarobfusco100

(Thanks for acknowledging the common ground; this response likewise deals only with the small area of disagreement.)

The issue here isn't whether feminists (or anyone else for that matter) are morally/emotionally justified in using these sorts of thought-terminating cliches,

Oh, I agree. My point in concocting the imaginary scenario of an embattled Less Wrong was to provide an alternative to the notion that feminism is fundamentally disposed to semantic stopsigns; namely that feminists find themselves in a situation) where semantic stopsigns are unusually cognitively necessary (as opposed to morally or emotionally).

That is, it's not possible to usefully understand the cognitive situation of public feminism without thinking about the death threats, the rape threats, the "you just need a good fucking" responses, the "feminists are just ugly women" responses, and so on. It's not that these morally justify the dismissive attitude represented by bingo cards, nor that they emotionally explain (i.e. psychoanalyze) it; but that they make it cognitively and dialectically a necessary tool.

but whether these types of cliches lower the quality of discourse and make their

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3Moss_Piglet
I think situation plays a role here as well though. If I'm reading the comments section on Shakesville and see some rando come in with a basic question and get hit with the "I'm not your sherpa" card and a link to 101 materials, that's fine. You can't drop everything to debate every random dude who expresses a disagreement; I certainly don't appreciate it when people wander into the bio department and start up debates about irreducible complexity (yup, true story). On the other hand, if I'm on GiantITP having a fun conversation about the best way to generate ability scores in Dungeons and Dragons (3d6 down the line, BTW) and someone goes full RadFem and derails the thread into talking about "biotruth" and privilege until it has to be locked, my jimmies get considerably rustled. Especially when I recognize a lot of the same rhetorical techniques I saw up in the first example. That's the general point I was making; these tools are useful for defense, but unfortunately just as useful for offense.
-2Eugine_Nier
In fact I suspect much of the feminists' need for defense comes from the highly aggressive ways they tend to go on offense.
2A1987dM
I guessed the “fundamentally” link would be to this.
-4Eugine_Nier
The problem with the Bingo boards is that they're not even a list of "answers to straw arguments" since they're missing the answers. Specifically, feminists treat placing an argument (or even a statement) they don't like on a bingo card as an alternative to answering (or disproving) it. This is similar to the obnoxious debating technique of saying "I don't want to here objection X" without bothering to actually address objection X. This nicely illustrates the source of the problem: What kind of arguments are the most frustrating? The kind where you don't have a good counterargument (possibly because the argument is in fact valid).
9TheOtherDave
Sure, many people use "I don't want to hear X" or "pfft, X is a well-known fallacy" or "you really should read author X on this subject and come back when you've educated yourself" or many variations on that theme to dismiss arguments they don't actually have counterarguments for. Agreed. This ought not be surprising... any strategy that knowledgeable people use to conserve effort can also be adopted as a cheap signal by the ignorant. And since ignorant people are in general more common than knowledgeable people, that also means I can dismiss all the people who use that cheap strategy as ignorant, including the knowledgeable ones, if I don't mind paying the opportunity costs of doing that. (Which in turn allows for cheap countersignaling by ignorant contrarians, and around and around we go.) None of that is to say that all the people using this strategy are ignorant, or that there's no value in learning to tell the difference.. Many knowledgeable people find frustrating being asked to address the same basic argument over and over. A common response to this is to write up the counterargument once and respond to such requests with pointers to that writeup. In larger contexts this turns into a body of FAQs, background essays and concepts, etc. which participants in the conversation are expected to have read and understood, and are assumed to agree with unless they explicitly note otherwise. LW does this with a number of positions... starting a conversation about ethics here and then turning out halfway through to not accept consequentialism, for example, will tend to elicit frustration. Non-consequentialists are not per se unwelcome, but failing to acknowledge that the community norm exists is seen as a defection, and people who do that will frequently be dismissed at that point as not worth the effort. Similar things are true of atheism, of the computational model of consciousness, and a few other things. It's not an unreasonable way to go.
-1Eugine_Nier
My point is that there is a difference between an important FAQ and a bingo card. Also, even with an FAQ one needs to be willing to engage in further discussion when people point out problems with the answers there, e.g., I don't entirely accept consequentialism (or many of the standard premises here for that measure) and have generally been able to have civilized discussions on the topics in question.
9TheOtherDave
I don't really agree. Up to a point, yes, but one reaches that point quickly. For example, we get theists every once in a while insisting that we engage in further discussion when they point out problems with our reasons for atheism. I often engage them in further discussion, as do others, although I wouldn't say we need to... it's not like theism is some kind of obscure philosophy that we're simply not acquainted with the compelling arguments for. If we instead got one every few days, I would not engage them, and I would also recommend that others not do so; at that point silent downvotes would be a superior response. Reasonable people can disagree about where exactly the threshold between those points is best drawn, but I think it's clear that it needs to be drawn somewhere.
3Yosarian2
This is an interesting example, because there is an entire subreddit of libertarians doing the exact same thing, making fun of strawman versions of anti-libertarian arguments just to train themselves to not listen to the actual arguments. http://www.reddit.com/r/whowillbuildtheroads/ It's interesting to see the exact same technique being used as a thought-killing device by people on both sides.
[-]RomeoStevens100

"everything is bad" is only a crappy thinking mode when unaccompanied by the obvious next step of "optimize all the things."

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[-]katydee170

I disagree. "Bad" is a value judgement that is not optimized for maximum utility. In my opinion, there's usually little reason (signaling aside) to make fun of something rather than provide constructive criticism.

While it's certainly possible to use "bad" as a shortcut for "needs optimizing," the word "suboptimal" already means that and doesn't carry the same pejorative connotations.

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0atucker
You would want your noticing that something is bad to, in some way, indicate what would be a better way to make the thing better. You want to know what in particular is bad and can be fixed, rather than the less informative "everything". If your classifier triggers on everything, it tells you less on average about any given thing.
0hyporational
The next depressing step is realizing you can't really do that. Maybe optimize the most important thing and pretend everything else is awesome?
[-]BaconServ70

If you can correct your beliefs by thinking up a good argument against them, isn't that a good thing? I'm unsure why you're terming it "warning."

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[-]katydee130

Studies indicate that in some cases, writing arguments causes you to later believe what you wrote, even if you didn't believe it at the time.

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0BaconServ
That sounds a lot like overcoming bias rather than creating it. If it happened in the general case, I'd suspect bias was in play, but if it's only some cases, it sounds like someone just corrected their incorrect beliefs without having to debate it out with an external party.
7[anonymous]
Two worrying observations from reality: 1. Propaganda seems to work. At least, many governments that stay in power put a lot of effort into it, and advertising is a massive industry. 2. False memories are incredibly easy to implant via suggestion. Don't believe everything you think.
-1BaconServ
Wow. This is incredible. I am advocating sitting down, thinking critically, and asserting that warning against doing so is contrary to rationality. You're committing severe fallacies here and getting far more upvotes than I am; not reforming your own opinions without your own rationality is more popular than actually doing so. Let's suppose you've sat down, played Devil's advocate, and decided the most logical stance is the one you've just now taken the time to realize; it is literally the best of your judgment at this exact moment. Allow me to extrapolate two illustratively extreme possibilities based on the premise of your first point: The original opinion is the result of propaganda. You have lived your life among your peers (who are also influenced by the same propaganda) and through their opinions—or through the opinions of the ones you've liked better, or were more willing to listen to—you'd come to the conclusion that your original opinion were only natural/obvious/rational/reasonable/whatever positive description. (Let's say, hypothetically, you were of the opinion that Christianity was a useful premise to build a life around because it possesses "knowledge of God.") You sit down one day to question yourself (or God, or whatever else) and, after a bit of thinking, realize that your opinion is full of contradictions. You immediately recognize your folly and immediately consider yourself a bastion of rationality in a sea of fools. You log on to LessWrong to upvote anyone making arguments against the guy advocating the Devil (because you still believe in him) and go back to resting on your laurels, fully convinced you didn't make any other severe mistakes of rationality while you were growing up. You later donate to the anti-faith militia because really belief in God is the only real mind-killer. The new opinion is the result of propaganda. Life is tough, and it just seems to be getting tougher. You're depressed and stressed and the idea of a psychotherapist
6Viliam_Bur
It depends on how likely your original opinion is true, how likely you are to change a wrong opinion to a correct opinion (using this exercise), and how likely you are to change correct opinion to wrong opinion (using this exercise). If your opinions are good on average, and if the process of argumenting for a belief has approximately the same chance to move you in any direction, then it is a harmful experiment. If the process is more likely to move you in a correct direction than in a wrong direction, and your original opinions are not too great, then you would benefit from this process on average. Unfortunately, I don't know any of these numbers. But it should be possible to make an experiment where the correct answer is known to the researchers, but half of the population believes the incorrect answer anyway -- whether the experiment would be more likely to move them in the correct direction. This would have to be repeated for differend kinds of topics, to make sure the effect is not specific for one of them.
2satt
I think katydee's post makes a valid point whether or not the answer to that question is yes. Making fun of beliefs often relies on making a bad argument against them instead of a good argument; in those cases the goodness of good arguments doesn't matter.
-1BaconServ
This post was written under the premise of resolving inferential silence. The author has opted to leave the post as drafted for optimum clarity, despite known flaws. Please bear this in mind. I had hoped I could explain what was wrong with that point in relation to my point without outright saying it had no bearing on the point I raised because it provides absolutely no reasoning about whether the before-opinion or the after-opinion is correct. Saying a response is entirely orthogonal to the thing it is responding to sort of just seems way too close to calling the author of the response a complete idiot in light of the cognitive biases inherent to the topic. I like to think that's an ad hominem and it's epistemologically incorrect and corrosive to discussion, so I tried to avoid it. Do you think I should edit my reply to explicitly assert, "That has literally nothing to do with what I said," regardless? My perception on what is offensive may be miscalibrated, so please. Although, reading this all over and over and over again, it occurs to me katydee's reply to my point may not have been a defensive reply at all, but rather an aside: "I read something once that warned about the possibility, so the connotation of it being a bad thing was a cached thought in my mind that I didn't remove. Thank you, I'll rephrase that part." Of course, some people prefer to not edit things, so I can't exactly claim the lack of editing is evidence that that wasn't the intention of that reply. Nevertheless, the votes paired with that reply seemed to me to strongly indicate a significant number of people that interpreted my reply as questioning whether or not this process can really alter your opinions. Ha, rereading, it seems this could well be the case! I'll edit that now, for clarity. So now I'm left with a question: If I meant one thing, and others read another thing, what went wrong? I'm seeing two likely interpretations of my original literal message: * "If you can [reason abst
1satt
I'm having trouble thinking up a useful response to your comment because I don't really understand it as a whole. I understand most of the individual sentences, but when I try to pull them all together I get confused. So I'll just respond to some isolated bits. This reads like you reckon katydee & I were making the same point, while I'd thought I was making a different point that wasn't a non sequitur. (Your comment seemed to me to rely on an implicit premise that making fun of things involves thinking of a good argument against them, so I disputed that implicit premise, which I'd read into your comment. But it looks like we mutually misunderstood each other. Ah well.) I'm not sure I follow and I don't think I agree. I probably would've if I were in your shoes. Even if katydee disagreed, the resulting discussion might have clarified things for at least one of you. (I doubt it's worth making that edit now as this conversation's mostly died down.) Personally, I'm usually content to tell someone outright "that's true but irrelevant" or some such if they reply to me with a non sequitur (e.g.). I interpreted it as saying the second one too. But in this context that point sounded irrelevant to me: if katydee warns someone that style S of argument is dangerous because it can make bad arguments sound compelling, a response along the lines of "but isn't it good if you can correct yourself by thinking of good arguments?" doesn't seem germane unless it leans on an implicit assumption that S is actually a reliable way of generating good arguments. (Without that qualifying assumption one could use the "but isn't it good if you can correct yourself" argument to justify any old method of generating arguments, even generating arguments at random, because sometimes it'll lead you to think of a good argument.)
1BaconServ
I believe I have a bad habit of leaping between points for understanding them to be more directly obvious than they commonly are. I think it might clarify things considerably if I start from the very beginning. When I first saw Making Fun of Things is Easy as a heading, I was pleased, because I have long recognized that numerous otherwise intelligent people have an extremely disuseful habit of refusing to spend thought on things—even to the point of failing to think about it enough to make a rational assessment of the usefulness of thinking about it—by dismissing them as "hilariously wrong." If LessWrong is getting to the point where they're starting to recognize positive emotional responses (laughter) can be disuseful, then I have reason to celebrate. Naturally, I had to read the article and see if my suspicion—that LessWrong is actually getting less wrong—was correct. A large part of the damage caused by laughing things into mental obscurity is that the laughing parties lose their ability to think rationally about the subject they are laughing at. The solution to this is to stop laughing, sit down, and take ideas that you consider ridiculous as potentially holding value in being even preliminarily considered. Ideas like telepathy, for example. It's bothersome that a community of rationalists should be unable to mentally function without excessive disclaiming. I realize this isn't actually the case, but that members still feel the need to specify "this-isn't-nonsense" is telling of something beyond those individual members themselves. So I read the article, and it's great. It touches on all the points that need to be touched upon. Then, at the very last sentence on the very last line at the very last word, I see a red flag. A warning about how your opinions could change. Good golly gosh. Wouldn't that be ever so horrible? To have my own ability to reason used against me, by my own self, to defeat and replace my precious now-beliefs? Oh what a world! ...You can
1satt
I find that reply easier to follow, thanks. The last sentence of katydee's post doesn't raise a red flag for me, I guess because I interpret it differently. I don't read it as an argument against changing one's opinion in itself, but as a reminder that the activity in footnote 2 isn't just an idle exercise, and could lead to changing one's mind on the basis of a cherry-picked argument (since the exercise is explicitly about trying to write an ad hoc opposing argument — it's not about appraising evidence in a balanced, non-selective way). Warning people about changing their minds on the basis of that filtered evidence is reasonable. I'm not too worried that inferential silence is a big enough problem on LW to merit its own discussion. While it is a problem, it's not clear there's an elegant way to fix it, and I don't think LW suffers from it unusually badly; it seems like something that occurs routinely whenever humans try to communicate. As such the presence of inferential silence on LW doesn't say anything special about LW. The paragraph about LW being a cult where "everyone's here to abdicate responsibility of thought to the collective" comes off to me as overblown. I'm not sure what LW's "memetic rationalized apathy" is, either. It looks like we interpret "making fun" differently. To me "making fun" connotes a verbal reaction, not just a laugh and a shrug. "Ha ha, get a load of this stupid idea!" is making fun, and hinges on the implicit bad (because circular) argument that an idea's bad because it's stupid. But a lone laugh or an apathetic shrug isn't making fun, because there's no real engagement; they're just immediate & visible emotional reactions. So, as I see it, making fun often does rely on making bad arguments, even if those arguments are so transparently poor we hardly even register them as arguments. Anyway, in this paragraph, I'm getting into an argument about the meaning of a phrase, and arguments about the meanings of words & phrases risk being
-2BaconServ
The problem is that most opinions people hold, even those of LessWrong's users, are already based on filtered evidence. If confirmation bias wasn't the default state of human affairs, it wouldn't be a problem so noteworthy as to gain widespread understanding. (There are processes that can cause illegitimate spreading, but that isn't the case with confirmation bias.) When you sit down to do the exercise and realize legitimate arguments (not merely ad hoc arguments) against your own views, you're overcoming your confirmation bias (default) on that issue for the first time. This is why it is important to respect your partner in debate; without respecting their ability to reason and think things you haven't, their mere disagreement with your permanent correctness directly causes condescension. Nonsensical ad-hoc arguments are more useful than no argument whatsoever; one has the quality of provoking thought. The only way otherwise rational people come to disagree is from the differing priors of their respective data sets; it's not that the wrong one among them is thinking up nonsense and being negatively affected by it. The truth is I don't really read comments on LessWrong all that much. I can't stand it. All I see being discussed and disagreed over are domain-specific trivial arguments. I recall someone on IRC once criticized that they hadn't seen evidence that Eliezer_Yudkowsky ever really admits being wrong in the face of superior arguments. This same concept applies to the entirety of LessWrongers; nobody is really changing their deep beliefs after "seeing the light." They're seeing superior logic and tactics and adding those onto their model. The model still remains the same, for the most part. Politics is only a mind-killer insofar as the participants in the discussion are unable to correct their beliefs on physically and presently important issues. That there exist subjects that LessWrong's users ban themselves from participation in is class A evidence of this.
2satt
That's not obvious to me. I'd expect LWers to be the kind of high-NFC/TIE people who try to weigh evidence in a two-sided way before deciding to like a particular politician or organization in the first place, and would probably, having made that decision, try to remain aware opposing evidence exists. I'm less optimistic. While nonsensical ad hoc arguments do provoke thoughts, those thoughts are sometimes things like, "Jesus, am I doomed to hear that shitty pseudo-argument every time I talk to people about this?" or "I already pre-empted that dud counterargument and they ignored me and went ahead and used it anyway!" or "Huh?!", rather than "Oh, this other person seems to have misunderstanding [X]; I'd better say [Y] to try disabusing them of it". Unfortunately a lot of arguments don't seem to be between "otherwise rational people", in the sense you give here. But I've seen (and occasionally participated in) arguments here about macroeconomics, feminism, HIV & AIDS, DDT, peak oil, the riskiness of the 80,000 Hours strategy of getting rich to donate to charity, how to assess the importance of technologies, global warming, how much lead exposure harms children's development, astronomical waste, the global demographic transition, and more. While these are domain-specific issues, I wouldn't call these trivial. And I've seen broader, nontrivial arguments about developing epistemically rationality, whether at the personal or social level. (What's the right tradeoff between epistemic & instrumental rationality? When should one trust science? How does the social structure of science affect the reliability of the body of knowledge we call science? How does one decide on priors? What are good 5-second skills that help reinforce good rationalist habits? Where do the insights & intuitions of experts come from? How feasible is rationality training for people of ordinary IQ?) That's too vague for me to have a strong opinion about. (Presumably you don't literally mean "nobody"
0BaconServ
[Comment length limitation continuance...] It will, despite my fantasies, be anticlimactic, as you predict. While I predicted this already, I didn't predict that you would consciously and vocally predict this yourself. My model updates as thus: Though I was not consciously aware of the possibility of stating my predictions being an invitation for you to state your own set of predictions, I am now aware that such a result is possible. What scenarios the practice is useful in, why it works, how it fails, when it does, and all such related questions are unknown. (This could be why my brain didn't think to inform my consciousness of the possibility, now that I think about it in writing this.) A more useful tool is that I can now read that prediction as a strong potential from a state of it not having been stated; I can now read inferential silence slightly better. If not for general contexts, then at least for LessWrong to whatever degree. Most useful of all data packed into that sentence is this: I now know, dividing out the apathy, carelessness, and desires for the last word and Internet Correction, what you're contextually looking for in this conversation. Effectively, I'm measuring your factored interest in what I have to say. The next factor to divide out is the pretense/build-up. Certainly so, insofar as you were willing to reply. Though you didn't seem it and there was no evidence, the thought crossed my mind that I'd gone too far and you were just not going to bother responding. I didn't think I exceeded your boundaries, but I've known LessWongers to conceal their true standards, in order to more fully detect "loonies" or "crackpots." There's no sentence I can form (Understand style) that will stun you with sheer realization (rather than be more likely to convince you of lessened intelligence). This is primarily because building the framework for such realizations results in a level of understanding that makes the lone trigger assertion seem mundane by concep
0satt
Yes, I expect whatever big conclusion you're winding up to will prove either true & trivial, or surprising & false. (I am still a bit curious as to whether you'll take the boring route or the crackpot route, although my curiosity is hardening into impatience.)
0BaconServ
Do you have any actual reason (introspection doesn't count) to "expect LWers to be the kind of high-NFC/TIE people who try to weigh evidence in a two-sided way before deciding"? I'm not asking if you can fathom or rationalize up a reason, I'm requesting the raw original basis for the assumption. Your reduced optimism is a recognition within my assessment rather than without it; you agree, but you see deeper properties. Nonsensical arguments are not useful after a certain point, naturally, but where the point lies is a matter we can only determine after assessing each nonsensical idea in turn. We can detect patterns among the space of nonsensical hypotheses, but we'd be neglecting our duty as rationalists and Bayesians alike if we didn't properly break down each hypothesis in turn to determine its proper weight and quality over the space of measured data. Solomonoff induction is what it is because it takes every possibility into account. Of course if I start off a discussion saying nonsense is useful, you can well predict what the reaction to that will be. It's useful, to start off, from a state of ignorance. (The default state of all people, LessWrongers included.) * Macroeconomics: Semi-legitimate topic. There is room for severe rational disagreement. Implications for most participants in such discussions is very low, classifying the topic as irrelevant, despite the room for opinion variance. * Feminism: Arguably a legitimate point to contend over. I'll allow this as evidence in counter to my stance if you can convince me that it was being legitimately argued: Someone would need to legitimately hold the stance of a feminist and not budge in terms of, "Well, I take feminism to mean..." Basically, I don't really believe this is a point of contention rather than discussion for the generalized LessWrong collective. * HIV & AIDS: Can't perform assessment. Was anyone actually positing non-consensus ideas in the discussion? * DDT: What's to discuss? "Should it have
1satt
* LWers self-report having above-average IQs. (One can argue that those numbers are too high, as I've done, but those are just arguments about degree.) People with more cognitive firepower to direct at problems are presumably going to do so more often. * LWers self-report above-average AQs. (Again, one might argue those AQs are exaggerated, but the sign of the effect is surely right given LW's nerdy bent.) This is evidence in favour of LWers being people who tend to automatically apply a fine-grained (if not outright pedantic) and systematic thinking style when confronted with a new person or organization to think about. * Two linked observations. One: a fallacy/heuristic that analytical people often lean on is treating reversed stupidity as intelligence. Two: the political stupidity that an analytical person is likely to find most salient is the stupidity coming from people with firmly held, off-centre political views. Bringing the two together: even before discovering LW, LWers are the kind of analytical types who'd apply the reversed stupidity heuristic to politics, and infer from it that the way to avoid political stupidity is to postpone judgement by trying to look at Both Sides before committing to a political position. * Every time Eliezer writes a new chapter of his HPMoR fanfic, LW's Discussion section explodes in a frenzy of speculation and attempts to integrate disparate blobs of evidence into predictions about what's going to happen next, with a zeal most uninterested outside observers might find hard to understand. In line with nerd stereotype, LWers can't even read a Harry Potter story without itching to poke holes in it. (Have to dash out of the house now but I'll comment on the rest soon.)
0satt
I agree with that, read literally, but I disagree with the implied conclusion. Nonsensical arguments hit diminishing (and indeed negative) returns so quickly that in practice they're nearly useless. (There are situations where this isn't so, namely educational ones, where having a pupil or student express their muddled understanding makes it possible to correct them. But I don't think you have that sort of didactic context in mind.) Hmm. I tend not to wade into the arguments about feminism so I don't remember any examples that unambiguously meet your criteria, and some quick Google searches don't give me any either, although you might have more luck. Still, even without evidence on hand sufficient to convince a sceptic, I'm fairly sure feminism, and related issues like pick-up artistry and optimal ways to start romantic relationships, are contentious topics on LW. (In fact I think there's something approaching a mild norm against gratuitously bringing up those topics because Less Wrong Doesn't Do Them Well.) Yep. The person I ended up arguing with was saying that HIV isn't an STD, that seroconversion isn't indicative of HIV infection, and that there's not much reason to think microscopic pictures of HIV are actually of HIV. (They started by saying they had 70% confidence "that the mainstream theory of HIV/AIDS is solid", but what they wrote as the thread unfolded made clear that their effective degree of confidence was really much less.) Here's the discussion I had in mind. I quickly skimmed the conversation I was thinking of and didn't see a clear split. But you can judge for yourself. Here's a post on deciding which charities to donate to. Here's a student asking how they can get rich for effective altruism. Here's a detailed walkthrough of how to maximize the cash you get when searching for a programming job. Here's someone asking straightforwardly how they can make money. Here's Julia Wise wondering which career would allow her to donate the most money. Th
0BaconServ
I do, actually, which raises the question as to why you think I didn't have that in mind. Did you not realize that LessWrong and pretty much our entire world civilization is in such a didactic state? Moreover, if we weren't in such a didactic state, why does LessWrong exist? Does the art of human rationality not have vast room to improve? This honestly seems like a highly contradictory stance, so I hope I'm not attacking a straw man. So it would. Thank you for taking the time to track down those articles. As always, it's given me a few new ideas about how to work with LessWrong. I was using a rough estimate for legitimacy; I really just want LessWrong to be more of an active force in the world. There are topics and discussions that further this process and there are topics and discussion that simply do not. Similarly, there are topics and discussions where you can pretend you're disagreeing, but not really honing your rationality in any way by participating. For reference, this conversation isn't honing our rationality very well; we're already pretty finely tuned. What's happening between us now is current-optimum information exchange. I'm providing you with tangible structural components, and you've providing me with excellent calibration data. Oh but that is very much exactly what I can do! In each and every one of those cases you will find that the person had not spent sufficient time reflecting on the usefulness of thought and refined reasoning, or else uFAI and existential risks. The state these ideas existed in their mind in was not a "deep belief" state, but rather a relatively blank slate primed to receive the first idea that came to mind. uFAI is not a high-class danger; EY is wrong, and the funding and effort is, in large part, illegitimate. I am personally content leaving that fear, effort and funding in place precisely because I can milk it for my own personal benefit. Does every such person who reads the sequences run off to donate or start having n
0satt
I did not. And do not, in fact. Those didactic states are states where there's someone who's clearly the teacher (primarily interested in passing on knowledge), and someone who's clearly the pupil (or pupils plural — but however many, the pupil(s) are well aware they're not the teacher). But on LW and most other places where grown-ups discuss things, things don't run so much on a teacher-student model; it's mostly peers arguing with each other on a roughly even footing, and in a lot of those arguments, nobody's thinking of themselves as the pupil. Even though people are still learning from each other in such situations, they're not what I had in mind as "didactic". In hindsight I should've used the word "pedagogical" rather than "didactic". I think these questions are driven by misunderstandings of what I meant by "didactic context". What I wrote above might clarify. Thank you for updating in the face of evidence. Fair enough. I interpreted "deep beliefs" as referring to beliefs that matter enough to affect the believer's behaviour. Under that interpretation, any new belief that leads to a major, consistent change in someone's behaviour (e.g. changing jobs to donate thousands to MIRI) would seem to imply a change in deep beliefs. You evidently have a different meaning of "deep belief" in mind but I still don't know what (even after reading that paragraph and the one after it). Hrmm. Well, that wraps up that branch of the conversation quite tidily. I suppose that's true... ...but I'd still soften that "will" to a "might, someday, conceivably". Things don't go viral in so predictable a fashion. (And even when they do, they often go viral as short-term fads.) Another reason I'm not too worried: the downsides of LW memes invading everyone's head would be relatively small. People believe all sorts of screamingly irrational and generally worse things already.
1TheOtherDave
If coming up with good arguments against a belief is not differentially harder for more valuable beliefs, then coming up with good arguments for beliefs is not a reliable way of sorting beliefs by their value.
0BaconServ
Have you read this article?
0TheOtherDave
Yes.
[-]WalterL50

I concur with you.

Also, you have an unlikely ally. I think it was C.S. Lewis that said that it was hard work to make a joke, but effortless to act as though a joke has been made. (google help me, yes, Screwtape Letters, number 11.) I generally try to let that guide me.

I think that genuinely funny jokes typically need some participation from the an aspect object of the joke. If you're mocking a policy by pointing out an incongruent consequence of that its certainly funny, but it wouldn't be possible if the root wasn't there to start with.

Say I'm an autho... (read more)

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8Viliam_Bur
So perhaps a good joke is about the essence of the criticized thing. And a bad joke is mere pattern-matching of the criticized thing; sometimes using a very poorly matching pattern. (Or the bad joke may be about something irrelevant. Reminds me of two politicians in my country who were very powerful a few years ago. One of them seemed mentally unstable, and he frequently said the exact opposite of what he said before, just because it happened to fit in his newest conspiracy theory. His opponents made fun of him, often simply by quoting what he said last year and what he said now; and they also made fun of how his supporters also quickly changed their mind but sometimes didn't get the memo about the latest change of mind of their leader, so they contradicted each other, and then clumsily pretended the contradiction didn't happen. But also the other side made fun of their most important opponent... saying that he was short. And it seemed equally funny to them.)
-5Eugine_Nier
2Richard_Kennaway
That explains so much stand-up comedy.
2katydee
I generally agree-- though I think that there are some cases in which even the first sort of joke is perhaps unwarranted. Jokes about spelling errors and other trivial mistakes seem to fall into a middle category where, while they are based on incongruities or errors, they are not based on substantive or meaningful ones. Also, C.S. Lewis is far from an unlikely ally of mine. I consider his writing important and useful in many respects.
-3Lumifer
So what's wrong with that?
-1hyporational
Personally, I find this sort of humour way too easy and therefore usually not funny. People not recognizing these two types takes away from the average quality of comedy. I reflexively see such people as stupid, but I understand this isn't entirely fair. Just laughing at the subject makes it possible to laugh at anything, and it starts to take away from other things, as lmm points out.
2Lumifer
Easy? I have in mind people like Jews in 1930s Europe, Russians under the Soviet rule, or, to take a contemporary example, Christian Copts in Egypt. Oppressed people who don't have an opportunity to change their lot through polite democratic process. Humor -- biting, nasty, derisive humor -- was and is very important for them. To fight back with, to keep their sanity, to feel as humans and not cattle. That humor's point is to "indicate derision towards the Hated/Scorned enemy".
0hairyfigment
Yes, quite reasonable - but it can degenerate into the Book of Revelation.
0hyporational
I somewhat agree with this, but I had a much more casual interpretation in mind. The examples of jewish humour I've seen have all been quite witty, so they don't really count as "just laughing at the subject". Just a data point: Your tone instinctively feels confrontational, and originally demotivated me from replying. Might be what turns off other people too. Is this intentional?
3Lumifer
Somewhat. The point is not to demotivate or turn off other people, the point is to liven up the exchange, as well as provide some entertainment and motivation. I am not averse to poking people with sharp pointy objects :-D but I don't object to being poked myself.
0hyporational
Ok, good to know. Livening things up is good. It's funny how a simple acknowledgement can shift your view of a user agent sailing in bitspace. You'd make a good surgeon. Just remember keep those objects sharp.
[-]hyporational50

Optimally, only bad things would get made fun of, making it easy to determine what is good and bad-- but this doesn't appear to be the case.

How do you differentiate between benign comedy and "making fun of"? Is it just the implied intent? I've found this is an incredibly difficult line to draw, people are so variably calibrated. Many times couldn't have helped myself and have inadvertently insulted people. Later I have learned that quite a few laughs are not worth one wrongly placed offence, so I mostly joke among friends.

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[-]Yosarian240

While that's all true, using humor can be a socially acceptable way to point out the flaws in someone else's "sacred cows" without them getting angry. By avoiding the anger response using humor, sometimes you can short-circuit the whole knee-jerk reaction and get someone to think in a more rational way, to actually take a closer look at their own beliefs. Political satirists have used this technique for a long time, and still do.

So it can be a positive and socially useful thing to do. Like all of these kinds of tools, it can either be used to get to the truth or to hide it, to think more deeply or to avoid thinking. It all depends on the details.

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[-]John_Maxwell40

How many people actually did the exercises katydee suggested? I know I didn't.

katydee, perhaps you could take a semi-random sample of things in relevant reference classes (politicians/organizations) and demonstrate how easy it is to make fun of them? Otherwise I suspect many people will take you for your word that things are easy to make fun of.

Here's my semi-random sample of organizations and politicians. I'll take the most recent 3 Daily Show guests) I recognize the names of and the largest 3 charities I recognize the names of.

  • Richard Dawkins

  • Chels

... (read more)
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0Andreas_Giger
I did, but I don't think people realised it.
[-]lmm40

The best conversations are in places that put a low value on humour. Unfortunately in wider society disliking humour is seen as a massive negative.

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[-]gjm140

I think (albeit on the basis of limited evidence) that what's helpful for good conversations is a low value on humour rather than a negative value on humour. The fora I've seen with the best discussion don't generally regard humour as bad; they just regard it as generally not good enough to redeem an otherwise unhelpful comment. Exceptionally good humour, or humour produced incidentally while saying something that would have been valuable even without the humour, is just fine on (for instance) Less Wrong or Hacker News -- but comments whose only point is a feeble witticism are liable to get downvoted into oblivion.

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3ILikeLogic
I find it can be really irritating to try to make any kind of point about anything with certain people. To some there is no point in talking other than to yuk it up. I guess you just have to know your audience.
1Lumifer
Not in my experience. I find best conversations in places which operate on the Ha-Ha-Only-Serious basis.
1hyporational
Why do you dislike humour?
7lmm
I'm pretty indifferent to humour per se, but empirically it takes away from other things. Discussion sites where humour is valued have a lower proportion of interesting (to me) posts; television series with a lot of humour seem to make a corresponding sacrifice in character development.
[-]AlanCrowe30

This example pushed me into formulating Crowe's Law of Sarcastic Dismissal: Any explanation that is subtle enough to be correct is turbid enough to make its sarcastic dismissal genuinely funny.

Skinner had a subtle point to make, that the important objection to mentalism is of a very different sort. The world of the mind steals the show. Behaviour is not recognized as a subject in its own right.

I think I grasped Skinner's point after reading something Feynman wrote on explanations in science. You can explain why green paint is green by explaining that paint... (read more)

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2fubarobfusco
Dennett's heterophenomenology seems to offer some of the good points of Skinner's behaviorism without a lot of the bad points. Heterophenomenology notices that people's behavior includes making descriptions of their conscious mental states: they emit sentences like "I think X" or "I notice Y". It takes these behaviors as being as worthy of explanation as other behaviors, and considers that there might actually exist meaningful mental states being described. This is just what behaviorism dismisses.
7AlanCrowe
In Beyond Freedom and Dignity Skinner writes (page 21) Dennett writes (page 83) So far Skinner and Dennett are not disagreeing. Skinner did say "We do, indeed, feel things inside our own skin,...". He can hardly object to Dennett writing down our descriptions of what we feel, as verbal behaviour to be explained in the future with a reductionist explanation. Dennett continues on page 85 Dennett takes great pains to be clear. I feel confident that I understand what he is taking 500 pages to say. Skinner writes more briefly, 200 pages, and leaves room for interpretation. He says that we do not feel the things that have been invented to explain behaviour and he dismisses them. I think it is unambiguous that he is expelling the explanatory mental states of the psychology of his day (such as introversion) from the heterophenomenological world of his subjects, on the grounds that they are not things that we feel or talk about feeling. But he is not, in Dennett's phrase "feigning anesthesia" (page 40). Skinner is making a distinction, yes we may feel jubilant, no we do not feel a disturbed personality. What is not so clear is the scope of Skinner's dismissal of say introversion. Dennett raises the possibility of discovering meaningful mental states that actually exist. One interpretation of Skinner is that he denies this possibility as a matter of principle. My interpretation of Skinner is that he is picking a different quarrel. His complaint is that psychologists claim to have discovered meaningful mental states already, but haven't actually reached the starting gate; they haven't studied enough behaviour to even try to infer the mental states that lie behind behaviour. He rejects explanatory concepts such as attitudes because he thinks that the work needed to justify the existence of such explanatory concepts hasn't been done. I think that the controversy arises from the vehemence with which Skinner rejects mental states. He dismisses them out-of-hand. One interpre
3fubarobfusco
Okay, I can see that interpretation. To draw something else from the distinction: Skinner seems to be talking about the objects of psychotherapeutic inquiry, such as "disturbed personality" or "introversion"; whereas Dennett is talking about the objects of philosophy-of-mind inquiry, such as "beliefs" and "qualia". The juvenile delinquent is imputed as having a "disturbed personality" by others; but the believer testifies to their own belief themselves.
[-]Lumifer00

whether or not people are making fun of it is not necessarily a good signal as to whether or not it's actually good

Correct.

Optimally, only bad things would get made fun of

Incorrect. Being too serious is a deadly disease. Everything should be made fun of -- it's fun!

Second, if you want to make something sound bad, it's really easy.

"making something sound bad" is not at all the same thing as "making fun of"

This sort of premature cynicism tends to be a failure mode I've noticed in many otherwise very intelligent people.

As us... (read more)

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3hyporational
Generally speaking, "making fun of" implies a pejorative connotation. But don't you worry, the op didn't make sense to me either until I checked the dictionary!
2Lumifer
Not necessarily, it depends on the context. For example, people in a secure, stable relationship tend to make fun of each other a lot. I associate "making fun of" with things like "irreverent" and "not taking too seriously".
1hyporational
Yeah. I think major part of the fun is knowing it would be insulting in most other contexts. I'm finnish, so I don't really know how english speaking people use the expression irl.
1Richard_Kennaway
It's a superset of it.
1Lumifer
Not in the way I use the English language. "Funny" != "bad".
4Richard_Kennaway
"Funny" is only a minor and not actually necessary part of "make fun of". To "make fun of" is to make jokes about someone or something in an unkind way, to mock, tease, ridicule, laugh at, taunt, mimic, parody, deride, send up (British, informal), scoff at, sneer at, lampoon, make a fool of, pour scorn on, take the mickey out of (British, informal), take the piss out of (taboo & slang), satirize, pull someone's leg, hold up to ridicule, make a monkey of, make sport of, make the butt of, ... All of which are ways of "making something sound bad". That's from a dictionary and thesaurus, but actual use, according to the Google hits that aren't dictionaries or thesauruses, agrees with them. Making something sound bad is the whole purpose of making fun of it. The "fun" part is the method of accomplishing that.
[-]Andreas_Giger-10

I'm not sure if this post is meant to be taken seriously. It's always "easy" to make fun of X; what's difficult is to spread your opinion about X by making fun of X. Obviously this requires a target audience that doesn't already share your opinion about X, and if you look at people making fun of things (e.g. on the net), usually the audience they're catering to already shares their views. This is because the most common objective of making fun of things is not to convince people of anything, but to create a group identity, raise team morale, and ... (read more)

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-1Eugine_Nier
I'd rather argue that this doesn't work to convince people who already like X (although it may make them more inclined to keep their opinions to themselves), but does influence people who have no opinion of X (possibly because they've never heard of X before) dislike X and cause people who mildly dislike X to strengthen their opinion.
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