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
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...
(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
"everything is bad" is only a crappy thinking mode when unaccompanied by the obvious next step of "optimize all the things."
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.
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."
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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...
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 ...
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. LessWrong only practices humble rationality in the realm of things that are theoretically relevant. The things that are actually shown to matter are taboo to even bring up because that might cause people to "realize" (confirmation bias) that they're dealing with people they consider to be idiots. Slow progress is being made in terms of rationality by this community, but it is so cripplingly slow by my standards that it frustrates me. "You could do so much better if you would just accept this one single premise as plausible!" The end result is that LessWrong is advancing, yes, but not at a pace that exceeds the bare minimum of the average.
Everything this community has done up to now is a good warm-up, but now I'd like to start seeing some actual improvement where it counts.
It's not the mere existence of inferential silence that is the issue here. Inferential silence exists everywhere on digital forums. What's relevant is the exact degree to which the inferential silence occurs. For example, if nobody commented, upvoted, or downvoted, then LessWrong is just a disorganized blog. If all the topics worth discussing have their own posts and nobody posts anything new, and everyone stops checking for new content, the site is effectively dead. The measuring of inferential silence has the same purpose as asking, "Is this site useful to me?" Banned subjects are a severe form of inferential silence. We're rationalists. We ought to be able to discuss any subject in a reasonable manner. Other places, when someone doesn't care about a thread, they just don't bother reading it. Here, you're told not to post it. Because it's immoral to distract all these rationalists who are supposed to be advancing the Singularity with temptation to debate (seemingly) irrelevant things. LessWrong places next to no value on self-restraint; better to restrain the world instead.
This is the part where things get difficult to navigate.
I predicted your reaction of considering the coherency of the collective as overblown. I'd already started modeling responses in my head when I got up from the computer after posting the comment. I don't predict you're terribly bothered by a significant degree of accuracy to the prediction; rather, I predict that, to you, it will seem only obvious that I should have been able to predict that. This will all seem fairly elementary to you. What I'm unsure about is the degree to which you are aware that you stand out from the rest of these folks. You're exhibiting a deeper level of understanding of the usefulness of epistemic humility in bothering to speak to me and read my comments in the way that you are. You offer conversational pleasantries and pleasant offers for conversation, but that can be both a consciously recognized utility or an unconscious one, with varying degrees in between. I can already tell, though, what kind of path you've been on with that behavior. You'll have seen and experienced things that most other LWers have not. Basically, what sets you apart is that you don't suck at conversation.
It's not that I predicted that you'd disagree or be unsure about what I was referring to, it's more that the idea I understand, by virtue of being able to understand it, inherently lets me know that you will immediately agree if you can actually grasp the concept. It's not that you'll immediately see everything I have; that part will take time. What will happen is that you'll have grasped the concept and the means to test the idea, though you'll feel uncertain about it. You'll of course be assessing the data you collect in the opposite of the manner that I do; while I search for all the clues indicating negatives, you'll search for clues and reasoning that leave LessWrong with less blame—or maybe you'll try to be more neutral about it (if you can determine where the middle ground lies). I wrote my last comment because I'd already concluded that you'll be able to fully grasp my concept; but be forewarned: Understanding my lone hypothesis in light of no competing hypotheses could change your beliefs! (An irreparable change, clearly.)
I've more to say, but it won't make sense to say it without receiving feedback about the more exact mechanics of your stage of grasping my concept. I predict you won't notice anything out of the ordinary about the thoughts you'll have thought in reading/responding to/pondering this. These prediction, again, will appear to be mundane.
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.
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.
...Nonsensical ad-hoc arguments are more useful th
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.