Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (or works of Quine):
"is false when preceded by its quotation" is false when preceded by its quotation.
Judea Pearl, Causality:
If two things are correlated, there is causation. Either A causes B, B causes A, they have common cause, or they have a common effect you're conditioning on.
Edit: If two variables are correlated, there is causation. Either A causes B, B causes A, they have common cause, or they have a common effect you're conditioning on.
The First 20 Hours (Josh Kaufman):
Practice something for 20 hours, and you'll learn a lot. Don't worry about feeling stupid/clumsy.
Causal Decision Theory / consequentialism:
"If your actions have results, you can use actions to choose your favorite result."
Epistemic rationality (as far as I can tell):
"Take every mathematical structure that isn't ruled out by the evidence. Rank them by parsimony."
Intelligence matters, you live in a high-IQ bubble, you're in politically-motivated denial about it, and your denial isn't helping anyone.
On Writing Well, by William Zinsser
Every word should do useful work. Avoid cliché. Edit extensively. Don’t worry about people liking it. There is more to write about than you think.
50 shades:
Keep telling the girl that she is smart, beautiful and courageous and that you love her more than anything, and she will indulge your weirdest fantasy.
The Better Angels of Our Nature:
Violence is down short- and long-term on a per capita basis. This is due to interacting effects of governments, women, trade, rationality & literature.
I feel this quote belongs in this thread.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H.L.Mencken
Counterculture movements are severely infected with status signalling spirals, making them various combinations of ineffectual, incoherent & parasitic.
If after ten minutes you don't know who the sucker is, it's you.
(Common advice which applies mainly to zero-sum competitive situations. I heard it in the context of negotiating with competitors, but I imagine it applies to poker, political strategy, and other things too.)
Matthieu Ricard, Happiness:
It's better to be happy than to be unhappy. If you're unhappy, you can fix it. Here's how: cultivate love, compassion and mindfulness.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Without the [view of life from gene perspective] there is no particular reason why an organism should 'care' about its reproductive success and that of its relatives, rather than, for instance, its own longevity
In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.
Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas
There's a quote I like from Terry Pratchett's juvenile book "Only You Can Save Mankind" that addresses a mistake that some people with a high IQ make:
"Just because you have a mind like a hammer doesn't mean you should treat everyone else like a nail."
That's 19 words (if you count "doesn't" as 1 word, rather than 2), but perhaps a 15 word version could be:
"Don't manipulate those you can out think, just because you are able to."
or, more abstractly,
"Don't treat people as inconvenient objects, even when you can get away with it."
From the Buddha's Kalama Sutra:
Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing,
nor upon tradition,
nor upon rumor,
nor upon what is in a scripture,
nor upon surmise,
nor upon an axiom,
nor upon specious reasoning,
nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over,
nor upon another's seeming ability,
nor upon the consideration, "The monk is our teacher."
Rather, when you yourselves know: "These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness," enter on and abide in them.'
As Eilenberg-Mac Lane first observed, "category" has been defined in order to be able to define "functor" and "functor" has been defined in order to be able to define "natural transformation".
Saunders Mac Lane, Categories for the Working Mathematician
Neat. It would be nice to describe this site in a dozen or so words and put this description on the front page.
Don't pick up pennies in front of a steamroller. Especially if the guy encouraging you to do it is taking a cut of the pennies but not spending any time in front of the steamroller himself.
Scott Kim, What is a Puzzle?
Ok here's a stab at it:
the basic goal of ethics is getting everyone to cooperate in a mass mutual prisoner's dilemma
"Try to choose actions causing high total net utility gains when summed over everyone affected."
is an attempt at a 15 word summary of:
Precedent Utilitarians believe that when a person compares possible actions in a specific situation, the comparative merit of each action is most accurately approximated by estimating the net probable gain in utility for all concerned from the consequences of the action, taking into account both the precedent set by the action, and the risk or uncertainty due to imperfect information.
Jayne's Probability Theory:
There is nothing "subjective" about Bayesian probability.
EDIT: I like badger's suggestion below better than this one.
I'd go with: Probability exists in your mind, not the world, but there still is an "objective" way to calculate it.
The evaluator, which determines the meaning of expressions in a program, is just another program.
Positivism: "Anything that can't be verified is meaningless". This can't be verified. So Positivism is meaningless / false.
Hehe...here's a controversial one.
The process and the consequences of fighting oppressive heirarchies are worse the heirarchies themselves - my take on Mencius Moldbug.
I don't really agree. But I've tried pretty hard to wrap my head around his ideology (he's incredibly long winded) and this is what I got from it. If I had to add a second sentence, it would be this:
"Progressive culture seduces intellectual elites and redirects their power to destructive, unreflective, self-righteous reformation."
..."This reformation inevitably strengthens th...
If you want me to cut an actual quote down to 15 words it'll sound like absolute nonsense, but if a paraphrase is sufficient;
"Humans thrive under Order and suffer without it, but Chaos is both easy and attractive."
I think that hits all the major points;
(Fair warning: I'm not a Formalist per se, I think the Patchwork is way too silly an idea to put my name near it, but I hope that this is a good enough summary for someone with a low tolerance for Moldbuggery.)
See, the trouble I have with Moldbug is that it's written less like a thesis and more like a poem. I got through a bit of it, and it was pretty fun to read and it constantly felt like I was on the edge of some earth-shattering revelation which would destroy all my previous political notions...but in the end I came away not quite getting the point. In places where I did understand the point, I didn't understand how it was supported.
I can readily identify all the statements you've listed as belonging to Reactionary schools of thought, but the bit about Order, Chaos, and Cathedral are all so layered in metaphor that I'm not really sure what they actually mean, let alone why I should believe that they are true. The point about life getting worse seems empirical, and I haven't fully grasped why he believes this.
So far, what I've taken is that reforming pre-democratic heirarchies (order) is both an act of violence and leads to violence and turmoil (chaos). Like most violence, this is a transfer of power to the progressive powers (the universities, the liberal democracies, and the reformers - collectively, the cathedral).
I don't see a distinction; if you think science is that institutionally corrupt, on a scale greater than even Lysenko could have aspired to, you're not functionally different from a postmodernist and have just as little credibility when talking about institutional science
Not necessarily. Moldbug might trust scientific consensus to be correct in areas where politics won't distort it.
i obviously do trust the scientific consensus, but steelmanning, there have been times when politics or culture has interfered with science in half-science half-humanities fields like anthropology. Historically, even biology has been tainted by politics at times, when it comes to sexuality. (I'm not talking about modern evolutionary biology, but historical things such as chalking up female orgasms to "hysteria" and the historical attribution of homosexual behavior in animals as "dominance displays")
That's a devil's advocate though. For the most part, I agree with you.
...Look up the word "biotruth" or do some research into the anti-GMO movement and you'll see your leftist buddies are on the front line right now fighting against the very science which might someday make tra
This line of conversation seems to focus on the "turning the dial to 11" idea, which I take to mean "increasing the distance from the mainstream".
I think I see a couple of problems with this.
First, a political ideology is composed of not one, but several "dial settings". Correlations between them are at least partly matters of historical accident, not logical necessity. We can conceive of dialing up or down any of these somewhat independently of one another.
Why is anti-colonialism linked to opposition to private property, instead of to protecting the private property rights of oppressed people? Why is it in the interests of "big-business conservatives" today to oppose scientific education, whereas in the mid-20th century the business establishment was strongly supportive of it? Why is antisemitism today found in both the far left and far right, whereas it once was a defining characteristic of right-wing nationalist populism? Because of the formation and breakdown of specific political alliances and economic conditions over historic time — not because these views are logically linked.
Second, a political ideology often opposes what outsiders se...
I think the issue here is that to you progressivism is a set of very specific ideals whereas to me it is a set of general-purpose political tactics.
Judging by the examples you give, the tactic you're attributing to progressivism is basically harsh condemnation (and often forceful suppression) of purported "human rights abuse" when the perpetrators are ideological enemies, but quiet tolerance (and sometimes even approval) of the same actions when they are perpetrated by allies or by people/groups who do not fit the "bad guy" role in the standard progressive narrative. Is this pretty much what you intended to convey, or am I missing something important?
If I'm not, then I don't see why you tie this behavior to progressivism in particular. It seems like a pretty universal human failure mode when it comes to politics. Of course, the specifics of the rhetoric employed will differ, but I'm sure I can come up with examples similar to yours that apply to conservatives, or indeed to pretty much any faction influential enough to command widespread popular allegiance and non-negligible political clout. Do you think progressives are disproportionately guilty of this kind ...
I concede that a lot of contemporary discussion of John Brown is unjustifiably reverential, and I don't consider him particularly heroic.
I consider him extremely heroic. Not ultrarational, but there were people suffering in the darkness and crying out for help, a lot of people saying "Later", and John Brown saying "Fuck this, let's just do it." If there's a historical consensus that the Civil War could have been avoided, I have not encountered it; and that being so, might as well have the Civil War sooner rather than later.
If I recall my past opinions correctly, I said at the time that while such wars were the only way to free certain countries, I did not trust the competence of the current administration to prosecute it and was strongly against the way in which it was carried out in defiance of international law.
I would say in retrospect that the resulting disaster would have been 2/3 of the way to my reasonable upper bound for disastrousness, but the full degree to which e.g. the Bush Defense department was ignoring the Bush State department was surprising and would not become known until years later. I have since adjusted my political cynicism upward, and continue to argue with various community-members about whether the US government can be expected to execute elaborate correct actions based on amazingly accurate theories about AI which they got from university professors (answer: no).
I took your explanation of "governmental entropy" to indicate a breakdown of heirarchy.
High order gov't = clear lines of heirarchy, which you could draw in a simple diagram
low order gov't = constant uncertainty about who's in charge (with the resulting insecurity resulting in violence).
We could argue it around in circles forever, so why not cut to the meat of the issue; what would we expect the progressive response to be like if each of us were right
So this is good, but I'm still confused.
Your examples describe a government which acts in its own interests (rather than by moral ideals) and I accept that this is in fact the case for our government, that it acts not according to ideals but in self-interest.
What I don't understand is why this is particular to progressive-ism, and not a general property of ideologically driven power structures. Or even power structures in general, for that matter - doesn't Fnarg also act in his own interests, by strengthening his allies and weakening his enemies?
who it's ultimately helping
Let's take India and Pakistan, and observe their positions on the Israel-Palestine scenario. Pakistan strongly sides with Palestine, probably because...
but doesn't that just class "Leftist Intellectuals" as one among many groups who use power to serve their own interests, while outwardly appealing to high moral ideals?
What's different here from all the other Fnargles who seize power? Why should I take any particular notice of this particular group of Fnargles who fall under the heading "Leftist Intellectuals"? Why is this Universe worse than the Universe that would result if there were no "leftist intellectuals"?
Are "leftist intellectuals" somehow meaner and more destructive than other Fnargles? Or is it simply that this brand of Fnargle is really, really good at re-directing power to itself?
Me, personally? My domain is biology, and am aware that my political opinions on most issues aren't to be taken any more seriously than the average undergraduate's opinions. I suppose that makes me the "average progressive", so maybe that's a good thing:
Truthfully, none of those are on my radar, and I know nothing about the Holocaust beyond what I learned in school. As far as I'm concerned it's just one among many terrible genocides, and one that presently gets more attention than the others because it was committed against a group who currently inhabits Western nations. Slavery of African Americans is similar - one among many terrible atrocities which happen to get more attention because the group they were committed against lives among us.
The American public (which includes me) ignores the Hoa because we never see the Hoa and have no clue who they are. I've never met a Hoa. There's no Hoa organizations fighting for increased awareness. If awareness existed, people would care...but it doesn't, so they don't. This is what is meant by liberals when we say "privilege" - African Americans and Jews living in the West, as a group, have more privilege than the Hoa o...
But ancient India, China, Greece were absolutely over-run by irrationality. The seeds of logic and reason were lying more or less ignored, buried in texts alongside millions of superstitions and bad epistemologies. And our currently fashionable epistemology is superior to theirs. They didn't have the notion of parsimony.
Why is logic and reason spreading faster today than in the past? Do you think that the rise of post-modernism (Actually, wait.... why are we using the word post-modernism to mean anti-science? That doesn't make sense...) will somehow eclipse the spread of rationalism?
Your model seems to have anti-science-post-modernism as a successor tor rationalism My model has anti-science as a reaction to the rapid spread of rationalism - a backlash. Whenever something spreads rapidly, there are those who are troubled. Anti-science can only define itself in opposition to science - imagine explaining it to someone who had never heard of science in the first place! Further, anti-science advocates a return to pre-scientific modes of thought. Both of these are the signals of a reactionary school of thought. Cthulhu doesn't swim that way.
...n the modern world (more-or-less everything
Whether "the system" won't punish you depends on which system. If you're in academia or paid-by-feds research (e.g. NIH), I would expect the system to punish you (not necessarily in immediately obvious ways).
I guess that depends on whether you are in the humanities or the hard sciences. I've heard several maths professors often making politically incorrect remarks and jokes in lectures where they couldn't have known that nobody was recording them. You wouldn't speak out against Socialism in a similar venue in the Soviet Union. (Or are web forums held to a higher standard than university lectures?)
I guess that depends on whether you are in the humanities or the hard sciences.
That's probably true. I suspect it also depends on whether you are a tenured professor, rather hard to dislodge, or a mere tenure-track larva terrified of not getting tenure...
People want to tell everything instead of telling the best 15 words. They want to learn everything instead of the best 15 words. In this thread, instead post the best 15-words from a book you've read recently (or anything else). It has to stand on its own. It's not a summary, the whole value needs to be contained in those words.
I'll start in the comments below.
(Voted by the Schelling study group as the best exercise of the meeting.)