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Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes April 2014 - Less Wrong
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Nassim Taleb
I think, by this standard, law is a BS discipline. But I'm not sure what to make of that.
Well - law is, in a strict sense, entirely about convincing other humans that your interpretation is correct.
Whether or not it actually is correct in a formal sense is entirely screened off by that prime requirement, and so you probably shouldn't be surprised that all methods used by humans to convince other humans, in the absence of absolute truth, are applied. :)
Would that include drafting a fire code for buildings? Would it include negotiating a purchase and sale agreement for a business? Would it include filing a lawsuit for unpaid wages? Would it include advising a client about the possible consequences of taking a particular tax deduction?
It's hard to see how it would, and yet all of these things are regularly done by lawyers in the course of their work.
Those are, indeed, all examples of persuading human beings.
The other two are excellent points.
"persuading human beings" is not exactly the same thing as "convincing other humans that your interpretation is correct."
Besides, in negotiating an agreement much of the attorney's job consists of (1) advising his client of issues which are likely to arise; (2) helping the client to understand which issues are more important and which are less important; and (3) drafting language to address those issues. Yes, persuasion comes into it sometimes, but it's usually not primary.
Filing a lawsuit for unpaid wages can be seen as persuasion in a general sense. If Baughn wants to claim that in a strict sense, litigation is about getting other people to do stuff, then I would agree.
Thank you.
In a narrow, rather than a strict sense. In that same narrow sense:
science is about convincing other humans that your experiments are correct
art is about convincing other humans that what you have made is art
parenting is about convincing other humans that you are a good parent
working for a living is about convincing other humans to pay you a living
competitions are about convincing other humans that you have won
teaching is about convincing other humans that you are teaching
being intelligent is about convincing other humans that you are intelligent
living is about convincing other humans that you are not yet dead
What if you convince everyone that you're a good parent while poisoning your child?
And everyone else can believe you're dead and you can still be alive. In fact sometimes in order to live you have to convince everyone you're dead.
Quite. Those were all intended to be bad arguments. Bad at a caricature level of badness. But Poe's law, I guess.
Oops, my fail. I thought you were saying 'there's nothing special about the law'.
But surely art really is about convincing other human beings that you've made art. What on earth else is going on?
And I reckon that there are aspects of law that aren't covered, but a barrister who can't convince is completely useless in court.
Off to update my estimate of my own written-irony perception skills.
This is the sort of question that you have to already know the answer to, to be able to ask. I won't attempt a definition, but as we all know, it involves such things as "the creation of things of beauty", "the expression of a truth that nothing else can express", and so on. That is what art is. We all know that that is what art is.
But for purposes of contradiction, suppose otherwise. Suppose art was entirely about convincing people that you have made art. Then the statement is a definition of art as being the fixed point of the formula "X is about convincing people you have made X". What in this formula picks out the class of works that, when we look at the real world, we see everyone calling art? There is nothing. If this is truly a statement of everything that art is, we should be able to insert a made-up name in the definition and convey the same information: "pightlewarble is about convincing people you have made pightlewarble". The fact that the revised sentence conveys nothing, yet "art is about convincing people you have made art" conveys something, demonstrates that the latter only communicates something because we already know something about what art is.
When such a sentiment is expressed, what it is intended to communicate is a criticism of art as practiced in the speaker's time and place. The claim is that what is being produced is not art, and that it fails to be art precisely because its creators have concerned themselves with nothing more than getting an artistic reputation among a similarly corrupt audience, and have failed to aim at making art at all. The "art" that the sentence is about is being asserted to be not art. The real meaning is the opposite of the literal meaning.
A similar analysis applies to every one of the examples I gave. All of them, when seriously uttered, mean the opposite of their literal reading.
Of course, the artist wants an audience, the lawyer must persuade the court, and so on. But these are not the terminal goals of the activities, and to take them for such is wireheading.
Here is another example. Tomorrow I will travel some 300 miles to Glasgow. How will I know when I have arrived? Well, if all goes to plan, the train will be pulling into Glasgow at about when the timetable says, there will be an announcement on the train, I will see signs on the platform saying "Glasgow", I've been there several times before so it will probably look familiar, and so on. (Btw, I also expect to be both busy and offline most of the weekend.)
So is travelling to Glasgow entirely about convincing myself that I have travelled to Glasgow? Of course, I have to reach the state of being convinced, just as the lawyer must convince the court etc. But the real goal is not to merely be convinced that I am in Glasgow, but to actually be there. In the real world of here and now (a place not as well frequented by LessWrongers as it might be) the only way of achieving the perception is to achieve the reality. Were this not so, my ability to achieve my real goal would be compromised, and I would have to find some other way of detecting when the goal was achieved. Compare the task of flying an aircraft in turbulence and poor visibility. A pilot who thinks that keeping the aircraft level is about feeling that the craft is level will crash. He has to trust the instruments above his physical sensations, and the instruments are there because the sensations are unreliable under those conditions.
Would you get on a train, if maintenance of the railway system was literally entirely about filling in the forms saying that the maintenance had been done?
Is it, really? Have you thought about art as pure self-expression? Art as a way to attempt to magically manipulate reality? Even art as a way to make something look pretty?
Then you are a successful Christian Scientist, say. Those are all descriptive claims, not normative ones.
... and the best way to do that is, in theory, to do good experiments. Hence replication and so forth. That's the basic idea of Science. (Alarmingly, some modern "scientists" have indeed been found cutting out the middle-man, as it were.)
Yes, this seems like a reasonable assessment. Some people have other goals in influencing the minds of their viewers, although this tends to edge into advertising etc.
No, this is only the lower bound that allows you to retain a child. Most of the rewards etc. of parenting are unrelated.
Definately.
This seems quite analogous to law, if the layer is themself the defendant.
In practice, sadly, it is. The incentive structure for teachers is pathetic, because no-one actually cares about it..
Not sure what to make of these last two, they don't seem remotely analogous to the OP.
More seriously, law is also about predicting what those humans will be most easily convinced of.
I think Spooner got it right:
-Lysander Spooner from "An Essay on the Trial by Jury"
There is legitimate law, but not once law is licensed, and the system has been recursively destroyed by sociopaths, as our current system of law has been. At such a point in time, perverse incentives and the punishment of virtue attracts sociopaths to the study and practice of law, and drives out all moral and decent empaths from its practice. If not driven out, it renders them ineffective defenders of the good, while enabling the prosecutors who hold the power of "voir dire" jury-stacking to be effective promoters of the bad.
The empathy-favoring nature of unanimous, proper (randomly-selected) juries trends toward punishment only in cases where 99.9% of society nearly-unanimously agree on the punishment, making punishment rare. ...As it should be in enlightened civilizations.
They can vote against people who write or enforce unjust laws. There's not much they can do about the judicial branch, but they only need to stop one branch.
That's the US anyway. I don't know the details about other countries.
If there's that much corruption, as opposed to people simply not voting for what they claim to care about, I don't think juries are going to be much help.
Interesting. There are famous cases of self-taught lawyers from previous centuries.
I wonder if this says something bad about the modern legal system. Maybe the modern legal system is less about making arguments based on how the law works (or should work) than about the lawyer signaling high status to the judge so that he rules in your favor.
I don't think I have good reason to think this is the case. At any rate, it's clear enough that the prestige bit seems to come in heavily in hiring decisions, so let's just talk about that. How, in the ideal case, do you think lawyers would be evaluated for jobs? Off hand, I can't think of anything a lawyer could produce to show that she's a good hire.
I'm not a lawyer, and English law is different from American, but I reckon that I can tell the difference between good and bad lawyers by talking to them for a while about various cases in their speciality and listening to them explain the various arguments and counter-arguments.
I've heard people who make a good living from the law make incoherent wishful-thinking type arguments about which way a case should have gone, when I can see perfectly well how the judge was compelled to the conclusion that he came to. I wouldn't want such a person defending me.
Presumably if you are yourself a good lawyer, it shouldn't be too difficult to do this. The law is fairly logical and rigorous.
Well, if his "reality distortion field" was powerful enough to also affect judges.
There are famous cases of self-taught specialists in scientific fields, too. There aren't so many of them nowadays. That's because both the law and science are in a state where a practitioner must know a lot of details that didn't exist as part of the field in earlier days.
What exactly is meant by the phrase "BS discipline"? Is the claim that most scholarship in law is meaningless nonsense? Or is the claim that there is no societal value at all in law? Or is it something else?
I suppose a discipline is BS if in the case of a science, it fails to systematically track the realities of an object of study. In the case of a trade, like business management or welding, then it's a BS discipline if it fails to make its practitioners more successful than those outside the discipline. I'm not sure what kind of a discipline law is.
Taleb's thought, I suppose, is that a discipline is likely to be BS if, instead of directly measuring the capabilities of its practitioners, we tend to measure only indirectly. This only implies that direct measurement is costly enough to outweigh its benefits, however. One reason for its being so may be that there's nothing to measure directly (i.e. the discipline is BS), but another might be that the discipline is so specialized that very few people are competent to judge any given applicant. Yet a third might be that its subject matter is subject to a lot of mind-killing, so that one can confidently judge an applicant without bias.
I agree that it's difficult to tell how good a lawyer is, which leads to a lot of nonsense like firms spending a lot of money of impressive offices and spending hours and hours of time chasing down every last grammatical error before filing court papers.
This is true for a lot of professions. Most of them don't have the problem you're describing.
Would you mind giving me three examples? This would help me think about what you are saying. TIA.
Plumbers, auto-mechanics, doctors.
Thank you for answering. I would have to say that with plumbers and auto-mechanics, it is a lot easier to assess how good they are compared to lawyers since if they do their job properly, the problem they are working on will normally be solved and if they do not do their job properly, the problem will normally not be solved. Do you agree with this?
I agree that with doctors, there is a similar problem of difficulty in assessing quality as with lawyers. On the other hand, there are also problems with doctors spending energy on signalling, although perhaps not as bad as with lawyers. For example, caring about where a doctor went to medical school; prestigious internships; and spending money on impressive facilities. Do you agree with this?
And with a lawyer you can tell what the outcome of the trial was. Now obviously, the lawyers might overcharge you, but you also have the same problems with car mechanics and plumbers. Also for some cases what kind of outcome one can reasonably expect can depend on details of the case that may not be obvious to an non-lawyer, but you have the same problem with car mechanics.
Also, with all four of plumbers, auto-mechanics, doctors, and lawyers (especially contract lawyers) its possible for them to screw up in ways that aren't immediately obvious but will cause problems down the line. (With lawyers one will at least be more obvious that the lawyer screwed up when the problem finally surfaces.)
How about manifacturers of multivitamins?
(BTW, the term for this sort of things is credence goods.)
This seems false in physics. Prestige of your institution matters. Prestige of the journal matters, too. Arxiv is fine, Physical Reviews is better, PRL is better yet. Nature/Science is so high, if you publish something that is not perceived as top-quality, you may get resented by others for status jumping. And there are plenty of journals which only get to publish second- and third-rate results.
Of course, the usual countersignaling caveat applies: once you have enough status, posting on Arxiv is enough, you will get read. Not submitting to journals can be seen as a sign of status, though I don't think the field is there (yet).
My understating is that this effect is a lot smaller in physics than in the humanities.
By that standard, all academic disciplines are BS disciplines.
I believe that is the intended meaning, yes.
Can't be. You can't draw a distinction within a category by separating it into two subcategories one of which is empty.
You can, though it's usually useless; but it also depends on whether that subcategory is always necessarily empty or it happens to be empty now but in principle it could be non-empty.
(But it's still a fallacy of grey: even if all academic disciplines were, in fact, BS disciplines, some disciplines may still be less BS than others.)
The category being separated is "disciplines", which divides into "BS" and "non-BS". "Academic" disciplines are thus a further subcategory of "BS" disciplines.
Actually, "academic" disciplines would probably be a subcategory of "disciplines" which is largely but not entirely subsumed by "BS" disciplines, but I don't usually demand that level of precision from witticisms.
[For the record, separating a category into two subcategories and proving one of them empty is just another way of proving the original category is identical with the non-empty subcategory. It is, indeed, valid from a technical perspective.]