A couple of those (specifically lines 2, 5, and 11) should probably be "I'm" rather than "I am" to preserve the rhythm.

Don't go before a hungry judge.

That doesn't seem quite true... if I'm confused while reading a textbook, I may be perceiving the limits of my understanding but not perceiving magic.

The percept of magic, given its possible hallucination or implantation, is not necessarily an instance of limited understanding; certainly not in the relevant sense here, at least.

You could also be perceiving something way way past the limits of your own understanding, or alternately perceiving something which would be well within the limits of your understanding if you were looking at it from a different angle

Or, (4), "I keep asking, but they won't say"....

Now repeat the same statement, only instead of abortions and carbon taxes, substitute the words "believe in homeopathy". (Creationism also works.)

People do say that--yet it doesn't mean any of the things the quote claims it means (at least not in a nontrivial sense).

While I agree with your actual point, I note with amusement that what's worse is the people who claim they do understand: "I understand that you want to own a gun because it's a penis-substitute", "I understand that you don't want me to own a gun because you live in a fantasy world where there's no crime", "I understand that you're talking about my beauty because you think you own me", "I understand that you complain about people talking about your beauty as a way of boasting about how beautiful you are."... None of these explanations are anywhere near true.

It would be a sign of wisdom if someone actually did post "I'm stupid: I can hardly ever understand the viewpoint of anyone who disagrees with me."

In modernity at least, moral values are incommensurable, insofar as they are generally internally coherent, and no standard prior to and independent of their first principles can adjudicate between competitor theories. Hence the shrill, circular debates which make no, and simply cannot, progress in politics. I think moral utterances are appropriately conceptualised through an emotivist conception of use: as being used to express preference and attitude, and to make the person under conversation register that preference and attitude, while the sense/reference of the words nevertheless being inherited fragments from (more than anything else, in the Western world) Christian Aristotelian. The question then turns to one of where the preferences and attitudes with ostensible moral form come from, and how we should evaluate this second-order phenomenon.

People do lots of silly things to signal commitment; the silliness is part of the point. This is a reason initiation rituals are often humiliating, and why members of minor religions often wear distinctive clothing or hairstyles. (I think I got this from this podcast interview with Larry Iannaccone.)

I think posts like the ones to which McArdle is referring, and the beliefs underlying them, are further examples of signaling attire. "I'm so committed, I'm even blind to whatever could be motivating the other side."

A related podcast is with Arnold Kling on his e-book (which I enjoyed) The Three Languages of Politics. It's about (duh) politics--specifically, American politics--but it also contains an interesting and helpful discussion on seeing things from others' point of view, and explicitly points to commitment-signaling (and its relation to beliefs) as a reason people fail to see eye to eye.

Or add a fourth laying: I think that I will rise in status by publically signalling to my facebook friends: "I lack the ability or willingness to attempt even a basic understanding of the people who disagree with me."

I like this and agree that usually or at least often the people making these "I don't understand how anyone could ..." statements aren't interested in actually understanding the people they disagree with. But I also liked Ozy's comment:

I dunno. I feel like "I don't understand how anyone could believe X" is a much, much better position to take on issues than "I know exactly why my opponents disagree with me! It is because they are stupid and evil!" The former at least opens the possibility that your opponents believe things for good reasons that you don't understand -- which is often true!

In general, I believe it is a good thing to admit ignorance when one is actually ignorant, and I am willing to put up with a certain number of dumbass signalling games if it furthers this goal.

Hmmm... let's try filling something else in there.

"I don't understand how anyone could support ISIS/Bosnian genocide/North Darfur."

While I think a person is indeed more effective at life for being able to perform the cognitive contortions necessary to bend their way into the mindset of a murderous totalitarian (without actually believing what they're understanding), I don't consider normal people lacking for their failure to understand refined murderous evil of the particularly uncommon kind -- any more than I expect them to understand the appeal of furry fandom (which I feel a bit guilty for picking out as the canonical Ridiculously Uncommon Weird Thing).

I don't understand what he wanted to say by this. Could somebody explain?

Airplanes may not work on fusion or weigh millions of tons, but still, substituting a few words in I could say similar things about airplanes. Or electrical grids. Or smallpox vaccination. But nobody does.

Hypothesis: he has an emotional reaction to the way nuclear weapons are used--he thinks that is arrogant--and he's letting those emotions bleed into his reaction to nuclear weapons themselves.

If I remember the book correctly, this part comes from a scene where Locke Lamora is attempting to pull a double con on the speaking character by both impersonating the merchant and a spy/internal security agent (Salvara) investigating the merchant. So while the don's character acts "rationally" here - he is doing so while being deceived because of his assumptions - showing the very same error again

If only I cared about who goes to my funeral.

Opportunity costs?

I would say it should be the one with best expected returns. But I guess Taleb thinks the possibility of a very bad black swan overrides everything else - or at least that's what I gathered from his recent crusade against GMOs.

I know that. People are so lame. Not me though. I am one of the genius ones.

People who often misunderstand others: 6% of geniuses, 94% of garden-variety nonsense-spouters.

We see what we see for adaptive reasons, not because it is the truth.

Contrast:

Nature cannot be fooled.

-- Feynman

One might even FTFY the first quote as:

"We see what we see for adaptive reasons, because it is the truth."

This part:

Nerds are the ones who notice that something is off - and want to see what's really going on.

is contradicted by the context of the whole article. The article is in praise of insight porn (the writer's own words for it) as the cognitive experience of choice for nerds (the writer's word for them, in whom he includes himself and for whom he is writing) while explicitly considering its actual truth to be of little importance. He praises the experience of reading Julian Jaynes and in the same breath dismisses Jaynes' actual claims as "batshit insane and obviously wrong".

In other words, "Nerds ... want to see what's really going on" is, like the whole article, a statement of insight porn, uttered for the feeling of truthy insight it gives, "not because it is the truth".

How useful is this to someone who actually wants "to see what's really going on"?

I downvoted this and another comment further up for not being about anything but nerd pandering, which I feel is just ego-boosting noise. Not the type of content I want to see on here.

The easy way to make a convincing simulation is to disable the inner critic.

That or the extent of the human capacity for pareidolia on waking.

Related: When (Not) To Use Probabilities:

I would advise, in most cases, against using non-numerical procedures to create what appear to be numerical probabilities. Numbers should come from numbers. (...) you shouldn't go around thinking that, if you translate your gut feeling into "one in a thousand", then, on occasions when you emit these verbal words, the corresponding event will happen around one in a thousand times. Your brain is not so well-calibrated.

This specific topic came up recently in the context of the Large Hadron Collider (...) the speaker actually purported to assign a probability of at least 1 in 1000 that the theory, model, or calculations in the LHC paper were wrong; and a probability of at least 1 in 1000 that, if the theory or model or calculations were wrong, the LHC would destroy the world.

I object to the air of authority given these numbers pulled out of thin air. (...) No matter what other physics papers had been published previously, the authors would have used the same argument and made up the same numerical probabilities

Was the context one where Waterhouse was proving a conditional, "if axioms A, B, C, then theorem Z", or one where where he was trying to establish Z as a truth about the world, and therefore also had the burden of showing that axioms A, B, C were supported by experimental evidence?

This quote seems to me like it touches a common fallacy: that making "confident" probability estimates (close to 0 or 1) is the same as being a "confident" person. In fact, they're ontologically distinct.

Neal Stephenson is good as a sci-fi writer, but I think he's almost as good as an ethnographer of nerds. Pretty much everything he writes has something like this in it, and most of it is spot-on.

On the other hand, he does occasionally succumb to a sort of mild geek-supremacist streak (best observed in Anathem, unless you're one of the six people besides me who were obsessed enough to read In The Beginning... Was The Command Line).

I don't see what to do about gaps in arguments. Gaps aren't random. There are little gaps where the original authors have chosen to use their limited word count on other, more delicate, parts of their argument, confident that charitable readers will be happy to fill the small gaps themselves in the obvious ways. There are big gaps where the authors have gone the other way, tip toeing around the weakest points in their argument. Perhaps they hope no-one else will notice. Perhaps they are in denial. Perhaps there are issues with the clarity of the logical structure that make it easy to whiz by the gap without noticing it.

The third perhaps is especially tricky. If you "re-express your target’s position ... clearly" you remove the obfuscation that concealed the gap. Now what? Leaving the gap in clear view creates a strawman. Attempting to fill it draws a certain amount of attention to it; you certainly fail the ideological Turing test because you are making arguments that you opponents don't make. Worse, big gaps are seldom accidental. They are there because they are hard to fill. Indeed it might be the difficulty of filling the gap that made you join the other side of the debate in the first place. What if your best effort to fill the gap is thin and unconvincing?

Example: Some people oppose the repeal of the prohibition of cannabis because "consumption will increase". When you try to make this argument clear you end up distinguishing between good-use and bad-use. There is the relax-on-a-Friday-night-after-work kind of use which is widely accepted in the case of alcohol and can be termed good-use. There is the behaviour that gets called "pissing your talent away" when it beer-based. That is bad-use.

When you try to bring clarity to the argument you have to replace "consumption will increase" by "bad-use will increase a lot and good-use will increase a little, leading to a net reduction in aggregate welfare." But the original "consumption will increase" was obviously true, while the clearer "bad+++, good+, net--" is less compelling.

The original argument had a gap (just why is an increase in consumption bad?). Writing more clearly exposes the gap. Your target will not say "Thanks for exposing the gap, I wish I'd put it that way.". But it is not an easy gap to fill convincingly. Your target is unlikely to appreciate your efforts on behalf of his case.

The dubious “lessons” of this forced labor as an overqualified ragpicker are that children are entitled to treat their mothers’ time as worth nothing, that you can make the world a better place by destroying economic value, and that the moral worth of an action should be measured by the conspicuousness of the sacrifice rather than the gain to the beneficiary.

What about: "using the education system to collect forced labor as a 'lesson' in altruism teaches selfishness and fails at altruism"?

Mostly correct, but only very loosely related to rationality.

all the good stuff (like the fiber) taken out

Vitamins also are good stuff but they aren't taken out (or when they are they usually are put back in, AFAIK).

A search brings up http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRSearch.cfm?fr=101.30 .

This seems to contradict the claim that "Sometimes there isn’t even any actual fruit in there, just chemicals that taste like fruit," since it would have to say "contains less than 1% juice" or not be described as juice at all.

Ambivalent about this one.

I like the idea of rational argument as a sign of intellectual respect, but I don't like things that are so easy to use as fully general debate stoppers, especially when they have a built-in status element.

I see the point, but on the other hand it leads to "Lie back and think of England" situations...

The rest of the article is also well worth the read.

I would like this quote more if instead of “has a positive utility for getting” it said “wants to get”.

What if he wanted to make them stay in love?

The idea that marriage is purely about love is a recent one.

Adams' lifestyle might work for a certain kind of wealthy high IQ rootless cosmopolitan but not for the other 95% of the world.

Living in the same house and coordinating lives isn't a method for ensuring that people stay in love; being able to is proof that they are already in love. An added social construct is a perfectly reasonable option to make it harder to change your mind.