Hmmm. I have a slightly different experience to you. I am bilingual - English/Afrikaans - though my Afrikaans was never a language I used a lot and I have a very poor grasp of it in comparison.

This has led to something interesting - if I try to think in Afrikaans, I notice a distinct difference in my thoughts. Normally, my thoughts take the form of an internal monologue (almost, but not quite, exclusively). If I try to think in Afrikaans, which has a different grammar (and importantly, a different word order) to English, then I get the distinct impression of parts of my thoughts queued up and waiting for their part of the sentence to happen. This tells me that there are more complicated things going on inside my head than I had previously thought.

...though interesting, I have not as yet found any practical use for this knowledge.

I, too, sometimes find that it is easier for me to express certain ideas in English than in my native language. However, I guess, in my case the reason seems to be analogous to the reasons mentioned in Steven Pinker's article "Why Academics Stink at Writing". Although it mainly talks about why academics find it difficult to express their ideas in simple words, it seems to me that if one uses predominantly English in certain settings or talking about certain subjects, then the reasons (chunking and functional fixedness) why ideas about these subjects are difficult to express in one's native language are probably similar.

Scholars lose their moorings in the land of the concrete because of two effects of expertise that have been documented by cognitive psychology. One is called chunking. To work around the limitations of short-term memory, the mind can package ideas into bigger and bigger units, which the psychologist George Miller dubbed "chunks." As we read and learn, we master a vast number of abstractions, and each becomes a mental unit that we can bring to mind in an instant and share with others by uttering its name. An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine of reason, but it comes at a cost: a failure to communicate with other minds that have not mastered the same chunks.

The amount of abstraction a writer can get away with depends on the expertise of his readership. But divining the chunks that have been mastered by a typical reader requires a gift of clairvoyance with which few of us are blessed. When we are apprentices in our chosen specialty, we join a clique in which, it seems to us, everyone else seems to know so much! And they talk among themselves as if their knowledge were conventional wisdom to every educated person. As we settle into the clique, it becomes our universe. We fail to appreciate that it is a tiny bubble in a multiverse of cliques. When we make first contact with the aliens in other universes and jabber at them in our local code, they cannot understand us without a sci-fi universal translator.

[...]

The second way in which expertise can make our thoughts harder to share is that as we become familiar with something, we think about it more in terms of the use we put it to and less in terms of what it looks like and what it is made of. This transition is called functional fixity. In the textbook experiment, people are given a candle, a book of matches, and a box of thumbtacks, and are asked to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax won’t drip onto the floor. The solution is to dump the thumbtacks out of the box, tack the box to the wall, and stick the candle onto the box. Most people never figure this out because they think of the box as a container for the tacks rather than as a physical object in its own right. The blind spot is called functional fixity because people get fixated on an object’s function and forget its physical makeup.

Now, if you combine functional fixity with chunking, and stir in the curse that hides each one from our awareness, you get an explanation of why specialists use so much idio­syncratic terminology, together with abstractions, metaconcepts, and zombie nouns. They are not trying to bamboozle their readers; it’s just the way they think. The specialists are no longer thinking—and thus no longer writing—about tangible objects, and instead are referring to them by the role those objects play in their daily travails. A psychologist calls the labels true and false "assessment words" because that’s why he put them there—so that the participants in the experiment could assess whether it applied to the preceding sentence. Unfortunately, he left it up to us to figure out what an "assessment word" is.

While scholars package their ideas and abstractions into chunks, in everyday language we package the connotations of words/idioms/expressions into similar implicit chunks that are hard to separate from the word/idiom/expression itself. Direct translation might not preserve all these connotations. It seems to me that while we could try to preserve some connotations that are most relevant in a given situation, we might feel uncomfortable doing so, because losing connotations feels like losing accuracy and precise meaning of what we tried to convey, even in situations where a simple paraphrase could preserve connotations that are actually relevant.

In a professional setting, functional fixedness becomes very important. It is probably the reason why so much professional jargon (outside the Anglosphere) is based on other languages, especially English.

Are there no instances in Russian which reveal a poorly categorized concept in English, or vice-versa?

I'm surprised ESR didn't bring up the difficulty of talking about "free software" in a language that doesn't distinguish "libre" from "gratuit", for example.

My own favorite example is how stunningly ambiguous the word "why" seems after learning about finer distinctions like the "por que" vs "para que" distinction in Spanish. How many creationists are subconsciously confused by the fact that "from what cause?" and "for what purpose?" are treated in English as identical questions?

You can always translate the ambiguity logically (into any sufficiently "complete" language?), but the increased awkwardness of the translation may have an effect. For an example from today's news commentary: even some ardent feminists are surprised to learn that "Banksy" might be a woman, possibly because even if you know intellectually that English uses "he" as a neutral pronoun for a person of unknown gender, that's not always enough to prevent prose references to an unknown person as "he" from affecting you subliminally.

Which features of English do you miss?

The tricky part is the "achievable levels of accuracy". It would be possible for, say Galileo to invent general relativity using the orbit of mercury, probably. But from a pebble, you would need VERY precise measurements, to an absurd level.

I always feel a bit bad for Vizzini. His plan is very well thought-out and sensible; he's just in the entirely wrong genre for those qualities to be remotely relevant to its success.

It doesn't help that up to that point, the genre looks like one where it should work. Obviously the character's timeline could make it more obvious, but from ours it isn't.

But the map is the map...

I saw it as more of a warning about the limits of maps - when something happens that you think is impossible, then it is time to update your map, and not rail against the territory for failing to match it.

(Of course, it is possible that you have been fooled, somehow, into thinking that something has happened which has, in actual fact, not happened. This possibility should be considered and appropriately weighted (given whatever evidence you have of the thing actually happening) against the possibility that the map is simply wrong.)

No observation is false. Any explanation for a given observation may, with finite probability, be false; no matter how obvious and inarguable it may seem.

That may be, but if you label them 'impossible' and dismiss them, you won't gather more evidence to prove it. And if something you consider impossible has actually happened, you're missing an opportunity to improve your model significantly.

This is in fact what happens in-context. With a preposterously-detailed description of observable events (via magic hypnosis; I didn't say the novel made sense), Gently concludes that something has happened which could not have happened as described, and that the only explanation which would explain the results involves time travel; the other person says that it's impossible, to which Gently replies this.

It seems to me that this is related to the idea of roles. If you don't see yourself as being responsible for handling emergencies, you probably won't do anything about them, hoping someone else will. But if you do see yourself as being the person responsible for handling a crisis situation, then you're a lot more likely to do something about it, because you've taken that responsibility upon yourself.

It's a particularly nuanced response to both take that kind of responsibility for a situation, and then, after carefully evaluating the options, decide that the best course is to do nothing, since it conflicts with that cultivated need to respond. That said, it could easily be a better choice than the alternative of making a probably-bad decision in the spur of the moment with incomplete information. Used properly, it's a level above the position of decisive but unplanned action... though on the surface, it can be hard to distinguish from the default bystander position of passing off responsibility.

Dr. Bowmen is consistently two steps ahead of the base commander. Instead of not causing emergencies, he might just leave better traps. Or nastier ones.

Or he would take advantage of what they would predictably do.

Well put!

max( Candy / e^Walking )

fudged with a constant of proportionality (pun intended).

The key here is the halting requirement. The other stuff is red herrings.

Inconceivable, isn't it? Extra points for actually implementing it.

The trope is Villains Act Heroes React, and the Foundation stories don't actually defy this AFAIC recall.

It might be more accurate to say that Ayn Rand's heroes start with grand and awesome schemes. There's a lot of speechifying in between, but in terms of action they always seem to degenerate into some form of "screw you guys, I'm going home" by the end.

I haven't read it for a long time, but I remember thinking that the first third of Atlas Shrugged is a much better book than the whole thing -- because up to that point, it's a novel about building something great in the face of adversity, and after that the adversity wins and it becomes a novel about spite and destruction on all sides. Also because it's way too long for its plot, but never mind that.

It's not clear to me that this is a counterexample. Ayn Rand's fiction strikes me as mediocre in general, but what strength it has seems to flow from following this principle.

[edit]I seem to have misread the parent, and am agreeing with it.

The dialogues in the film versions of Atlas Shrugged always felt bland and lame to me until I realized that the "good ones" were saying their lines as "good ones." When I read the book, I felt instinctively drawn to imagining the "good ones" saying their lines as "villains." When you read Dagny as the villain, her dialogues feel much more potent.

http://www.cliffstamp.com/knives/forum/read.php?5,28239,page=2

Maybe you? Apparently you have some specific Open Problems in mind - I don't. Could you spell them out?

Those studies show improvement with MDMA, but they have small sample sizes and their control groups (which get similarly unusually intense/long therapy sessions without MDMA) show some improvement too. The "apparently miraculous" effect size is at least a good part hype.

Also, lots of people take MDMA in non-therapeutic contexts and lie about it, so it isn't like you're going to find a control group of people you can be definitely sure haven't taken MDMA since they got PTSD - especially if they've heard of said hype.

I'm not saying MDMA doesn't help with PTSD (I even grant that it could help in the treatment of Antisocial Personality, Postpartum Depression and especially Couples Therapy), I'm just saying I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of the measured effect was due to the length/intensity of the therapeutic sessions these studies use, rather than due to the drug.

I have difficulties confirming your point. I can't say anything about his positive psychology though that sees to be OK but Seligman's evaluation of 'what you can/can't change' seems to be very well established. Could you point me to your contrary evidence?

I've asked SJs whether there was ever a time in their lives when they thought they were in a group that was satisfyingly inclusive, whether there was some experience they were trying to make more common. Admittedly, I only asked a few people (and with tact set on maximum). The only answer I got was no.

It's possible I was overgeneralizing in several ways, but I was asking because it seemed to me that what I'd read of anti-racism had a tone of "something hurts, it's urgent to stop the pain", but there was no positive vision.

This might have something to do with political (and maybe even choices inside businesses) which actually make life better vs. those that don't. There's always some sort of vision, but maybe there are issues related not just to whether pieces of the vision are accurate, but whether it's clear enough in appropriate ways. For example, was part of the problem with centralized economies that no one had a clear idea of how information would get transmitted? (This is a real question.)

No plan survives contact with the enemy (or reality), but that doesn't mean you can just wing it. Of course you need a specific plan, but you also need the ability to change that plan as needed, in a controlled and sensible way. Realising the problems of advanced planning means you need to spend more time, not less, on working out what you are trying to do.

no revolution ever produced the system that the people who threw the revolution planned to introduce

This is trivially true if you mean that no revolution produced the desired result up to the end of time. But then, the same is true of anything any human being does.

If you interpret it in a narrow, nontrivial way such as "no revolution produced a result that was close to the desired result and took at least as long enough to become unrecognizeable as the existing order would have taken to become unrecognizeable", then there are several candidates, including the American Revolution and several post-Soviet states (if you count leaving the USSR as a revolution).

An explicit argument that lack of regulation would produce better results than the current regulatory system is not the same thing as disliking and actively opposing the current system yet having no idea what to replace it with.

It's amazing!

We have to assess claims about oppression based on more than just what people say about themselves. If I took the idea of the infallibility of the oppressed seriously, I would have to trust that dragons exist. That is why it’s such an unreliable guide. (I half-expect the response, “Check your human privilege!”)

I took it as a reminder of what was discussed in How to Actually Change Your Mind: confirmation bias, affective death spirals etc.

While this is on My Side, I still have to protest trying to sneak any side (or particular (group of) utility function(s)) into the idea of "rationality".

To be fair, while it is possible to have a coherent preference for death far more often people have a cached heuristic to refrain from exactly the kind of (bloody obvious) reasoning that Boy 2 is explaining. Coherent preferences are a 'rationality' issue.

Since nothing in the quote prescribes the preference and instead merely illustrates reasoning that happens to follow from having preferences like those of Boy 2. If Boy 2 was saying (or implying) that Boy 1 should want to live to infinity then there would be a problem.

Yes, but plenty of hostile AIs would prefer to exist forever, if possible, since that would let them make more paperclips "and everything". The quote doesn't present life as a terminal goal (an end in itself).

It's a bit unclear without the context, but what he means is that subjects should think more about the task and realize that they need to, e.g. use a pen and paper.

Marriage to Kim Kardashian is not contagious.

As far as we know! Perhaps it simply has a long incubation period, and transitive polyamory will be legally recognized some time in the 2020s.

And for all the scaremongering over so-called 'dinosaur killer' asteroids, total casualties are very low (even including Chelyabinsk)!

died from UFAI

How sure are you about that? Everyone on Air France flight 447 died as a direct result of insufficiently-friendly AI. Patient zero for ebola in the US was discharged from the emergency room with some painkillers and antibiotics because software looking through his medical records failed to recognize, and call the triage nurse's attention to, obvious risk factors.

That did cause some problems with quantum physics, when they assumed that their measuring equipment along with the scientists themselves weren't getting stuck in quantum superposition.

Interesting position! I can't speak for James, but I want to engage with this. Let's pretend, for the scope of this thread, that I made the statement about the proper role of skepticism.

I'm happy to endorse your wording. I agree it's more precise to talk about "claims" than "things" in this context.

Quick communication check. When you say "increased" you're implying at least two distinct levels of skepticism. From your assertion, I gather that difficult-to-measure claims like "there exist good leaders, people who can improve the performance of the rest of their team" will face your higher level of skepticism.

Could you give me an example of a claim that faces your lower level of skepticism?

We're doing politics? Cool.

In a very short-term sense, "death panels". We provide a terrible end-of-life experience for people; we keep people barely at great expense in states of pain and confusion as long as possible even when this is not something that they would want; finite healthcare dollars are thus spent torturing the dying rather than fixing treatable problems in otherwise healthy people.

An attempt to make a dent in this (by at least getting people to talk about advance-care directives, for example) was derailed in a failed attempt to score some political points. As a result, this will continue to be a problem for the foreseeable future, because it's no longer a technical problem, it's a Red Team/Blue Team thing. Well done, politics.

Excellent point, but his prior was even weaker.

Without doing much in the way of research, which would spoil the game, I think the quote is urging people not to privilege the beliefs of the culture they live in. For example, many popular beliefs of the 1900's are clearly incorrect when viewed in hindsight; the logical conclusion is that, in a hundred years, many popular beliefs today will be seen as clearly incorrect by those future generations.

I can think of a few likely candidates off the top of my head. And sorry for the sesquipedalian loquaciousness. I keep trying to stop, but I can't!