Thanks for these summaries.
When Ariely left Cokes in dorm fridges, they disappeared within 72 hours. When he did the same thing with $1 bills, no one touched them, because people take money more seriously.
Out of curiosity, did he literally leave $1 bills in fridges? That's odd enough (who puts money in a fridge?) that people might be suspicious that they are being watched. It's like those twenty-dollar bills attached to threads that practical jokers use to taunt pedestrians.
There is a difference between concept analysis - which ideally ends with words having a useful meaning - and a different, less productive kind of analysis which ideally ends up with words in a discussion having the same meaning that they have outside the discussion.
Philosophers are indeed uniquely trained to conduct the first kind of analysis.
In a world where you can tell someone to think of a square, and then use functional magnetic resonance imaging and find a pattern of neurons lit up in a square on his visual cortex,
Wait, is that literally true? Is it true in general that, when you think about a shape S, an actual S-shaped region of your brain lights up?
I can't help but think that that represents a serious privileging of the hypothesis - given a little black notebook claiming such absurd powers, you shouldn't carefully devise 20 different studies which try to falsify your various theories and inferences about its powers & limitations.
Unless you mean that after he verified that the Death Note did in fact kill supernaturally as claimed (after the biker and hostage-taker, I suppose), he should have gone into scientist mode?
In that case, my first thought is that from Light's perspective, delay is massive waste (all those dead people murdered by people who should be dead, eg.) and he thought he could handle any challenges that came his way. Which he was almost right about, after all.
So, who's worse? Greenspan or Rand? I'm pretty sure that very few people heading the F.R. would have done better than Greenspan... but Rand wrote a few novels that perfectly reflect her pathological psyche. She was a clear case of NPD and abused amphetamines for decades.
I've only read Atlas Shrugged.. and that only because I couldn't put it down. Had to see whether it could get any worse..
Arguably, the biggest mistake Light made was one of abstract strategy: he started using the Death Note almost immediately after obtaining it. He should have spent many years testing the thing, pondering its implications, studying police work, etc, before putting his plan into action.
Big DN fan, my thoughts:
1) Only a mistake if you consider his goal to be "kill as many people as possible" rather than "reduce crime as much as possible", and for the latter the small loss of anonymity may well be a justified sacrifice for the deterrent effect he could achieve by exposing his own existence. Especially since, as you point out, he might well have been discovered anyway.
2) Yep, pretty big mistake there.
3) I think you slightly under-rate this one, by not considering that L can't always eliminate people with certainty, prior to this it would have been possible that Kira was not Japanese but was timing his kills to make it look like he was to lead the police awry. This test made that hypothesis a lot less likely.
4) Agreed, this is the big screw-up, also probably the one that most of the viewers could have been expected to spot.
5) Bear in mind he was actually quite careful to prevent Penbar from being singled out, although he could have done better by delaying all the killings for a week or so. Misora would have narrowed down his anonymity even more had she not been killed.
For his optimal strategy, might he not have been even better off by deliberately sending misleading information, by timing the killings to indicate he lived somewhere else for example? After all, applying your strategy might well narrow it down to 'people who know information theory' which probably costs quite a few bits.
The categorization seems very weird. The word clusters basically sound like you'd be describing the same group in an out-group context, but would either want to frame them in a generally positive and inoffensive or a somewhat suspicious light.
Here's what these word-clusters suggest to me:
Liberal/Secular/Scientific: age 30-60, works at a university, thinks global warming is a more urgent problem than UFAI.
Libertarian/Atheist/Technophile: age 15-30, works as a programmer/reads Less Wrong from parents' basement, thinks UFAI is more urgent than global warming.
...in other words, basically a status classification.
This is quite true, but again, if I understand you correctly, what's at work here is the opposite of crypto-religiosity - it is determined denial of anything which might give non-materialistic entities a chance to reenter the conversation. A scorched-earth policy for materialist ontology.
I like that theory even better. It should encompass a superset of the behaviorists encompassed by my "religious cynic" theory - many militant atheists are former faithful gone cynical. But some are not; some learn animosity to the doctrine of the soul only from observing its bad effects.
When someone tries to get me outraged over something, I do quick distance and magnitude checks. In another country, involving people I've never heard of, involving low-level government officials doing something less bad than murder, which I couldn't plausibly affect in any way? Caring would be a mistake; if my outrage threshold were that low, I'd never do anything but fume.
That's been one of the reasons I've not donated either (apart from one £10 donation made for odd reasons). Unfortunately, the SIAI seem to have made a decision that they need to keep what work they're doing secret. That's understandable, but it means we have absolutely no idea what the actual effect of donation is.
do many attendees seem to expect a drop in rape incidence as a result of their action?
I think they expect an increase in convictions of rapists, and thus indirectly a drop in rapes because of the increased deterrent.
(A "Sluts With Knives" march?)
...would have the opposite of the desired effect. It would make it seem like it was the victim's responsibility to defend themselves.
The categorization seems very weird. The word clusters basically sound like you'd be describing the same group in an out-group context, but would either want to frame them in a generally positive and inoffensive or a somewhat suspicious light. I have a hard time seeing this as an actual actionable classification and not a framing trick.
I've got no idea whatsoever if the event is a good idea or not. This whole post seems a bit arbitrary for such a potential comment thread can of worms though.
The"Liberal/Secular/Scientific" and "Libertarian/Atheist/Technophile" phrasing also seems weird to me - is there really a split between "secular" and "atheist", and is it really correlated with politics? Same for "scientific" and "technophile" :P
I agree, with the 'rational/positive' thing and even more so with this technophile, etc stuff. I don't especially identify with any of those things. I could almost take all of them or none of them.
These protesters were dressed in revealing clothing and holding signs in order to reject the belief that female rape victims are "asking for it"
From the image search "Revealing clothing" seems to be an overstatement. Perhaps it is the selection effect on the personalities most engaged with this sort of issue but the average level of dress is less revealing than what I'd expect to see on the street on a warm day.
I don't see why I have to limit my approval to such categories as 'rational' and 'irrational'. I doubt it has much effect on the direct cause either way but it sounds like fun to participate in or watch. And hey, the participants get to go around dressing provocatively and feel morally virtuous for doing so. That's a rare opportunity to flip the script on a self limiting belief.
I'm not a big fan of the phrasing of your poll - I'd prefer if it was directly asking about approval / disapproval rather than "positive/rational" versus "negative/irrational"; it's not obvious what "rational" would mean in a context like this, beyond being generally positive in this community.
The"Liberal/Secular/Scientific" and "Libertarian/Atheist/Technophile" phrasing also seems weird to me - is there really a split between "secular" and "atheist", and is it really correlated with politics? Same for "scientific" and "technophile" :P
My general impression from the "Slutwalk" you describe is that it's more about "Yay sluts boo uptight cops and judges" than about actually reducing rape - do many attendees seem to expect a drop in rape incidence as a result of their action? IS your question about whether going "Yay sluts" is a good thing in general (which would seem to be highly function of the current status of sluts in Canadian society, a subject I know very little about), or whether it's an efficient way to reduce rape?
(Edit) Actually, a better framing might be that some judges / cops considered "boo sluts" as a way to reduce rape, and sluts responded to the status attack by going "no, it's not a good way - yay sluts!". Less focus on the status attack and more on alternative ways of reducing rape (A "Sluts With Knives" march?) might have been better.
OK, I'll strengthen it: If you want to be taken seriously then you should consider doing those things. Because on the face of it, it seems like (1) you've got this frankly rather crazy theory suggesting that behaviourist ideas are commonly motivated by a quasi-religious horror of the idea that mental states might be reducible, (2) typical behaviourists' thinking was pretty much the opposite of that, and (3) you've given no actual reason why your crazy-looking theory is at all likely to be right.
I see a few comments focusing on the metric as a valuation of understanding, I suppose a few people may have missed this:
It is useful to think of someone as a level above you if they can generate novel ideas that you can only understand, but could not have produced from scratch.
Bearing this portion of the claim in mind, here are my initial thoughts:
It seems a bit (only a very, very little bit) better to me than simply understanding an idea, but this whole 'levels' business seems far too vague to be useful, especially if we don't have any sort of objective metric for determining exactly how difficult a novel idea is to generate.
Intuitively it seems like the task of creating such a metric would require an understanding of all (or at least most) of the (cognitive and extra-cognitive) factors that play into idea generation, which makes it a very non-trivial task.
On top of the issue of having an objective metric for idea evaluation, we have to determine a valid metric for idea generation potential, because as it stands it appears to me that all we have to go on is the feeling that something is too hard to do, which does not seem even remotely reliable.
Further still, if we want to distinguish between "mutable" and "immutable" levels, it seems that we would have to determine what factors that go into idea generation can be effectively hacked in a reasonable period of time, which is yet another highly non-trivial problem. Bearing in mind these issues, it seems that the "levels" would almost certainly need to be significantly more gradated than this Level += 1, Mutable/Immutable structure.
In addition, even taking into account the reductionist concerns pointed out by komonisto, it seems very likely that bottom-level cognitive features would play into idea generation in various ways such that even if individual tasks were not level-separable (in the sense that gjm is talking about), some sets of tasks likely would be (or at least very nearly be, even if the division isn't always totally clean).
I bet if you took a sample of random kids and sent some to college and prevented the others from going, the college group would spend more time thinking about certain specific socially-valued college-related topics than the control group.
Or it could go horribly wrong... ;)
I bet if you took a sample of random kids and sent some to college and prevented the others from going, the college group would spend more time thinking about certain specific socially-valued college-related topics than the control group.
If you want a horse to drink, it often helps to lead him to water.
Phil, your last sentence is correct but as for the rest... it's as if you can't believe that these people simply meant what they said (there is no such thing as meaning or mind). Questions about meaning and mind were not threatening to philosophical behaviorists because they feared cognitive reductionism; those questions were threatening because the obvious answers led towards dualism and religion.
Remember that you are the beneficiary of many decades' worth of extra ideas and knowledge. OK, Kant talked about representation back in the 18th century, but Kant was seen in the English-speaking world as obtuse German metaphysics. Also, the localization of brain function was not seen in terms of representational function. The cognitive revolution of the 1970s, and the adoption within neuroscience of information processing concepts, were really big breakthroughs. It's like biology before and after Darwin: Before the idea of natural selection, it was a rare person who could look at the intricacies of biology and not think in terms of design. Similarly, before the idea of neural computation, it was really hard to think about the mind in a materialistic way. For example, Chomsky couldn't have written his critique without having the concept of a state machine.
As a result, materialist psychologists in the first half of the 20th century just didn't have the option of cognitive reductionism. Though I think the psychologists were less extreme about behaviorism than the philosophers. It really was a methodological choice for the psychologists, but the philosophers turned it into an ideology, and provided the sophisticated rationales for propositions like: there are no mental states, only words about mental states; and, words don't have meanings, they're just sounds which are produced within certain behavioral contexts.
In a comment you write "even a scientific theory can be hijacked by what we want to believe". This is quite true, but again, if I understand you correctly, what's at work here is the opposite of crypto-religiosity - it is determined denial of anything which might give non-materialistic entities a chance to reenter the conversation. A scorched-earth policy for materialist ontology. I believe this outlook is still at work, by the way, regarding qualia, the self, and so on. They do not fit naturally within the physical ontology we have, therefore they can't be real - so say some. These days there's a lot more belief in the harmony of science and subjectivity, to the point that people espouse views (the qualia are the computational states) which suffer from a different problem, crypto-dualism. (See Bertrand Russell for a materialistic thinker who was nonetheless good enough to realize that there is a problem in just identifying material states and mental states - thus his adventures in "neutral monism" and in various forms of aspect dualism.) But there remains a chronic tendency for people who love their favorite scientific ontology to sacrifice any aspect of consciousness - the flow of time, for example - if it doesn't fit.
This is one area where we are repeating the old mistake - of refusing to see what's in front of us, for the sake of a higher truth - in a new way. It's ontological tunnel vision: I have a private reductionism, at the level of my ontological categories - perhaps I reduce everything to computation, or to configurations - and can't imagine new categories or see the need for them. Everything that people say gets translated into my existing ontological language, or rejected. It's a very difficult barrier to overcome, because as with Darwin, and as with the cognitive revolution, the third way only becomes accessible to everyone after pioneers map it and domesticate it a little. Until that happens, talking about it is like trying to point into the fourth dimension.
Chomsky had demolished behaviorist linguistics in 1959, nine years before Quine's article.
Presumably you are talking about his critique of Skinner's book: Verbal Behavior - which was mainly focussed on the emphasis on operant conditioning, arguing instead for innate elements. AFAICS, Skinner never denied a role for genetics in the first place:
Skinner argued that verbal behavior is a function of the speaker's current environment and his past behavioral and genetic history.
The article also says:
Chomsky's review has been further noted to misrepresent the work of Skinner and others, including by taking quotes out of context.
You are an intelligent human being. Your life is valuable for its own sake. You are not second-class in the universe, deriving meaning and purpose from some other mind. You are not inherently evil — you are inherently human, possessing the positive rational potential to help make this a world of morality, peace, and joy. Trust yourself.
-- Dan Barker
I think I recall reading somewhere that you only need first-order logic to define Turing machines and computer programs in general, which seems to suggest that "not expressible in first order logic" means "uncomputable"... I could just be really confused about this though...
Anyway, for some reason or other I had the impression that "not expressible in first order logic" is a property that might have something in common with "hard to explain to a machine".
This is ingenious but seems like speculation largely detached from evidence. In particular, if you want to be believed then you might do well to offer better grounds for saying ...
It is speculation, and I don't want to be believed. I want to float the idea that this is one aspect of behaviorism, and that even a scientific theory can be hijacked by what we want to believe.
That's not the angle Quine was taking. He was saying words don't have meanings. There are behaviors, and streams of words correlated with behaviors, but nothing inside a head that is a "meaning". Quine was not talking about cases where one person would point to a square and say "square", and another person would point to a triangle and say "square". He was talking about cases where two people both point to an equilateral triangle and say "equilateral triangle", but one meant "triangle with all three sides the same" and the other meant "all three angles the same". That's not a great example, but it is a short example. Or where you ask them to raise their right hand, and they both raise their right hand, but one person unknowingly has the perception of raising his left hand, and "feels" left the way others feel right. Quine argues that these are not singular examples, but that all language is undermined by indeterminacy like this.
Something more in line with your worldview is more likely. This is the point of a worldview.
Someone whose opinion you respect is more likely to be right. This is the point of respecting people's opinions.
What's the irrational decision-making you're alluding to?
There's a related claim over at PredictionBook:
By 2100 it’s obvious to the average human that (1) Global warming is true and (2) it’s actually a good thing: Resulting in a better climate then we have had in recorded history. A stable Wet-Sahara/Warm-Siberia/No Rainforest scenario.
Out of four people that have expressed an opinion, I'm currently the only person there against this claim.
"But it is an empirical question. With math, plus with some reasonable assumptions, you can prove that you can unambiguously determine the correct mapping even from the outside. In a world where you can tell someone to think of a square, and then use functional magnetic resonance imaging and find a pattern of neurons lit up in a square on his visual cortex, it is difficult to agree with Quine that the word "square" has no meaning."
Of course the word "square" has meaning, but that meaning may be different from our meaning. In a world where society told this individual all the time that an "square" is really a triangle with an X in it, and then you do that experiment, you'll see what that individual thinks a square is...and he'd be right, going off the definitions and meanings that society have told him about a square. Doesn't help the researcher who is trying desperately convince said research subject what a square is "supposed" to be.
(AIUI, the common colloquial use of "taboo" is by no means the same as the phenomena that go by that name in Polynesian societies)
Indeed not. The English word "taboo" is from Fijian or Tongan, which I can't speak to; but the Hawaiian cognate is "kapu" which means more or less "restricted" or "forbidden".
It doesn't mean something that can't be discussed, or is shameful or unthinkable. It was typically used to refer to food prohibitions, structurally rather similar to kosher, halal, or for that matter hippie vegetarianism; but also for places that are off-limits to commoners, or are "private" to the chief or the gods (or someone else important) and not to be trespassed upon.
The English sense of "taboo" is a projection onto foreign cultures of a very Western notion of shame and the unspeakable. It reminds me of the expression "sacred cow", which projects onto Hinduism the notion of an impractical but unquestionably revered thing, which is not at all what Hindus mean by protecting cattle.
This is ingenious but seems like speculation largely detached from evidence. In particular, if you want to be believed then you might do well to offer better grounds for saying ...
... that Quine's attitude to meanings or mental states resembles taboos in some actually religious sense (AIUI, the common colloquial use of "taboo" is by no means the same as the phenomena that go by that name in Polynesian societies)
... that when behaviourists said that only external behaviour should be looked at and didn't mention the possibility of looking inside people's skulls, the reason wasn't simply that they hadn't thought of doing that, or didn't realise that the available techniques were sufficient to tell them anything useful, or thought those techniques were too seldom practical to be relevant, or something
... that any behaviourists were trying to "protect the mind from reductionism by denying that it exists"
And you might also do well to say more explicitly what you think this "parasitic religious doctrine" actually was, and who you think believed it, and what reasons you have for thinking that other than that it might explain the fact that Quine didn't consider using brain scans or EEGs to resolve the problem of radical translation.
A side note: AFAIK, it isn't known whether siblings are really 50% identical. They are slightly more than 50% identical with regard to gene expression, because of gene imprinting on the sex chromosomes. It's possible there's some weird mechanism that causes an imbalance or bias in recombination. Perhaps we haven't sequenced enough siblings to know.
You can ban things, and see reported and banned things. Generally, you should only ban spam and not content submitted by actual users, however inane. You can observe reported posts and comments here and here (normal users can't see these pages). I expect matt sent you a private message, but you missed it.
That link says,
Articles are selected for promotion on the basis of substantive new content, clear argument, good writing, popularity, and importance. Promoted articles appear on the Less Wrong home page. Non-promoted articles are still available in the other views, such as New or Popular.
But it doesn't say who does the selection. I thought it was only Eliezer. Can anyone else promote an article? Can anyone un-promote an article? Is there a vote? A sum of up-down votes from editors? What?
Similarity to the Reichstag Fire and the subsequent Enabling Act perhaps? The Reichstag fire probably wasn't laid by the Nazis themselves either, but since they enormously profited from it politically many people believed (and I guess still believe) that they did it.
Disclaimer: Any discussion of XFrequentist's model in this comment is not necessarily how XFrequentist thinks of it, but rather my variant on it.
My instinct was to ignore this reply, but I recently read a suggestion that among sufficiently rational people there is never simply a need to agree to disagree. Do you folks on this site have some sort of standard disclaimer that questions are grounded in curiosity, and are not meant to belittle anyone's experience or opinion? In any case, I'm just curious. These questions are directed to Cyan and/or Normal Anomaly and/or anyone else with a similar reaction.
The community norm is that questions are grounded in curiosity. I've never seen anyone take offense at an honestly asked question.
Suppose that within a given domain of knowledge, Alice can create concepts that Bob can understand but not generate, and Bob can create concepts that Carol can understand but not generate. Does this imply:
Alice is two levels above Carol?
Nothing in particular, because this is not the intended semantic meaning of "two levels above"?
Any concept created by Alice is beyond Carol's reach? (I doubt this.)
Alice is capable of generating some concepts (at least one) which is beyond Carol's reach?
My interpretation (assuming this all takes place within one subject area) is that:
Yes iff Alice can generate concepts Carol cannot understand,
No,
No,
Probably, but not necessarily (see bullet 1).
I'm also confused about what it means for a concept to be beyond someone's reach. The closest experience I can think of is a mathematical theorem I cannot understand. But usually the cause of that is that I do not understand one or more of the definitions or theorems involved in the statement of the theorem itself, and enough study could presumably resolve that.
If we are talking about Immutable Levels, a concept beyond my reach is one that I will never understand no matter how much I study or how well it is explained to me. I cannot name any concepts I've encountered that seem to be beyond my reach in this sense, except maybe General Relativity. That one could just be a lack of math background.
If we are talking about Mutable Levels, a concept beyond my reach is one that I could not learn without further study of background material.
Until the third morning, when Wim finally declared, "Everything's a trick, if'n you can see behind it, just like with them witches in the hills. Everything's got a–reason. I think there ain't no such thing as magic!"
Jagit fixed him with a long mild look, and the specter of the night in the Grandfather Grove seemed to flicker in the dark eyes. "You think not, eh?"
Wim looked down nervously.
"There’s magic, all right, Wim; all around you here. Only now you’re seeing it with a magician’s eyes. Because there’s a reason behind everything that happens; you may not know what it is, but it’s there. And knowing that doesn’t make the thing less magic, or strange, or terrible—it just makes it easier to deal with. That’s something to keep in mind, wherever you are … . Also keep in mind that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
Wim nodded, chastened, felt his ears grow red as the peddler muttered, "So's a little ignorance…"
-- The Peddler's Apprentice by Joan and Vernor Vinge
You are not concerned with which strategy is best? I see.
On reflection, "to accelerate the arrival of the Singularity in order to hasten its human benefits" does sound bad. If someone told me that was their explanation for why they wanted their program to go rapidly, my expectation would be that they were either confused or not telling the truth.
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