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komponisto comments on Video Q&A with Singularity Institute Executive Director - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (122)
For the love of the flying spaghetti monster, can you please, please stop saying "at Singularity Institute", "within Singularity Institute", et cetera?
As has been explained before, this is annoying, grating, and just plain goofy. It makes you sound like a fly-by-night commercial outfit run by people who don't quite speak English. In my estimation it's about 2:1 evidence that SI* is a scam.
Now, as you know, my prior on the latter hypothesis is pretty low. But this is nevertheless a serious issue. We're talking about how serious your organization sounds, at the 5-second level. And at this point it's also a meta-issue, having to do with whether you (all) listen to criticism. Because, in light of the discussion linked above, you would at the very least need a damn good reason to continue this practice in the face of some rather compelling criticism. As in, "we did a focus group study last year which showed that omitting the definite article would likely result in a 5% increase in donations". As far as I know, you have no such good reason. Indeed, the only reasoning anyone at SI* has offered for this at all is contained in a comment by Louie whose score is currently -9 (not by any accident).
[passage removed]
I could be convinced in the face of a sufficient display of (e.g.) marketing expertise (for example, a focus group study as mentioned above). But in this case, my position is well supported not only by data I provided but also by the agreement of other members of the LW community, as reflected in the voting patterns and other comments. And if Louie's comment is representative of SI's* actual reasoning on this matter, it frankly doesn't look like you people have a clue what you're doing.
* And I just want to emphasize, yet again, that I didn't write "the SI", despite the fact I would write "the Singularity Institute". This contrast is standard usage, and not in any sense contradictory!
I have to confirm that this in particular is a significant issue. Until he redeemed himself Luke's reply had me updating towards writing him off as another person with too much status/ego to hear correctly.
I don't think I have ever been so dismayed to see a comment at +15 and no less than 11 children comments. WTF, people.
BS. (Here, let me indulge in some anecdotage - 800 Verbal on the SAT etc, also what I would consider my greatest skill - and it doesn't bother me in the least. That cancel out your 'Bayesian information'? Good grief.)
Your entire comment is sheer pedantry of the worst kind, that I'd expect on Reddit and not LessWrong.
For what it is worth, komponisto's basic point without the egotism is essentially correct. The dropping of the definite article sounds incredibly awkward and does signal either a scam or general incompetence. I don't understand what they are thinking. The self-congratulatory puffery that is the second half of the comment doesn't reduce the validity of the central point.
Said "puffery" has now been removed. My own mental context for those remarks was evidently quite different from that in which they were seen by others. (Though no one actually complained until gwern, quite a while after the comment was posted.)
It is amazing how much difference one antagonistic reader can make to how a statement is interpreted by others. Apart from the priming it makes you a legitimate target.
Quite so. This "bandwagon" behavior is disturbing, and has the unfortunate consequence of incentivizing one to reply to hostile comments immediately (instead of taking time to reflect), to fend off the otherwise inevitable karma onslaught.
Yes, I found Asch's Conformity Experiment pretty amazing too.
I support the grandparent. Your condemnation here barely makes any sense and is unjustifiably rude.
I am rather shocked that kompo needed to make the comment. The subject had come up recently and more than enough explanation had been given to SIAI public figures of how to not sound ridiculous and ignorant while using the acronym.
Logically ruder than claiming one's dislike is 'Bayesian evidence'? Since when do we dress up our linguistic idiosyncrasies in capitalized statistical drag? Is there any evidence at all that this is a meaningful change, that it really makes one sound 'ridiculous and ignorant'?
Own dislike is clearly some evidence of others' dislike, the relevant question is how much evidence. Votes add more evidence.
I said unjustifiably rude, not logically rude (although now you are being the latter as well).
There was nothing logically rude about kompo claiming his own expertise as evidence. It does come across as somewhat arrogant and leaves kompo vulnerable to status attack by anyone who considers him presumptive but even if his testimony is rejected "logical rudeness" still wouldn't come into it at all.
Don't try to "dress up" corrections about basic misuse of English as personal idiosyncrasies of komponisto. He may care about using language correctly more than most but the usage he is advocating is the standard usage.
Neither. What you want is:
When the entire point of quoting a statement is to question whether or not "the" should be used you can't go around truncating like that! (Are you being disingenuous or is that just a mistake?)
Notice the difference in how an added 'the' would sound now?
Incidentally: Think "MIT" or "NASA" instead of "FBI".
I have now removed the quote completely. I was planning on writing something else first that was more relevant to the quote. Sorry.
There might be some sort of rules that govern when it is correct to use "the" and when it is wrong. But ain't those rules fundamentally malleable by the perception of people and their adoption of those rules?
An interesting example is the German word 'Pizza' (which happens to mean the same as the English word, i.e. the Neapolitan cuisine). People were endlessly arguing about how the correct plural form of 'Pizza' is 'Pizzen'. Yet many people continued to write 'Pizzas' instead. What happened a few years ago is that the Duden (the prescriptive source for the spelling of German) included 'Pizzas' as a secondary but correct plural form of the word 'Pizza'.
So why did people ever bother to argue in the first place? German, or English for that matter, would have never evolved in the first place if thousands of years ago people would have demanded that all language be frozen at that point of time and only the most popular spelling be regarded as correct.
Not that I have a problem with designing an artificial language or improving an existing language. Just some thoughts.
The rules may not necessarily be simple, however. In the worst-case scenario, they may simply consist of lists of cases where it is one way and cases where it is the other.
(As you no doubt realize, the same issue also comes up in German: why is it "Deutschland, Österreich, und die Schweiz" instead of "Deutschland, Österreich, und Schweiz" or "das Deutschland, das Österreich, und die Schweiz"?)
Yes, and the exact same thing could be said about any human signaling pattern, not just those that concern language. But don't make the mistake of thinking that this is a Fully General Counterargument against any claim about the meaning of a particular signaling pattern in a particular context at a particular time.
It isn't as if everything eventually becomes accepted. Language changes, but it doesn't descend into entropy: in the future, there will still be patterns that are "right" and others that are "wrong", even if these lists are different from what they are now. Not only will some things that are "wrong" now become "right" in the future, but the reverse will also happen: expressions that are "right" now will become "wrong" later.
From what I understand, linguists actually consider "-s" the regular manner of plural formation in modern German, despite the fact that only a minority of words use it, because it is the default used for new words. (So the dispute you mention is perhaps really about how "new" the word "Pizza" is felt to be.)
I'll return the favor and express my own dismay that the parent has been voted up to +3, while wedrifid's comments haven't been voted up to +10 where they deserve to be.
Your comment is sanctimony of the worst kind. Attempting to seize the "moral high ground" at the expense of someone who makes an honest expression of feeling is an all-too-familiar status strategy, and not one that earns any respect from me.
Ironically, the point about the typical mind fallacy, as expressed in Yvain's original post on it, applies with full force to the parent, insofar as you have apparently failed to grasp that others could be seriously bothered by something that doesn't bother you.
(I find it regrettable that I am in a hostile exchange with you, since I have found many of your writings here and on your own site interesting and valuable.)
I am being sanctimonious about your 'honest expression of feeling'? Let me quote from you again:
You have gone way beyond an 'honest expression of feeling'. You have successively claimed arrogantly high linguistic abilities, abused badly important terminology worse than any post like 'Rational toy buying', you have directly condescended to Luke (who is a better writer than you, IMO, even if not fluent in X languages), you have claimed this tiny verbal distinction brings disrepute upon the SIAI and anything connected, called it evidence for a scam, and finish by insulting everyone involved who does not think as you do.
And I will note that despite a direct request to wedrifid for any random grammarian or language maven reference, none has been provided, despite the fact that you can find recommendations for and against any damn grammatical point (because there is no fact of the matter).
So not only are you engaged in ridiculous accusations on something that is manifestly not worth arguing about, you may not even be right.
I don't understand why you are seeking to escalate a conflict that I specifically tried to de-escalate above (see last sentence of grandparent).
I disagree with the above in the strongest possible terms, resent the insults and hostile tone, and take severe exception to the fallacious appeals to emotion, strawman arguments, and question-begging.
Point by point:
No I have not. My original comment reflects my feelings entirely accurately. There is no posturing or exaggeration involved (for what purpose I can't even imagine). I said exactly what I thought, no more, no less. This statement of yours about my "going way beyond" is completely false on its face and must be interpreted as some kind of rhetorical way of saying that you are offended by how strongly I feel. If that was what you meant, that is what you should have said.
I do not consider the level of linguistic ability I claimed to be "arrogantly high". Just high enough for me to be worth listening to, rather than ignored like I was the last time this issue came up. That was the context of this remark about linguistic ability (of which I had omitted all mention on the previous occasion). Note that "worth listening to" is not the same as "worthy of being unconditionally obeyed". Perhaps if I had claimed the latter, that would have been "arrogant". Note also that several specifically non-arrogant disclaimers were inserted: "It's a bit embarrassing to admit this..."; "My ability in this area isn't perfect..."; "it's overrideable". Apparently you didn't notice these, despite having quoted one of them yourself.
Nonsense. You are free to disagree with my claims about whether X is Bayesian evidence of Y (I assume that is what you are referring to here), but the mere fact that you disagree with such a claim does not make the claim an abuse of terminology. An abuse of terminology would be if I used the term despite not actually meaning "X is more likely if Y is true than if Y is false"; but that is exactly what I meant above.
Since I have NEVER said anything here about being a "better writer" than anyone else, this uninvited comparison is simply a gratuitous insult. That is NOT what we are talking about here. There are plenty of subskills that make up writing ability, and sensitivity to the kind of grammatical details that I am sensitive to is only one of them (and arguably quite far from the most important).
It's as if you inserted this in a deliberate attempt to signal hostility and offend me. You succeeded.
Also, I did not "condescend" to Luke. I regard Luke as a peer -- not someone of significantly higher or lower status --and addressed him as such. (If anything, I sometimes feel that Luke is inappropriately condescending, although I think he has been making more effort to avoid this, for which he is to be commended.)
Here you beg the question. For me, it isn't "tiny". That is the whole point!
False. I claim it brings "disrepute" (not my word) on SIAI itself. I didn't say anything about "anything connected". (It doesn't particularly bring disrepute upon Less Wrong, for example -- even though LW is clearly "connected" to SIAI.)
Yes. I expect scam organizations to be twice as likely to use "at X Institute" (instead of "at the X Institute") as non-scam organizations.
I take exception to the tactic of appealing to indignation at the word "scam" as if that were an argument against the factual anticipation I stated above.
Wrong again. That is simply not a correct characterization of what I wrote. I suggest you read it again, in context, and more charitably. The comment I referred to had in fact completely misunderstood what I was talking about and showed a decidedly superficial analysis of the issue on top of it. In such a context, it is completely appropriate to say "if [that] comment is representative of SI's actual reasoning on this matter, it frankly doesn't look like you people have a clue what you're doing". I further expect this is exactly what the SI staff would expect me to say if in fact it actually looked like that to me (which it did). It does not even address, let alone insult, "everyone who does not think as [I] do". For one thing, no one actually offered a contrary point of view; the only thing evinced was a lack of comprehension of the opinion and argument that I had expressed.
In my original comment on this issue I cited numerous Wikipedia articles illustrating the usage in question. You are free to use Google to find further confirmation. And (not without irony, since someone originally attempted to cite it against me), I can refer to this for explicit confirmation of the existence of the distinction we're talking about (between "strong" and "weak" proper nouns, in the terminology used there).
Once again: completely begging the question. I will again refer you to Generalizing from One Example for a discussion of how something that seems insignificant to one person can be highly bothersome to another, a lesson which you have evidently failed to internalize.
If you were interested in persuading me of this, you have chosen a completely wrong approach. In fact, you have potentially damaged my ability to form correct beliefs in the future, since there is now a feeling of negative affect -- perhaps even an ugh field -- attached to you in my mind, making me less likely to give proper consideration to any information or argument you may have to offer.
We were on good terms before, despite the occasional disagreement. If you thought I was actually wrong about something here (as opposed to being more inclined to notice and bothered by non-standard language patterns than you), would it have been that hard to simply present an argument?
(If anyone is tempted to suggest that the ancestor comment of this thread was hostile in a manner similar to the parent, not only do I disagree, but that isn't even the relevant comparison. My original comments on this topic were free of any sign of exasperation, yet ignored by Luke and other SI personnel, despite upvotes and verbalized agreement from others; hence the impatient tone of the ancestor.)
if you don't see what's wrong with claiming that your opinion on a linguistic matter is basis for significant Bayesian update, especially in the style that you did, then that significantly lowers any update I would make based on your communication skills. I strongly think that "the singularity institute" sounds better, but you're making me sad to agree with you.
This is a cheap shot.
(1) I have not made any claim to superior "communication skills". Those are highly complex and involve many smaller abilities. The most I did was make a claim to (a certain kind of) superior language skills in order to draw attention to an explicit argument I had given that had been ignored.
(2) Compare the following:
For what class of adjective do you regard this as a general template for a sound argument?
I'll let you in on a secret. IN THE STYLE YOU DID was a part of what I said, and it was an important part. Claiming to be wise enough that what you think should make other people significantly change their point of view is OBVIOUSLY arrogant. What is so hard to understand about that? Adding lines like "I'll let you in on a secret" makes you come off significantly worse. Your style of communication is dismissive of any contrary opinion, insulting, and ridiculously pompous. If you can't see this, my opinion of your language skills HAS to go down based on them being a subset of being able to understand communication. Your dislike of singularity institute is clearly based on what you think that phrasing communicates, and yet you can't seem to understand why people might dislike your own communications.
The class of adjective is irrelevant. What's wrong with that claim is not whether or not it is true or useful, but how well it persuades. And a flat statement saying you should update on my beliefs, when we are specifically talking about whether to update beliefs based on how something is said, is unconvincing and annoying.
I have now edited the comment, removing what I understand to have been the most offensive passage.
Thank you for the feedback. Let me now try to reply to some of your points, in order to help you and anyone else reading better understand where I am coming from. (I don't intend these replies as rejections of the information you've offered about your own perspective.)
I was only claiming to be "wise enough" to have my point of view taken into account. Not all Bayesian updates are large updates! Now, of course, in this particular case, I did think a large update was warranted; but I didn't expect that large update to be made on the basis of my authority, I expected it to be made on the basis of my arguments.
That seems bizarre, unless you interpreted it as sarcasm. But it wasn't sarcasm: I spelled out in the next sentence that I was actually embarrassed to be making the admission!
Another strange thing about the reaction to this is that I didn't actually claim my "single greatest skill" was actually all that great. I just said it was the greatest skill I had. It could perhaps be quite bad, with all the other skills simply being even worse. The only comparison was with my own other skills, not the skills of other people.
What I was saying was "if you ever listen to me on anything, listen to me on this!".
This feels to me like I'm being interpreted uncharitably. My statement was highly specific and limited in scope. It was not in any sense a "flat" statement; it was fairly narrowly circumscribed.
A data point: doesn't seem bizarre to me. Whether I interpret it as (a specific type of) sarcasm I'm not sure. Sarcasm needn't hinge only on the contradiction between the literal and factual meaning of "secret", but also on the contradiction between a relatively familiar / seemingly friendly phrase and the general expression of disagreement.
Irrelevant to me. A bad comment is a bad comment. Our past and future interactions do not matter to me. To the extent I comprehend our interaction, it is me commenting on and discussing your Knox materials and you silently reading whatever you read of me; even if I were selfishly concerned about future interactions, I doubt I would value it at very much - you will continue to discuss Knox or not regardless of whether you are angry with me.
If you really do form an ugh-field just over this discussion, you should work on that. Bad habit to have.
You stand by everything you said, the personal attacks and absurd inferences, and feel this is perfectly honest? That this violates no LW norms of communication? That all this is perfectly acceptable? You feel that there is no problem with saying all that, because hey, you actually thought it?
WE ARE NOT OPERATING ON CROCKER'S RULES.
I will repeat this; we operate on a number of norms where we do not accuse, in an inflammatory way, someone of making the SIAI look like incompetent crooks simply because we 'feel honestly' this way.
WE ARE NOT OPERATING ON CROCKER'S RULES.
Some of us do, but not lukeprog or anyone I've noticed in these threads.
Interesting that you were ignored, you say. I wonder why you weren't ignored this time? Gee, maybe it has something to do with how you expressed it this time?
But no, you were merely honestly expressing your feelings! (I guess you were being dishonest last time, since I don't see any other way to differentiate the two posts.)
'I could be mistaken, and my ability in this area isn't perfect (embarrassingly), but I think your mother is a whore.' You're offended? But I just included 3 disclaimers that you blessed as effective!
Lamentably, disclaimers no longer work in English due to abuse. I believe Robin Hanson has written some interesting things on disclaimers. If you are not speaking in a logical or mathematical mode, don't expect disclaimers to be magic pixy dust which will instantly dispel all problems with your statements. If you didn't believe them as stated, why did you write them? Honest expression of feelings, right?
This post is Bayesian evidence of you being a murderer, because murderers are low on Agreeableness, which correlates with arguing online.
Without any evidence, any framework, or any of what passes for genuine investigation as opposed to 'I don't like it!', to pull out 'Bayesian evidence' is to dress up what is epsilon evidence (charitably) in euphuistic garb to impress readers. It is technical jargon out of place, ripped from its setting for your rhetorical purpose, and worse than Behe defending creationism with information theory twisted into meaninglessness, because you know better.
The point is someone who is an inferior writer has little prior credibility when they claim superiority in any subskill.
This faux precision is hilarious. This is like reporting figures to 10 significant places. How could you possibly be able to give the likelihood ratio down even to an order of magnitude?
Seriously, how could you? Do you keep lists of legitimate organizations which make you linguistically flip out vs scam organizations which make you linguistically flip out?
Is there a study somewhere I am unaware of which classifies a large sample of organizations by their fraudulence and discusses signs by likelihood ratio which you have been consulting?
I'm dying to know where this 'twice' comes from. After all, you've been insisting on oh-so-precise interpretations of everything you said, from 'honest feeling' to 'Bayesian evidence' to your disclaimers; surely you didn't slip on this fascinating claim. What evidence is your 'factual anticipation' based on?
You're citing non-SIAI examples as proof of your thesis, while acknowledging that there is an entire common class of names where your thesis is outright false? With no evidence which one one is applicable which is the entire question? Now who is begging the question?
Gee, it's almost as if there is no fact of the matter and neither is right or wrong. How strange.
You are aggressively and publicly trolling a prominent member when he is not being hostile. You should not anticipate the negative consequences of that to be limited to his own perception. You seem to be willfully sabotaging your own reputation. I don't understand why.
He didn't do anything of the sort.
Which seems to be applicable to you, and not kompo at all.
Saying that a particular behavior gives a terrible signal is not a personal attack. The following, what kompo actually said, is not a norm violation:
For the same reason people in other articles rail against the 'Rational Xing' meme - because komponisto's sort of comment is the sort of thing I do not want to see spread at all. I do not want to see people browbeating lukeprog or anyone with wild claims about their unproven opinion being 'Bayesian evidence', or all the other pathologies and dark arts in that comment which I have pointed out.
If I fail to convince people as measured by karma points, well, whatever. You win some and you lose some - for example, I was expecting my last comment attacking the Many Worlds cultism here to be downvoted, but no, it was highly upvoted. As they say about real karma, it balances out.
If my reputation is damaged by this, well, whatever. Whatever can be destroyed by the truth should be, no? I think I am right here and if I do not give an 'honest expression of my feelings', I am manipulating my reputation. And if it is so flimsy a thing that a small flamewar over one of the obscurest grammatical points I have seen can damage it, then it wasn't much of a reputation at all and I shouldn't engage in sunk cost fallacy about it.
Ah, an excellent reply. To many many questions - 'no'. I see.
Tu quoque!
Yeah, whatever. I already dealt with this BS with the disclaimers and other stuff.
By the way, komponisto has not produced the slightest shred of evidence for that ratio. Is 'making stuff up' not a norm violation on LW these days?
And by the way, you haven't provided any citations for the linguistic point in contention, despite my direct unambiguous challenge several days ago.
How many times will I have to ask you and komponisto about this before you finally dig up something - an Internet grammarian or anything saying you are right about how to refer to the SIAI and its myriad connexions? I think this makes 4, which alone earns you two my downvotes.
I most certainly haven't. The "challenge" in question was a logically rude - and blatantly disingenuous - attempt to spin the context such that I am somehow obliged to provide citations or else your accusation that komponisto is "dressing up [his] linguistic idiosyncrasies in capitalized statistical drag" is somehow valid - rather than totally out of line. I am actually somewhat proud that after I wrote a response to that comment at the time you made it I discarded it rather than replying - there wasn't anything to be gained and so ignoring it was the wiser course of action.
I was also pleasantly surprised that the community saw through your gambit and downvoted you to -4. In most environments that would have worked for you - people usually reward clever use of spin and power moves like that yet here it backfired.
If his preference is only his preference, why do we care? We should do nothing to cater to one person's linguistic whims.
If we care because his preference may be shared by the LW community, 10 or 15 upvotes are not enough to indicate a community-wide preference, and likewise nothing should be done.
If we care because his preference is descriptively correct and common across many English-speaking communities beyond LW, then a failure to provide citations is a failure to provide proof, and likewise nothing should be done.
This is another kind of comment I dislike.
Karma should be discussed as little as possible. Goodhart's law, people! The more you discuss karma and even give it weight, the more you destroy any information it was conveying previously. Please don't do that; I like being able to sort by karma and get a quick ranking of what comments are good.
I don't know. I gained more respect for gwern after reading his comment.
Pardon me: "... with the obvious exception of the other person who has also been heavily downvoted for abusing komponisto in the same context"
What's abusive about it? It seemed to me like a straightforward error, but the presentation was admittedly bad. I was tired and possibly inebriated; so it goes. Nobody lost many hedons over it.
On the gripping hand, gwern doesn't even talk about komponisto's tacit conflation of karma with correctness, or that of total karma with total number of people approving. I don't even agree with gwern on the issue at hand, as I said before.
I gained respect for him because it takes a great deal of nerve to write such a thing, and I think that's admirable. Or maybe my model of gwern is more accurate than yours? I don't know.
EDIT: Rereading that thread, I notice drethelin did succeed in convincing komponisto of a related point. As I expected, it took more writing than I was interested in doing at the time. Props to it, as well.
Actually, I think this is a linguistic corner case in whether you ought to use the word "the", and some speakers/dialects will fall on either side. Consider:
She works at the institute.
* She works at institute.
She works at SingInst.
* She works at the SingInst.
? She works at the Singularity Institute
? She works at Singularity Institute
(* denotes a sentence that is incorrect to all speakers and ? denotes a sentence that is incorrect to some speakers but not all.)
If Singularity Institute parses as a modified noun, then it should have an article. If it parses as a name, then it shouldn't. You can force it to be a name by either compressing it into something that isn't a regular word (SingInst), or by adding something that's incompatible with regular words. Compare:
He will attend the Singularity Summit.
? He will attend Singularity Summit.
He will attend Singularity Summit 2012.
* He will attend the Singularity Summit 2012.
And that's the entire fact of the matter. From a linguistics perspective, whether a sentence is grammatically correct or incorrect depends solely on the intuition of native speakers; and if native speakers disagree, then it must be a dialect difference. Arguing what is "correct" in a speaker-independent sense is meaningless and unproductive.
I also mildly agree with using a determiner for names of organizations that end in "Company" "Institute" "Organization" etc, and also don't mind treating the acronym version as you would without knowing the expansion.
I don't think it's a full bit of scam-signal, though.
Some weak (top prescriptivist result in Google) evidence: http://writing.umn.edu/sws/assets/pdf/quicktips/articles_proper.pdf (although it contradicts komponisto and me in advising that determiner choice should be the same as the expanded version (while simultaneously advising "an SDMI" and not "a SDMI" presumably because read aloud, "an S" is "an ess")
The recent attention on this discussion compels me to point out that
absolutely does not follow from
at all.
Like, "time to question whether you are intimately familiar with Bayes Thereom".
I assumed you were, because you spoke of evidence likelihoods and Bayesian evidence in favour of propositions: but now I fear those are just locally high-status words you were using, because when you take a low prior and update on 2:1 evidence you are left with a low prior.
And if you have a low prior for it being a scam, you don't embellish on it being a scam!
I am reminded of the double illusion of transparency. I assumed when people talked about Bayesian evidence they had done calculations.
You seem to be confused. It isn't supposed to follow - it is meant as a contrast! Kompo estimated 1 bit of evidence of crackpotness is embedded in prominent misuse of language. He then reaffirms that despite this he isn't saying that singinst is a crackpot institute... that is what declaring a one bit update on a very low prior means and there is no evidence suggesting that kompo intended anything else. He is making a general gesture of respect to the institute so it is clear that he isn't using this issue as an excuse to insult the institute itself.
He knows this, has used bayesian reasoning correctly in the past in his posts and has not made a mistake here.