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ChristianKl comments on Open thread, 18-24 August 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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It doesn't look to me like human inarticulation.
Take funny sentence from the DC meetup introduction:
Mistaking irrational numbers for irrational humans is not something that a meat brain is likely to do accidently.
I disagree. It could be a joke, or it could be the result of a kind of "magical thinking" whose perpetrator knows that in principle they're entirely separate concepts but is convinced that the commonality of names must be significant, or it could simply be the result of very shallow thinking -- reading lots of things, picking up key words but not really understanding them. The latter two shade into one another.
I think (but realise I am not sure on what basis, so it may be rubbish) that this sort of failure mode is not uncommon for people with some kinds of mental illness. And I think (but again am not sure why) it's not uncommon among pseudoscientific/pseudomathematical cranks of the sort who send letters in green ink to eminent mathematicians asking them to look at this wonderful new proof that pi = 3 exactly, which also leads to a simple proof of Fermat's Last Theorem and reveals how to travel faster than light.
It takes some skill to be able to joke on that level. Someone who thinks that names a significant usually has more seriousness in their writing.
I am unconvinced, but there seems little value in merely airing our prejudices at one another.
At present, ishi's "overview" page contains a single comment, to do with the use of IQ to predict life outcomes. (From Why the tails come apart.) If you read this, I think it's very apparent that it's not something a computer would have produced. It's very badly written, for sure, but there's something resembling a coherent argument there, of the sort that you just never get from chatbot-like programs unless they're effectively copy-pasting whole comments from other people. (Which in this instance ishi's comment isn't.)
Or take the first comment currently on ishi's comments page. The first paragraph says: ishi's background is X, whereas the AI community (including LW) uses words in different ways. The second paragraph begins: "So it's almost like I'm reading a code or cipher". Again, this sort of coherence is really unusual in computer-generated text.
To be sure, ishi's writing is not very coherent compared with that of many human beings whose writing (and, I'm fairly sure, thinking) skills are better. I suspect schizophrenia or something of the kind. But it's orders of magnitude beyond what I would expect from a computer.
OK, we all agree ishi's writing style is a headscratcher, but the subcomments are quickly degenerating into bullying. This is a human being we don't even know, and look at us happily speculating on hir thinking skills and sanity.
Actually, it now appears to me that the insults started at the first comment, when hir humanity was put into question and we accepted it was a valid discussion topic. Getting involved in seemingly interesting puzzles without pausing to consider how our words may hurt people "has been the fate of many a Ravenclaw."
Therefore, I'm retracting my previous participation in this discussion.
I respectfully submit that you use this term in a noncentral way:
Specifically, there was no harassment. Whether ishi has suffered harm as a result of this thread is unclear at best, and certainly no harm was intended by any of the commenters, even assuming ishi is human.
Please consider tempering your allegations next time you feel indignant.
I'll just link to this and I'm done.
Oh, wow, that's where this uniform protest against making guesses about mental states comes from? It's actually written into their ethical guidelines?
I don't understand this. Is there some obvious or non-obvious reason for psychiatrists not to guess at mental states out loud, beyond the obvious one where people might listen to your opinions?
I don't get it.
If the doctor hasn't personally examined the person in question, any attempt at diagnosis is guesswork and has a great risk of damaging that person's reputation.
If the doctor has personally done the examination, he/she is bound by professional confidentiality.
If the one attempting to diagnose is not a doctor in the first place, he/she has no business speculating on other people's mental health, and there's still risk of damaged reputation.
It is bad for the reputation of psychiatry — and thus, people's willingness to go to psychiatrists when they would benefit from doing so — if psychiatrists use allegations of mental illness as a social or political stigma.
If you believed you might have a sexually transmitted disease, would you go to a doctor of a school that was known for speculating on how poxy or syphilitic various public figures were, as a way of saying those figures were bad and untrustworthy people?