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Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014
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Comments (289)
Apparently when the adherents of an ideological movement seize political power, they put a lot of effort into rewriting the story of the nation state's recent past which casts the previous order of affairs in a bad light compared to the allegedly improved way the new rulers say they'll run things. That explains why, for example, American historical accounts of the Revolutionary War usually don't explore whether the revolutionists had reasonable grievances, or whether King George III had a defensible case for maintaining and asserting his authority over the American Colonies. Americans have come to a collective decision to cut off inquiry into those questions, at least as far as indoctrinating the young goes, because certain kinds of answers throw into doubt the legitimacy of the way things actually happened.
I wonder how much of that has happened on a larger scale to Western civilization because of the political success of adherents to the Enlightenment. Since I discovered Neoreaction and it has poked at the splinter in my mind, I have engaged in crimethink about whether we have an impoverished understanding of social alternatives because the Enlightenment's intellectuals and their heirs have worked very hard, and very successfully, at making sure that we get a heavily biased view of how things worked in the before-times which makes it look terrible compared to its replacement. Yet the splinter in our minds remains. Just ask questions about whether we really benefit from democracy, equality or feminism, and the emotional reactions from some people (David Brin, for example) show genuine anxiety on their part. These excessively emotional responses resemble how reminders of death, called "mortality salience" in Terror Management Theory, activate people's anxiety buffers to try to suppress distressing thoughts.
Did our ancestors in the West invent the Enlightenment, with its emotionally soothing message about human nature, to manage some kind of terror we should confront directly instead of trying to hide from it?
Doesn't this line of thinking pretty much end up portraying a sort of sociopathic troll — a person who possess no values of his or her own, but who is able to provoke to anger anyone who has values — as the ideal?
There are a lot of problems with what you've wrote here, and I think that gjm's comment is a pretty good response. However, there is a glimmer of truth in your comment. There were definite attempts to portray pre-1600s cultures as more stagnant and backwards than they were. There are two clear-cut examples. The first is the invention of the Iron Maiden) which was not an actual medieval torture device. (It is worth noting here that actual medieval tortures were still pretty bad. See Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" for some discussion of the better documented horrors.) The second is the claim that medievals by and large believed that the world was flat. While, some did so, and even some church fathers did so, they were by and large a minority. The belief became more common as a Protestant slur against Catholics and gradually became a more general belief.
More generally, there have been issues of narrative. There's a standard narrative, often taught in high-school physics classes that portrays no major development in physics between Aristotle and Galileo. This is deeply wrong. Galileo and others of his time-period would not have made the advances they did were it not for people like Oresme, Buridan, and al-Bitruji. Among other important results, they developed the idea of "impetus" which was a precursor to the idea of momentum. It is unlikely that the thinkers in the late 1500s and early 1600s would have made the progress they did without these ideas. But it is also important to note that this may to some extent not be an issue of motivated falsification of history or anything like that. It may simply be a combination of that simple narratives are easy and that it would have been difficult in past times to actually have access to many historical sources. In many ways, one has more access today to many medieval texts than someone in the 1800s would have had.
Also, it really, really doesn't help to use overblown terms like "crimethink" and it is especially dangerous to fall into the thought-process that what one is thinking is somehow persectuced. Once one falls into that trap it makes the cognitive dissonance much more difficult to deal with when one finds data that might cause one to adjust one's beliefs. The fact that all the examples above are well known to historians and widely discussed shows how far any of this is from anything resembling throughtcrime.
Little observed fact: The Enlightenment was a (small r) reactionary movement, in the sense of wanting not just to preserve the status quo but to go back to a Greco-Roman status quo ante, and declaring the intermediate period the "middle" or "dark ages".
The Enlightenment began with Epicurus. Perhaps even earlier, but Epicurus is the earliest source we have. Perhaps for as long as one man has said "God", another has said "Man".
I've been reading "Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Revolution", by Matthew Stewart, since seeing a quote from it on the current quotes thread. That, and another book I read this year, "Victorian Sensation", suggest a different history of all this.
This is just a quick outline, or I'd have to spend days writing this up. "Epicurus' Dangerous Idea", as Stewart calls it, was simply this: we live in and are part of a material universe. There are no gods, or if there are they don't care about us, or they're metaphors for our own ideals, but at any rate they're not up there in the sky watching out for us and answering our prayers. We are all we have, and we are made of atoms that have come together for a little while, and when we die and they come apart again, we are gone.
Well, of course we are, any of us here might say, but following Yvain's method of reading philosophy backwards, we should ask, what made this idea so offensive to people from the ancient Greeks onward? God, or the Gods, were part of people's everyday mental furniture. The Gods taught us virtue and set our foot on the right road. Evil acts were, quite literally, offences against the Gods. God made all this: when you looked at the world, you were looking at the work of God. God moved the sun, or the sun was a god. God brought sickness, and recovery from sickness. God hardened the heart of the Pharoah and inspired the saints. God quickened the seed in the ground and in the womb, and God decreed that our years were three score and ten.
And Epicurus said "Atoms" and started an itch that never went away.
From that we eventually got to really practising the idea, universal now, that you can find out how stuff works by looking at it. And we've never found anything to contradict Epicurus' original vision. People like Galileo and Newton, and all the scientists before them, put foundations under Epicurus' speculations by making major discoveries about how the universe worked, and God was nowhere to be found. "I have no need of that hypothesis" runs the anecdote of Laplace and Napoleon, but the idea has been around since ancient times. The poet Kabir wrote in the 15th century:
There is nothing but water in the holy pools.
I know, I have been swimming in them.
All the gods sculpted of wood or ivory can't say a word.
I know, I have been crying out to them.
"Victorian Sensation" is a book about another book, Robert Chambers' "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation". (If you know Chambers' English Dictionary, that was published by Robert and his brother William, who were publishers and literary figures in Scotland.) "Vestiges" was first published anonymously in 1844, and ran through many editions. It was nothing less than a summary of the scientific knowledge of the time, as it related to the structure of the universe, the geological history of the Earth, and the development of species. This was well before Darwin's Origin. Darwin read Vestiges and considered the book an important one.
The atheistic implications of the work were evident to everyone, even though Chambers, like many writers on these things before him, was careful to attribute the marvellous clockwork to the divine hand setting it in motion. But what need of God in a universe that ran by itself?
What sustained the social order in earlier times, the social order that neoreactionaries like to praise so much, was religion. When God is not in His Heaven, overseeing all, rewarding the good and punishing the evil, whither Man? But how can that belief be sustained, in the face of the inexorable power of the single most dangerous idea of all: that you can observe a lot by looking?
John C. Wright is the only example of a Christian neoreactionary I've encountered. There may be others, but all the others I've seen here on LW or on the sites that have from time to time been linked to, say not a word of religion, beyond praising its moral character. None profess any faith themselves, although other than advancedatheist's choice of moniker, I have not noticed them professing atheism either. They want the virtue of past times without the religion that was its foundation. They are silent about how to expel the elephant from the drawing room without letting the bull into the china shop.
To find virtue in a material world: a grand project. Who will carry it out?
It should be noted that a moral tradition needs not be theistic in nature, much less Abrahamic-Zoroastrian - Confucianism is a case in point here. And even a "material universe" cosmology may be sen in a variety of quite diverging ways. A particle physicist may argue - much as Democritus and Epicurus did - that our ontology should be a reductionist one, founded on some kinds of irreducible elements, and that it is a moral imperative to understand these tiny elements of nature by running huge, incredibly costly and perhaps risky experiments using particle accelerators.
Nonetheless, others, perhaps more interested in ecologies and human societies, may object that particle physics tells us quite little about our everyday lives and how we can best thrive in a nurturing milieu (as in both an ecology/environment and a community/society), which many people would indeed consider as a "right", or at least as something ethically relevant. Perhaps they would have us focus on very different things to "look" at: maybe indigenous peoples - as societies that have "stood the test of time" in a very real sense - and even our closest animal relatives in the Hominidae taxon (which, incidentally, are now significantly endangered due to human activity). So, yes, there is clearly a relevant conflict here, but it's far subtler than what you're referring to. In the end, medieval philosophers and theologians may well have the last laugh, as "reason" and scientific inquiry turn out to be the slaves not just of our passions, as Hume would have it, but even moreso of our ethics and morality.
You are taking particle physics for the totality of science throughout, cherry-picking a part of science most remote from everyday concerns, ignoring the rest of the elephant. We know the chemical elements, the methods of taking them from the ground, how to combine them in a million ways to produce the cornucopia of our everyday life. We know how plants grow and how to make them grow better. Because of that we build better buildings, make better roads, and grow better and more plants than our ancestors. We can talk to each other around the world in seconds and travel there in hours. Science! It works!
Who is indigenous, and what is the test of time? We are all indigenous to this planet, and for better or worse, the ones that people call "indigenous" are conspicuously not standing the test of time since encountering the ones that picked up the material ball and ran with it as fast as possible. Throughout history, the test of time has been the test of whether or not you got overrun by your neighbours. I'm not arguing that might makes right, but might certainly makes might.
That leaves out the fact the science works, and the more you do it, the more it works. It is not the slave to our passions, but the tool of our passion to make everything in our lives better, and we use it to the full. Science isn't cathedrals to particle physics, it's food on the table, houses to live in, and matter rearranged to our desire. Religion works only until everyone realizes there's no-one behind the curtain. The curtain hangs in tatters.
Perhaps I was not clear enough, but that wasn't my intention - far from it. I was trying to highlight the diversity of scientific inquiry, by choosing a few representative fields. The elephant has many, many parts to it, and some of them are distinctly less useful or likely to "work" than others. But note that you can't even talk about what's likely to "work" without adopting some normative standards first, as you implicitly did in your reply: and our general worldview, with its cosmology (what's out there? or - even more critically - what's important? What should we be paying attention to?) and morality ("what should we do?") is going to have a big impact on such choices, in any but the most crudely-technocratic or runaway-capitalist society.
These are not trivial issues - indeed, scientists of such caliber as Einstein and Oppenheimer were famously forced to grapple with these when they found out - much to their horror and dismay, if popular accounts are to be believed - that "science" had given them the ability to build catastrophically destructive weapons. And our own MIRI is often said to be facing similar concerns in its work on AI.
Whether "religion" is relevant here depends mostly on how you define the term. But AIUI, many scholars would argue that Confucianism qualifies as one, despite it being quite non-theistic, and more in the nature of a collection of moral maxims, and of course, a basic worldview highlighting such principles as cultivating basic kindness, showing loyalty and care where appropriate, and participating in rituals that foster a sense of unity and social harmony. Many people would argue that such a "religion" could be highly appropriate for our hyper-"material" world - whatever it is that we choose "material" to mean.
"Working" is as objective as it comes. Nobody wants to die of smallpox, and smallpox vaccination works, while prayers don't. Nobody wants to die at sea, so sailors have to know the tides, and how to determine where they are. No-one wants to starve, so farmers have to know how to make their crops thrive. They won't get that knowledge by praying for revelation. In short, people have purposes, and can observe whether what they are doing to achieve them is working. The better they can find out what works and what doesn't, the better they will achieve those purposes, whatever they are.
That is the pressure, objectively and insistently exerted by nature, to find things out. The carpenter making a better table has no need of God to tell him what sort of glue will give way and what will hold fast.
Confucianism is an interesting case, but I think it was sustained not by its own virtue but by the power of the centralised and authoritarian Chinese state, with which it was a good fit with its emphasis on loyalty and deference to superiors. The scientific revolution didn't happen there. So theocracy isn't the only thing that can stop science from happening.
As for a religion appropriate to the modern world, the traditions of the past are available to all in the Internet age. Anyone can pick and choose or make their own. But I see little future for mass religions based on fictions and unenforced by state power.
And an even briefer sketch of now a neoreactionary might answer that last challenge.
The problem in former times of virtue, the neoreactionary might say, is that people did not know enough to be able to demonstrate what is virtue and what is vice. People have always known right from wrong, but they have not known how they know, any more than they knew how they see. Having God as the explanation, even though it be a false one, had the beneficial effect of protecting their knowledge from their ignorance. When people generally began to see that there was no God (including those who believed they believed, but whose God had dwindled to the shadowy ghost in the background), virtue decayed, for we are all like Chesterton's fence-lifters, discarding a thing, however useful, when we notice that we do not see the reason for it.
But now, the neoreactionary might continue, in the last century, or perhaps just the last few decades, we have discovered the material origin of virtue. This knowledge comes primarily from evolutionary biology and neuroscience, and history reinterpreted in its light. We know how societies flourish and how they decay. We know how we know right from wrong. With this new knowledge, we shall restore virtue to the world.
To which the progressive might even more briefly respond:
Yeah, our people tried some of that in the early 20th century. The project was supposed to make society better by making better people. It applied scientific knowledge of Darwinian evolution, Mendelian genetics, and the science of psychology that gave us the ability to measure feeblemindedness and mental degeneracy.
It was called eugenics. It didn't work.
Its failure was not that it was pseudoscience. Quite a lot of it wasn't. Its failure was that it involved giving a political and technical elite a kind of power over other people that couldn't not be abused — abused to control others; abused to enact ancient prejudices like antisemitism, and new ones like middle-class fear of the poor and rural; abused to allay some people's fears of a collapsing, degenerating society at the expense of other people's bodies and lives.
I think you overrate the influence on science on German nationalism. The idea that blood relationships matter doesn't come out of science. It's a much older idea.
Or are you speaking about something that doesn't have something to do with Germany?
What are you talking about? Late 20st century US thought?
The specific ideas behind Nazi eugenics and "racial hygiene" derive — in part — from earlier eugenics and racial-hygiene movements in the US. See, for instance, the Indiana eugenics act of 1907 and, more pointedly, the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which combined legislation against mixed-race marriages with compulsory sterilization of the "feebleminded".
No, early-20th-century US thought,. I should have been more clear: by "new" I meant "new at the time", not "recent as of today". The idea that poor rural families were inbred hives of criminality, madness, and race-mixing was one of the motivations behind American eugenics of the early 20th century.
Thing is, it's true that many mental disorders are heritable. In that regard, the early eugenicists were not operating entirely on pseudoscience. But they went wrong in believing that if nations refused to use law and violence to control people's reproduction (and, ultimately, to kill the "unfit"), that society (or "the race") would degenerate.
After WWI Germans did try to copy American culture and might have copied scientifically motivated racism. On the other hand that stopped a bit with the Nazis. They didn't care about copying the US. "Blut und Boden" ("blood and soil") was a quite old idea.
"Racial hygiene" isn't really the same as "scientific racism". The latter seems to be used more to refer to the anthropological theories of racial superiority, now euphemistically called "human biodiversity" by their advocates.
But "racial hygiene" policies included the elimination of "undesirable" gene lines within the advocates' favored race — first through forced sterilization, and later through killing.
The German 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring reads like an echo of Harry Laughlin's 1922 Model Eugenical Sterilization Law, which was the model for the sterilization provisions in Virginia's 1924 law.
In 1933 in some sense yes. Hermann Muckermann who was co-author of the law did study in the US. By 1936 the Nazi however forbid him from speaking publically.
Yes, that's the main failure mode of ethical naturalism. "You must die, because SCIENCE!"
What would the progressive atheist's answer be to the challenge of producing virtue from matter? I'd try writing that one as well, but I think I'd end up caricaturing it.
My libertarian shard says it's the main failure mode of politics: "You must die, because POWER!"
No idea, but mine is game theory coupled with compassion — a System 2 mathematical insight and a System 1 intuitive and trained response. Ethics comes down to symmetry among agents: my good is no more or less The Good than your good. Humans can recognize this both as a matter of explicit mathematical-philosophical reasoning, and using intuitive-emotional responses (which can be trained). Virtuous humans both recognize and feel that symmetry, and vicious humans do not recognize or feel it.
The basic ethical failing that leads to atrocities is not usually the lack of System 2 ethical reasoning, but the sentiment (or System 1 trained reaction) that those people are not really people; they are some sort of mockery of people who do not deserve compassion. See Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality".
What we see in the history of eugenics politics is the notion that society can progress by freeing itself from having to care about certain kinds of people — so that they can be subjected to medical violation, mutilation, or extermination. But this is the same thing that we see in religious antisemitism or any number of other sources of the dehumanization meme. Dehumanization works the same evil whether it's couched in the language of progressive science, the Lutheran language of Nazi antisemitism, or in the order to the Albigensian crusaders: "Kill them all; God will know his own."
Rorty's critique of ethics since Plato has a weird echo when we're talking about eugenics, though:
But speaking of science and ethics, I think it's really kinda weird that humanity had the Golden Rule from traditional sources since antiquity, but didn't invent the math to describe it until the mid-20th century — the same time frame in which engineering gave to politics the ability to destroy the world.
For what it's worth, I've been in the UK since about age four and everything I learned about the American Revolution took the view that the Americans were basically in the right. I don't know how typical this is, but if it is then one explanation (not the only one but maybe the most plausible) is that actually that's the conclusion most reasonable people would come to when looking at the available evidence, and the most plausible explanation of that is that actually the Americans were (according to typical present-day values) in the right.
I don't think this sort of overheated language is helpful. No one is going to put you in prison (or even fine you, or even mock you gently) for thinking that current views of the Enlightenment may be misleadingly positive.
Emotional responses are also what one would expect if a thing has (really, truly) been established only with difficulty and much opposition and turned out to be extremely beneficial, and if the person making the response is worried that it's being attacked again.
It is usually best to determine that something is wrong before undertaking to explain the mental pathologies that produce it. (The idea described at the other end of that link is about doing this to beliefs, but I think one can say much the same about attitudes.)
This seems like one hell of a leap. There are things other than fear of death that lead people to respond emotionally to things. I already mentioned one above, but there are plenty of unflattering ones if NRx has already made it impossible for you to take seriously the possibility that admirers of "Enlightenment values" might be sincere and sane: for instance, maybe people like David Brin have so much of their personal identity invested in such values that criticism of them feels itself like a personal threat. Or maybe they don't really believe in the Enlightenment any more than you do, but they recognize (as you do) the extent to which present-day Western society is built on it, and fear the consequences if it's overthrown.
It's crimethink in the sense that people automatically downvote anything critical of the Enlightenment.
Evidence?
(It looks to me as if most of the unthinking downvoting on LW is done by neoreactionaries. But being not at all neoreactionary-minded myself, it's likely that it looks more that way to me than it is in reality.)
Of course, even if your claim were true that wouldn't suffice to make "crimethink" an appropriate word; the whole horror of the term in 1984 is that the Party tries (apparently quite successfully) to control not only actions, not only words, but thoughts, and did it by means a little more brutal than downvotes.
Backing up your general observation. Someone just went ahead and upvoted advancedatheist's original comment, upvoated Michael's comment, and then apparently downvoted every critical comment in this subthread. If they can give an explanation for why they think your responsed to advanced deserved a downvote I'd be really intrigued to hear it.
Nearly any political discussion has a few people downvoting on LW. If that's the standard every political discussion is crimethink.
There also the idea that policies should be judged on their merits and not based on whether or not they are enlightment policies and as such a post focusing on criticism a policy based on being an enlightenment policy might be downvoted for reasons having nothing to do with "crimethink".
http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#the-american-revolution
Interesting: thanks.
applause
[META]
It seems like several people are against having a meta sub-thread in the Open Thread. I thought it would be a cool thing to have, I'm provisionally assuming I was wrong. If no one objects, I'll revert back to the norm of not having one in any future OTs I post.
But how could you have made this kind of announcement without a meta sub-thread?
He could have made it without putting it in a sub-thread.
Perhaps I could post a top-level reply with a "[META]" tag at the top?
What are the arguments against it?
Two users downvoted the [META] comment. One of them withdrew their downvote after I posted the grandparent. So not exactly arguments, but there does seem to have been a general preference revealed for not having a meta sub-thread.
I didn't downvote, but one possibility is that they prefer that the meta thread is posted by the first person to post in it rather than at the same time as the open thread. In that case they only downvoted the TLP because the thread was empty/clutter.
Thanks for the input. Perhaps I could ask that anyone who has a meta comment make a [META] TLP and post their comment as a reply to it? Or should I just not mention it?
In the spirit of Tell culture, I'd like to make known my preference for not being downvoted without a reason given. I'm open to modifying my behavior in response to criticism, but just downvoting something I write doesn't give me much information, and I find it rather unpleasant to know that people disapprove of something I've done, without knowing what I did wrong or what I might be able to do to fix it.
I'm retracting this because in retrospect, I don't think it was a good idea to post this (I was rather tired when I wrote this--not a state of mind known for its good judgement.), and I'd rather not worry about having this as a potential karma sink. While I still agree with what I wrote, I don't think it was necessary to post about it, as I think most have similar preferences, and I can see how some would read it as whining (Though that's not what I was going for.).
An explanation is better than a vote, sure, but isn't a vote still better than nothing at all? And up is better than down in a vacuum, but up given good is as valuable as down given bad, no? It reminds me of someone's description of pain as the greatest gift we never wanted. It is information and information tends to be good. I get not liking it, but value it. There's no cash value to high karma.
I disagree with this sentiment. If anything, giving criticism and downvoting are alternatives, not things that go together. For example, since I don't like this idea I might have just downvoted this comment. But since I'm responding to it I'm not going to do that; it isn't necessary to downvote if I'm going to express my criticism anyway, and most likely it wouldn't be helpful either, since you'd probably just be annoyed by the downvote.
In other words, your comment is basically a criticizing of downvoting in general; if that is a reasonable preference, we should just remove the possibility of downvoting at all.
My personal downvoting policy is this: I tend to refrain from downvoting unless the comment really is atrocious in a way that I feel ought to be intuitively obvious. This has very little to do with the actual content of the comment and a great deal to do with the presentation; for example, I won't downvote a comment that I disagree with, but I will downvote a comment that I perceive as adding nothing to the discussion.
In practice, this means that I do not downvote very often; in the totality of my time here on this site, I believe I've downvoted less than ten comments. The less atrocious comments, however, I neither upvote nor downvote; instead, I write a reply discussing what I disagree with in the comment and what can be done better. (Note that in this case I actually upvoted your comment for being well-written and thoughtful, even though I disagree with your conclusion.) In that sense, my downvoting rationale adheres to your "exclusivity" principle. And yet I feel that downvoting based on pure disagreement, which you appear to be endorsing, is rude and is not a healthy behavior for the community, seeing as it basically serves to provide negative reinforcement every time someone says something contrarian, which is hardly conducive to an atmosphere of cooperative discourse. Comments that you disagree with should be replied to, not downvoted without explanation, unless there's some other factor unrelated to content that caused the downvote.
Most of the time, however, when I'm downvoted, I find that I can hardly discern the reason. I strive to make clear comments that express my point concisely without going on for to long, so whatever the reason is, it can't be presentation. Content, then? But if I'm saying something stupid or wrong, I'd very much like to know! Naturally I don't think I am, so if someone randomly downvotes one of my comments without telling me why, I'm forced to either (a) make unsupported speculations about what I'm doing wrong, or (b) disregard the downvote as uninformative and therefore not worth thinking about. Neither option seems particularly appealing to me, so I'd say that as a strategy to positively impact the behavior the of person being downvoted, your suggested policy of downvoting fails. Is there some other reason you're endorsing it?
I did not suggest downvoting purely on account of disagreement. It is true that if I had not responded to Gondolinian's comment, I might have downvoted it. But not just because I disagree, but because I find complaints about downvoting unpleasant and would rather see less of them on the site.
In general there might be many other reasons for downvoting which do not necessarily involve disagreement, such as vagueness, excessive verbosity, illogical reasoning, and so on. Again, of course you can simply respond and mention those things, but again in that case there is not all that much reason for downvoting at all. The advantage of downvoting is that it takes very little resources and does not require responding to something which may not be worthy of a response.
The suggested policy does not necessarily fail, for several reasons: 1) the person may indeed in some cases realize why he is being downvoted; 2) even if he does not, he may speculate randomly and modify his behavior until he is no longer downvoted -- i.e. downvoting provides selective pressure on comments; 3) in some extreme cases, it would be good even if he just becomes less likely to comment at all. In any case, as I said, the point of downvoting is that such a small use of resources is involved that it is not necessary that there be some particular positive effect in every case.
A recent paper looks at the geography of plagiarism. Paper is here. They looked at preprints on the arXiv and used sophisticated algorithms to look for text reuse that was not attributed. Not too surprisingly, certain countries have much higher reuse rates. China is one of the high rates, but it is interesting to note that Bulgaria and Egypt had higher rates- but that may be due to small sample sizes in those countries. An article about their work can be found here.
How long until someone produces a suspiciously similar paper?
I've noticed that for many LW posts - and EA posts to a lesser extent - it's very common for a comment on them to get more upvotes than the post itself. Since it's usually a lot harder to write a post than to comment on it, it seems like this isn't incentivising people to post strongly enough.
This also seems to apply to facebook posts and likes in the LW and EA groups.
Don't posts get ten times the karma as comments?
You don't want to incentivise people to make top-level posts, you want to incentivise them to contribute excellent content, and it doesn't matter much if it's in the top-level post or the comments.
The guy who thought the value of the product must reflect the labour that went into it was Karl Marx. He was wrong.
I think that people making more top level posts makes the community better off. I think that a new post that someone has put work into tends to be a lot better content overall than the top comment that might just be stating what everyone else's immediate thought about this was. Top level posts are also important for generating discussion and can be valuable even if they are wrong for that reason (though obvious they are better if they are right).
Well, his actual claim is that any product which sells for less than its inputs cost will not exist in the long run, which is correct, because its production does not sustain itself. But this seems to be an empirically valid description of the common impression (even among Marxists) of Marx.
As far as I remember, that's what he got to in the third volume of Das Kapital, but the first volume is very certain that the value of any product is a direct function of the amount of labour that went into it. I think the observation that Marx was a proponent of the Labour Theory of Value is uncontroversial? He didn't invent it, of course, but his name is strongly associated with it.
I'll have to wait until I get home to find the relevant section in my copy* to make sure I haven't misremembered it, but as I recall he claims a widget's value is lower bounded in the long run by the cost of labor because otherwise that laborer will starve / switch to doing something else.
That qualifier is very important, as with it the statement is a correct observation about equilibria, and without it the statement is an incorrect empirical claim (people can make mistakes and misinvest resources in the short run) that typically takes on a prescriptive or moralistic flavor.
* It's been a long time since I read Marx for a reason. I'm not seeing it in the 40 pages I was expecting it to be in, so who knows if it's there.
Well, thanks to the magic of the 'net let me quote from Volume 1:
I think Marx is quite clear on what he believes creates the value of the product.
I think the first part of that sentence is very dangerous: Marx does not use the writing style most modern readers of English are used to. For example, "plainly" can be either read as stating that the underlying reality is as simple as the description (as I think most moderns would interpret that sentence) xor that the underlying reality is less simple than the description (as most moderns would interpret that sentence if he used "simplistically" or "naively" instead). I'm moderately confident that the second case is the intended one: in the first volume, Marx makes a sketch, that he then refines again and again and again in the volumes to follow, and so to call him "very certain" of the sketch in the first volume is misreading him (or, at least, misrepresenting him).
All Marx is doing here is acknowledging that all commodities can be traded for each other, and that means there is some idea of a 'common standard of exchange-value,' and the obvious 'natural currency' in which to express exchange values is a sort of generalized human time. Consider this section a few pages later:
The following section also serves as evidence that he is using generalized human labor just as a reference for prices:
To step back, Marx spends several pages discussing the difference between "Use value" and "exchange value"- the first is what we call 'utility,' and the second 'price,' and Marx typically uses "value" to refer to "exchange value"- consider this paragraph:
All that feels a bit too post-modern to me :-/ Even if Marx's thinking changed in between Vol 1 and Vol 3, that's not a good thing for the theory and cherry-picking is still cherry-picking.
Without going into what Marx really believed, let me just point out that the labour theory of value is widely accepted by Marxists (those that still remain) as the correct one, see e.g. here.
(Reposted from http://thinkingornot.tumblr.com/post/104694726216/a-voting-proposal . I'm not taking the time to rewrite this from tumblr-quality to lw-jargon. The idea should be clear enough as written.)
I was thinking about an idea for voting; I don’t know if it’s been talked about before, or how feasible it is. The main purpose is to allow strategic voting in a way that makes a difference.
Basically, every vote should be not for a person, but for a short program. Every candidate is assigned a number. There is a system which maps any name to a number, so as to allow write ins. There is also another mapping from numbers to programs.
Each program gets as input all the other programs, and how many votes each of them got. Each program must output a number which corresponds to a candidate. To simplify, there will still be a standard slot for each candidate that qualifies (like today) that just runs the program “vote for candidate X no matter what”. Each program is limited in the amount of time it can run. Obviously, if your program is given the numbers of votes for the “standard” candidates, it won’t have a problem with running them in time, but there might be a problem with running other programs that try to run you. This may be solvable, similiar to the way Prisoner’s Dilemma problems with mutual cooperation can be solved when the programs can access each other’s source code.
The programs would be in a special language that is deterministic and “simple”. (In an intuitive sense, it should be a function from inputs to output that only depends on the inputs.)
One thing I should point out: this doesn’t take a lot of time to finish after the votes have been counted, as each program only has to be run once no matter how many votes it got. You could perhaps have a minimum number of votes each program needs to get before it is run at all, and put programs on the ballot that get a certain number of petition signers, or so on.
Any comments of refinements on this idea are welcome. I’d especially be interested if it turned out something like this has been talked about already.
This doesn't sound like a system that would be easy for less intelligent/educated voters to use. I wouldn't be surprised if it would lead to a number of voters voting for candidates they didn't intend to vote for. Additionally, many more potential voters might refrain from voting at all because of the complexity of the system.
That's why I said a "standard" option would still be available. That would just be a standard vote for one candidate. Also, raising the sanity line for voters might be a net positive ...
That would help, but just adding complexities to the act of voting could turn people away (just as offering more possible modes of response to surveys can sometimes decrease response rates).
Whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing depends on what the purpose of voting is. If the purpose of voting is to benefit from collective wisdom, perhaps preventing less educated/intelligent voters from voting is a net positive. However, if the purpose of voting is to represent diverse interests in order to more fairly allocate societal resources, than preventing less educated/intelligent voters from voting could leave them less effectively represented.
What if it's neither of those?
Right now, I bet that over 50% of the people who vote in a US presidential general election couldn't explain how the electoral college works, and over 10% think they are voting directly for president (if anyone is less lazy than me and looks up relevant surveys, let me know.) This doesn't stop them from voting. My system would still have the individual candidates on the top, and only advanced voters would even care about going further. Is this really so much more complicated than the electoral system, compared to a direct voting system?
I know this has no chance of happening in a real government anytime soon, but I'd still like to talk about it. There are voting systems that are more complex than ones used in "production" and only used privately. (I can't name any off-hand, but I'm not so familiar with voting theory.)
Also, if this is more optimal than what's being done now, then we can educate voters, or at least know that it's better so one day when people are ready, we can switch. What led me to this idea was thinking about the National Popular Vote, which only goes into effect if it itself gets a cetain number of votes (or rather, the strategy of the states that adopted it is to do something different if enough other states also do so.)
That depends very much of what you mean with real government. There no reason why the student body of an university can't be persuaded to elect their Student Government President that way.
Various open source projects govern themselves through complex processes.
LessWrong didn't use an election to pick a moderator but we could have, if we would believe that a democratic process would have been better.
If you think you have a system for better governance than it's a mistake to focus mainly on the national level. It's bad to suggest that the national level should switch to a system that hasn't proved it's worth on a smaller scale.
As a young and idealist college student who wants to change governance, student self governance is the ideal playground. On the one hand you are facing smart people who have other interests than you, on the other hand you don't mess up too much if you get things wrong.
Many folks' response to advocacy of weird voting systems seems to be something like — "The only reason you would advocate that weird voting system is because it gives your party some sort of sneaky advantage. I don't know enough about voting systems to know what that sneaky advantage is, but I know enough about humans to know that you're up to something."
Have you been in any discussion with practical implications about a voting system, based on which you make that statement or is your experience mainly about talking with people who don't have an influence on actual voting systems?
It was, in fact, to do with student government. :)
What kind of pitch did you gave in favor of another voting system? If all you can say is "the math is more beautiful" than that's likely not going to convince anyone.
The electoral college system doesn't require that they look over a long list of conditional responses and select from among them; the complexities are hidden from the voters, as you mention. I don't think the complexity of the electoral college system provides much evidence for how prospective voters would react to a complex system of voting options.
Voting systems used privately can be more complex than voting systems for public office because a more educated population may be using them.
I'd be more concerned about getting a representative pool of voters than trying to get voters to learn a new more complex system. I don't believe the difficulty of strategic voting is a major problem. On the other hand, I do think that reforms that reduce the cost of voting would be useful, and are being implemented in some states.
I like the national popular vote, but the complexities of that idea, like the electoral college, are hidden from voters; I don't think it's comparable to your ballot system.
Does anyone consider the recently deceased Nathaniel Branden an important intellectual? He based his career on making grandiose claims about "self-esteem," yet mainstream psychological research doesn't support his views:
https://medium.com/matter-archive/the-man-who-destroyed-americas-ego-94d214257b5
This relates to the phenomenon of getting on in years and realizing that the books which mattered to you earlier in life don't seem to have aged well when you revisit them.
I had no idea Nathaniel Branden was a psychotherapist, or that he's partially to blame for the self-esteem movement! I always vaguely assumed he was just an Objectivist.
Being wrong doesn't mean you weren't important. The self-esteem movement affected a lot of schools and was pretty popular; to the extent he's to blame for it, then he was indeed important.
I have a question about a seemingly complex social issue, so I'm interested if anyone has any insights.
Do protests actually work? Are e.g. the Ferguson/police crime protests a good way of attacking the problem? They seem to me to have a high cost, to be deflecting from the actual problem, and not enough sustained effort by people who care to push through to actual social change in the U.S.
What problem? That Blacks aren't free to steal from and intimidate Asian store owners and then charge at a police officer going for his gun?
Whether the protesters are trying to solve a problem that actually exists is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether protests work, and you're making your irrelevant point in an extremely confrontational red-tribe-blue-tribe way. This is exactly what the whole "politics is the mind-killer" thing is about, and doesn't belong here.
Well, in the parent I listed one potential "problem" that the protests were trying to "solve". You might not think of it as a problem (and I would agree), but at least some of the protesters seem to. In any case the protests probably have in fact helped to "solve" that problem. Given what happened to Officer Wilson, many cops are going to decide that they don't want to risk being the target of the next "anti-racist" media circus/protests and simply avoid policing black neighborhoods.
How so? If the problem doesn't actually exist, the protests are guaranteed to NOT work. They might have a variety of different consequences but they cannot work in the sense of solving that problem.
I meant that whether these specific protesters are attacking a non-existent problem isn't relevant to the effectiveness of protesters in general. One could make an argument that there's a more general tendency for protesters to attack problems that don't really exist and therefore can't be solved, as a reason why protest is generally ineffective, but I'm pretty sure alienist wasn't doing that.
There is no good answer to the question of the effectiveness of protesters in general. The answer will always be "It depends".
I disagree. alienist's answer was a bit flippant, but he's pointing out a real issue. If we're not even sure that there is a problem to be solved, how can we assess what protests are supposed to achieve? His links discuss newly-released grand-jury testimony (among other things) that is significant evidence, and should rationally lead us to alter our views of the Ferguson incident.
I was wondering that too; personally, I have no idea how to even begin answering the question. It would seem that at least some protests do work, as evidenced by the civil rights movement during the Martin Luther King era; but I don't know if this is true in general.
I think protests work if there is already a critical or near-critical mass of support in the relevant decision-making body (legislature, courts, civil service, etc.) Protests rarely change minds, but they can give already-sympathetic people a new impetus to take action in this area rather than another.
ETA: It also helps if the protesters have specific, focused demands, like "end segregation," or "bring the troops home."
According to Stephen Pinker, protests can turn individual knowledge into mutual knowledge
This suggests that protests may lead to something in a particular case when most people already have individual knowledge, but they do not have mutual knowledge yet. For example, suppose those people really care about some issue and have idea what to do, then if participating in protests is risky, that signals that all those protesters are willing to take risks in order to achieve their goal (curiously, in this particular case, if protesting is safe (as it is in most Western countries), the signal might be less clear). This way individual knowledge becomes mutual knowledge. So if it is the lack of mutual knowledge that prevents their goals from being achieved, then protests might help. Otherwise, if it is something else that prevents solution (e.g.lack of idea how to solve a problem, various game theoretic (or coordination) problems that are not solved by going from individual to mutual knowledge, etc.) from being achieved, they are probably much more likely to be useless.
You need to define your goals. Do protests work to achieve what?
Em..change in policy I suppose, isn't all this protest business about it?
Which "change in policy" do Eric Garner protests aim to achieve? A rewriting of how indictment or grand juries work? Which "change in policy" did Occupy aim to achieve?
I think that's one issue with protests. Many people gather with ill defined goals that are tangentially related to what most would agree is the actual problem. The "actual problem" for Occupy relates to unequal distribution of wealth, and the "actual problem" for the recent police brutality protests relates to systemic bias in the criminal justice system. I'm not sure if there actually is this sort of systemic bias, nor am I sure of the implicit claim that "things have gotten worse."
So, what do protests actually achieve, and is that effective in making things better? It seems that they do raise some level of awareness in the sense that more eye balls are on the issue for a short period of time. It's unclear to me that that's effective though, especially since it's a double edged sword. Raising awareness about the issue makes the negative externalities (like rioting and looting) more likely to be picked up and emphasized about the media.
A recent Yvain blog post might be helpful.
In my area, protests are largely social gatherings of like minded people. I asked protesters on three occasions last year and only two of a couple dozen protesters thought they were reaching an audience that does not already agree. I stress this was not a scientific study, but at least average for anecdote.
Have a look at this post from Death is Bad Blog. It won't answer your questions, but it will help you shine more light on it.
There should be a sustained writing speed measurement unit. I would name one after Wildbow: 1 bow = 100k words a month. An average fiction writer would do well to write at 0.1 bow.
I recently started reading up on the standard approaches to epistemology. Much of the primary discussion seems to be focused on the question "what constitutes knowledge?". The basic definition used to be that to count as knowledge it needs to be a belief, it needs to be justified, and it needs to be true. But there's the Gettier Problem which points out that there are cases that satisfy the above criteria but which we wouldn't normally consider "knowledge". Numerous alternative "theories of knowledge" have been proposed, new counter-examples have been pointed out, philosophers have split into competing camps (each under its own "-ism" title), and hundreds if not thousands of papers have been published on this topic.
But I'm totally confused. It sounds like they're just arguing about basically arbitrary definitions. So agree on a definition and get on with it. Or define different types of knowledge if that suits you better. And if that doesn't perfectly capture everything we might mean by the word "knowledge", what difference does it make? If they'd taboo the word "knowledge" would there be anything left to discuss?
I assume I'm just missing something. But if in fact they could just taboo the term and get on with more important discussions, then could someone please explain to me why so many highly intelligent, extremely thoughtful philosophers have spent so much time on a (seemingly) ridiculous discussion?
That has been my exact reaction to most of the "big" questions, with a few exceptions.
As for the "justified true belief" "definition", each word in it is already so poorly defined, you might as well give up on it. My personal working definition of knowledge is the capability to accurately predict the outcome(s) of a certain (set of) action(s). Which probably matches an existing camp or two, not that I care.
Yes.
If we want to have an AI that knows things we have to be specific about what knowledge is. If we have unrealistic naive concepts we will never get the knowledge into the AI.
If you want an university to teach knowledge, then it makes sense to have an idea of what the university is supposed to teach.
If you want to decide whether someone has depression, than it makes sense to ask what you mean with the sentence: "Alice has depression." Currently it might mean: "A trained psychologist has found that Alice fulfills the criteria of the DSM-V for depression." It would be possible to get saner way to deal with the issue if we would have a better grasp on the underlying ontology.
Based on certain ideas of knowledge people reject certain approaches as pseudoscience because they don't fulfill the criteria of what's believed to be necessary for knowledge generation.
I agree with this. However, there are philosophers who criticize this practice. For instance, Peter Unger recently published a vehement criticism of mainstream analytic philosophy, Empty Ideas.
One influential view is that we should not try to "analyze" pre-theoretical concepts, but rather construct fruitful, exact and simple "explications". If you have that view, definitions do not become interesting for their own sake. Rather, terms and concepts are a tool in the pursuit of knowledge, which can be more or less effective. See Carnap's dicussion in Logical Foundations of Probability, pp. 3-20 (esp. p. 7).
That said, it is true that many philosophers continue to write papers on the Gettier problem in a very classical essentialist fashion, along the lines you are describing. The same goes for many other philosophical discussions (e.g. on truth, reasons, etc).
I think that there is a selection effect at work here: those who think this is silly move on to other things while those who think that it isn't keep on doing it. This creates the illusion that more people think this is a good and interesting form of philosophy than is actually the case.
Of course now and again some outsiders get so fed up with this that they write a book on it to attack it. Another similar example of this (in addition to Unger) is Ladyman and Ross's attack on mainstream analytic metaphysics (which treats questions like "is the statue and the lump of clay that is made of distinct or identical objects?). I suspect that many others feel, however, that although this kind of philosophy is a bit of a nuisance, there are other more pressing problems more worth focusing on. For instance, I suspect Nick Bostrom doesn't like this kind of philosophy, but as far as I know he hasn't spent much time criticizing it, thinking there are other problems which are more important to spend time on.
Also, it seems surprisingly hard to weed out. The kind of criticism that Carnap gave is at least a century old, but the Gettier problem and other similar problems are still treated seriously.
An interesting argument for why people who are critical of this kind of philosophy should do something about it is, though, that it presents a great opportunity cost:
Do you think the question whether or not core foundations of analytical philosophy are correct is unimportant?
No, though I understand my comment could be read in that way. I have thought and read a lot about these questions (and written some things) and sometimes get a bit frustrated with them. I have started to become more pessimistic about the possibilities of convincing mainstream philosophers who like to work on these questions ("scholasticism with a dull knife", as a brilliant colleague of mine scribbled on his noteblock during a talk on the Gettier problem).
Perhaps we should instead focus on showing what alternative things philosophers could do. Also we should make alliances with other subjects. People outside the discipline are much more likely to want to fund work on business ethics or medical ethics than yet another go at some concept or metaphysical question.
I think this view of Matti Eklund's has a lot to be said for it:
If we can't disprove the Gettier stuff, perhaps we can hope that people will get bored of it (if we provide them with a less boring alternative).
When you can't disprove something the straightforward way is to accept it. In this case you can switch to a more construtivist notion of knowledge. To quote Heinz von Förster: "Truth is the invention of a liar."
The problem isn't that you can't do anything useful with ontology but that a lot of analytic philosophers are confused about the subject and produce papers that provide no value.
Barry Smith does deal with the question of knowledge and get's funded because he actually does something useful. Applied ontology is useful for bioinformatics and other fields likely also would profit from it.
It possible that in one or two decades bioinformatic inspired mapping of mental states is good enough that the psychology folks with their DSM simply loses it's authority.
Further thoughts on Imaginary Expertise...
I'm currently studying a final-year undergrad course in the mathematical underpinnings of statistics. This course has three prerequisite courses, all of which have the word "statistics" or "statistical" in the title. While the term has obviously come up beforehand, it was only a couple of chapters ago that we were given a formal definition for what a "statistic" is, (in the context of parameter sufficiency).
It occurred to me that if someone was ignorantly mouthing off about statistics, and you wanted to shut them up, you could do a lot worse than to ask "so, what exactly is a statistic?"
I've noticed beforehand that "so what exactly is money?" has a similar effect for economics pseudo-blowhards, and "so what exactly are numbers?" for maths. It's worth noting that these questions aren't even the central questions of those disciplines, (insofar as such broad categories have central questions), and they don't necessarily have canonical answers, but completely blanking on them seems indicative of immature understanding.
I've now taken to coming up with variants of these for different disciplines I think I know about.
This seems like a fun exercise!
Genetics: "what is a gene?"
Evolution: "what is a species?" / "what is an adaption?"
Physics: "what is energy?"
I am a graduate student of physics and I am inclined to say that I now know even less about what energy is.
Oh, that's easy. It's just another word for wakalixes.
(Two irrelevant remarks: 1. Sorry, that webpage is eyeball-bleedingly ugly. 2. I conjecture that the last two words in the excerpt are why HPMOR!Harry chose to give his army a name that enabled him to call himself General Chaos. I suspect, more precisely, that at some point Eliezer read that bit of Surely you're joking... and thought "hmm, General Chaos would be a good name for a supervillain or something".)
Hm. If I had to give an answer, I'd say it's the stuff that's conserved because the laws of physics don't change over time. But that's pretty theoretical - maybe an extensional definition would be better.
I don't really like these questions. "What exactly is a number?" doesn't really have an answer. I can give the standard answer about representing integers as certain sets. And I give the details of constructing the real numbers either as cuts or Cauchy sequences of rationals. But neither answer is very satisfying imo. Saying that integers "are" certain kinds of sets seems wrong to me (as it does to Tim Gowers). My feeling is I don't know what numbers exactly are.
I understand you probably are going to attack someone's expertise if they blank and can't say anything. But people react to things differently. I could imagine a version of myself who was didn't realize she needed to spout information even if she couldn't answer the question fully.
The other problem is my best friend studied computer science not mathematics. She is however much more intelligent than myself. Her knowledge of math is really quite good. She can give the "standard answer" to "what is an integer" but cannot give the details of a construction of the real numbers (I just asked her).
So I really think we should be careful about these gotcha questions.
This seems incredibly obnoxious and I don't understand how it's helpful. It reminds me of a little kid playing the "Why?" game. Regardless of whether someone can provide a precise exact definition for "money", I think we all understand what it is on some level. You don't have to define every single word you use in a conversation, because the definitions are already assumed to be understood... that's the whole point of having words. I agree that there are situations where two people might fundamentally disagree on the definition of a word they are using and unless they define it they will never get anywhere (e.g. utilitarians and deontologists arguing over what is "good"), but I don't see how these situations are like that.
I'm not an economist or statistician but:
Money: an item with no inherent worth of its own, but is understood to have a specific value and can be traded for goods and services
Statistics: facts about the world that are expressed in quantitative form
I don't know how either of those advanced my understanding.
Also I have had the opposite problem with academia, I find it really annoying how every professor feels like they have to spend the first day of class on "what is design?" or "what is psychology?" or "what is logic?" or etc. etc.
This is somewhat unfair. If you already think someone's a blowhard, and you want to take the wind out of their sails, go for it, but a lot of people who have some legitimate expertise won't have a definition at their fingertips.
Or if they do know, you'll tip them off that you don't think much of them.
Or they might give a legitimate answer that differs from your own flawed understanding. In which case you're just a jerk to judge them by it.
Reiterating what I said to ChristianKI, it's not about seeing whether the person has a "correct answer", but whether they're already aware it's a non-trivial question.
I'd still say it's unfair. I was burned by a question like this in a job interview. Would you agree that that sort of high-pressure context is a poor place to ask questions like this?
I'm not sure how the conversation got here. Your question is reminiscent of a friend or partner talking about the perceived-wrongdoing they suffered at the hands of a mutual acquaintance, before asking "don't you agree it was wrong of them to do that?"
It's not obvious to me that interviews are a bad situation for questions like the ones I describe in the OP. I don't know the circumstances of the interview you experienced, though I can believe it was conducted poorly and you have my sympathies.
There are obviously social consequences to going round putting people on the spot with awkward questions all the time. If people can't exercise good judgement in this matter, I don't think anything I write will save them from themselves.
I'll clarify: I think the ability of people to respond adequately to these questions depends as much on their confidence as their knowledge, and that interpreting their answers is very subjective. In general, asking your suggested questions are a good way to make someone look dumb or fluster them, but not the best way to correctly identify their expertise. Only in limited contexts are questions like these asked in good faith.
They're still valuable to think about because if you're ever in a position to receive these sorts of questions, you should be prepared to give at least a couple types of concise and competent-sounding answers, whether the question is asked in good faith or not.
Languages : what's a syllable?
I'm not sure this has something to do with Imaginary expertise. If you ask a 10 year old kid what money happens to be, it probably gives you a straightforward answer.
On the other hand an expert might understand flaws of various different definitions of money and therefore won't give you a straightforward answer.
This isn't about whether or not one can provide a straightforward answer. It's whether or not one is even aware that the question has a non-obvious answer. Saying "actually, that's a complicated question" is a more virtuous answer than providing some unsubstantiated, ad-hoc response that falls apart under the slightest scrutiny.
It most poignantly ties in with imaginary expertise as both arise from the illusion of explanatory depth, (i.e. "I am familiar with this, therefore I understand it")
Or of question ambiguity. If the word exists on many layers, and they're not sure which one you're asking about, they might get stuck there. I notice that I mostly agree with your questions (a 'statistic' and 'money' are both fairly crisp ideas that have a clear use in their respective fields, and so even just pointing at what they're used for is a decent definition), but that bramflake's suggestions all seem problematic.
"Money" is a vague idea. It's defined as something that can be traded for goods and services, but everything can be. It's just a question of how quickly, reliably, and consistently it can be done. Out of necessity, economists have given precise definitions of "money". At least six of them.
Sort of? The sentence that immediately follows seems precise enough to me, and is the same idea (though different words) than the definition I had in mind. If someone jumps to, say, "root of all evil" or "shared fiction" instead of "trade," that does seem informative about their blowhard-nature.
Chemistry: "What is a bond between two atoms?" or "What is a reaction?"
Linguistics: "What is a word?" or "What is a language?"
At the Less Wrong meetup yesterday we played the Less Wrong Name Game. You may know the regular Name Game by another name. It involves all players having the name of a celebrity, historical figure, fictional character, etc., attached to their forehead. The identity of each figure is not known to the player labelled with it, and they must deduce this identity by asking a series of yes/no questions. In the Less Wrong variant, we gave each other identities from the Less Wrong memeplex/ideosphere.
We played this fairly late on at the meetup when we were down to six attendees. Our identities were Peter Singer, Aubrey de Grey, Yvain, Moloch, Philip Tetlock and The Sorting Hat.
This was fun, informative and pleasantly in-groupish. That said, when labelling someone else, I'd suggest being very sure that they've heard of the person you're assigning to them. We now know quite a few obscure facts about Philip Tetlock.
Last week I was going to ask if anyone had recommendations for nerd-friendly resources on public relations. Then I remembered where I was, and went "ha ha ha!"
This was possibly unfair.
Out of the many people who read Less Wrong, it feels like one or two of them should be able to recommend a good entry point for any given subject. We've got physics, mathematics, statistics, computer science, et al covered, but other areas don't enjoy the same coverage.
It does seem to me that if there were someone on Less Wrong with a background in PR (or constitutional law, or the Yugoslav conflict, or whatever), they'd probably have some ideas about what material other Less Wrongers might find accessible or valuable. With that in mind, does anyone want to volunteer an unusual-for-LW academic or professional background we can mine for information?
To fill that last gap while we wait for an actual expert to arrive, I offer my own reading list on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Actually, it is also a watching list, because I recommend doing as I did by starting with
Watching TV science documentaries mostly soured me on documentaries in general, because I realized they have a woeful information density compared to academic books. But as an introduction to a tranche of history, a lower density documentary* was extremely useful for learning the names & places I needed to know to understand chapter- and book-length treatments of the wars.
If I read someone's name in a book I'm likely to forget it before it crops up again, but if I see ten clips of someone answering questions with their name hovering by their head, I have a good chance of remembering who they are. (Something I like a lot about the documentary is that it's not stingy with the name captions.) It also helps that the series mixes things up with photographs, maps, tourist adverts, state TV cartoons, contemporary news reports (and yes, old Yugoslav TV looks about as you'd expect it to), at least one snippet of hidden camera footage, recordings of phone calls, and amateur camcorder film.
A downside of Death of Yugoslavia is that it's too old to cover the war in Kosovo, but it's still indirectly helpful there because it gives a fair amount of background information about the province. I've also seen allegations that the film's English translations are tendentiously inaccurate, but the only remotely reliable source I have for those claims is a couple of references to ICTY transcripts in the documentary's Wikipedia article.
Once you know the broad structure of the wars, it's time for books. The documentary has an accompanying book, also called The Death of Yugoslavia, and I've yet to find an academic who dislikes it, but I haven't read it. I assumed it was a bit redundant after watching the series, and I wanted something else. I wanted academic books with contributions from many people of different nationalities (to reduce the risk of reading one-sided propaganda), written in English, and available for free somewhere on the Internet. Which led me to:
The books are all a bit different. Confronting is very much an ivory tower product, with each chapter drafted by its own team, and each team headed by a pair of researchers who wrote a first draft for multiple rounds of critique & editing. The line-up of contributors has 300+ people from 30 countries, including every ex-Yugoslav country, and the introduction describes an arduous composition process which makes me picture a Yugoslavia-themed IPCC. Burn This House is a more straightforward edited volume with chapters by 11 authors from different fields (journalism, theology, history, Yugoslav foreign affairs, broadcasting, academia, and think-tank punditry). Finally, Thinking is basically a compilation of Sabrina Ramet's reviews of "more than 130[!] books about the troubled region", so you get some idea of what many scholars think even though the book is a single person's effort. All three books sport copious references to specific sources.
None of the books are perfect. The e-book of Burn This House is missing the pictures, replacing them with boxes labelled "Image Not Available". Confronting and Burn This House both suffer from typos and similar slip-ups, some of which corrupt dates and other numbers. I made a note of a few examples from my copy of Confronting:
Ramet's Thinking has much less of this, though I have spotted at least one iffy statement. p. 22 says, "[m]ore than 200,000 people died in Bosnia during the war of 1992-5", a number broadly accepted when Ramet was writing, but since halved to around 100,000 (on which see Calic & Mitrović's "Ethnic Cleansing and War Crimes, 1991-1995" in Confronting).
So, worthwhile as these books are, they still call for critical thinking and careful attention. Fortunately, the bulk of the problems which set off my bullshit detector are unintentional bloopers like those I just listed, rather than vague warning signs which give me a creeping sense of "I can't put my finger on specific factual errors, but I doubt I'm getting a full, fair picture here".
Two exceptions do fall into that last category, namely the chapters on the Kosovo war by Udovički in Burn This House, and by Gow & Hadžić in Confronting. Udovički gives me pause by guilelessly citing Washington Times articles, a Cato Institute speaker, and Diane Johnstone. Gow & Hadžić take an oddly uncritical perspective on the West's actions in Kosovo, focusing on evidence supporting NATO's bombing of Serbia & Montenegro, failing to rebut opposing evidence, and arguing against charges of NATO war crimes on the naive basis that the ICTY didn't think the charges worth pursuing (and that NATO ran its mission plans past lawyers before executing those plans).
Other books. My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocities is an edited volume about justice and social reconstruction in ex-Yugoslavia & Rwanda. Quite dry, but some of the chapters have interesting data or descriptions of how war crime courts and other post-war projects work. Sarajevo Under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime is an inessential but engrossing ethnography documenting life in (duh) besieged Sarajevo. Debating the End of Yugoslavia, a just-released anthology springing from this conference, might prove to be a solid literature review in the vein of Ramet, but more up to date.
* Which is not to say that Death of Yugoslavia dilutes its facts to the point of becoming boring. It goes at a steady clip — except for the final half hour, which covers the juddering stop-start progress towards a peace agreement in great detail.
PR is a quite wide field. I personally have been multiple times on TV, radio and mainstream newspapers for the topic of Quantified Self.
One of the best books to read on PR is likely Trust Me I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday. Ryan Holiday is a nerd and was Director of Marketing for the clothing company American Apparel. He also did PR for a few authors such as Robert Greene and Tucker Max.
Even when you don't want to use some of the dark arts technqiues he writes about, reading his description of how US newsmedia works, is likely very useful.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look into it.
I don't know how useful I can be, but I have friends whose opinions I can ask. Fields: botany, biological conservation, zoology, genetics.
The paper-machine household has finally obtained some of this mythical Soylent (v1.2) stuff that has been making waves about the internets.
Shipping: Originally ordered on June 17; shipped December 10, arrived December 13. Supposedly reorders ship in 1-2 weeks -- we shall see.
We intend this to be a breakfast/lunch substitute, as both of us are too busy to prepare breakfast and tired of buying lunch. Of course the boyfriend is one of those rare folks (around here, at least) who both enjoy cooking and are talented at it, so dinner will remain his demense when he has the time for it.
Good things:
One pitcher = one day's supply (2000 kcal) is brilliant design. Due to shaking requirements for mixing Soylent, one has to trust somewhat implicitly the pitcher's seal, but the thing seems sturdy enough.
The taste is best described as neutral, confirming other reports. The boyfriend and I expected something more like a traditional protein shake, but this is thinner and practically tasteless. Perhaps vaguely like soy milk, but much less strong? It's believable that someone could eat this exclusively for long periods of time.
Improved digestive health almost immediately. Boyfriend reported mild heartburn, but could be confounded by other food. No sign of the increased gas some reported with 1.0 and 1.1.
Bad things:
Pitcher has no markings, which makes measuring for meals a bit awkward.
Soylent residue becomes very difficult to remove, like most meal substitute drinks.
Slightly unpleasant grittiness that doesn't go away with increased shaking.
Still really expensive, even when you compare it to eating out. Worse when you compare it to cooking.
Harper's Magazine seems to be featuring LW, among others, in its January 2015 issue in the article "Come With Us if You Want to Live: Among the apocalyptic libertarians of Silicon Valley" (apparently features Vassar, MIRI, and LW survey stats).
It's paywalled, there don't yet seem to be any copies floating around, and I can't get it through my university proxy or Libgen. Can anyone get a copy?
First quote about Lesswrong:
That seems somewhat uncharitable. Most critiques of Less Wrong I've read seem to be predominantly predicated on the fact that it seems "weird". This is unfortunate, in my opinion, as Less Wrong actually has a lot to offer, and it's a shame that people are turned off by their first glance. Articles like this only serve to heighten the effect, especially since readers might not even visit Less Wrong after reading such an article. I have to confess that I wish journalists wouldn't do this sort of thing...
...but that's little more than a pipe dream. Non-academic journalism has notoriously low standards, which means they can pretty much write whatever they want. Which means that if we want to stop getting called out as "weird", we're the ones who're going to need to do something about it...
The article basically says that we are a bunch of weird people with an average IQ of 138. That means that most people who read the article won't think they are at home on LW and most people probably wouldn't. On the other hand readers who want to take part in a high level discussion forum, might be motivated to check out LW.
It's okay that not everybody wants to join LW.
I have to say I appreciated the first description of LessWrong as "confoundingly scholastic".
And here it is, as a pdf! (I finally thought of trying to log in as a subscriber)
Thanks. I've excerpted it at http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ldv/harpers_magazine_article_on_lwmiricfar_and/
I have it in hard copy, but all attempts so far to scan or photograph it have been foiled. I'm working on it, though; by far the best media piece on Less Wrong I've seen so far.
ETA - To give you an idea: the author personally attended a CFAR workshop and visited MIRI, and upon closer inspection one can make out part of the Map of Bay Area Memespace in one of the otherwise-trite collage illustrations.
David Pizer started a petition to promote more anti-aging research.
"In 40 to 100 years, if the world governments spent money on research for aging reversal instead of for research on building weapons that can kill large numbers of people, world scientists could develop a protocol to reverse aging and at that time people could live as long as they wanted to in youthful, strong, healthy bodies."
To sign the petition, go here
Currently at 13 signatures, I'm not optimistic about its prospects.
Before promoting a petition it would make sense to write a good one on the topic.
Wait But Why wasn't too popular last time around, but I find the site really interesting, so I'm trying again. I don't agree with everything there, but I do honestly think it's interesting to read through. Here we go!
Discussion topic of the week from a few weeks back: How long would you live if given the arbitrary choice? http://waitbutwhy.com/table/how-long-would-you-live-if-you-could-choose-any-number-of-years
Now we know what kind of sex the British politicians do not like.
The law change is just "if it was already illegal to put it on a DVD and sell it, now it's also illegal for other kinds of porn", so if anything I'd consider it a step forward, making the laws consistent and bringing already-existing shitty laws into the spotlight. Although possibly I'm having too much faith in the public and in their ability to influence the government.
I'm not sure that the actors are politicians instead of burocrats.
SIA/anthropics strike again? "Fantastically Wrong: The Scientist Who Thought 22 Trillion Aliens Live in Our Solar System":
(The Presumptuous Natural Philosopher notes: 'while it is true that we have no direct evidence of life on other planets, or indeed solid confirmation that the other bodies of the solar system are rocky and support life, all of this is at least consistent with our current knowledge, and consider the anthropic aspect: with a global population of ~1b in 1837, and a possible system-wide population of 22 trillion or 22,000 times the global population, would not the SIA provide crushing evidence that the other planets are likely inhabited?')
Well, that's kind of close. The average density of Saturn is in fact less than that of water, and the gravity at its cloudtops is only very slightly higher than at Earth's surface. Jupiter's isn't that bad, either, at ~2.5g.
Sure, but that's not impressive and you'd expect him to be close to right about those numbers. As I understand it, it's pretty easy to derive the volume of planets from optical observations of diameter, and the mass from their orbits & Newtonian mechanics, and then divide to get net density.
So, I think I've... not really 'unlocked an achievement', I guess, but hit a milestone of some sort: my first mockery in an academic publication. From the PhD thesis "Effectiveness of n-back cognitive training: quantitative and qualitative aspects", Vladimír Marček ("polar") 2014:
(If you've been subscribed to the DNB ML, it's pretty clear only one poster fits Marček's description; the 'neutral reviews' would be my FAQ and in particular my meta-analysis - he pointedly cites the pro-passive-control meta-analyses, even Au which was very recent, and ignores my and other meta-analyses, even Melby-Lervåg & Hulme's. What amuses me the most is that our main clash was over whether n-back gains were due primarily to passive control groups, and here polar did a large experiment with an active control group and found... no gains. Whups.)
Making the news today is MIT taking down all Walter Lewin videos (most now, some at the end of the term) as a result of their investigation into sexual harassment allegations. This seems like a gross and unprecedented overreaction (a rough equivalent of removing all Bill Cosby videos), so I would estimate that this decision will be partially or fully reversed within 1 year, with probability of 75%.
Richard Feynman may have been a creep-and-a-half, but it would be a shame to stop publishing the Feynman Lectures on Physics on that regard.
(That said, Richard Feynman is dead and therefore cannot sexually harass any of his current readers.)
A similar argument could be made that a pre-recorded lecture cannot sexually harass someone either (barring of course very creative uses of the video lecture format which we probably would have heard about by now :P ).
From the MIT press release, it sounds as if the former professor emeritus¹ has been harassing online students through means other than pre-recorded videos.
¹ Would that be a professor demeritus?
It's MIT - they have lots of compelling lecturers. Far more likely one of them will be tasked with producing a replacement series long before then. Actually, that's probably already in motion.
Lewin spent 25 years recording lectures. That's a quarter century working on them after he was singled out as the guy to do it, some combination of already being a good lecturer and willing to put in the work. And, no, MIT does not have a lot of compelling lecturers -- the teaching prize is known as the "Kiss of Death Award."
In our ridiculous societal climate, if you're not the chief inquisitor you'll be the target of the next shitstorm yourself, #MIThateswomen. You're mostly getting punished for underreacting, so you err on the side of overreacting.
If you can't beat'em, join'em. If they are crazy, the best way to be safe is to (pretend to) lead them (unless you can avoid them, which wasn't an option).
Welcome to the brave new world. Blood and games, keeps us busy from dealing with the issues that matter.
Historically speaking, not the best way. Once the ranks of external enemies thin or move out of reach, rabid movements start destroying their own.
You hope the roving ire of the storm front has moved on until then. (xpost /r/meteorology)
There are plenty of historical examples in which monarchs sought to defuse revolutionary pressure by "joining" some of the more moderate factions, it's one of the two typical responses (placate them versus fight them). The demise of monarchy shouldn't be taken to mean that they weren't occasionally successful, see for example Victoria of England, or the German "revolution" of 1848/49. (Disclaimer: Not claiming expertise, also not a NRx-disciple.)
ETA: Also, your argument seems to be "eventually the movement will turn on itself (see the French Revolution "devouring its children") once it runs out of external enemies", which is a general argument against joining such movements. However, the question is whether you're "allowed" to stay neutral and wait until the whole thing blows over. Typically, such isn't an option. Instead the alternatives often come down to "get beaten by them"/"become one of them". In which case the latter is preferable to the former.
Typically, such is. We are not talking about acceptance or even necessary obeisance -- you said the best way is to "lead them". This means much more than just proclaiming "Yes, witches are bad, I don't like them, too". This means grabbing the torch and the pitchfork and shouting "After me, lads! I know some witches that need burning!".
Take a pretty extreme case -- Stalin's Russia. You had no choice about demonstrating loyalty and singing the praises of communism and Stalin personally. But you did have a choice about joining the secret police and "leading" the hunt for the insufficiently enthusiastic.
Joining the secret police would probably render you safer (note the comparative) from being their target than trying to be an accepting bystander. The 'best way to be safe', i.e. 'the safest way', not the only potentially safe way.
Finding the least amount of cooperation you can "get away with" sets you up for being identified as a target. The worst case comes from underreacting, or from trying to find some middle ground which could be perceived as underreacting. Back to the MIT case, "leading" in the sense of "look, we 'sacked' the guy (in his emeritus activities) and destroyed his legacy even before anyone could even ask us for our reaction!". Leading in the literal sense: being the forerunner, not a follower, showing a preemptive radical reaction to signal "see, we're one of us, we're leading the wave of punishing the evil professor". "(Pretend to)" since clearly everyone involved there would like nothing more than the whole thing to go away, and to go back to business as usual once they've collectively passed the "we're the most progressive/feminist/buzzword institution ever, see we even cut off our own hand! (figuratively)" test.
I do maintain the "typically, such isn't an option", since it referred to "stay neutral and wait until the whole things blows over". I wouldn't say "acceptance or even necessary obeisance" falls under that description, that would be along the lines of "join them". Which can mean you're safe. It's just not the safest way, which is joining the secret police equivalent.
The "Gerstein Report" makes for fascinating reading, an SS scientist who purportedly sabotaged a lot of the gas production, was suspected of being a dissenter at various points, but always got away through being of high rank in the very organisation everyone was so fearful of.
Stalin's purges around 1937 show otherwise.
That depends -- first, I'm arguing for the "hide in crowds" tactics, not for the least possible amount that doesn't get you shot immediately, and second, you are assuming the "nowhere to hide" scenario. Since we are speaking about SJWs and such, some people and organizations are forced to declare their positions, but a lot are not.
But right in the parent post you talk about the necessity of "being the forerunner, not a follower, showing a preemptive radical reaction to signal". I continue to think that passive acceptance and active participation are very different things.
Certainly if you can thoroughly evade the spotlight that's a good alternative and one most of us are taking right now, as we speak. Such situations do exist historically as well, no doubt, you mentioned one.
I didn't mean to overly generalize in the first comment, as you say I was assuming a "nowhere to hide" scenario because in this particular case (and similar cases these days) that's what it was: the Twitter spotlight (the modern Eye of Sauron) was about to shine upon them, and they needed to frame their role thus that it reflects a positive light. Like meeting drunk soccer fans in an alley, you gotta declare yourself to be a friend of their club, if they friend/foe query you.
Generally/Typically I do think that it is the easiest way (note the superlative, "the safest way") to evade prosecution when you're one of the prosecutors yourself. But of course that's hard to quantify, let alone when the domain spans across human history.
I didn't mean to say that typically there are no alternatives which could also keep you safe, or that the safest way is always to join the most radical part of the winning faction. But even if you're including a margin a safety in that "least possible amount", that still puts you closer to the crazy's bad side than being one of their bannermen. If they can target e.g. Richard Dawkins / UVA / Lewin they can target anyone.
Which is why, of course, ahem, I wholeheartedly support the crazies. If they asked ...
The problem is that they commonly ask for corpses of infidels as proof of your sincerity.
If it comes down to it, better their corpses than my own. Since I'm in this body, and not some other one.
Under Stalin party members weren't very safe. For Stalin is was more important to kill members of the party that might not be according to his standards than it was to kill random people without any political power. It was quite easy to pick the wrong side in inner party battles.
Good point.
Noooooooooooooo!!!!
I don't care if Walter Lewin is actually Stalin in disguise, those videos are awesome.
Does, um, anybody know if someone is linking to a backup somewhere (cough)gwern(cough)?
You can watch them on Youtube, e.g on this channel. If you would like to have a backup copy on your own computer, you can download them using, e.g. this Firefox addon.
oh, they are online various places elsewhere, since the license allows copying.
Recorded on Prediction Book here.
What would attract you to read an introductory textbook in a field very far from your own? (I have a dream to write a kind of 'Bayesian Botany in Your Backyard and Beyond' introduction into plant ecology on some point later in my life, so if it comes true, I will also ask your opinion on it:)) well, here goes nothing.)
Curiosity.
Also, practical necessity, of course.
I'm glad my Stupid Questions monthly thread idea was well received. I'm also thinking of making a monthly thread for lifehacks in the spirit of this post, though without calling them munchkin ideas, as I worry that might seem weird without context. Any thoughts on that, or should I just go ahead and try to post one?
Are there any LessWrongers at NIPS (in Montreal) this week? Perhaps we can have a mini meetup. Send me a PM or reply if you're here. I'm here till Sunday.
I'm here until Thursday.
I'm seeing a doctor in two weeks, in an attempt to obtain some sort of something to attack my chronic akrasia (chronic in the sense that it appears to get worse over time). Bloodtesting is planned. Aside from thyroid hormone, iron and testosterone, is there anything specific I should ask about? If I get the chance to bring up alternatives (I.E. citing uncooperative sleep to try and aim for a -afinil), are there any in particular I should focus on?
For the record, I tried Focalin briefly in 2010, followed by Prozac. The Focalin appeared to help with focus but not choice, and either dropped off after the first week, stopped taking effect on something useful, or was placebo all along. Prozac didn't strike me as doing much of anything (or at least, I was not happy enough with the results to bother refilling after several months).
I want to try Creatine whenever possible, which probably means next week at the earliest. Should I wait until after the tests?
I haven't found creatine to have much mental effect, but once you start trying it I recommend trying some intense exercise - creatine made it dramatically more comfortable.
table top particle accelerator
http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20141108164731.shtml
23andMe/SNPs: so I recently decided I might as well get around to getting my own data since the price has not dropped much for a while and I figured out how to work around the state restrictions. I now have my raw SNP data, and I'll be posting some random notes soonish. Does anyone have any ideas for what to do with this data?
Look at SNPs corresponding to methylation defects, and run a self experiment on any interventions that drop out of that.
Not to derail the post, but I saw on your blog you had IQ testing done. I just had it done, about to get the results.
Do you have any recommendations for resources that will help me make sense of the results? My motivation in taking the test was to see what types of problems/domains I might be good at (relative to my own performance in other domains).
The links were broken for me.
I picking up my kit from the post office tomorrow. I'm also gifting all four grandparents with kits for Christmas. I would be very interested to hear what you plan to do with your data.
Look at this site:
http://www.23andyou.com/3rdparty
I haven't looked at it closely yet, but it may prove valuable. I would love to hear suggestions from other people on the site about what I should do with my data, especially given that all my grandparents will do it, which is probably very rare at this point in history.
When is it wrong to enable someone to significantly reduce the quality of their life and thereby significantly increase yours, while remaining happy themselves?
I usually approach this sort of question by modeling people as approximations to ideal agents who reliably act in such a way as to actually optimize the world for their own values.
If I consider a hypothetical person who very closely approximates that ideal, I'd say it's generally+ not at all wrong to enable them to significantly reduce the quality of their own life... they will either do so, or not, depending on their own values.
If I consider the other extreme, a hypothetical person who reliably acts in such a way as to optimize the world for the opposite of their own values, I'd say it's generally+ wrong to enable them to make any effective choices at all.
Either way, their happiness is largely irrelevant to me except insofar as it's subsumed in their values, and whether I benefit from their actions is irrelevant.
That said: obviously I'm more inclined to motivated cognition when I benefit, and therefore need to be a lot more scrupulous about whether my thinking has gone completely off the rails.
There's something to be said for the rule of thumb that if a line of reasoning tells me it's OK for me to act in ways that predictably lower the quality of other people's lives and benefit mine, I should reject that line of reasoning as flawed... not because that's necessarily the case, but because human minds being what they are that's the way to bet.
+ There are exceptions in cases where I think their values are themselves wrong, but I think that's a different conversation.
Unless the quality of life is reduced because they have a false belief that it would increase, and I can prove to a sufficient degree that that belief is false, I'd say "it's pretty much never wrong". Is it really wrong to get paid for constructing a church if I think organized religion makes people worse off? And I certainly wouldn't want someone applying that principle to me, because I know how bad other people are determining what reduces the quality of my life. It's this logic which leads to large soda bans.
I motion to make the Stupid Questions threads monthly.
Start posting it monthly then.
In the spirit of asking personal questions on Less Wrong I'd be pleased if some of the community's brainpower could be directed in my direction. (It's a minor problem.)
After about a year of being unemployed, I found a job (hooray), but it's not a job I want to do for a long time. This means looking for a new job, but due to the long and unpredictable hours of my current job I'm left without time to look for a new job. The time away from the job is spend, in decreasing order: sleeping, quality time with girlfriend, internet, food and personal entertainment/projects. As it stands, I don't feel like I can touch either of the non-work activities without going insane, or at least not to an extent where I can shave of an hour to allocate to looking for a new job (I know from previous experience that doing it for less than an hour doesn't result in anything) without going insane.
Current options (I can see):
Ideas, recommendations or "third options" I failed to see?
Are you sure cutting 15 minutes from each of the four non-work things would make you go insane?
How many hours of sleep do you get per day, on average? That seems to me the most plausible option here to cut down on without suffering any psychological or emotional effects, although of course if you're not getting much sleep as it is, it's probably best not to go with this idea. At any rate, if you sleep roughly 8 to 10 hours a day, do you think you could cut down on sleeping for maybe an hour or so, possibly by setting an alarm, or is that unfeasible?
There're also biphasic and dual core sleep schedules which may reduce the need for sleep to ~6 hours total per day. I believe Yvain uses something like this. (ETA: It seems he does have a biphasic sleep schedule, but it's 8 hours total. (double ETA: source)) As I understand it, more extreme polyphasic sleep schedules are difficult to get into to say the least and aren't compatible with mainstream work schedules.
Excellent point, although you are correct about the difficulty of integrating such a sleep schedule into a regular work schedule. The diagrams in the Wikipedia article, however, seem to imply that sleep episodes need to be more or less equally spaced. Is this always the case? If not, it might be possible to "shift" a nap a little bit earlier or later in order to accommodate a full-sized workday.
Something like the Everyman would likely work if Mathias could take a nap during his lunch break. (If it's a short break, he could simultaneously try out intermittent fasting. :)) I also imagine the 20-minute nap biphasic would tolerate his waiting until the late afternoon to take the nap. I don't know about the others, perhaps someone with polyphasic sleep experience could weigh-in?
In So Good They Can't Ignore You, Cal Newport argues that the path to enjoying a job goes primarily through being good at that job, not liking the job when first starting it. I suspect there is much to be gained by devoting yourself to your current job and getting good at it. Even if you transition to another job, the self-control and emotional maturity you learn by doing this is likely to transfer.
(He also argues that it's better to be in a field where quality is detectable and valuable; if you're doing commodity work, than being especially good is unlikely to get you far. But I think there's a psychological component as well: it is highly likely your coworkers and employers can detect a shift from disliking the job to liking the job, and you might be surprised at how much that transition will get you in terms of respect and power on the job.)
Sounds like reasonable advice, but my reasons for not wanting the stick with the job have less to do with my enjoyment of it and more with it it not being something I'm talented at/uses the skills I'm good at, it isn't a direction I want to go with nor is it very high-paying. I like the job just fine and want to do it properly (to an extent), I'd just enjoy doing something else more.
If you're interested in IT, talk to someone in your area working in IT about the options for somebody without a degree in IT to get a job in that field. In the US at least, there are a number of mini certifications that would take a lot less than 3 years. Similarly, you should explore a variety of more easily obtained technical vocations. I am not sure what the options in Belgium are. 3 years spent towards only a slight improvement sounds like a negative return on investment.
Look around your current company and see if there's another job in there you'd like better (or which would suck less). Switching jobs inside a company is often easier than switching companies.
Ask someone to find a job for you. Family and close friends will often do this for free. Others might if they like you and they trust you'll remember you owe them a favor. Your girlfriend might, because it means you get more time together.
Learn how to slack and not get caught. If you're in an office, there are HowTos. If not, you can still determine which parts of your job are safest to slack off at.
If you haven't, become friends with someone who has the kind of job you want. If you have, deepen that relationship and ask to be introduced to similar friends. As long as you never directly beg for a job, it is perfectly alright to say you're looking for a job in that area.
All of this is assuming that one year of unemployment was entirely due to factors outside your control. This is very unlikely. You could almost certainly raise your employability in lots of ways that you haven't used. Move to a place with a better job market for example, dress better (to use the Halo effect), or whatever it is - basically remove some of the differences between you and the kind of person who gets the job you want.
For more advice, be a lot more specific about your situation. What kind of job do you want, why don't you have it, how much are you willing to sacrifice to get it?