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Open thread, Oct. 5 - Oct. 11, 2015
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Comments (346)
I haven't seen The Martian yet, but I find the reviews of it interesting. Why would a robinsonade set on another planet appeal so strongly to people, and especially now?
Well, we can feel the spiritual sickness of living in our world full of parasites and thought police. You have to learn how to manipulate people and keep careful control over what you say and do around them so that you can have a tolerable life - and you don't have access to the most elite people who have the most power over our whole society, like, say, Federal Reserve bankers.
By contrast, it feels more natural and healthier for us to extract our sustenance from nature directly through the use of our own minds and hands, where you don't have to play these ridiculous mind games with idiots. Our ancestors repeatedly had to solve survival challenges posed by new environments and situations by doing their version of "sciencing the shit out of them," and today's movie audiences seem to respond to that by seeing it in a science fictional context.
This could also explain the popularity of those admittedly staged "survival" series on cable, along with the reality series which show blue collar guys working on commercial fishing boats, in logging camps or in gunsmithing shops. We know that we live largely in a simulacrum of reality, especially with all this social-justice make-believe, and the knowledge has become a splinter in our minds.
Let's hope this is a preview of common people forcing the SJW elite to confront reality.
I again call bullshit on your vote manipulation. I saw this post rise from -3 to +4 in the same reload cycle in which your other post in the open thread rose from -10 to +7.
Well now I've both read the book and saw the movie, and I can tell you that's the complete opposite: Mars is portrayed as the perfect alien environment, strikingly beautiful yet extremely deadly, uncaring about its human inhabitants.
The struggle of Watney is exactly this, surviving with only your wits and a few scraps of human technology, but doing so without ever losing humor and optimism (this is the reason I personally love it).
Humanity, in The Martian, is yearned, a safe heaven to return to. Literary speaking, the point of catharsis is the return inside the human community.
For the first time since Verne, real-life science has advanced so much that mundane sci-fi has gotten actually interesting. What's not to love about that?
I'm a bit confused about the concept of mundane sci-fi -- what's sci-fi about it or, rephrasing slightly, why is it not just plain old fiction?
The sci-fi part of it is the extrapolation into practical applications or social consequences of established science. If we take, for example, genetics, both X-Men and Gattaca are genetic sci-fi, but only Gattaca is credible from a scientific standpoint.
Your link defines mundane sci-fi as (emphasis mine):
I don't thing Gattaca qualifies.
As to X-Men, I don't consider them sci-fi at all, at least any more than, say, Twilight.
OK, think Gravity vs. Star Trek (ignoring for the sake of argument the factual inaccuracies in Gravity).
I've received several PMs from different users that would like to continue a discussion, but would not do it publicly -- they were afraid to be received negatively, or in other words, "negative karma".
I thought people on LW would be able to look past insignificant and shallow virtual ratings that I. personally, cannot tell what their meaning is. My own karma fluctuates between -15 to 15 and I'm perfectly fine with that; but other people seem to view it as some steps toward hell.
I thought I could escape all the usual nonsense surrounding discussions here, but I think I might be wrong.
You could treat it as a failed gut check and tell 'em to go grow an pair and then brass-plate it.
Or you can think about it as image management. Reputations are delicate things and are more than just your karma score.
Once again, a point I want to emphasize: I thought that at LessWrong people would be able to overcome things such as "image management" and "reputation". In my view those things are just a few steps away from not asking a question or not presenting an opinion. Being scared of being wrong won't make your situation any better.
Do tell me if this isn't the case, or this isn't supposed to be the case.
Unless Lesswrong exists in a vacuum, it has no or almost no power to overcome those things. Even if you didn't worry about being judged by people on lesswrong, the risk of being judged by someone elsewhere online still exists.
Why do you think this would be a good thing? Reputations are a valid concept, highly useful in social interactions. If you care about social interactions, you should (= it's rational to) care about your reputation which leads directly to the image management.
The real issue is the trade-off between maintaining a desirable reputation and the costs of doing so (e.g. not asking questions for the fear of looking stupid).
Some of us are exhausted of the status games of meatspace life and just want to dissect ideas.
No one forces you to play status games. If you don't care, you don't care so just dissect ideas and ignore the rest.
LessWrong was talking about other people being too concerned with their image. If you don't have this problem, well, there is no problem, is there?
You can choose groups with different status indicators and different ways of measuring reputation, but you probably can't find any human communication (and I'd argue this applies intra-personally as well as inter-; you're dealing with past-you and constraining future-you RIGHT NOW) that doesn't involve status, power, and image.
Karma scores mean that the community doesn't welcome a certain post. If you want lesswrong to be enjoyable for all participants it's reasonable to focus on writing posts that are likely to have high karma.
Apart from that you are a person who hides behind an anonymous handle that is expandly to you. Other people on LW don't hide but have their identities attached to what they write and there the possibility for real life effects.
I'd enjoy a conversation with anyone who thinks they have a useful comment (on any topic) which is un-postable because it would be received negatively. I'd like to explore whether it's about avoiding negative karma points, or fear of unkind followup comments, or wanting their user page to have only "important" things, or something else.
I'd like to have it in public, though - if you fear any of these things (or other reasons I haven't thought of), make a throwaway/burner account and use that.
When you were a child did you prefer to play the hero or the villain in pretend and role-playing games?
Today, are your favourite fictional characters heroes or villains?
In the US, 'Professor' seems to refer to several classes of academic rank that are more junior ranks in the Australian system, where Professor denotes a full professor specifically. Are you aware of anyone who tried to assess the signalling benefit of cost of seeking a U.S professorship instead of a local academic position for career capital, authority or grants?
I am not aware of any such cases despite having been working in US and now UK academia for the past 20 years.
"Professor" in this sense tends to be a title of address rather than a job title: US students have learned that in most circumstances it is appropriate to refer to an instructor as Professor (whether assistant professor, associate professor or full professor.... or indeed in many cases even university teaching staff who do not have a PhD yet); in the UK this is only appropriate for full professors, and many still prefer to be addressed by first names.
Career capital, authority, grants: anyone who matters in the UK is likely to be aware of differences in job titles and the approximate mapping between them (ie UK lecturer = US assistant professor, UK reader = US associate prof, professor = professor). Grants: while biased toward established academics this is more about publications, other grants, profile and not the title itself.
Sometimes people use honorary appointments the way you suggest, though. I know of one person who got updated business cards to add "Honorary Professor, X University" once a meaningless honorary appointment (granting library access and little more) was approved.
I have also seen cases that could work in the opposite direction: UK lecturers who want to maintain a US profile sometimes qualify their job title for the US market, as in "Lecturer (US equivalent = assistant professor)". This is because many US universities use "lecturer" as job title for adjunct teaching staff (lower status than appropriate).
...and then, there are the Germans :-)
So, Steven Hawking basically quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky almost verbatim, without giving him any credit, as usual: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama_series_stephen_hawking_ama_answers/
Example:
Disappointed.
As usual for Hawking, or for people quoting Eliezer, or?
Unsuprising if someone generated that independently. Even more unsuprising if an intelligent person does. Be more charitable.
I think it's great, the ideas getting out is what matters. Whether Eliezer gets some credit or not, the whole reason he said this stuff in the first place was so that people would understand it, repeat it and spread the concept, and that's exactly what's going on. If anything, Eliezer was trying very early to optimize for most convincing and easily understandable phrases, analogies, arguments, etc. so the fact that other people are repeating them or perhaps convergently evolving towards them shows that he did a good job.
And really, if Eliezer's status as a non-formally educated autodidact or whatever else is problematic or working against easing the spread of the information, then I don't see a problem with not crediting him in every single reddit post and news article. The priority is presumably ensuring greater awareness of the problems, and part of that is having prestigious people like Stephen Hawking deliver the info. It's not like there aren't dated posts and pdfs online that show Eliezer saying this stuff more than a decade ago, people can find how early he was on this train.
What's the saying? Something like "When you're young, you worry people will steal your ideas, when you're old, you worry they won't."
So academia keeps people forever young.
I don't seem to be able to reply to a Gunnar Zarncke reply to my comment on another thread because of my low comment score.
How can I explain my comment and myself [to the extent that I can] to this resident of Germany?
BTW, my view of the world seems to be different than most of you.
Possibly it's because the mortality tables say that half the men born on the same day as me will dead in 14 years and so my priorities may be different. Also, most of my life has been lived so I'm not so much worried about the uncertainties that most of you seem to be. In fact, what else can they [they, in a general sense] do to me? :)
The books [don't ask which, I don't remember them all] tell me that I should come to terms with the life I have lived. This is not easy. I have failed to bring down almost all bad guys and failed to protect good guys.
I do thank this site for making me aware of things I've never heard of but I don't know that I can teach anyone here anything.
Thanks for reading.
I wanted to sow some spinach and lettuce this month cause it's the right time, both all these aphids are eating my brocoli. Not hard to get rid of, but so disgusting. Don't even want to eat it now. Growing your own food is so hard. Thank god for economic specialisation.
I have banned advancedatheist. While he's been tiresome, I find that I have more tolerance for nastiness than some, but this recent comment was the last straw. I've found that I can tolerate bigotry a lot better than I can tolerate bigoted policy proposals, and that comment was altogether too close to suggesting that women should be distributed to men they don't want sex with.
Well, in other forums he suggested that women have systematically less intelligence than men. So I guess that to him women are not much more than domestic animals.
One side of me is happy that he is gone, the other side is mildly disappointed for the lack of a local bigot to study in a safe environment.
Well, the evidence strongly indicates that is in fact the case, at least at the high end.
Could you define what you mean by bigot? Because, the definitions I've heard tend to boil down to "someone who applies Bayesian reasoning to humans".
Quoted from Wikipedia: "One study did find some advantage for women in later life, while another found that male advantages on some cognitive tests are minimized when controlling for socioeconomic factors. The differences in average IQ between men and women are small in magnitude and inconsistent in direction."
It seems a very thin thread to hang such a heavy prior, and it looks a lot more like a conclusion that someone wants desperately to be true.
Sure. I used it in the sense of: "aa is uncommonly out of synch with the contemporary sensibility about personal freedom, and refuses to explain why he believes what he believes".
So expressing contrarian opinions is grounds for banning?
Except he did explain why he believes what he does.
As always, it's a matter of degree and interaction on how well argumented your position is.
So yes, you can express a sufficiently contrarian opinion that would lead to banning. "All women should be treated as sex slaves", for example, is such an opinion.
I asked aa at least twice, possibly more, what evidence he had for his assertions and got nothing back. Can you point me to a place where he did so? A post mortem would still be useful.
But I don't think even you would argue that the reason for banning that opinion is its contrariness.
I don't think the second sentence follows from the first. Children certainly have less intelligence than adults, yet we shouldn't treat children as animals.
(Not that I agree with the first sentence)
Not per se, it follows from the first sentence and NancyLebovitz comment on him denying women autonomy.
This sentence is weird to me because I was not talking about what I think is right or how to steelman aa's thought.
Anyway, consider these:
- he believes that fully formed females have less intelligence than males;
- he attributes the difference to a systematic genetic trait;
- that he thinks women should be denied autonomy on a basic right.
How would you call the status of a sub-human non-autonomous being? Domestic or friendly animal seems to me quite precise.
Well children are both less intelligent than adults, and non-autonomous, in that they have no choice over whether they go to school etc., so I think my comparison still stands.
I also don't think that someone or some group having below-average intelligence means they are sub-human.
Also, does AA think that women have less general intelligence, or that they are less good specifically at STEM subjects? Because a lot of scientists do think that there are cognitive differences, but balanced, in that women have higher verbal & empathising intelligence.
I don't remember aa saying anything one way or the other about women's intelligence vs. men's.
Not here, in another forum. Quoting verbatim (regarding the ability to think abstractly):
"Women generally either lack, or fail to develop, that ability, so they don't think about right and wrong in the way men do."
What definition of "bigotry" are you using? The "standard definition" amounts to "applying Bayesian priors to people". So is discussion of the policy implications of Bayesian reasoning now punishable by banning without notice? Also since you admit that he didn't actually make the proposal but was "close to suggesting" it does that mean that even being "close to suggesting" implications of Bayesian reasoning for policy is bannable?
Note to Eliezer or any super-administrators reading this: I strongly suggest that in the interest of keeping LessWrong a place where people can discuss rationality without fear of suddenly being banned, NancyLebovitz's administrative privileges be revoked immediately.
Huh, no it doesn't.
Lots of people had expressed annoyance at advandcedatheist talking about the same topic over and over again. That's hardly "sudden". (OTOH I would have preferred him to be officially warned by a moderator before being banned.)
The leap from annoyance to a ban was quite sudden.
Ok, looking at the first result we get:
Which was the standard meaning of "bigotry" a century ago. Ok, let's apply this definition to the current situation: it would appear that NancyLebowitz is more guilty of bigotry then AA. Does that mean she should be banned?
Again, ISTM NancyLebovitz (and other LW readers in general) are less intolerant of AA's ideas themselves than of his continuing to post them over and over again after people have made abundantly clear they're not interested in reading them for the zillionth time, so a response to an extraordinary situation and not a "habitual" state of mind. And AA does seem intolerant of the idea of women's sexual freedom.
That said, I'll tap out now.
Then Nancy should ban him based on his habit of repetitively posting, rather than what she actually banned him for, which is for "bigoted policy proposals" (and worse yet, for just almost making bigoted policy proposals). Banning him for that makes it much more dangerous for me to support limits on immigration, say almost anything concrete about how to use IQ tests that falls on the wrong side, connect vegetarianism to abortion, give many answers to the trolley problem, or otherwise speak about a lot of topics that turn up in discussions that have nothing to do with AA.
I wouldn't actually have a problem with the ban if she banned him for repetitively posting.
That's some terrible priors you have there.
Well, would you care to enlighten us as to your definition of "bigotry". Bonus if the definition refers to something obviously bad and something AA was guilty of.
If you focus on labels instead of on individuals, you're a bigot.
If your treatment of people is based on tribal allegiances, real or imagined, instead of what they've actually done, you're a bigot.
If you already have an opinion on someone you've just met, based on appearances only, before you've bothered getting to know them, you're a bigot.
If you blame an entire category of people for the actions of select outliers, you're a bigot.
If you believe all members of an arbitrarily defined category of people behave the same way or think the same way or can be expected to respond in the same way, you're a bigot.
If there's a group of people you especially like to hate, you're a bigot.
If you're an identity essentialist, you're a bigot.
If you believe there are "superior" and "inferior" classes of people, you're an über bigot.
This is what Baysian logic requires that you do.
I don't believe I've seen anyone do this. (Hint: sex, race, religion, etc., aren't arbitrary categories).
I have murderers and child-molesters.
Ok, now define "identity essentialism", I'm have a hard time coming up with a definition that's not largely true.
Does it matter if this is actually true for the metric under discussion.
Only for such a broad value of "opinion" that Bayesian logic requires you to have an opinion about the number of apples in a tree you haven't seen.
I take it you never interact with people you haven't interacted with before.
Sometimes I do, but then I update my beliefs about them based on the evidence (or at least I try to -- I'm not a Platonic spherical perfectly rational being). In any event, even with people I haven't interacted with before I usually have more information than "appearances only", e.g. where we are, who introduced us to each other, and whether I have already heard of them before.
Assuming someone introduced you and this isn't someone you're passing on the street.
Well, it's not like all member of the same sex/race/religion/etc. behave the same way or think the same way or can be expected to respond in the same way, either.
Not all, but most and their responses can be more similar than you'd think.
How do you know how similar I'd think their responses can be?
Religion does sound pretty arbitrary to me.
There you go.
Ok, except this definition makes "identity essentialism" true.
Evidence?
Don't be silly.
<waves> Hello! I'm a bigot! Pleased to meet you!
I'm guessing you disapprove of some of the things polymathwannabe lists, much as PMWB does, but think others are fine. It might be more interesting to know which.
I disapprove of assigning labels on the basis of checklists to start with, the same labels that polymathwannabe professes to dislike in his first sentence.
Any particular reason you ask? I'm not a big fan of purity/political correctness/ideological orientation tests either. Got to focus on the individual, y'know.. :-P
I can't see why you'd have posted as you did if you didn't want to (1) point out what you see as deficiencies in PMWB's list of alleged features of bigots and/or (2) tell us something about yourself; but what you've said so far doesn't provide enough information to identify the alleged deficiencies or determine much about you. So it seems like you haven't done what you intended to.
Also, I'm curious.
But I did: see the grandparent post. I just went one meta level up.
I also generally dislike the "people who believe <positions I disagree with> are <an insult>" lists.
Anyway, sorry, I'm not going to go down the list and jot down my attitude towards each point. It looks like a waste of time.
On that we agree.
Anybody who treats family members such as cousins differently because they are family is a bigot?
My aunts resent me for this, but you guessed right: I do not hold the accident of genetic closeness alone as a valid reason for preferential treatment. To quote Gabriel García Márquez,
How is that even relevant? I don't see anything about genetic closeness up there. I do see a reference to family, which is not the same thing and can easily include people with "friendship formed".
That's not the point of the question*. The question is whether anybody who doesn't see things that way is a bigot.
*: Unless of course you define being a bigot as having different preference than you have.
In itself, treating your relatives nicely because they're family doesn't seem to sound too bad; it sounds like the obvious and natural thing everybody would do. The problem I have with it is that it means you're intentionally treating everybody else less nicely because they're not family, which to me is a very weak reason to withhold your good will. When taken to the field of real-life decisions, it takes the form of nepotism, which can be seen as bigotry against the entire rest of humanity.
Look at all the effective altruism and utilitarian arguments that basically imply that you should consider the welfare of all people in the world equally and that putting more weight on yourself, your family, and people who are close to you or who resemble you is just not something that rational people are supposed to be doing.
And then they get called bigots, and then bigots get banned....
I just want to take a moment to point this out: the hypotheses people like advancedatheist push for why they're incel are very emotionally salient (a small number of men are monopolizing all of our women! omg!) So everyone, please don't let this very emotionally salient hypothesis prematurely crowd out other explanations for the same phenomenon.
Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo wrote a book called the Demise of Guys. Among other things, he discusses the sexual frustrations of modern men and offers some possible explanations:
He's also got a section on how men are being diagnosed with erectile dysfunction at younger and younger ages, linking to the site yourbrainonporn.com which discusses this.
Are we really supposed to believe that evolutionary factors like female hypergamy are responsible for increased shyness and erectile dysfunction among young men? Female hypergamy, insofar as it exists, is a mostly static biological phenomenon that's been around for 100s or 1000s of years. Are we really supposed to believe that right around the time when the world is changing faster than ever, suddenly female hypergamy goes from being a constant in the background to a destroyer of societies? I'm sure the liberation of women plays an important role here, but I think its role is frequently overstated. Think back to the 60s and 70s when the sexual revolution first happened. Where were the hopeless incels back then? Or think of forager societies where chastity was not held to be valuable... where were the "omega males" at that point?
Anyway, yourbrainonporn.com also has a page on how excessive porn use may destroy social confidence. Like most addictions, porn decreases your brain's dopamine receptor levels, and lower dopamine receptor levels have been shown to predict lower social status in monkeys. Anecdotally if I avoid porn completely for extended periods my social confidence and abilities with women improve significantly.
(This also matches perfectly with nerds being worse with women if they spend more time alone with their computers.)
I approve.
Possible karma fraud probably didn't help.
I don't mind this ban, but I think it would be a good idea to make a clearly defined ultimatum before making such bans. E.g. tell him any additional comments on the topic would result in a ban. Worst case scenario he gets to make one more annoying post before he gets banned, best case scenario he cleans up his act and we get to keep a positive-sum commenter. Was AA ever given such an ultimatum?
I disapprove.
Upvote because disapproval is not wrong around my universe. not sure if people are trying to downvote in support (aka they also disapprove) or against your disapproval.
I'm somewhat glad for aa's ban. I've lurked LW for a while now, and have found a lot of content posted here extremely interesting. Seeing aa's posts in open threads on incels every week being upvoted, containing content I felt was extremely prejudiced and malformed, with no apparent improvement over time, unnerved me quite a bit, and I felt like I was not only wasting my time reading his posts, but also gave me a negative impression of what LWers think. This was enough to stop me from browsing open-threads/browsing less wrong for a while.
Not being a constant user of LW, I was unaware of vote manipulation, but I did feel myself being confused by the apparent clash between aa's upvoted posts on incels and general concept I had of LW, so it shouldn't have been hard to conclude that there were alternative explanations for his upvotes.
What do you mean by "prejudice"? The "textbook definition" basically amounts to "applying Bayesian priors to humans" and that doesn't seem like a bad thing.
The OED says "Preconceived opinion not based on reason or actual experience; bias, partiality; (now) spec. unreasoned dislike, hostility, or antagonism towards, or discrimination against, a race, sex, or other class of people." The further definitions given are either shades of this one or other senses not relevant here (e.g. legal terminology).
From a brief glance at the web, other dictionaries say the same. The second half of the OED's definition is but a currently prominent instance of the first half. That part is probably what you mean by "the textbook definition", but I don't know what textbooks you've been reading. Probably books by progressives that you study to keep your wrath warm.
"Not based on reason or actual experience." "Unreasoned." That is the core of the concept, is it not?
In Bayesian reasoning, that, without the pejorative overtones, is what your prior is. Your state of belief, represented as a probability distribution, before you have seen the data to which you intend to apply Bayesian reasoning.
I am not seeing that in your use of the phrase "Bayesian prior", which you seem to be waving as a rationalist password without noticing the step that it implies, of looking at data and updating from it. Without that, it is not a prior — there is nothing that it is prior to. No, for you "applying Bayesian priors to humans" means stopping at your priors without any awareness that a prior is an expression of ignorance to be improved on, not knowledge to be clung to.
The definition I learned in public school, which does have a rather extreme "progressive" bias.
Like the data on the relationship between sex and intelligence. The data on the relationship between how many men a women has had sex with and her ability to participate in future stable relationships.
In that case, you are talking about posteriors, not priors, and there is no need for the Bayes jargon. Beliefs, conclusions, from whatever sources and methods it may have been. "Bayes" is not a Power Word: Stun.
Of course, it's still prior to looking at the person in front of you and observing them.
Good, I see you are making progress in understanding this.
I hope that one day I will be able to say the same of you.
It is, however, often used to fill in the phase 2 in the underpants gnomes business plan.
I tend to ascribe a naïve etymology of pre-judgement to 'prejudice', so I suppose that is the sense I was using it there, but I really wasn't appealing to any "textbook definition" I know of.
There is nothing about Bayes in the "textbook definition". It boils down to "applying strong priors to humans" where "strong" means "resistant to change by evidence".
Ok, so what evidence was AA refusing to update on?
I'm not talking about AA, I'm talking about your understanding of prejudice.
For people you haven't interacted with it isn't, for other people it's the posteriors you should apply, not the priors.
You know what, if "nerves" were actual, reliable evidence of voting abuse I would have no issue at all with advancedatheist's ban. Unfortunately, I don't think that's how it works.
I'm inclined to think there were some actual people who liked what aa was saying. They're a small proportion of LW, and there were a good many more people who didn't like what he was saying.
I think that banning him was good from a consequentialist POV, but bad from deontological POV.
You may have a point. It turns out that at least one person would like to get in touch with aa, and I'm not sure how that's possible.
What's more (and this sounds like karma) I read something by a man who was involuntarily celibate, and discovered that hormone therapy helped. I'd have sworn I saw this on the most recent SlateStarCodex open thread, and now I can't find it. Meanwhile, it would be exactly like the usual human level of competence to treat a physical problem as though it has an emotional cause.
What deontological rule did you have in mind?
Freedom of Speech seems most obvious.
He is free to continue speaking about the subject, just not on LW.
This is a very non-standard definition of freedom of speech.
No, it's the standard right of freedom of speech that's enshirned in the constitution.
In general an editor of a newspaper can decide which articles the newspaper is going to publish and a website can decide which posts to publish.
Classically nothing about the idea of freedom of speech compels other people to publish your opinions. Rather the idea is about giving people the choice to publish whatever they want to publish.
That's just plain not true. There's a long history defining the exact role of the media in relation to free speech, and the conversation does not end at "media can print what it wants."
There's an entire subfield of journalistic ethics about this relation, and how the media has a responsiblity to protect free speech, even WITHIN the media itself , because the media has a role in how ideas get shared. A personal website in this regard is very different then a discussion board, as the latter serves a similar purpose of allowing discourse. As reductio ad absurdem of your definition of free speech, imagine someone in Iran saying "The Iranian people have the right to free speech - just not within the country". Even though it's technically true, it still doesn't say anything about the EFFECT of the restriction of speech on discourse (which is the purpose of free speech in the first place).
LW exist for allowing discourse to refine the art of rationality. It's purpose is not that everybody can share whatever is on his mind.
Editorial and moderation choices are going to be directed by that goal. It's different than a medium like facebook that exist for everybody to share anything.
I doubt that's technically true. The Iranian government is going to punish speech by it's citizens that it doesn't like regardles whether that speech happens in Iran or whether it happens in another country.
I was expecting a rule like bans should be preceded by a warning and a chance to reply.
But a rule like "don't ban people for opinions you disagree with" would also fit the bill, no?
That would be a horrible rule -- no one would be able to ban me for my ardent desire to eat babies alive. I mean, unless you have some equally perverted moderators...
There is a debate like this- about, abortion. And you're right, I don't think that people should be banned for having the position that pro-lifers think of as "pro-killing babies",
Okay, so that was a bad example... (?) But the point still stands. If in order to ban someone we have to have a moderator who agrees with the person being banned, then some people will be much harder to ban than others. And we will most likely have to add some sub-optimal choices to the moderator pool, simply because now we are selecting for a factor that we otherwise wouldn't value.
I am surprised that my original comment was down-karma's so much -- if you have useful feedback onthis (especially 'bad point' vs. 'bad expression of point'), please respond or private msg me -- learning is good!
Ahh, I see what's happening. You're thinking of my suggestion as "Don't ban people who's opinion you disagree with."
But that's not actually what I meant. You're very welcome to disagree with the person you ban - it's just that you shouldn't ban them BECAUSE you find their opinion objectionable.
I've said things which could be interpreted as wanting to eat babies, at least if you go by Nancy's "altogether too close to saying" standard (I didn't actually say it, but I got close). I really would not want to be banned for such a thing, and I think banning people for such things is poisonous to the discourse here. The example of killing patients for their organs is another one.
It would, and I was following it for a while.
That's a rule I'd strongly support other than in cases of absolutely unambiguous spamming or clear sockpuppets of banned individuals.
That's not a deontological rule.
Thou shalt not restrict freedom of speech.
Sigh. Jerking knees are rarely the best responses.
Trolls. Spam. Speech inside your home. Big loudspeakers outside your windows. Etc. etc.
Freedom of speech is a right with a matching duty to not interfere with the speech owed by the government. It's not a general deontological rule applicable to all human interactions.
There's a concept of "free speech absolutism" which basically says that if you are in a venue that encourages discourse, you should allow any speech.
You're not a deontologist, so you might look at that rule and say "but what about the consequences". But, that's not what a free speech absolutist would do.
Unless you are arguing that you are a free speech absolutist, or, maybe, that LW should be run under such absolutism, I don't see the relevance. There are a LOT of fringe concepts around.
I'm not a free speech absoluist, but I do think that Advanced Atheist should not ahve been banned for the reason of free speech.
Regardless of what I believe though, I wasn't arguing for or against it, I was answering Nancy's Question.
Try here: https://www.reddit.com/user/advancedatheist
I looked through his comments for a second, and at least on reddit he's talking about incel stuff in the relationship subreddits and cryonics in the transhuman subreddits.
Thank you.
I... what? As I understand the comment, he wanted to ban sex outside marriage. Describing that as "women should be distributed to men they don't want sex with" seems ridiculously exaggerated.
I agree that his one-issue thing was tiresome, and perhaps there is some argument for making "being boring and often off-topic" a bannable offense in itself. But this moderation action seems poorly thought through.
Edit: digging through his comment history finds this comment, where he writes it would be better to marry daughters off as young virgins. So I guess he did hold the view Nancy ascribed to him, even if it was not in evidence in the comment she linked to.
Also, "monogamy versus hypergamy" has been discussed on Less Wrong since the dawn of time. See e.g. this post and discussion in comments, from 2009. Deciding now that this topic is impermissible crimethink seems like a pretty drastic narrowing of allowed thoughts.
In my opinion, the problem wasn't the topic per se, but how the author approached it:
comments in every Open Thread on the same topic, zero visible learning.
Sure, I think that was annoying. But it's not the stated reason for the ban.
Just a few thoughts:
I completely approve the ban. Although next time maybe getting a formal warning first would be better.
Let's not debate what exactly AA meant and what he didn't. He is not here to defend himself.
I agree with the banning, given the fact that he was basically constantly commenting on the same issue, and one which is not particularly relevant to Less Wrong. But I disagree with this reason. Basically I think banning someone for the content of their proposals or implied proposals should be limited to the kind of the thing which might be banned by law (basically imminent threat of harm.)
LW self regulates the content of proposals via karma voting. In advancedatheist the communities desires were quite clearly expressed via karma votes and he still continued to bring up the topic.
Those post significantly reduce the likelihood that woman who read LW want to contribute. When the community karma votes that it doesn't want posts like this a user should accept that.
Yes, that's why I said I agreed with the banning.
I also think that this sets a very murky precedent. I don't disagree at all with banning AA if it turns out he has abused voting privileges, but so far there's no hard evidence that he did. Putting that aside for now, all we're left with is a block being based on whether some individual moderator "can tolerate" some controversial comment (meaning that it attracts both downvotes and upvotes, as far as the LW userbase is concerned). This strikes me as careless.
I sympathize with your point of view, but I find it difficult to come up with rules. I don't know if this is enough, but I think the fact that I'm pretty tolerant about content (spam doesn't count as content) means people aren't at high risk of me losing my temper with them.
I'm not convinced I'm obligated to take my system 1 completely off-line when I'm dealing with ideas that are inimical to my interests.
For what it's worth, I have a long history at LW with a high karma score (typically 92% positive), I was offered the job of moderator rather than asking for it, and when I announced that I had become moderator, I got a lot of upvotes. I think these facts are evidence that I have a pretty good sense of the community.
Have a rule-- I detest it (though not to the point of banning people) when someone mentions something they saw online and doesn't offer a link, or at least apologize for not having one.
I think, as a general rule, people in a decision-making capacity are best advised to recuse themselves from any choice whenever they feel that their System 1 is interfering. (In your case, I would've waited for some solid evidence on the karma-abuse question. After all, if the upvotes on that comment turned out to be genuine, that would definitely affect my own views.) I am aware that this is not always realistic. But make no mistake here - the thought process that led to this decision will also make LW less, not more trustworthy (however mildly) when dealing with issues that are unusually complex or politically contentious. Masculinity and involuntary celibacy are canaries in the coalmine - our treatment of them is direct evidence of how well we can treat everything else.
That depends very much on the audience. Some people will trust more others will trust less.
I'm pretty sure that the latter will outnumber the former quite a bit. Speaking generally, we want social norms that discourage excess political talk (politics is the mindkiller, and gender politics is no exception) but when it does come up, people should be allowed to speak freely if they have something worthwhile to say. Anything else is a recipe for severe bias (via "evaporative cooling" and factionalization).
Given that the post from him on that topic were constantly downvoted, the community seemed to feel that he didn't have something worthwile to say.
I think that's a really bad rule in almost any setting, including this one. It amounts to acting as a straw Vulcan.
Well, System 1 is a complicated beast. In most cases, it helps you reach better and quicker decisions than a Straw Vulcan would, and this is a good thing. But there are some times when you're fairly sure that it cannot be trusted - this is arguably one of these times.
You care about false upvoting a great deal more than I do.
Is it worth mentioning that I was kinder to aa than most of the people who replied to him?
Check out the discussion at SlateStarCodex about banning Steve Johnson, a time-wasting fellow who wasn't quite breaking the rules.
SlateStarCodex does not have a karma system, though.On LW, time wasters tend to be downvoted swiftly, so they don't really waste much time anyway. If someone who's broadly considered a "time-waster" is nonetheless upvoted, this tells me that what they're posting is unusually interesting.
In this case AA's post got downvoted swiftly but still wasted a lot of energy.
I really want to hope I can say the same. I sort of took it as my personal mission to respond to every outrageous thing he said, and point out the problems with his politics and his theory of sexuality. As a former member of the online incel community, I thought I was in a better position to empathize with his situation, and could present alternative arguments in a way that he might be more receptive to than standard refutation. But AA never replied directly to me, so I don't know how he took my approach.
It sounds like we had an effective if unstated rule: "When someone does a bunch of stuff wrong, get rid of them."
AA checked four boxes:
We are missing some rules that might be useful to have, specifically 'what are the boxes' and 'how many do you need to check to get banned'. But quite frankly, looking at those four sins, I would think that any three should be enough to get someone banned. If anything, NancyLebovitz probably waited longer than necessary.
I would also say that making a rule based on only one of those factors would be counterproductive. I think most of us are forgiving (as far as bans go, albeit perhaps not in voting) when a user repeatedly fails on one of those, as long as they are also providing useful content in other posts.
That's a strawman. Nancy said "last straw". It wasn't a single comment that caused the ban.
This community doesn't suffer from being overmoderated. I think it's worthwhile to have a moderator who is in the position to moderate when they think it's necessary to do so.
It sounded like he suggested that "we need to restore a healthy patriarchy where women can't get sexual experience until marriage." That doesn't mean "women should be distributed to men they don't want to have sex with". He is advocating prohibiting sex, not requiring sex, and more specifically that if society prohibits sex with lots of partners, women would be willing to settle for partners that they won't settle for now.
Also, prohibiting "bigoted policy proposals" is a really bad idea. All sorts of suggestions turn up here that could be put in that category, from cutting up travellers for their organs to valuing one's countrymen more than immigrants to letting employers hire based on IQ.
I don't support this ban, but I have to admit I'm more of a naturalist than a cultivator when it comes to gardens: weeds are plants too, right?
If there's significant evidence of karma fraud (even if that evidence isn't shared), that's a good reason. If it's just "annoying posts that don't get downvoted enough for our tastes", that's pretty weak.
I've seen quite a bit of evidence of karma fraud on their part.
While I'm deeply concerned about the possibility that AA has been engaging in vote-gaming which does seem to be a bannable offense, it isn't clear to me that, as reprehensible as that comment is, that it is enough reason by itself for banning, especially because some of his comments (especially those on cryonics) have been clearly highly productive. I do agree that much of the content of that comment is pretty disgusting and unproductive, and at this point his focus on incel is borderline spamming with minimal connection to the point of LW. Maybe it would be more productive to just tell him that he can't talk about incel as a topic here?
I have mixed feelings about this. He was posting the same argument about being incel in every single open thread, and the repetitiveness seems more annoying than the content, to me. But OTOH he also posted some interesting cryonics stuff.
Incidentally, suppose someone posted on the forum to say "As an Indian, my cultural heritage says that parents should decide who a woman marries."
Should this person be banned?
I'm not saying to support AA's position, nor as an attempt to criticise Indian culture, I'm just trying to see if we can have a consistent position on what counts as unacceptably offensive.
Do they say it once, or do they keep mentioning it all the time despite the downvotes?
AA didn't even say it once. He said something that Nancy interpreted as implying he believed it.
If they only say that once, no they shouldn't. If they say it umpteen times and continue doing so even after being downvoted to oblivion umpteen times, maybe.
Seems reasonable and consistent.
No, but that might be because the hypothetical Indian is making a much weaker policy suggestion.
By the way, arranged marriage means that neither partner has a choice.
AA didn't even make a policy suggestion, he said something that you interpreted as implying he supported said policy. The fact that you seem to be unable t see the difference strongly indicates that you shouldn't be deciding who to ban.
And that's better?
Advancedatheist is flagrantly abusing the voting system. How can this be addressed/reported/stopped?
I literally saw a long post of his in this open thread, nearly-universally downvoted to -10, rise to 0 in 3 minutes just now.
EDIT: An additional 7 upwards in 5 minutes as I made this post, contemporaneous with a blast of +7 on another of his posts.
Seriously, how can his constant trolling be stopped? He is hurting discussion and he's been at this for quite some time, I've seen this happen over and over again for more than a year and I'm sick of it.
I haven't done anything to "abuse" the voting system, and you should retract your accusation because you have no evidence of that. I don't understand how my posts can gain so many upvotes in such a short time.
Do you believe that those posts that receive massive downvotes are healthy for LW? Otherwise why do you continue posting them?
Speaking for myself, I find most of his contributions relevant and interesting.
The question was specifically about the ones that get lots of downvotes. That is, the ones where he's riding his hobbyhorse of complaining about the phenomenon of men not getting any sex even though they'd like to, and specifically the fact that he is in that situation. Do you find those relevant and interesting?
(Most recent examples, in reverse-historical order: one, two, three though that one only kinda fits the pattern, four, five.)
I've seen this happen with non-AA posts, too. Specifically, I'm thinking of buybuydandavis' replies to me in this thread (and I think the actual comment linked too, but I'm not sure about that).
I currently think (~75%) that it's not AA himself doing it. Eugine Nier seems more likely.
Downvoting for stating a conjecture as certainty. Insulting language doesn't help, either.
If those timings are correct, then it seems like very strong evidence for something highly improper going on. (I agree that that's not the same as advancedatheist being responsible for it.)
Regardless of whether or not advancedatheist has been abusing the voting system, I'd like him to stop posting about involuntary celibacy (incel) entirely on LW. Though I sympathize with his plight-- people don't ever deserve to be in a state of mental strife, or experience anything that feels like suffering-- his posts on incel mostly don't attract quality replies, and probably scare people off. Moreover, he hasn't stopped posting about this despite having been consistently downvoted.
Are there any appropriate forums where he might be able to post about incel to a more receptive audience? Don't neoreactionaries tend to be sympathetic to incel folks?
I used to belong to a couple of incel fora many years ago, and from my experience I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Male incel communities are very hard to keep sane. They function as training camps for misogynists and PUA predators, and the few women who post advice there don't help as much as they believe they do. I was ridiculed every time I tried to calm down the hatred and resentment. I wouldn't wish to inflict that level of stress on anyone, much less anyone desperate enough to seek for such a place.
(Full disclosure: I'm bisexual, 32 years old, still a virgin with women, and opposed to both the premises and the methods of PUA.)
Given access to the raw data of who upvotes what and at what time, an algorithm should be able to auto flag sockpuppets, at least until the sockpuppets get wiser and start upvoting at different times of day.
Looking for lots of accounts with similar IP addresses is a strategy too, but proxies could be a problem.
This week on the slack: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mpq/lesswrong_real_time_chat/
I wonder how extended time would go. I.e. On a spaceship with the only crew being consenting duplicates of one human entity. I feel like there would be an eerie consensus and trust.
Like. That understanding of one's self, would truly extend to those around you. And yet when I consider myself as a human similar to the humans around me - I don't think I would ever get along with other humans with the same peacefulness that I could have - knowing I was getting along with duplicate myselves.
Although I now wonder if applying duplicate myselves outward as an imprint mould on the other humans - would help me get along with more people, and communicate and understand more than ever before...
I wonder if a level of love and trust could be found in people who don't currently try to understand one another in any such way. By giving them this model of empathetic understanding of one another and everyone else's actions around them."
Programming - Some legalities of trying to auto-consent for people to give up their right to pursue your use of their contributions to your communal piece of work, "what does a legally valid transfer of copyright between two strangers emailing each other actually look like"
Projects - (renamed from composition) What we are writing about; Accountability space, Novels; Having a preference, Focussing, Data mining, Submitting things to the US DIA, Hypotheticals, Drawing with a wacom tablet, Dealing with clients, NLP, Remembering names.
"a web app that allows you to have a conversation with "simulated selves"" available here in version zero https://tangoapp.herokuapp.com/ "It's still probably very buggy, limited in functionality and confusing to use, but as they say... release fast! Mostly, I'm just posting because a couple people seemed interested in playing with it, and because I gave myself until the end of the weekend as a conservative estimate."
real life - Living in an RV, Sharing your salary with others, War and other stressful (but not always), deadly scenarios. Biases when debating, gun control (we all feel sorry for America)
rss feed - we have an RSS feed of any post on LW or SSC that notifies of posts if you are in the channel.
Science and technology - the electric car market, brain-volume and intelligence, cooling cap (for sleep quality improvement), Yelp for people (a pretty bad idea), smart light bulbs,
Startups - various startup ideas.
welcome - everyone answers the questions: "Would you like to introduce yourself? Where are you from? What do you do with your time? What are you working on? What problems are you trying to solve?"
Feel free to join us. Active meetup time: A time to try to get lots of people online to talk about things is going to be Sunday afternoon-night for the US, If you want to chat actively with other lesswrongers; we are going to try to be active at that time.
We have over 130 people who have signed up. Not nearly that many people are active, but each day something interesting happens...
last week on slack: http://lesswrong.com/lw/msa/open_thread_sep_21_sep_27_2015/crk1
Ha!
"In this paper, I take the position that a large portion of contemporary academic work is an appalling waste of human intelligence that cannot be justified under any mainstream normative ethics."
Out of Harvard, no less.
I've found I've become a smidge more conservative-- I was in favor of the Arab Spring, and to put it mildly, it hasn't worked well. I'm not even sure the collapse of the Soviet Union was a net gain.
Any thoughts about how much stability should be respected?
I definitely value it higher than the momentary high of getting to impose your values on others, which seems to be the opposite of the current US foreign policy.
People tend to conflate two different things by that phrase.
1) The fall of Communism.
2) The break up of the Soviet Union into 15 republics.
Which one are you asking about.
For a consequentialist this is a question for historians and those who model historical what-ifs (psycho-historians? Hari Seldon, where are you?)
There are multiple possibilities that I can think of offhand:
1. a revolution/regime change/instability may have some negative or positive effect in the near term, but no measurable long-term effect anywhere
2. there are some long-term positive/negative effects locally, but none globally
3. there are both local and global effects, positive and/or negative
A historical analysis can only get you so far, as it is hard to come up with controlled examples. Was the US revolution similar to the French revolution? To the Russian revolution? To the Spartacus' uprising? To the Chinese dynastic revolts?
Would the US have been better off peacefully separating from Great Britain like Australia and Canada? Did the horrors of the World War II scare Europe into peace? Was the Holocaust a net good for the Jews, since it led to creation of Israel and the rise of Jewish influence in the US and in the world? (Assuming either of those are beneficial. Most Arabs would disagree.)
Even the seemingly clear-cut "good" cases, like the end of the Apartheid in South Africa eventually resulted in rising crime rates in the country.
To misquote a famous historian, "History is just one damned thing after another".
My current position on the issue is that any uprising is only worth considering if you can reasonably expect near-term positive effects for the group you care about, because there is currently no way to estimate long-term effects, and you cannot hope to be honest about the welfare of people you don't care about.
This position is an awkward one, since it means that Hitler's takeover of Germany was worth supporting at the time it happened, unless you cared about Jews, Gypsies and gays more than about ethnic Germans. It also means being against most armed revolts of uncertain prospects of success, since they necessarily lead to near-term increase in suffering.
Not being in favor of the collapse of the Soviet Union seems to me a gigantic mistake. The threat of large scale nuclear war is greatly reduced. 100s of millions of people live in a much less repressive environment. (If you don't believe that, consider information was greatly restricted in the communist bloc with communist propaganda keeping the sad truth that communist lives were way circumscribed and poor compared to Western lives, and people were literally shot for trying to leave). It would be interesting to poll people over the age of 45 or 50 that live in eastern europe to find out how many of them would not be in favor of getting out from behind the iron curtain.
Dum-dum-dum-DOOM
MALE GENERAL INTELLIGENCE (G) DOES NOT INCREASE FEMALE SEXUAL ATTRACTION
(all caps in the original X-D)
P.S. This is a Just Another Psych Study, so any resemblance between its conclusions and reality is merely coincidental. Good for lulz, not too good for serious consideration. But it's funny :-)
Well, it certainly agrees with the anecdotal evidence.
Not with mine. My anecdotal evidence says that high IQ does NOT compensate for a variety of other deficiencies (from personal hygiene to self-confidence issues) but otherwise it's very useful :-)
In which case there's still the issue that it seems to correlate with said deficiencies.
Citation needed.
A paper titled "High IQ is correlated with the inability to learn to use a shower" got to have a decent chance at getting an IgNobel X-)
I think it's more because of restriction-of-range effects (people who have both low IQ and said deficiencies are likely to be in their parents' basements so we don't usually see them, and people who have both are likely to be in places like DC so we don't usually see them either) than because they actually correlate in the whole population.
Well, autism causes both for starters.
What?
EDIT: Do you mean the technical meaning or the colloquial meaning? The former aren't that smart in average...
Autism is a spectrum. Here I mean the ones whose social skills aren't so ban its impossible to meaningfully interact with them.
EDIT: fixed typo.
And having social skills so bad it's impossible to meaningfully interact with you causes high IQ? What?
The usual caveats about small and culturally limited studies apply, not to mention that it's a hypothetical behavior study.
This being said, it's worth noting that a lot of mating venues have so much background noise that conversation is discouraged.
So male intelligence does increase romantic attraction, but if all you want is a shag then you don't care about intelligence.
This makes sense, and also makes the title a little misleading.
Wouldn't a better approach be to look at okcupid profile reading level (as in, does their profile use long words and correct grammar) or answers to match questions such as "which is bigger, the sun or the moon?" and correlate this with how many messages they get? I suppose this wouldn't be very academic, but you could get a sample size of millions.
Why do you believe that correlates with intelligence? It might very well correlate with willingness to provide contrarian answers.
Some of the posts on OkTrends, the official OkCupid blog, have studied similar things.
Guessing the distribution before I look: Small-ish penalty for below-average intelligence, a flat line through average into slightly above average, then a small-ish penalty for above-average intelligence.
ETA: Oh. No data provided. Pity.
My employer changed their donation matching policy such that I now have an incentive to lump 2 years' donations into a single year, so I can claim the standard deduction during the year that I don't donate, thereby saving around $1200 every 2 years. I've been donating between 10 and 12.5 percent for the last few years. This year I would be donating around 21%. Has anyone here been audited because they claimed a large fraction of their income as charitable contributions? How painful was the experience? I doubt it's worth paying $1200 to avoid, but I thought I'd ask.
Julia and I donate 50% and haven't been audited yet, but I expect we will at some point. We keep good records, which should help a lot.
I donated roughly that percentage several years ago & was not audited.
Heh. Andrew Gelman of the Bayesian Data Analysis textbook discovers Yvain.