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Comments (346)
How do you convince people of Cromwell's rule? (the use of prior probabilities of 0 or 1 should be avoided)
Next time I discuss degrees of belief with my local atheist group, I'm going to try this one: absolute certainty = faith. That will surely shock them enough into abandoning absolute certainty.
Judging by my experience with atheists... no it won't. Your group might be better. Those I've encountered who hold to absolute certainty believe their absolute certainty is justified on the basis that God is impossible, or infinitely unlikely, or some similar line of argument.
ETA: That is, expect some line of argument about your certainty about the nonexistence of a triangle with total internal angles of 240 degrees, or something like that.
The first time I tried to use this argument, my test subjects switched from exact 0 to a ridiculously low percentage intended to mean basically the same.
Now I notice that your comment reveals that I may have committed an inconsistency with respect to a chain of comments I wrote before on the same topic.
This has me thinking. Eliezer said,
I guess a fully consistent position would sound like this: "I'm very confident that the traditional description of God conflicts with itself, which makes the existence of God extremely unlikely in this universe, but of course there's always some likelihood that this universe doesn't work the way I suppose it did, or logic has a loophole that nobody has seen before, or omnipotence doesn't really care for impossibilities, and as a result God is real. But so far this doesn't look like the type of universe where that would happen."
Why isn't microcurrent therapy more common for pain management?
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.
It may also be not that they think that they are talking about a unwelcome subject, but only that they recognize that not every conversation needs to be held publicly and recorded for posterity. If they want to talk about the weather, they should not do it in a thread -- not because it will be downvoted, but because it is rather rude to broadcast every conversation when we have a number of perfectly acceptable ways to hold conversations without distracting the entire site.
Of course, if "negative karma" was what they were really worried about, and this is not just your interpretation, it may be useful to hold conversations out in the open. At best you will be happily surprised, and at worst you will have am audience to encourage you to do your best when talking about questionable subjects.
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.
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.
For myself (and from what I can tell of some others) I've chosen to accept and incorporate my humanity and the complexity of human social interactions, rather than "overcome", which is hard to distinguish from "denial of reality".
Image management, and especially self-image management, are important and difficult. They're going to color all human interactions, whether you or not you prefer that.
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.
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.
Unsuprising if someone generated that independently. Even more unsuprising if an intelligent person does. Be more charitable.
As usual for Hawking, or for people quoting Eliezer, or?
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.
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.
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?
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-)
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.
It's worth noting that it cites an existing study titled "Intelligence and mate choice: intelligent men are always appealing"
Wild hypothesis: it is possible that the Flynn effect has levelled out the range where intelligence was a factor of sexual attractiveness?
Maybe it's more important to mate with a 90 IQ rather than an 85 IQ, but after 100 IQ every male seems equal.
It's interesting how you are not conditioning this on the IQ of the girl...
Sure, you can always add a parameter to make the model more complex, if needed.
How is that interesting?
How would you have conditioned the preference on women's IQ?
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.
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.
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.
Man, I want to try playing a game of Rationality Cardinality online, but the place is a wasteland. Anyone want to coordinate for some upcoming evening or something?
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've been trying to prove things more often because I haven't done it a lot and I'm interested in a mathy career. I started reading Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation and came across a chance to try and prove the statement 'For every graph G, the sum of the degrees of all nodes in G is even.' I couldn't find other proofs online, so I thought I'd share mine here before I look at the book, especially because mine might be completely different and I wouldn't really know if it was any good.
A graph G equals the set of the set of nodes/vertices V and the set of edges E. That is, G = {V, E}.
Let G be the empty graph with no nodes and no edges. The sum of the degrees of the nodes of this graph is zero, which is even.
Let G be the graph with one node and no edges. The sum of the degrees of the nodes of this graph is zero, which is even.
Let G be an arbitrary, non-empty graph such that the sum of the degrees of the nodes in G is even.
Let G' be a graph identical to G in all respects except that it contains an additional node that is a member of an additional pair in E with one other node. (That is, 'make a new node' and 'make an edge' to attach it to an existing node with.) The degree of a node equals the number of pairs in E of which the node is a member. Each pair contains two elements, so that if a graph G has i edges and j equals the sum of the degrees of all nodes in G, then the sum of the degrees of all nodes in a graph G' with i+1 edges will equal j+2. Because this is true for an arbitrary, non-empty graph G, it is true for every non-empty graph G. j is even by assumption, and the sum of two even numbers is even, so j+2 is even. Because this is true for an arbitrary, non-empty graph G', it is true for every non-empty graph G.
For every non-empty graph G, the sum of the degrees of all nodes in G is even. The sum of the degrees of all nodes in the empty graph is even. Therefore, for every graph G, the sum of the degrees of all nodes in G is even.
FYI, this is called the sum of degrees theorem. In fact, the sum of degrees is not only an even number, but twice the number of edges in the graph. This is due to Euler, I think. He used the famous Koenigsberg bridges problem as a motivation for thinking about graphs.
Good work on thinking about proofs, +1 to you.
I love that I can come to this website and have one of Judea Pearl's former students check my elementary graph-theoretic proofs.
But really, thanks for the encouragement. I had also been wondering if it had a name.
Your operation for turning G into G' doesn't let you construct all graphs, e.g. K3 (the triangle graph) can't be formed like that. The rest of that paragraph is probably more dense than it needs to be. You're on the right track, but I can't quite tell if you actually rely on that construction.
Thanks for the feedback. I think you can construct all graphs and use it to prove the theorem if you prove that you can add an arbitrary number of additional edges and nodes to an arbitrary graph and keep the sum of the degrees of all nodes even, instead of just one additional node and one additional edge. I also see what you mean about this:
I think the inductive hypothesis in the rest of that paragraph might be enough, and I just wrote down how I intuitively visualized the proof before that without realizing that it wasn't necessary (nor sufficient, I now know) for the argument to carry through.
If you have an idea of how you would write the proof, I'd be interested in seeing it. I looked at the book and the proof is actually even less formal there.
Lemma: sum of the degrees of the nodes is twice the number of edges.
Proof: We proceed by induction on the number of edges. If a graph has 0 edges, the the sum of degrees of edges is 0=2(0). Now, by way of induction, assume, for all graphs with n edges, the sum of the degrees of the nodes 2n; we wish to show that, for all graphs with n+1 edges, the sum of the degrees of the nodes is 2(n+1). But the sum of the degrees of the nodes is (2n)+2 = 2(n+1). ∎
The theorem follows as a corollary.
If you want practice proving things and haven't had much experience so far, I'd recommend Mathematics for Computer Science, a textbook from MIT and distributed under a free license, along with the associated video lectures *. To use Terry Tao's words, Sipser is writing at both level 1 and 3: he's giving arguments an experienced mathematician is capable of filling in the details to form a rigorous argument, but also doing so in such a way that a level 1 mathematician can follow along. Critically, however, from what I understand from reading Sipser's preface, he's definitely not writing a book to move level 1 mathematicians to level 2, which is a primary goal of the MIT book. If you're looking to prove things because you haven't done it much before, I infer you're essentially looking to transition from level 1 to 2, hence the recommendation.
A particular technique I picked up from the MIT book, which I used here, was that, for inductive proofs, it's often easier to prove a stronger theorem, since it gives you stronger assumptions in the inductive step.
PM me if you want someone to look over your solutions (either for Sipser or the MIT book). In the general case, I'm a fan learning from textbooks and believe that working things out for yourself without being helped by an instructor makes you stronger, but I'm also convinced that you need feedback from a human when you're first getting learning how to prove things.
* The lectures follow an old version of the book, which ~350 pages shorter and, crucially, lacks exercises.
I really appreciate this comment, thank you.
I've actually never studied automata, computability, or complexity before either, so that's really why I picked up Sipser. But I'm downloading your other recommendation now (just moved, mobile Internet only); I can certainly imagine that some books are more useful than others for learning proof, I just saw an opportunity to practice and see how my natural ability is. I'll try to include things more specifically for learning proof in my diet. I sure will PM you if I need some feedback (I expect to), thanks.
I think it's actually cleaner to prove the theorem non-inductively (though I appreciate that what GS asked for was specifically a cleaned-up inductive proof). E.g.: "Count pairs (vertex,edge) where the edge is incident on the vertex. The number of such pairs for a given vertex equals its degree, so the sum equals the sum of the degrees. The number of such pairs for a given edge equals 2, so the sum equals twice the number of edges."
(More visually: draw the graph. Now erase all of each edge apart from a little bit at each end. The resulting picture is a collection of stars, one per vertex. How many points have the stars in total?)
If I were doing it inductively, I'd go in the other direction, removing edges instead of adding them. Take a graph G with n>0 edges, and remove an edge to get G'. The degree sum of G' is two less than the degree sum of G (two vertices lose one degree, or one vertex loses two degree). Then induction shows that the degree sum is twice the edge count. There are probably simpler proofs, but having been primed by yours, this is the one that comes to mind.
I feel like being completely formal is the sort of thing that you learn to do at the beginning of your math education, and then gradually move away from it. But you move to a higher class of non-rigor than you started from, where you're just eliding bookwork rather than saying things that don't necessarily work. E.g. here I've omitted the inductive base case, because I consider it obvious that the base case works, and the word "induction" tells me the shape of the argument without needing to write it explicitly.
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?
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.
There is yet a third interpretation: the loss of control by the USSR over the other states of the Warsaw Pact. This is the aspect that is most clearly a good development. Added: In fact, I think that is the most common use (cf Viliam).
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.
I would be inclined to agree, but the B vs P comparison is a bit unsettling...
I think it was a gain for me, because it decreased the probability that Soviet Union would attack my country. Many people from former Soviet area of influence have the same opinion. Then again, many have the opposite opinion.
Also, as a result of collapse of Soviet Union, I am allowed to cross borders and attend LW meetups at Vienna. I know, it's pretty selfish to wish an entire empire to collapse only to improve my weekends, but still, I am selfishly happy.
The Arab Spring has worked quite well in the one country that actually had a well-established civil society prior to it, namely Tunisia. (Not coincidentally, this is also where the AS got its start.) All else being equal, I am in favor of having solid evidence about the factors that can actually lead to long-lasting social improvement in the Arab world and elsewhere.
Lots! But it seems like if we start doing "yay stability" vs. "boo stagnation" we'll be at politics pretty quick.
Stagnation is actually a stable condition. It's "yay stability" vs. "boo instability," and "yay growth" vs. "boo stagnation."
Those are true words you wrote. I lounge corrected.
I think the question is WAY too general. The only possible answer is: "It depends".
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.
Was exactly does that mean? That you cheered when it happened? Or do you mean something more political significant?
I cheered when it happened.
The interesting question is how did you decide the Arab Spring was a good thing.
Was it because the New York Times told you so? Or was it a consequence of the prior that "More democracy is always good?"
There may have been some influence from the NYT, but it was also less tyranny as well as more democracy.
Democracy is a quite deceptive word. 74% of Egyptians want Egypt to be ruled via the Sharia.
Did the NYT narrative have Egyptians suddenly stoning homosexuals which a majority of that country believes, or did it have the new government not representing the views of the Egyptian population?
As far as I remember not really. It had the idea that western democracy with people who value western value suddenly came to Egypt without really thinking it through.
"Less tyranny" isn't the same thing as "more democracy".
I'm not sure that I know what's meant with "less tyranny".
Some governments are more abusive than others, and governments which are very abusive tend not to be democracies.
What do you mean with being abusive? Democracies don't have inherent protection of minorities.
Do you believe that the Pakistani government was less abusive than prerevolution Egypt?
I can't speak for Nancy, but my own reaction to the Arab Spring was something like "oh, that looks like a good thing if it actually works out rather than leading to more repression in the end", and it was a consequence of a prior that resembles the one you describe but contains less straw: "More democracy is usually good, other things being equal".
[EDITED to add: I mention this only because I find it striking how the two possibilities you mention are both, if you'll pardon my directness, rather stupid[1], and I'm wondering on what basis you assume that Nancy's reasons were stupid ones.]
[1] Meaning "it would be rather stupid to decide on that basis" rather than "it is stupid to think that someone else might decide on that basis". And of course "stupid" is a strong word; believing whatever you read in the NYT isn't really that bad a strategy. But I'm sure you see what I mean.
This is an entirely generic attitude suitable for everything that claims to have a noble aim in mind.
Doesn't look like a workable prior given that other things are never equal. Looks like a hedged version of "the expected value of more democracy is more good".
I don't think so. Nancy is not an expert in Arab politics -- she relies on opinions of others. Given this, accepting the prevailing opinion of the media (of the appropriate political flavour) is an entirely normal thing and happens all the time. "There is another coup in Backwardistan? The newspaper I read says it's bad? Oh, I guess it must be so <yawn>".
Ditto with using general priors when you can't or can't bother to analyze the situation yourself.
Nope. For instance, abstinence-only sex education claims to have in mind the noble end of preserving the virtue of the young. I do not particularly hope that it succeeds in its aims, because I disagree about their nobility.
Regarding what the "Arab Spring" was trying to do as a noble end (as opposed to one merely claimed to be noble) says something not altogether trivial about the values of the person who so regards it.
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.
Possible karma fraud probably didn't help.
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.
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.)
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.
The leap from annoyance to a ban was quite sudden.
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.
Religion does sound pretty arbitrary to me.
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?
There you go.
Ok, except this definition makes "identity essentialism" true.
Evidence?
Don't be silly.
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....
<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.
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 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.
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'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.
For people you haven't interacted with it isn't, for other people it's the posteriors you should apply, not the priors.
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.
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.
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.
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... 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.
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?
I'm not sure what policy suggestion AA was making. I thought that you thought he was proposing forced marriages. What do you think he was proposing?
And of course, a lot of pressure is put on men to go into arranged marriages, but at the end of the day they do have a little more freedom, as if it comes down to violence they are more able to defend themselves. And that's a possibility - I have heard an girl of Indian decent say "I can't be forced into marriage because I have no male relatives and I could take my mum in a fight."
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.
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."
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?
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.
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.
That's a rule I'd strongly support other than in cases of absolutely unambiguous spamming or clear sockpuppets of banned individuals.
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...
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.
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.
It would, and I was following it for a while.
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.
Why not ask advancedatheist to make his opinion clearer? My internal model of AA does not include him being especially supportive of, say, ISIS' sex slavery (to take one crystal-clear example of "women ... be[ing] distributed to men they don't want to have sex with"). Could it be that you're simply misinterpreting his original intent?
That's a strawman. AA speaks in favor of traditional partriarchy and that's a system that has arranged marriages where woman often have little to say about whom they want to marry and then have sex with.
Does it include him declaring that society must make sure that men get enough sex, whatever it takes, and then averting his eyes from the "whatever it takes" particulars?
Well, what should "whatever it takes" mean, exactly? Very few values are anything close to non-negotiable - EY's Sequences are unusually clear on this.
If I had to guess, I'd say that AA thinks "men getting enough sex" could be achieved cheaply enough, by improving male attitudes (and more broadly, societal attitudes) towards masculinity and sex. That would doubtlessly make some radical feminists uncomfortable, but this is clearly the sort of "policy" option that's actually on the table. Which means that even treating your "particulars" as if they could ever be meant seriously is a batshit-crazy misrepresentation of what incels are actually talking about.
I think you meant "improving female attitudes".
Well, I can't speak for the whole incel subculture, but I'm pretty sure I meant what I wrote above. Of course, the point of changing societal attitudes is that once you stop telling women that they're supposed to hate "toxic" masculinity, their attitudes will improve as well. But that's pretty much obvious.
No problem-- I was reacting aa's complaints that women are too picky about men, and also revolted by men.
A lot of this discussion has convinced me that communication is difficult.
Yeah well, this whole exercise starts making very little sense once you go into such specifics - Viliam is right about this. It might be that you're putting too much weight on that one single complaint (which would just be considered a typically 'edgy' throwaway remark if it came from within the incel 'community'), or that I'm oversimplifying in assuming AA shares the broader views of the incel subculture and, more generally, the "Dark Enlightenment" (incels, redpillars, puas, neoreaction, what have you).
Averting one's eyes means that you never ask yourself that question.
"Make it happen, I don't want to know how" is not a terribly uncommon sentiment.
He has been sufficiently clear already. Nitpicking over the exact role he sees for women in society as he would arrange it is something that cannot possibly be to the benefit of this site and its community.