= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Glen comments on Rationality Quotes Thread March 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (44)
Vox Day
The closest thing to rationality content I can pull from this is "just because a thing looks good, doesn't mean it is good". However, the source page lists a grand total of one corrupt non-profit. You can find one bad version of anything, no matter how good or bad the whole group is. You could probably even find a hundred such examples, just from population size and base rate alone. Vox doesn't attempt to check if he is right, he doesn't even list a few examples. He just lists a single instance of a probably corrupt non-profit and, pleased with his own cynicism and insight, declares he they has found a pattern. This is a good example of what not to do, and an important failure mode to watch out for, but you are presenting it as though it were rational rather than a cautionary tale.
Think of it as an exercise in looking at the incentives people in various situations have. You may want to start by examening the sentence:
Look closer. It's a comment about organizations which exist mostly for the benefits of their employees. One might call them parasites.
He lists a single "parasitic" non-profit, and then declares the entire field of non-profits to be corrupt thieves on the scale of the financial sector. This post is explicitly about his disgust with the "non-profit world", and he pretty clearly believes that this sort of this is common despite providing no strong evidence in support of that belief. That is his mistake, generalizing from a single example with no additional evidence provided or even discussed.
It's a quote. Most quotes generalize and don't provide or discuss evidence.
By he I meant Vox. I read the linked post, and it makes all these mistakes. I wouldn't expect a quote to include a full argument or evidence base, but the source ideally should.
Most quotes have a justification lurking about somewhere, either within the quote itself, or in shared experience. A quote that's just an unsubstantiated claim shouldn't be quoted.
"Shared experience" is the most common, I think, and is conveniently unfalsifiable.