Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 22 July 2015 11:22:28AM *  13 points [-]

One issue is that if you base your self-esteem on your rationality, that might make it more difficult to notice flaws in your rationality, for the same reasons as basing self-esteem on being a Nazi might've made it more difficult for historical Nazis to notice the issues. Hence the idea of keeping identity small, not including important things in it, to avoid that particular cause of misperceiving them.

See Cached Selves for more details. There does seem to be an important difference between the usual ideologies and technical subjects, in that ideologies allow much more wiggle room, which might be at the heart of the problem, see Ethnic Tension And Meaningless Arguments. Sidestepping that sort of vagueness by making sure a few key ideas remain clear is also the approach explored in Yudkowsky's How To Actually Change Your Mind, for example see The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality and Human Evil and Muddled Thinking.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 05 July 2015 04:13:35PM *  1 point [-]

I strongly believe in effective altruism and they do not. [...] I am being outvoted two-to-one by people who believe saving lives and saving souls are nearly equally important.

Differences in belief about what's important are somewhat independent from differences in disposition about pursuing effectiveness. A person may have very unusual beliefs about what's important (i.e. caring about lives of insects), but remain motivated to seek the most effective ways of influencing these things.

Comment author: Mirzhan_Irkegulov 29 June 2015 07:51:14AM 2 points [-]

I didn't question that you were interacting with many members of the community. I'm saying you're projecting. Maybe people are either normal or slightly depressed/anxious/bitter/etc, meaning, they have same emotional problems just like any human being. You, however, see them as unusually emotionally damaged.

Typical Mind Fallacy, to understand other people we model them just like ourselves. You said yourself you had emotional problems before, so I believe your perception of the community is skewed. Maybe you see signs of emotional damage in other people, just like insecure promiscuous people seemingly spot depravity in other people.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 30 June 2015 01:45:09AM 4 points [-]

This doesn't address the issue of the claimed difference in Jonah's perception of LWers from his perception of other groups.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 18 June 2015 12:42:26PM *  10 points [-]

The aspect of taking ideas seriously that you are talking about seems orthogonal to forming beliefs. It's about initiative in investigating ideas and considering their general applicability, as opposed to stopping at a few superficial observations or failing to notice their relevance in unusual contexts. You don't need to believe an idea to investigate it in detail, the belief may come eventually or not at all. Considering an idea in many contexts may also blur the line with believing it. (Another aspect is taking action based on a belief.)

The process of investigating ideas in detail might get triggered by believing them for no good reason, but there is no need.

In response to The Joy of Bias
Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 09 June 2015 07:58:13PM 3 points [-]

A flaw shifts priorities from the next thing you'd do to fixing the thing that failed, but not if fixing the flaw is too hard or makes no difference. If the issue we found is easy to fix and fixing it provides a significant improvement, we are lucky. We should share such luck by filing bug reports. Conversely, finding no flaw is a disappointment.

Comment author: skeptical_lurker 09 June 2015 12:53:19PM 2 points [-]

What makes you think SA's ability to write interesting posts has anything todo with rationality? He's mentioned that at least one member of his family is very talented, and that he won writing contests when he was a child (and so, before he encountered LW).

In general, in many ways creativity is correlated with insanity, not rationality.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 09 June 2015 07:28:37PM 2 points [-]

In general, in many ways creativity is correlated with insanity, not rationality.

Definition and evidence? What do you mean by "creativity" in this statement and why do you believe it's true? (If by "insanity" you mean something other than mental illness, what do you mean?)

Comment author: ChristianKl 04 June 2015 11:24:24AM 0 points [-]

In general this is a useful move, looking for an idealized version of what is being said, abstracted from irrelevant details.

Depending on your goal it makes sense to focus on different information while reading. If you read a mathematical proof, status is completely irrelevant. It's rational to completely ignore that layer.

If you read an article on a platform like this it's useful to understand what's driven the author. Jonah thinks that because he spend his 10,000 hours on training epistemic rationality people should pay more attention to his writing. Paying more attention to his writing means treating him as higher status. The status is not irrelevant for a reader because it influences how the reader spends his time.

To me it's not a big issue. I usually don't parse for status when reading LW posts. At the same time it's there. As far as I understand Jonah suggests that when people derivate from "mathematical style reasoning" that means they aren't reading carefully. That it's due to not having enough training in epistemic rationality.

the problem is not the idea of ignoring some of the details as irrelevant for the idealized version of the intended claim (about Jonah's emotional state)

I parse the post as saying: "Jonah's advanced skills in reasoning allowed him in a short amount of time to learn MLK style compassion." That would be evidence that suggests that Jonah is indeed having advanced skills in reasoning and thus deserving of a high status. High status that results in people spending more time reading and contemplating his posts.

I usually don't focus on the status layer when I read LW either.

In this case Jonah not only intends to make a claim about his emotional state. He also makes a claim that MLK is just a human, which indicates that MLK abilities aren't as impressive as people who hold him to be "more than a human" believe. Given that MLK is a political figure, that claim is even more problematic than it otherwise would be.

There's also the claim that his emotional state is desirable and that it's desirability means that other people should copy Jonah's technique that gave Jonah that emotional state.

Careful reading means picking up those 3 claims in addition to the claim about Jonah's emotional state. That's very different then mathematical style reasoning. In a mathematical proof you only have to focus on explicitly made claims. If you just focus on Jonah's emotional state and consider everything else insignificant I don't think you are engaging with the substance of his post.

Of course that doesn't means that it's always important to engage with every claim that's made. I usually don't parse LW posts for status or focus on those claims.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 04 June 2015 12:45:45PM 0 points [-]

The status is not irrelevant for a reader [...]

I'm trying to clarify the issue by introducing the distinction between different implicit claims, so that relevance for each of these claims can be considered on its own. A reader may be interested in multiple claims, so that if a detail is relevant for one of them, it becomes relevant for the reader. But when it's relevant for the reader, it may still be irrelevant for some of the claims. Talking about irrelevance for the reader collapses this distinction.

When Jonah is pointing to careful reading, that includes awareness of various claims that are being considered and relevance of presented details for each of them. Clarification may address uncertainty about these claims individually.

Comment author: ChristianKl 02 June 2015 03:25:36PM 4 points [-]

What I came to realize is that the standard of careful reading that I had in mind (similar to the level of attention that I put into checking a mathematical proof) may be entirely alien to most of my readers, so that I may have been totally misreading them as not caring about epistemic rationality.

I think "careful reading" mistakes what that debate is about. Perceiving status claims in your writing is picking up on elements of your writing by carefully reading it.

If you want people to ignore that layer of meaning you are asking them to ignore information. You are asking them to read less carefully. The fact that you didn't make a conscious choice to deliberately make a status claim doesn't change this.

Apart from status if you assume that learning deep stuff takes a lot of time your claim that you got to world class in a skill in a short amount of time invites challenge. The most likely explanation is that you simply underrate what it takes to be world class in the skill. Could you explain how more careful reading would prevent that interpretation? I don't see how spending more time with the article would change anything.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 03 June 2015 08:06:49PM *  1 point [-]

If you want people to ignore that layer of meaning you are asking them to ignore information. You are asking them to read less carefully.

In general this is a useful move, looking for an idealized version of what is being said, abstracted from irrelevant details. What is relevant depends on context. For example, a mathematical statement with a minor error should probably be understood to refer to its corrected version, which may be easy to find based on the surrounding discussion.

In the Martin Luther King/Gandhi example, the problem is not the idea of ignoring some of the details as irrelevant for the idealized version of the intended claim (about Jonah's emotional state), but lack of convincing justification for their irrelevance for a different claim (about Jonah's status on LW), a signal that is proving hard to disclaim. Even then it seems clear that these details are irrelevant for the intended claim and should be discarded from its idealized reading.

Comment author: Gondolinian 03 June 2015 02:22:49PM *  1 point [-]

What Is Mathematics? was the only one I was able to find from a local library. I've put a request in for it and I should be getting it soon. Thanks for the recommendation; if it helps me to not hate math then I might be able to do something actually useful for existential risk reduction.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 03 June 2015 07:45:20PM 1 point [-]

These are available on Library Genesis.

Also, "What is Mathematics?" is more serious than the other two. "The Shape of Space" is probably the easiest and most fun, and "The Enjoyment of Math" is a collection of almost completely independent small pieces that don't assume any background, but some of them are a bit involved for something that doesn't assume any background.

Comment author: JonahSinick 01 June 2015 02:51:06AM 1 point [-]

So it may well be sufficient to provide a bit of motivation to keep them learning, with evidence about truth of the eventual conclusions irrelevant throughout.

Are you saying that it might be best to provide no evidence, and instead just give references?

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 01 June 2015 03:12:43AM *  4 points [-]

It's often possible to sidestep the difficulty of communicating evidence by focusing on explaining relevant concepts, which usually doesn't require evidence (or references), except as clarifying further reading. Evidence may be useful as motivation, when it's easier to communicate in the outline than the concepts, but not otherwise. And after the concepts are clear, evidence may become easier to communicate.

(Imagine trying to convince a denizen of Ancient Greece that there is a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. You won't get to presenting actual astronomical observations for quite some time, and might start with the entirely theoretical geometry and mechanics. Even the mechanics doesn't have to be motivated by experimental verification, as it's interesting as mathematics on its own. And mentioning black holes may be ill-advised at that stage.)

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