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Thanks for answering. (Like the one-word one, this comment provides insight into nothing except my own state of mind, in which you are perfectly entitled to be uninterested.)
I try to go through the cognitive bias list calling to mind past examples of me falling for them. I know I'm smart, but it's very important to accuracy to be closely in touch with my own stupidity.
"You don't understand a cognitive bias until you know you have it yourself" sounds highly plausible, and may even be true. You'll certainly know it better than you would only from others.
Generalising from one fictional example. (But a funny one.)
I had an existential crisis a few weeks ago that was very helpful. I now fully believe "it's physics all the way down." It's also given me some insights as to how self-awareness arises in physical systems, and made me realize cryonics is trivially workable. I also have an intuitive feel for how humanity is collectively wearing rose-colored glasses, and am very curious what happens when these will get taken off! (In other words, I look forward to the creation of a fully rational agent according to a prescribed utility function.)
This also means I can hardly stand news and movies anymore, because I deconstruct everything. I have no problem maintaining social interactions, but no longer carry any of the standard social obligations. It's a little eerie, like feeling the matrix.
Mmm. Sounds familiar. But what do you mean by '"physics all the way down"'?
I'm saying "not here, not like this."
I find this argument persuasive. You have changed my mind.
Huh. I agree with both of you, up to
we do that by tackling the mind killing, not by tackling the issues[.]
At least, if 'tackling the issues' means 'coming to any kind of conclusion|decision as to what to think or even what to do. Obviously a rational approach is a prerequisite for that, but doesn't replace it. I also agree in general with
the fact that this is our pet issue makes us far more vulnerable
but vulnerable to what in this case? Irrationally believing that SOPA would be a bad thing?
Exactly.
Why downvoted? Vacuousness? (Sometimes when I really like a comment, I don't feel satisfied by just upvoting it.)
With that said, I'd suggest that politics exercises its mind killing power over some issues more than others, at any given time within a society. Some issues inflame political loyalties, but some do not.
ADBOC, a bit. I think that is accurate in terms of a description of society. I think it is misleading if you interpret it causally. Issues do not inflame political loyalties in an individual because the issues are possessed of some properties with respect to society. They inflame political loyalties in an individual because of attributes of that individual. A part of this may be an expectation that society at large cares about the issue (I think this is likely in some cases) but I don't think that is essential - I expect that it applies to identification with any particular group that is likely to have a strong opinion on the topic.
Right now, I'm under the impression that copyright enforcement law simply is not a highly-charged partisan issue for the overwhelming majority of people in the United States.
Probably not. But I would say that it is absolutely a highly-charged (non-partisan, but that's my point) issue for, say, the overwhelming majority of people on Slashdot or Reddit. Would you disagree?
Given our demographics, how do you think LW compares?
That's interesting. I initially parsed "copyright enforcement law simply is not a highly-charged partisan issue for the overwhelming majority of people in the United States" as meaning that it's almost universally agreed to be bad. That reading was reinforced by "A few individuals may strongly identify as[...] fans of copyright law" (if it had been "fans or opponents" maybe that would have straightened me out). I'm pretty sure that most people who have been directly affected by some kind of copyright enforcement mechanism or copyright enforcement law did not enjoy the experience, and I am sceptical that they are a tiny minority.
Of course, positions on copyright and its enforcement in general are entirely distinct from positions on SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, et al. (as evinced by the many anti-SOPA statements that begin with announcements of approval of copyright enforcement in general).
In any case, I quite agree---especially after seeing the development of this thread---with your main point that LW is part of the community in which strong opinions on the present topic are ubiquitous. (I don't know about opinions on copyright and its enforcement in general.) But to be more precise, we are part of the community in which the opinion that SOPA is bad is ubiquitous---like many other opinions, such as that elaborate theological arguments are a waste of time. That isn't enough to make it controversial, and that's why I thought perhaps we could discuss it rationally. But of course we are afraid, and perhaps that fear is more salient and more immediate than the fear of various existential dangers and similarly scary things we discuss.
I'd expect mass takedowns of all sorts of things as soon as the legislation passes. Possibly a full shutdown of YouTube, megaUpload, and other sites deemed to be "encouraging piracy", but I wouldn't offer strong odds on that.
SOPA will become US law and either Youtube or Megaupload will be shutdown.
Additionally, you can expect other nations to get sick of random things being pulled from the DNS registries (basically huge lookup tables that tell your computer what to do with things like "www.lesswrong.com"; changing these to a "this page has been removed" page is the SOPA method-of-choice for taking a site down). An independent DNS network will probably be created, segmenting the internet into a US internet and a global internet.
So I know we're not supposed to get into this on LW (politics, minds, death, etc), but I figure opposing the censorship of the internet is alright to do.
Scream loudly at your local representatives (if you are a US citizen), and encourage others, particularly the young voters who are very attached to the internet, to do the same. If you're not a citizen, try writing someone in a diplomatic position to protest the censoring of a global resource for the benefit of US corporate interests (everyone uses the same DNS servers at the moment, so you'll be seeing the results whether you live here or not).
You are so mind-killed that you non-jokingly advocated folk activism on Less Wrong as the first method to stop the "censorship of the internet". Step away from the keyboard, take some deep breaths, multiply some probabilities, and come back after you've calmed down.
Interestingly, your link is to a political think-tank site. (Of course, argument screens off authority and all that---it looks like a pretty good article.)
I am not saying we - as individuals, or as parts of groups elsewhere - should ignore politics. We should be skeptical of even our own conclusions, but we should try to do what we deem best. I am interested in politics.
I am strongly rejecting the following passage:
I agree with you that most politics is green-team-versus-blue-team, and for this reason politics is the mindkiller. But I'm under the impression that both support and opposition to SOPA come from people on both the left and the right.
because it is wrong. There is no bias fairy that comes and sprinkles magic Green-Blue dust over party labels. Absent additional evidence, my priors say that this sort of effect should appear with any group you identify with that might have "positions".
I more weakly reject this kind of discussion here because it is likely to hijack more productive discussion, is likely to turn off those who have reached different conclusions (perhaps even honestly), and we don't have good methods for dealing with the many biases that crop up here. I am strongly in favor of discussion of ways to combat those biases when we do consider these things in other environs, which we should of course be doing.
Certainly one valid (type of) response to the OP would be to explain why the proposed legislation wouldn't harm the internet. (I've seen a few claims to that effect [elsewhere], but none that seemed well-informed or carefully reasoned.)
Or is 'harming the internet' too subjective|vague a notion to begin with? Perhaps that is worth discussing. Incidentally, it was part of my original thought that maybe somehow the net outcome of the SOPA regime could be positive, e.g. by spurring the development of a new censorship-proof distributed DNS infrastructure. But I didn't know about any specific efforts in that direction, and also I mistrusted the idea as probably manifesting a 'storytelling-fallacy' approach to prediction. (I'm sure that's been called something else on LW, but I don't recall what.)
I agree that clear signs of political-mode thinking are on display here. In particular, I don't trust the comments that appear to be motivated either by optimism (hope?) or by pessimism (despair?). I was and am looking for the kind of precise, epistemologically sound thinking about object-level phenomena that are so often exhibited by LW participants. I also thought that---assuming the new regime will create the sorts of practical problems all of us seem to suppose it will---people here might be especially aware of specific possibilities for solving them.
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Thou Art Physics or, as a philosophical position, reductionism or materialism.
Well, another possibility would have been the negation of (what's usually called around here) Tegmark's Level IV. (That's probably not the only other possibility.)
ETA: Not that your interpretation isn't the obviously correct one.