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I think that the mechanism for rape trauma triggers is different from the mechanism for Muhammed representation offense taking, and so the two should probably be treated differently. The trouble with the Dickwolves controversy is that you wound up with offense-takers and trauma-havers on the same side, in the same camp, so they got conflated.
Hmm, but it does seem like trauma triggers and the psychic-distress-via-salmon work via the same mechanism. So probably the key here is to distinguish between actual psychic stress and feigned stress used for status maneuvers. It is not, however, clear to me how to do that in general.
In response to
Offense versus harm minimization
Another case that's interesting to consider is the Penny Arcade dickwolves controversy. The PA fellows made a comic which mentioned the word "rape", some readers got offended, and the PA guys, being thick-skinned individuals, dismissed and mocked their claims of being offended by making "dickwolves" T-shirts. Hubbub ensues.
What's most interesting about this case is that, apart from perhaps some bloggers, many of the people taking offense appear to be rape survivors for whom reading the word "rape" is traumatic (I guess? This is what I gathered, but being thick-skinned and not a rape survivor it is impossible for me to understand). I don't think it's possible to claim Machiavellian maneuverings here, given that a feminist blog who made a dickwolves protest shirt eventually stopped selling the shirt on account of some rape survivors saying that the shirt acted as a trigger for them.
More to the point: there is apparently a small population for whom using the word "rape" causes psychic horror. So what, are we now not allowed to ever use that word? Or can we not even allude to the act? Of course, reasonable concessions should be made (i.e. not using the word when directly in the presence of such a person), but at what point do sensitive individuals need to take it upon themselves to relocate their attention elsewhere?
You are reading Bush as saying he won't update his priors on the evidence. But to me it is obvious that Bush is saying exactly what everybody says about themselves and about the people they support, which is that they won't shift with the political winds.
Here's an example of a person who follows Bush's advice. He is an atheist and a Darwinist. He enters a Christian Creationist community. Around him everyone is a Christian and a Creationist. They make fun of him for being a Darwinist. He has two options:
A) He can make life easy for himself by seeing which way the wind is blowing and becoming a Creationist, so that people will accept him better socially.
B) He can remain steadfast in his Darwinism, because he realizes that the mass of opinion surrounding him is scant reason to update his priors, when the physical evidence and the reasoned arguments of Darwin and others speak so plainly.
Bush is saying he's a B type.
Here's a common expression which is used to chide someone who has shown signs of being an A type:
If all your friends jumped off a bridge then would you too?
Social pressure is not the same thing as evidence and argument. Someone who succumbs to social pressure is not being a good Bayesian rationalist.
How do I know that this is what Bush really means? Because it's what pretty much every person prefers to say and think about himself. Everybody wants to think they have good reasons for what they do. Nobody wants to think they're a weathervane, a leaf tossed around by the social winds. It's a massively unremarkable statement. And it's especially applicable to politicians, who are at extra pains to say that they are people of principle and reason, and don't flipflop based on the latest popularity polls.
Bush says "I know what I believe in" instead of saying "I know what I know", because the former is the way we have all been taught to talk. We have been taught to be non-confrontational, so we talk to each other about what we "believe", what we "think", instead of about what is real or about what is right, since discussion about what is real or right will quickly lead to arguments, which we are at pains to avoid. It's not the right wing, by the way, that introduced this way of thinking, this relativism. It was not the right wing which taught us to stop saying "the truth" and start saying "my truth".
This has nothing to do with any assessment of Bush as President. I am reading Bush on the basis of my knowledge of humanity, on the basis of my knowledge about what pretty much everybody likes to think about himself.
I agree, yours is a more reasonable interpretation. I think I was interpreting "winds" as referring to "the winds of evidence," which is not reasonable in this context.
I do think your accusing me of "tribal affiliation signaling" was unnecessary and uncharitable: I don't consider Bush to have been a significantly worse a president than any other recent presidents. I just happened to have run into the quote awhile back, and in my misinterpretation thought it was a good anti-rationality quote.
Edit: I did some thinking to try to figure out how I could have missed the obviously correct interpretation of Bush's words. The first hypothesis (which Constant first put forth) was that I was signalling tribal loyalties -- boo Republicans, yay Democrats. That does not make much sense, however, because I pretty solidly dislike all major political parties and the entire politics theater of the U.S. Maybe I was attempting to signal loyalty to the "boo politicians" tribe, but I think there's a better explanation: a cached thought. Even though I do not currently belong to the anti-Republican tribe, I did belong to that tribe in my high school years (i.e. during Bush' presidency), and I was most likely operating on a "Bush is stupid/irrational" cached thought.
you need to take into account background knowledge about George W. Bush (such as that he is a person who believes that God talks to him.)
Oh good lord, this whole topic so far is two quotes from Republican Presidents, and the supposed irrationality of the quotes seems to be nothing more than strained readings of what they meant. Can people come up with any examples of irrational/arational quotes that aren't just a labored attempt to ridicule the chieftain of the enemy tribe as a form of tribal affiliation signaling?
Here's the expanded quote:
Is it hard to make decisions as President? Not really. If you know what you believe, decisions come pretty easy. If you're one of these types of people that are always trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing, decision making can be difficult. But I find that -- I know who I am. I know what I believe in, and I know where I want to lead the country. And most of the decisions come pretty easily for me, to be frank with you.
When we take into account further context that this was spoken to children in elementary school, I think the only strained reading is the one which sees this quote as reasonable. Hey kids, the only thing you need to make good decisions is to know what you already believe in! Reasoning is so much easier when you write the bottom line first.
In response to
Arational quotes
Is it hard to make decisions as president? Not really. If you know what you believe, decisions come pretty easy. If you’re one of these types of people that are always trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing, decision making can be difficult.
-- George W. Bush
David Marr on two types of information-processing problems
I found an essay written by David Marr called Artificial Intelligence -- a personal view that I thought was fairly insightful. Marr first discusses how information processing problems are generally solved:
The solution to an information processing problem divides naturally into two parts. In the first, the underlying nature of a particular computation is characterized, and its basis in the physical world is understood. One can think of this part as an abstract formulation of what is being computed and why, and I shall refer to it as the "theory" of a computation. The second part consists of particular algorithms for implementing a computation, and so it specifies how.
This is reminiscent of Marr's three levels of analysis.
Next, Marr draws a distinction between a Type 1 information processing problem and a Type 2 problem. A Type 1 problem has a solution that naturally divides along lines mentioned above: first one can formulate the computational theory behind it, and then one devises an algorithm to implement the computation. Marr proposes, however, that there is a class of problems that doesn't fit this description:
The fly in the ointment is that while many problems of biological information processing have a Type 1 theory, there is no reason why they should all have. This can happen when a problem is solved by the simultaneous action of a considerable number of processes, whose interaction is its own simplest description, and I shall refer to such a situation as a Type 2 theory. One promising candidate for a Type 2 theory is the problem of predicting how a protein will fold. A large number of influences act on a large polypeptide chain as it flaps and flails in a medium. At each moment only a few of the possible interactions will be important, but the importance of those few is decisive. Attempts to construct a simplified theory must ignore some interactions; but if most interactions are crucial at some stage during the folding, a simplified theory will prove inadequate.
More discussion about Type 1 and Type 2 problems follows, but I'm not going to summarize it. It well-worth reading, however. I did think this critique of the GOFAI program was pretty sharp for having been formulated in 1977:
For very advanced problems like story-understanding, current research is often purely exploratory. That is to say, in these areas our knowledge is so poor that we cannot even begin to formulate the appropriate questions, let alone solve them
...
Most of the history of A.I. (now fully 16 years old) has consisted of exploratory studies. Some of the best-known are Slagle's [24] symbolic integration program, Weizenbaum's [30] Eliza program, Evans" [4] analogy program, Raphaers [19] SIR, Quillian's [18] semantic nets and Winograd's [32] Shrdlu. All of these programs have (in retrospect) the property that they are either too simple to be interesting Type 1 theories, or very complex yet perform too poorly to be taken seriously as a Type 2 theory
...
And yet many things have been learnt from these experiences--mostly negative things (the first 20 obvious ideas about how intelligence might work are too simple or wrong)... The mistakes made in the field lay not in having carried out such studies--they formed an essential part of its development--but consisted mainly in failures of judgement about their value, since it is now clear that few of the early studies themselves formulated any solvable problems.
If we accept this taxonomy, then where does Friendliness fit in? My hunch is that it's a Type 2 problem. If this is so, what Type 1 problems can be focused on in the present?
Indeed. However, you've raised a single remarkable exception to a general heuristic as if a single example is all that is needed to thorougly refute a general heuristic, and of course that's not the case.
The overwhelming majority of papers put on arXiv and nowhere else are:
- [ ] comparable to Perelman's proof of the Poincare conjecture
- [ ] not comparable to Perelman's proof of the Poincare conjecture?
It's not clear to me what the disagreement is here. Which heuristic are you defending again?
If it's not published, it's not science
Response: Can we skip the pointless categorizations and evaluate whether material is valid or useful on a case by case basis? Clearly there is some material that has not been published that is useful (see: This website).
If it's not published in a peer-reviewed journal, there's no reason to treat it any differently than the ramblings of the Time Cube guy.
Response: Ahh yes, anything not peer-reviewed clearly contains Time Cube-levels of crazy.
Or none of the above? I'm not sure we actually disagree on anything here.
orgmode does this insanely well and looks like what workflowy does but less flashy and not web-based. You can narrow to a subtree (see C-x n s) and then un-narrow (see C-x n w). In addition, you can track todos, record data in tables, export to html, PDF, or even a Beamer presentation.
Anyway, it's pretty darn amazing. I've hunted around a lot for various notes/todos solutions, probably like yourself -- OneNote, EverNote, Google Notebook, TiddlyWiki, Monkey-Pirate-GTD-TiddlyWiki, TaskPaper (also pretty much what Workflowy looks like), Task Coach, iGTD...
Nothing has touched orgmode :)
I wrote a little bit about it on my blog HERE.
Emacs has a steep learning curve, but it can't be any more time intensive than rolling your own code!
Yeah, I've tried org-mode, but the problem isn't that its Emacs-based (I use Emacs to write code), but it's that it isn't web-based. I wanted my notes to be accessible not only from both OSes I dual boot, but from pretty much any computer I might ever be at. I could make the file accessible I guess by putting it in a Dropbox public folder, but then there's still the issue of "what if the computer I'm on doesn't have Emacs".
Also the time-intensitivity thing of rolling my own code isn't a major drawback, as I'm trying to find a programming job at the moment and I needed something to add to my portfolio. :D
Perelman's proof has been published, e.g. this by the AMS, which has a rigorous refereeing process for books, and this in Asian Journal of Math with a more controversial refereeing process.
Though Perelman's preprints appeared in 2002 and 2003, the Clay prize (which Perelman turned down) was not offered to him until last year, because the rules stipulate that the solutions to the prize problems have to stand unchallenged in published, peer-reviewed form for a certain number of years.
I'm not really familiar with the topic matter here, but I want to note that Michael Nielsen contradicts what you said (though Nielsen isn't exactly an unbiased source here as an Open Science advocate):
Perelman's breakthrough solving the Poincare conjecture ONLY appeared at the arXiv
The important point is that it doesn't appear that Perelman produced the paper for publishing in a journal, but he made it and left it on the arXiv, which was later (you claim) published in journals. That's quite a different view than "if it's not published, it's not science"
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Agreed. See also: Chase your reading