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Creating an X does not give the creator the right ...
Of course it doesn't. The question is if the world becomes a better place if they do it anyway.
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I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions
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I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions
Sure. My answer is no, it does not.
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I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions
Not only is intellectual property law in its current form destructive, but the entire concept of intellectual property is fundamentally wrong. Creating an X does not give the creator the right to point a gun at everyone else in the universe who tries to arrange matter under their control into something similar to X. In programming terminology, property law should use reference semantics, not value semantics. Of course it is true that society needs to reward people who do intellectual work, just as much as people who do physical work, but there are better justified and less harmful ways to accomplish this than intellectual property law.
Those examples are good evidence for us not being able to test coherently yet, but I don't think they are good evidence that the question is ill-posed.
If the question is "how can we test rationality?", and the only answers we've come up with are limited in scope and subject to all kinds of misinterpretation, I don't think that means we can't come up with broad tests that measure progress. I am reminded of a quote: "what you are saying amounts to 'if it is possible, it ought to be easy'"
I think the place to find good tests will be instead of looking at how well people do against particular biases, look at what it is we think rationality is good for, and measure something related to that.
Ill posed does not necessarily mean impossible. Most of the problems we deal with in real life are ill posed, but we still usually manage to come up with solutions that are good enough for the particular contexts at hand. What it does mean is that we shouldn't expect the problem in question to be definitely solved once and for all. I'm not arguing against attempting to test rationality. I'm arguing against the position some posters have taken that there's no point even trying to make progress on rationality until the problem of testing it has been definitely solved.
People spout all kinds of nonsense in a social context where it's just words, but usually manage to compartmentalize the nonsense in a material context where they will be affected by the results of their actions.
But doesn't it seem that if you decompartmentalized with correct beliefs you should do way better? Possibly in a testable way?
Martial arts practitioners have had this testing problem for centuries and still don't seem close to solving it, which doesn't make for optimism about our prospects of solving the rationality testing problem this century.
See MMA. There is still a problem of whether being a good fighter is as important or related to being good at self-defense, but martial arts are now measured at least relative to all fighting styles.
But doesn't it seem that if you decompartmentalized with correct beliefs you should do way better?
Maybe; there are all sorts of caveats to that. But that aside, more directly on the question of tests:
Possibly in a testable way?
You still run into the problem that the outcome depends greatly on context and phrasing. There is the question with turning over cards to test a hypothesis, on which people's performance dramatically improves when you rephrase it as an isomorphic question about social rules. There are the trolley questions and the specks versus torture question and the ninety-seven percent versus one hundred percent question, on which the right answer depends entirely on whether you treat it as a mathematical question that happens to be expressed in English syntax or a question about what you should do if you believed yourself to really be in that situation. There are questions about uncertain loss isomorphic to questions about uncertain gain where people nonetheless give different answers, which is irrational if considered as a material problem, but rational in the more likely and actual situation where the only thing at stake is social status, which sometimes does depend on how the question was phrased. Etc.
That's why I called the testing problem ill posed; it's not just that it's hard to figure out the solution, it's hard to see what would be the criteria of a good solution in the first place.
Sure, all exercises can also be viewed as tests, but they make for pretty narrow tests and risk being irrelevant to the big picture. I'd like a more comprehensive test that would use many subskills at once. For example, when learning a foreign language, a simple exercise may look like "conjugate this verb", and a comprehensive test may look like "translate this text" or "carry on a freeform conversation". When learning a martial art, a simple exercise may look like "punch the bag exactly as I show you", and a comprehensive test may look like "stay on your feet for two rounds against this guy".
It seems that comprehensive tests are often toy versions of real-life problems. They guide the development of simple exercises and let you tell good exercises from bad ones. If someone cannot imagine a comprehensive test for their skillset, I don't see how they convince themselves that their simple exercises are relevant to anything.
Testing rationality is something of an ill posed problem, in part because the result depends greatly on context. People spout all kinds of nonsense in a social context where it's just words, but usually manage to compartmentalize the nonsense in a material context where they will be affected by the results of their actions. (This is a feature! Given that evolution wasn't able to come up with minds that infallibly distinguish true beliefs from false ones, it's good that at least it came up with a way to reduce the harm from false beliefs.) I'm not sure how to create an accurate test in the face of that.
Your martial arts analogy isn't a bad one. The outcome of a karate contest is often not the same as the outcome of a street fight between the same participants. There are any number of cases of a black belt karateka with ten years training getting into a fight with a scrawny untrained criminal, and getting his ass kicked in three seconds flat. Martial arts practitioners have had this testing problem for centuries and still don't seem close to solving it, which doesn't make for optimism about our prospects of solving the rationality testing problem this century. Given that, proceeding as best we can in the absence of a comprehensive and accurate test seems reasonable.
I'll concede that it was of help, if they don't try to pass one of them, or an equivalent bill, next year after the elections. As I put it in a different HN comment thread:
For now, any way. As soon as it's out of the news, after the elections, they will almost certainly try to pass them, or another similar bill, again. It's a never ending game of Whack-A-Mole. Eventually, one will get through.
ADDED: This is a combination focussed benefit for SOPA/PIPA/RWA supporters, versus a collective action problem for the opposition. While I hate the SOPA/PIPA/RWA trilogy, the reality is they will very probably (>80%) become law within the next three years.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
It would be wonderful if defending freedom were a one-off job like proving Fermat's Last Theorem. As it turns out, it's an endlessly recurring job like fighting disease; unfortunate, but that's the way it is. And yes, sometimes our efforts fail, and freedoms are lost or people get sick and die. But the answer to that is to work harder and smarter, not to give up.
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The Gift I Give Tomorrow
Most of this post, along with the previous posts in the series, is both beautiful and true - the best combination. It's a pity it had to be mixed in with the meme about computers magically waking up with superpowers. I don't think that meme is necessary here, any more than it's necessary to believe the world was created in 4004 BC to appreciate Christmas. Taking it out - discussing it in separate posts if you wish to discuss it - is the major improvement I would suggest.
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A case study in fooling oneself
Good points, upvoted. But in fairness, I think the ink blot analogy is a decent one.
Imagine you asked the question about the ink blot to a philosopher in ancient Greece, how might he answer? He might say there is no definite number. Or he might say there must be some underlying reality, even though he doesn't know for sure what it is; and the best guess says it's based on atoms; so he might reply that he doesn't know the answer, but hopefully it might be possible in principle to calculate it if you could count atoms.
I think that's about where we are regarding the Born probabilities and number or measure of different worlds in MWI right now.
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[SEQ RERUN] Stop Voting For Nincompoops
« Amazingly, the media collectively exerted such tremendous power, in nearly perfect coordination, without deliberate intention (conspiracies are generally much less necessary than believed). » is something very important, but very hard to explain to people, I found out.
Some people will believe in conspiracy, and most people will label you "crazy conspiracy theorist" as soon as you point to something like that. It's very hard to make people understand that a set of people having a generally common mindset (they know each other, they went to the same schools, ...) and the same purpose (attract the highest number possible of viewers/readers) will tend to do the same selection of whom/what to give focus to, without requiring any coordination or conspiracy.
There is a wonderfully evocative term, Stand Alone Complex, from the anime series of the same name, which refers to actions taken by people behaving as though they were part of a conspiracy even though no actual conspiracy is present. It's pretty much tailor-made for this case.
Mencius Moldbug calls this instance the Cathedral, in an insightful series of articles indexed here.
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The post asked for opinions so repulsive people have a hard time generating them in the first place. This is a relatively common opinion.
I took the post to be asking for opinions sufficiently far outside the mainstream to be rarely discussed even here, and I haven't seen a significant amount discussion of this one. Then again, that could be because I wasn't particularly looking; I used to be of the opinion "intellectual property law has gone too far and needs to be cut back, but of course we can't do away with it entirely," and only recently looked more closely at the but of course part and realized it didn't hold water. If this opinion is more common than I had given it credit for, great!