Retrospectively, I'd say that I was doing counterintuitiveness-seeking. "Hey, look at this, the commonly used extremely simple model says that definitely P, while this more complex model (which seems to me to be more descriptive of the world) says that maybe not P." This is mildly dangerous on its own, because while it runs on truthseeking, it also subordinates that to contrarianism. And doing this on a political topic was particularly stupid of me.
Again, this is exactly the reason I put the references there. They are not a signalling device saying "look at me, I read all these things" but a tool so that I don't have to recreate their respective authors' arguments as to their respective models' degree of explanatory adequacy and why that makes sense in terms of what most of their readers already accept. This saves time for those readers of this post who have at some earlier point read some (or perhaps all) of these articles, as well as for me. The models are explicit.
The t...
Yes.
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, "left" is commonly understood to mean the whole Thrive coalition. I figured that using "left" would be more confusing/absurd-looking than using "socialist".
For the purposes of the argument, I'm using a model where political behaviors are largely a result of personality traits (thrive/survive, cognitive decoupling, and cultural class membership) with most people using the theories as justification. I.e. theories have negligible influence, they are not causes but consequences of coalitions. This is a simplification, but not an unreasonable one ("all models are wrong, some are useful").
This is exactly why I put the sources, including the "tilted political compass" model I'm referring to, right at the top. Technically the author uses the label "left" for what I'm calling "socialist", but his description of the quadrant's internal logic very clearly fits with what is usually called socialism, including by many of the people the label refers to. He even remarks:
"This has lead to a game of linguistic musical treadmills where liberals try to claim an identity apart from the left without joining the right, while leftists try to prevent them from doing so."
I edited the post slightly, hopefully it will be less ambiguous.
By changing a mind, you can change what it prefers; you can even change what it believes to be right; but you cannot change what is right. Anything you talk about, that can be changed in this way, is not 'right-ness'.
If the characters were real people, I'd say here Obert is "right" while having a wrong justification. Just extrapolate the evolutionary origins of moral intuitions into any society in approximate technological stasis. "Rightness" is how the evolutionarily stable strategy feels like from the inside, an...
That is my point: the people who think in this way are not unreasonable, they are not evil mutants or anything. They just happened to "ask the wrong question" at the starting point, and if they follow it tenaciously, they wind up with insane conclusions.
Once you have a stable epistemology based on an observer-independent reality, you can say that "oh, by the way, minds are part of causality a.k.a. reality, thus people can have beliefs about what other people believe". In the cartographic analogy, this comes out clunky: "maps are ...
I'm not arguing against relying on other people and outsourcing knowledge. I'm barely arguing for any action; mostly I'm describing what tends to happen regrettably often to people who base the definition of "knowledge" around answering questions like "who is popular" rather than "what will this program do". In fact, both epistemologies will contain the concept of empirical verification! In the anti-epistemology, going to everyone in class and privately asking "hey, is Alice popular?" is the analog of empiricism.
I don't mean to inspire cruelty. If I successfully gave you understanding, you can use it for kindness, pity or cruelty as you see fit. Mostly I wrote the last paragraphs in the tone of "Humans are Cthulhu" as seen through the eyes of someone who thinks in this anti-epistemology.
Your answer to "objective popularity" is only slightly different from common knowledge, and it has the same properties of being fundamentally observer-dependent. Ask some Greens and some Blues separately "is X popular?" where X is a politician,...
I was hoping to compress the description of behaviors that are otherwise baffling (surprising, difficult to explain, high-entropy) but common.
I didn't mean the distribution of the population over the political compass. I meant the distribution of the votes over candidate-labels. FPTP doesn't do any processing to discover facts (distances and directions between the candidates), just returns the mode == the candidate with the most votes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph preexisted the electric telegraph for speed of information over land. (Although it has some related systems, such as heliographs.)
I'd guess materials science as a field with several discontinuous leaps. Bessemer process, duraluminium, carbon fiber reinforced plastics: I think these are the most famous candidates. (It's hard to put it into metrics, but nearly all non-immobile things were structurally built out of wood until Bessemer/Martin steel came around.)
Rocketry is intimately related to nucle...
Regarding Africa, late 19th century technology solved at least *two* crucial problems that prevented European takeover before. One was that Europeans themselves would die to tropical diseases, solved by quinine. The other was that Europeans' *horses* died to nagana (known as sleeping sickness in humans), solved by steam riverine ships.
I think a part of the observations are better explained by Harry (any a few other characters) being at Kegan stage 5. Without going into the rest of the theory (which I think messed up stages "3" and "4"), consider three concepts of property:
No experience, just an idea: create a line of retreat for a "smaller version" of the topic before confronting the whole, to make the concept more available. First, answer "what would you do if it turned out that you(r friends) were mistaken about some minor details of God", and only after that ask about nonexistence. (I'd guess that more iterations would be seen as condescending.)
There isn't, and the article is committing a type error. The terrain isn't a map, reality isn't a model/theory.
Unless you are using a model to approximate the behavior of a system that is of exactly the same kind, i.e. using a computational model to approximate another computational thingy, in which case you could indeed have the model that exactly coincides with what it is to describe. This may even be useful, e.g. in cryptography. But this is an edge case.
To be charitable to the postmodernists, they are overextending a perfectly legitimate defense against the Mind Projection Fallacy. If you take a joke, and tell it to two different audiences, in many cases one audience laughs at the joke and the other doesn't. Postmodernists correctly say that different audiences have different truths to "this joke is funny" and this state of affairs if perfectly normal. Unfortunately, they proceed to run away with this, and extend it to statements where the "audience" would be reality. Or very ...
"Three of their days, all told, since they began speaking to us. Half a billion years, for us."
I think this severely breaks the aesop. In three frames, hum-AGI-ty learns the laws of the alien universe. But then the redundancy binds, and over the next hundred thousand frames ("It's not until a million years later, though, that they get around to telling us how to signal back.") humanity learns little more than how to say "rock". Then "it took us thirty of their minute-equivalents to [...] oh-so-carefully persuade them to give us Internet access", altogether 3*10^6 years up to that point.
I'm putting it here, because the insight clicked when reading this article: perhaps one of the most important of "our" characteristics is simply being bad at compartmentalization?
"The New Atheists contend that the beliefs we hold have consequences for our conduct." -- Let's assume this view is basically typical mind fallacious, and the majority mostly compartmentalize away their religious beliefs. (Beliefs-as-attire, to be worn in the appropriate context only.) What would happen to those people who don't natively do thi...
Recognition that the so-called "repugnant conclusion" isn't repugnant at all. Total utility maximization involves an increase in the population---eventually, not necessarily right now---as most human lives have positive subjective utility most of the time (empirically: few people commit suicide).
Reductio ad absurdum: what would the universe be worth without humans in it to value it? Lesser reductio: what would a beautifully terraformed planet be worth, if humans were present in the universe, but none on that planet?
Additionally, beyond the...
"There's no third-party experiment you can perform to tell you the answer."
While it's irrelevant to the anthropics/quantum physics debate, I almost immediately thought: let's put an electrode onto one side of an Ebborian brain-paper, and give it a train of pulses while it splits. Ask the Ebborian that "inherits" the other side of the brain, how many pulses it experienced.
Hallo, this is a chronophone call from 12 years in the future.
I would transmit a technical analysis of various voting systems, and the fundamental process they are meant to solve (simplistically: the process itself doesn't add any information whatsoever, just condenses the noisy information in the ballots into a set of winning candidates—single-winner systems weakly tend to reduce variety). Some do a terrible job (FPTP selects the mode of the distribution) while some are quite involved (given the input containing orderings/scorings of labels, reconst...
I've not seen anybody mention those students who said "strange metals in the plate" in particular, and I'd like to argue for them. Their answer was not a password (the teacher never mentioned it), and actually shows correct anticipation-controlling beliefs! That is to say, they noticed that the observed outcome is not what they would have predicted, and looked for some hypothesis that explained why the heat gradient is reversed. Working from the incorrect assumption that they are seeing a stationary state, they guessed a hidden means...
Bailouts: I'm not sure whether this is overstating the case. The central bank is the liquidity provider of last resort (and clearinghouse) in addition to being the monetary policy authority. Saving insolvent banks is not its job, but saving illiquid banks is.
Prediction markets: Let's set up one to correctly debias a biased coin, and use binary options. If the market starts at 55:45, we add more weight to the tails side until the prices move to 50:50, and we get a fair coin. Let's say that the market is funded with $10. Now I come along ...
The important thing is not the value of money but the rate of inflation; not f(t) but f'(t)/f(t). It's mentioned in the text that people suffer from money illusion in an asymmetric way, and adapt to slight inflation better than to slight deflation. Thus if the value of money goes up, prices are weirdly rigid and trades start not to happen. Consequently it makes sense to say that everyone has too little money.
"Everyone has too little money" is so simple you can crank it out of Say's law. Take one guy on an island; he cannot have...
1. The Fed needs to be able to buy back the entire base money supply always, always, always. If it cannot, i.e. the Fed is insolvent, instant hyperinflation is almost certainly the result. (Theoretically, the value of money could float in midair. Practically, lots of arbitrageurs will be betting on hyperinflation—and in principle the Fed could buy back money as long as it could, and maybe the speculators would run out of dollars before the Fed ran out of assets—but don't count on either assumption holding up.) As a result, it can only expand the m...
The belief that overdosing on sleeping pills is fatal comes from barbiturate medications, while modern pills contain benzodiazepines such as diazepam. Modern sleeping pills are pretty easy to get exactly because even if someone downs the whole bottle, they don't die, only go to deep unconsciousness, i.e. "knockout sleep" (physical stimuli, such as shaking the patient, don't wake them up) that possibly lasts several days. Thus if James Randi took a fatal-by-barbiturate-standards dose of benzodiazepine sleeping pills, then (after he wok...
This mostly reminds me of SSC's discussion of Jaynes' theory. An age where people talk out loud to their invisible personal ba/iri/daemon/genius / angel-on-the-shoulder, and which is -- in a similar manner as clothes -- are in practice considered loosely a part of the person (but not strictly). Roughly everyone has them, thus the particular emotional need fulfilled by them is largely factored out of human interaction. (I believe a decade or two ago there was a tongue-in-cheek slogan to the effect of "if the government wants to protect mar... (read more)