All of BenAlbahari's Comments + Replies
Sigh.
A 5-second method (that I employ to varying levels of success) is whenever I feel the frustration of a failed interaction, I question how it might have been made more successful by me, regardless of whose "fault" it was. Your "sigh" reaction comes across as expressing the sentiment "It's your fault for not getting me. Didn't you read what I wrote? It's so obvious". But could you have expressed your ideas almost as easily without generating confusion in the first place? If so, maybe your reaction would be instead along ...
people who identify as rationalists they seem to moralize slightly less than average
Really? The LW website attracts aspergers types and apparently morality is stuff aspergers people like.
don't go into the evolutionary psychology of politics or the game theory of punishing non-punishers
OK, so you're saying that to change someone's mind, identify mental behaviors that are "world view building blocks", and then to instill these behaviors in others:
...come up with exercises which, if people go through them, causes them to experience the 5-second events
Such as:
...to feel the temptation to moralize, and to make the choice not to moralize, and to associate alternative procedural patterns such as pausing, reflecting...
Or:
......
The 5-second method is sufficiently general to coax someone into believing any world view, not just a rationalist one.
Um, yes. This is supposed to increase your general ability to teach a human to do anything, good or bad. In much the same way, having lots of electricity increases your general ability to do anything that requires electricity, good or bad. This does not make electrical generation a Dark Art.
I have an image of Eliezer queued up in a coffee shop, guiltily eyeing up the assortment of immodestly priced sugary treats. The reptilian parts of his brain have commandeered the more recently evolved parts of his brain into fervently computing the hedonic calculus of an action that other, more foolish types, might misclassify as a sordid instance of discretionary spending. Caught staring into the glaze of a particularly sinful muffin, he now faces a crucial choice. A cognitive bias, thought to have been eradicated from his brain before the SIAI was found...
In accordance with the general fact that "calories in - calories out" is complete bullshit, I've had to learn that sweet things are not their caloric content, they are pharmaceutical weight-gain pills with effects far in excess of their stated caloric content. So no, I wouldn't be able to eat a triple chocolate muffin, or chocolate cake, or a donut, etcetera. But yes, when I still believed the bullshit and thought the cost was just the stated caloric content, I sometimes didn't resist.
While I'm inclined to agree with the conclusion, this post is perhaps a little guilty of generalizing from one example - the paragraphs building up the case for the conclusion are all "I..." yet when we get to the conclusion it's suddenly "We humans...". Maybe some people can't handle the truth. Or maybe we can handle the truth under certain conditions that so far have applied to you.
P.S. I compiled a bunch of quotes from experts/influential people for the questions Can we handle the truth? and Is self-deception a fault?.
The chief role of metaethics is to provide far-mode superstimulus for those inclined to rationalize social signals literally.
Ethics and aesthetics have strong parallels here. Consider this quote from Oscar Wilde:
For we who are working in art cannot accept any theory of beauty in exchange for beauty itself, and, so far from desiring to isolate it in a formula appealing to the intellect, we, on the contrary, seek to materialise it in a form that gives joy to the soul through the senses. We want to create it, not to define it. The definition should follow the work: the work should not adapt itself to the definition.
Whereby any theory of art...
merely serves as after-the-fact justification of the sentiments that were already there.
Or Ben Franklin, contemplating his vegetarianism:
But I had formerly been a great Lover of Fish, & when this came hot out of the Frying Pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc'd some time between Principle & inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs:--Then, thought I, if you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you. So I din'd upon Cod very heartily and continu'd to eat with other People, returning only now & then occasionally to a vegetable Diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do
I've gone through massive reversals in my metaethics twice now, and guess what? At no time did I spontaneously acquire the urge to rape people. At no time did I stop caring about the impoverished. At no time did I want to steal from the elderly. At no time did people stop having reasons to praise or condemn certain desires and actions of mine, and at no time did I stop having reasons to praise or condemn the desires and actions of others.
Metaethics: what's it good for...
I believe the primary form of entertainment for the last million years has had plenty of color.
I don't think social influence alone is a good explanation for the delusion in the video. Or more precisely, I don't think the delusion in the video can be explained as just a riff on the Asch conformity experiment.
I'm merely less skeptical that the woman in the video is a stooge after hearing what Nancy had to say. But yes, the anchoring techniques he uses in the video might be nothing but deliberate misdirection.
Interesting. This makes me less skeptical of Derren Brown's color illusion video (summary: a celebrity mentalist uses NLP techniques to convince a woman yellow is red, red is black etc.).
Perhaps the post could be improved if it laid out the types of errors our intuitions can make (e.g. memory errors, language errors, etc.). Each type of error could then be analyzed in terms of how seriously it impacts prevalent theories of cognition (or common assumptions in mainstream philosophy). As it stands, the post seems like a rather random (though interesting!) sampling of cognitive errors that serve to support the somewhat unremarkable conclusion that yes, our seemingly infallible intuitions have glitches.
I dunno Nancy. I mean you start off innocently clicking on a link to a math blog. Next minute you're following these hyperlinks and soon you find yourself getting sucked into a quantum healing website. I'm still trying to get a refund on these crystals I ended up buying. Let's face it. These seemingly harmless websites with unrigorous intellectual standards are really gateway drugs to hard-core irrationality. So I have a new feature request: every time someone clicks on an external link from Less Wrong, a piece of Javascript pops up with the message: "...
Speaking of the yellow banana, people do a lot of filling in with color.
One of Dennett's points is the misleading notion that our mind "fills in". In the case of vision, our brain doesn't "paint in" missing visual data, such as the area in our field of vision not captured by our fovea. Our brains simply lack epistemic hunger for such information in order to perform the tasks that they need to.
I've noticed that this account potentially explains how color works in my dreams. My dreams aren't even black and white - the visual aspects ar...
Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained is a very relevant piece of work here. Early in his book, he seeks to establish that our intuitions about our own perceptions are faulty, and provides several scientific examples to build his case. The Wikipedia entry on his multiple drafts theory gives a reasonable summary.
You've articulated some of the problems of a blogroll well. Perhaps the blogroll idea could be evolved into a concept that better fits the needs of this community, while retaining its core value and simplicity:
1) Along side a link could be its controversy level, based on the votes for and against the link. By making the controversy explicit, the link can no longer be seen as a straight-up endorsement.
2) Along side a link could be its ranking based on say only the top 50 users. This would let people explicitly see what the majority vs. the "elite ratio...
A website has a specific goal that it's trying to uniquely achieve, and a general goal that places it within a community of like-minded websites. Less Wrong's specific goal is to refine the art of human rationality, and its general goal is to raise the sanity waterline. If other websites are successfully raising the sanity waterline, it behooves Less Wrong to link to them.
...I don't like this idea. The choice of websites to put on the sidebar is likely to be contentious. What exactly qualifies a website to be endorsed by LW? How should a website be judged c
What I dislike most about the idea is that it gives some sort of official collective endorsement to external websites. One thing I like about LW is that except for the institutions that historically gave rise to it (OB and SIAI), it has no official doctrine and official endorsements. There are issues of broad consensus, but they are never officially presented as such. Thus, even if I have some disagreements with the majority on these issues, I can always voice my arguments without the unpleasant feeling that I'm invading the forum as an outsider trying to ...
Blogroll / Side Bar Section for Links to Rationality Related Websites. I love Overcoming Bias, but it seems a bit biased that Overcoming Bias is the only other website linked from here.
Reply to this comment with a comment for each website nomination?
Hmm... maybe with this feature new links could be added by users (presuming a minimum karma criteria), and then each link other users could vote up and down, so that the ordering of the list was organic.
Emotional awareness is a skill that can be cultivated, and increases one's agreeableness. Watch a disagreeable person in action and it's pretty obvious that they're not really picking up how other people are reacting to their behavior. Note that it's much easier to see disagreeable behavior is in others than in oneself. The challenge in becoming more agreeable lies partly in seeing oneself as others see you.
if you really want to know how valid a particular idea you've read is, there are quantitative ways to get closer to answering that question.
The ultimate in quantitative analysis is to have a system predict what your opinion should be on any arbitrary issue. The TakeOnIt website does this by applying a collaborative filtering algorithm on a database of expert opinions. To use it you first enter opinions on issues that you understand and feel confident about. The algorithm can then calculate which experts you have the highest correlation in opinion with. ...
I guess the moral is "Don't trust anyone but a mathematician"?
Safety in numbers? ;)
Perhaps it's useful to distinguish between the frontier of science vs. established science. One should expect the frontier to be rather shaky and full of disagreements, before the winning theories have had time to be thoroughly tested and become part of our scientific bedrock. There was a time after all when it was rational for a layperson to remain rather neutral with respect to Einstein's views on space and time. The heuristic of "is this science established / uncontroversial amongst experts?" is perhaps so boring we forget it, but it's one of the most useful ones we have.
To evaluate a contrarian claim, it helps to break down the contentious issue into its contentious sub-issues. For example, contrarians deny that global warming is caused primarily by humans, an issue which can be broken down into the following sub-issues:
Have solar cycles significantly affected earth's recent climate?
Does cosmic radiation significantly affect earth's climate?
Has earth's orbit significantly affected its recent climate?
Does atmospheric CO2 cause significant global warming?
Do negative feedback loops mostly cushion the effect of atmospheric CO...
If you have social status, it is worth sparing some change in getting used to not only being wrong, but being socially recognized as wrong by your peers...
Emperor Sigismund, when corrected on his Latin, famously replied:
I am king of the Romans and above grammar.
I know that most men — not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems — can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.
— Leo Tolstoy, 1896 (excerpt from "What Is Art?")
It seems to me that people here are very aware of the very real ways in which they are in fact very superior to the general public, even the elite public, and also of the very real ways in which they are, in most cases, very inferior to the elite public (and frequently somewhat inferior to the general public). The problem is that they tend to morally endorse both their strengths AND their weaknesses, seeing, as Robin does, both as 'high'. I see the high/low motivation intuition as actually being somewhat rarer in the general world that Robin and most peo...
Voted up.
if you have to choose between fitting in with your group etc and believing the truth, you should shun the truth.
I think many people develop a rough map of other people's beliefs, to the extent that they avoid saying things that would compromise fitting in the group they're in. Speaking of which:
irrationalists free-ride on the real-world achievements of rationalists
Trying to get to level 4 are we? (Clearly I'm not ;)) Conversely, you could argue that "irrationalists" are better at getting things done due to group leverage and rationalists free-ride of those achievements.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to remember, and keep remembering, and make it clear in your writing, that "women" are not a monolithic block and don't all want the same thing.
A woman who doesn't want a generalization applied to them? :)
For me, understanding "what's really going on" in typical social interactions made them even less interesting than when I didn't.
Merely "tuning in" to a social interaction isn't enough. Subtextual conversations are often tedious if they're not about you. You have to inject your ego into the conversation for things to get interesting.
So if I'm with a bunch of people from my class ... and none of us have any major conflict of interest...
If you were a character in a sitcom I was writing, I'd have your dream girl walk in just as you were saying that.
It seems this post bundled together the CPU vs. GPU theory regarding the AS vs. NT mindset, with a set of techniques on how to improve social skills. The techniques however - and in a sense this is a credit to the poster - are useful to anyone who wants to improve their social skills, regardless of whether the cause of their lack of skill is:
1) High IQ
2) Introversion
3) Social Inexperience
4) AS
5)
A combination of several of these factors might be the cause of social awkwardness. It's possible to place too much importance on looking for a root cause. The i...
Thanks for the feedback.
there's a lot of chaff.
Do you mean chaff as in "stuff that I personally don't care about" or chaff as in "stuff that anyone would agree is bad"?
there doesn't seem to be enough activity yet.
Yes, the site is still in the bootstrapping phase. Having said that, the site needs to have a better way of displaying recent activity.
Franklin's quote is more about cryonics being good if it were feasible than if it is feasible. Ben, do you think it should be moved to this question?
Good call.
to even include some of these people together is simply to give weight to views which should have effectively close to zero weight.
No no no! It's vital that the opinions of influential people - even if they're completely wrong - are included on TakeOnIt. John Stuart Mill makes my point perfectly:
......the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is... If an opinion is right, [people] are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impr
TakeOnIt records the opinions of BOTH experts and influencers - not just experts. Perhaps I confused you by not being clear about this in my original comment. In any case, TakeOnIt groups opinions by the expertise of those who hold the opinions. This accentuates - not blurs - the distinction between those who have relevant expertise and those who don't (but who are nonetheless influential). It also puts those who have expertise relevant to the question topic at the top of the page. You seem to be saying readers will easily mistake an expert for an influencer. I'm open to suggestions if you think it could be made clearer than it is.
Voted up because I think AS is a great example of psychological diversity. I'm curious however as to the origin of your belief that AS people are more attracted to decompartmentalization than neurotypicals are.
This is the bunk-detection strategy on TakeOnIt:
- Collect top experts on either side of an issue, and examine their opinions.
- If '1' does not make the answer clear, break the issue down into several sub-issues, and do '1' for each sub-issue.
Examples that you alluded to in your post (I threw in cryonics because that's a contrarian issue often brought up on LW):
Global Warming
Cryonics
Climate Engineering
9-11 Conspiracy Theory
Singularity
In addition, TakeOnIt will actually predict what you should believe using collaborative filtering. The way it works, is th...
Actions speak louder than words. A thousand "I love you"s doesn't equal one "I do". Perhaps our most important beliefs are expressed by what we do, not what we say. Daniel Dennett's Intentional Stance theory uses an action-oriented definition of belief:
...Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same consi
Status is relative to a group, and each group values different skills and traits. We gravitate towards groups where we have value.
Yes. But if the topic of something you're not good at comes up, what are you going to do? Various strategies:
a) Downplay the importance of the thing that you're not good at.
b) Change the subject.
c) Make a joke about totally sucking at that thing (while keeping the literal subject the same, it changes the implicit subject to the social ability of making other people laugh).
d) Mention a close relative, friend, or partner who's really good at that thing (increasing status by affiliation).
I think I may even do e) which is to show enthusiastic appreciation for ...
Being dismissive of things you're not good at is beneficial to your status.
Based on your idea and the discussion that followed, I've added the feature to flag a quote as fictional.
On the question pages, fictional quotes are put in their own group:
Is information-theoretic death the most real interpretation of death?
On the expert pages, fictional quotes are flagged per quote:
H.P.Lovercraft's Opinions
Fictional quotes are discounted from the prediction analysis.
Unless you count things like "on top of stalagmites" as sitting methods.
From Blackadder:
Aunt: 'Chair'? You have chairs in your house?
Edmund: Oh, yes.
Aunt: [slaps him twice] Wicked child!!! Chairs are an invention of Satan! In our house, Nathaniel sits on a spike!
Edmund: ...and yourself...?
Aunt: I sit on Nathaniel -- two spikes would be an extravagance.
Being understimulated is intolerable to me.
How can something intolerable be understimulating? Sure, I'm equivocating on the type of stimulation you're referring to here, but in the spirit of luminosity, shouldn't we be interested in exploring the places in our minds that we're afraid to go? I'm not recommending you step into a sensory deprivation chamber (or have your brain emulated without hooking up the inputs and outputs), but experimenting with meditation seems like a potentially luminous activity, even if you did it with the modest goal of simply g...
Construal Level Theory (the one used to explain near-far mode) can also be used to explain self-control. One of the creators of the theory explains in a paper here%20construal%20levels%20and%20self%20control.pdf) and another paper is here.
...The authors propose that self-control involves making decisions and behaving in a manner consistent with high-level versus low-level construals of a situation. Activation of high-level construals (which capture global, superordinate, primary features of an event) should lead to greater self-control than activation of lo
Hi Zvi,
A couple of months ago I wrote a covid-19 risk calculator that's gotten some press, and even translated into Spanish. Here's the link:
https://www.solenya.org/coronavirus
I've updated the calculations to leverage your table for age & preconditions, which were better than what I had. You can check the code for the calculator by clicking on the link near the top of the page. I've also put a link in that code to your article here.
Note that I'm trying to keep the interface ultra-simple. I get a stream of suggestions (e.g. can ... (read more)