All of EGarrett's Comments + Replies

Looks interesting. I may try writing an article or two to help the environment along.

Disabling downvoting would just turn "voting" into a popularity contest.

Downvoting doesn't stop it from being a popularity contest. If you don't like someone, you can vote them down just as much as you can vote up people you like.

Yes, he confessed to it when confronted. My understanding was that there were posts about mass downvoting and people asking who was doing it and if it was happening and he never admitted it or posted in them to confirm it, whereas if he thought it was okay there was no reason for him not to.

He didn't just mass downvote. He purposefully attempted to remove other contributing members from the community. He also did not confess to it indicating both dishonesty and that he was aware that his actions were unacceptable. He also multi-accounted and still does and posts absolutely disgusting and logic-free racial comments and trolling (referring to black scientists to "dancing bears." You're welcome to demonstrate what's rational or constructive about that).

You don't just undo those actions, you punish the person who takes part in them in order to deter the action occurring in the future. So that there can be civil discourse going forward. This is rational and a standard part of human social requirements.

0Richard_Kennaway
Never publicly, but I believe that (when he was posting as "Eugine Nier") a moderator did question him privately about it and he said that was his intention.

Well I'm not interested in copy/pasting for cheap karma, and I don't wish to encourage or create an environment where others do it. All the best, no offense taken and hopefully no offense caused.

The goal is not to tell people what they already know nor flout tradition. Just to share a quote from the Slack Chat that some segment of the thread readers may find useful.

0gjm
You can be telling people what they already know and flouting tradition even if that's not your goal :-). Seriously, I think part of the point of the "rule" (in so far as it is a rule) is to disable what would otherwise be a cheap strategy for getting lots of karma without actually adding much value or demonstrating good sense or cleverness or anything: look through 5-year-old Rationality Quotes threads and repost the ones that got the most upvotes. For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not accusing you of doing that! I'm saying that you've done, for other reasons, something that's frowned on because not frowning on it would open the way for that sort of misbehaviour.
0gjm
It is a useful idea, indeed, but it's familiar enough that it doesn't particularly need repeating, and the tradition here is not to repeat quotations at all. (Isn't it?)
4Richard_Kennaway
Chesterton's Fence is a well-known concept on LessWrong and frequently alluded to. It even has an entry in the wiki, containing this exact quote.

"In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." -GK Chesterton

3mwengler
This is my first time seeing this quote and it is a good one. Took me a minute to realize what he was saying. And I've been hanging out on this site for years. I can't stop you from saying or thinking I should have noticed the quote before, if that's the way your mind works. But in reality I am not unique and I am not an idiot and if I find something particularly useful here there is likely a significant minority of the rest of the readers who find it useful. Which is sort of consistent with the quote.
2gjm
Posted before: December 2012 and February 2010 before that.

Just to underline here...philosophy has a bad track record because when it finds something concrete and useful, it gets split off into things like science and ethics, and very abstract things tend to be all that's left.

Hypotheticals are probably in the same class. Useful when they apply to reality, entertaining or stimulating sometimes even when they don't...and in some cases neither. The third category is the one I ignore.

"It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." -Einstein

I regularly bicker about hypotheticals on the Facebook group. I wish I could give a tidy answer here, but I can't put all hypotheticals in the same category. Some represent reality better than others. "Where will I post my ideas if this group closes?" is a perfectly normal and useful one.

The hypotheticals I question are ones that don't plausibly occur in reality and that are known primarily because they irritate the brain, or allow social signaling, or some other non-useful purpose.

"If a tree falls in the forest..." can be useful since ... (read more)

When did I say i'd read the book? There are hundreds of humor theories and as I've said I haven't been able to review all of them, which is why I asked people to detail what they think is relevant so it can be discussed. Similarly, I didn't ask anyone to review all of my papers, but have pointed out and described the relevant points here specifically for people to see.

The descriptions I see of the material all fit the style that Dennett uses, which I don't enjoy for reasons I've offered. You're welcome to make a substantive reply with actual points from the book or addressing the points I made. Bald assertions aren't that.

0Azathoth123
Really? I would think that constantly inventing new rationalizations to explain away the evidence would at least be intellectually challenging.
2Lumifer
So why are you doing it?
3V_V
Yeah, whatever. Answer this question: Are self-reported black people less likely to have blue eyes than the world population? Yes or no. I never voted. For a slow-reproducing species like humans, environmental pressures take at least thousands or tens of thousands years to cause any noticeable evolution. It doesn't change the fact that these correlations hold right now. Except that it hasn't.
1A1987dM
I'd guess it'd take a while (i.e. longer than Africans have been in America) before the traits end up “wildly different”, though.

As opposed to the banishment/disenfranchisement etc of actual convicted criminals?

If you remove the trait, you won't have criminals. A genetics-caused relationship, logically, would allow you to do this. You'll know beforehand who will be a criminal. Not only that, since it would assist in establishing likelihood, you should be able factor race into the evidence in criminal trials. This would be a terrible idea.

Whether races exist as useful categories that allow to make predictions about observations is an epistemic question. We have very strong evide

... (read more)
4V_V
Only if the correlation was perfect. In any case, even if you were able to identify criminals before the fact, it doesn't mean that it would be moral to "punish" them beforehand. There are good reason not to use profiling in criminal investigations and trials. Anyway, what evidence would make you accept the claim that one group of easily identifiable people people was more prone to commit crime than the general population? If you were given this evidence, would you consider appropriate to use profiling against this group in criminal trials, or otherwise bannish/disenfranchise or even genocide them? Evidence would be appreciated. I don't want to come out as rude but I don't think you know what you are talking about when you say ' Correlation is not causation': Distinguishing causation from correlation is important only when one of the variable is under your control. There is some controversy about whether Evidential Decision Theory or Causal Decision Theory or something else is the ultimately ideal way of making decisions, but in practice the best that you can do in most non-pathological scenarios is to use some approximation of Causal Decision Theory. You can decide to smoke or not smoke, so establishing whether smoking causes cancer or is merely correlated to it via a common cause, is of paramount importance. (*) People's race, on the other hand, is not a decision variable. You can't change your neither your own race nor somebody's else race. Therefore, the 'correlation vs causation' issue is irrelevant. But more generally, nobody in this thread is suggesting that public policy should be predicate public policy on race. ( When using EDT, the relevant question becomes whether, after conditioning on everything you know, including your own preferences, smoking is still positively correlated to cancer. If it is (*), and you value not getting cancer higher than smoking, then you should decide not to smoke. If it not, then you can smoke if you like it.) (** In ca
-3bramflakes
Have you actually sat down and thought about this for 5 minutes by the clock? Go do it now.

If I ask you to estimate the probability that a person randomly sampled from the world population has blue eyes, you can do no better than aswer with the worldwide prevalence of blue eyes. If I then tell you that this person is black, then you can improve the a posteriori probability of your prediction by updating it to the, much lower, prevalence of blue eyes among self-reported black people. We can do the same even for traits that are not immediately visible, yet entirely genetic, such as lactose tolerance or blood type.

This is evidence that self-report

... (read more)

A self-identified "black person," has a highly unpredictable amount of actually African genes, and the common results of certain traits will depend on genes that may not cause self-reporting, so your conclusions will all be corrupted.

Are you seriously going to argue that self-reported black people are no less likely to have blue eyes and blond hair than the general world population?

Including the fact that genetic-causation of traits is a hopelessly flawed concept in the first place.

What? Do you deny that eye color, hair color, lactase pers... (read more)

-2Azathoth123
For American blacks this is not the case. The "one-drop rules" together with taboos against miscegenation also resulted in there being very few blacks with less than 50% Sub-Saharan African DNA.

Assuming I'm parsing this sentence correctly, you favor "changing short and long term environmental pressures on groups of people". Good, so do I. However, the way racial differences are currently not acknowledged is making this difficult.

First, I hope it's clear that if we chalk up personality traits and other such individual characteristics to race instead of environment, then the solution to removing certain undesirable traits (like criminality) would be banishment/disenfranchisement etc of an entire race of people, or outright genocide. T... (read more)

-1bramflakes
I think that might say more about your own attitude to low IQ people than it does about everyone else's ...
8V_V
As opposed to the banishment/disenfranchisement etc of actual convicted criminals? You seem to be conflating several claims and committing the is-ought fallacy: * Whether races exist as useful categories that allow to make predictions about observations is an epistemic question. We have very strong evidence for this claim. * Whether some races, in modern Western countries, are more prone to have certain "bad" traits (e.g. low IQ, high crime rates, etc.) is also an epistemic question. We also have strong evidence for these claims. * Whether this correlation between race and "bad" traits is essentially due to genetic factors, is yet another epistemic question. We don't have strong evidence either for or against these claims, and in general they are very difficult to test. Political incorrect as they are, some of these claims, specifically the one about IQ, have some degree of plausibility, due to the high heritability of some of these traits. But the jury is still out. * Whether we should discriminate against these races with "bad" traits is an entirely different kind of question, a moral question. It doesn't follow from any of the previous claims.
2Azathoth123
Notice how your attempting to equivocate between mass murder and disenfranchisement. Those are two very different things. One is obviously (terminally) bad. The other is at best an instrumental problem and we need to estimate its consequences to see whether its actually bad. The causality is environment -> genetic differences -> different behaviors. If a causality chain with more than one term is too complicated for you, I recommend you start by reviewing causality 101. Well, I've just argued your definition of "race-based thinking" is rather confused and isn't clear a bad thing, so would you please provide a better definition and an explanation before you continue using the term. Also while you're at it could you define "prejudice and discrimination" and how it differs from using Bayesian prior to help make decisions. The purges were targeted at kulaks, i.e., the people who were doing better, because that kind of thing can't be permitted in the new egalitarian communist utopia. So yes, these are in fact "egalitarian" failures. A better analogy is that you're arguing that we should avoid thinking X because some people who think X have shot dogs, I'm pointing out that people who (falsely) think not-X have shot far dogs than people who think X.

Yes in the example the person is viewing a single tendency in an example and acting in a damaging way because of that. It may be more accurate for the speaker to say that he saw a group of Asian people sleeping on a plane and none waved back, while the Hispanic person who was awake, did.

1bramflakes
No it's still not right. That implies there is a genuine difference in the aggregate group-level behavior. A proper example would be Black people commit crimes at a disproportionate rate compared to Whites. This is because Black people are inherently more violent and criminal than Whites. The second sentence doesn't necessarily follow from the first, because there could be other factors that cause Blacks to be more violent. Your examples are fallacies of generalizing from small and/or unrepresentative samples, not fallacies of inferring causation from correlation.

I really don't think you're engaging with the actual points here, which are (1) that puns and similar jokes can be funny simply by being clever, without any "misplacement" required; and (2) that even when a "misplacement" is involved, your theory doesn't appear to identify any reason why the pun should be funnier than a mere plausible mistake that no one would be amused by.

I feel that puns, when by themselves, all play off of our misplacement instinct. But not all puns are equally funny. Some things are more "out of place" ... (read more)

...a single line that expresses itself in a broad wide open polydimensional space of ideas and humor. In the second paper we listed 40 examples of different "blooms" from this single seed. There are countless more.

I don't think this is unprecedented at all. Take the Theory of Evolution. It's amazing to me (and of course what we're discussing is even just a small slice of its results). The whole of Evolution is also a single line (variation and selection) that expresses itself in thousands and even millions of ways.

I'll continue thinking about what you've said.

It's not a matter of disputing, it's a matter of not recognizing and taking it into account.

Of course, saying the "environment is the ultimate cause" is like saying "the big bang is the ultimate cause", true but not helpful.

You don't see how a logical thought process that would advocate genocide (removing "bad genes" you believe are responsible for undesirable social characteristics or behavior) over changing short and long term environmental pressures on groups pf people is a bad idea?

Care to define what you mean by &qu

... (read more)
1bramflakes
The example doesn't match the definition.
-9private_messaging
6Azathoth123
Assuming I'm parsing this sentence correctly, you favor "changing short and long term environmental pressures on groups of people". Good, so do I. However, the way racial differences are currently not acknowledged is making this difficult. A lot of institutions have policies requiring that admittance to educational institutions or employment be proportional by race. And there are people seriously arguing that arrests should be proportional by race of population. Also, false egalitarian beliefs have killed far more people than false "racist" beliefs. The way is happens is the following logic: "As we all know no group is better than any other, yet group X is doing better than other groups. Why is this the case? It can't be that group X is in any way better, it must be that group X is getting ahead by cheating and other nefarious means, thus group X must be punished." Come to think of it, the Nazi anti-Jewish campaign also followed the above logic. Just replace the first clause with "as we know no group is better than Aryan Germans". Um, the genetic aspects of ethnicity quite likely are the cause of a lot of those differences. Yes, they were ultimately caused by differences in the ancestral environment but genetics are in fact the proximate cause. Um, this example doesn't appear to be about confusing correlation with causation so much as inferring correlation based on insufficient evidence.

DNA Tests can predict a trait that would cause you to self-identify, but that doesn't relate to the rest of your gene profile...and that trait (like hair consistency, nose size and shape etc) may have nothing to do with the other result you're trying to measure. I may self-identify as black because I full lips, but if you then try to measure my athleticism, you may find that's dictated by genes I received from someone Native American or white in my ancestry.

They recently tested Snoop Dogg and Charles Barkley for a bit on the George Lopez Show. Snoop Dogg h... (read more)

4V_V
Alleles tend to correlate with each other. For instance, it is possible for conventionally black people to have blonde hair and/or blue eyes, since the alleles that control hair and eye color are, to some extent, different than those that control skin color. Some black people do indeed have blonde hair and/or blue eyes, but most of them don't. If I ask you to estimate the probability that a person randomly sampled from the world population has blue eyes, you can do no better than aswer with the worldwide prevalence of blue eyes. If I then tell you that this person is black, then you can improve the a posteriori probability of your prediction by updating it to the, much lower, prevalence of blue eyes among self-reported black people. We can do the same even for traits that are not immediately visible, yet entirely genetic, such as lactose tolerance or blood type. This is evidence that self-reported race is an epistemically useful concept. EDIT: Actually, they are both self-reported black people and the DNA test detected primarily sub-Saharan African ancestry in both of them.

If the self-report isn't actually reflective of their real genetics, then that's a problem for trying to link traits with self-reported race and then claim or imply that is data about the real genetics.

0V_V
It may not exactly overlap with geographic ancestry, but if self-reported race can be predicted by DNA tests, how can it not be reflective of real genetics?

I'll correct that. Was probably in the course of typing several replies on different parts of the subject. Bone structure gets detected by environment, but it in itself isn't.

Wikipedia adds:

Correspondence between genetic clusters in a population (such as the current US population) and self-identified race or ethnic groups does not mean that such a cluster (or group) corresponds to only one ethnic group. African Americans have an estimated 10–20-percent European genetic admixture; Hispanics have European, Native American and African ancestry.[6] In Brazil there has been extensive admixture between Europeans, Amerindians and Africans, resulting in no clear differences in skin color and relatively weak associations between self-reported race and African ancestry.

2V_V
It doesn't mean that self-reported race is not an epistemically useful concept.

This is natural reciprocal altruism. If I was bickering a bunch of calling names, I wouldn't mind receiving it back. But I'm going out of my way not to do so, so I'm less tolerant of receiving it.

Similarly, not every reaction someone has is a sign of personal weakness of them. Including "quicker-than-optimal to take offence." Focus instead on the ideas and not trying to force things into aspersions on others.

No, that's not what's commonly meant, and the lack of acknowledging that environment is the ultimate cause is one of the major sources of confusion that creates racist thinking.

Not realizing this may confuse the issue for you. But I know precisely what I'm saying.

-1Azathoth123
I don't think anyone is disputing this. Of course, saying the "environment is the ultimate cause" is like saying "the big bang is the ultimate cause", true but not helpful. Care to define what you mean by "racist thinking", also preferably with an explanation of why your particular definition is a bad thing?

You said "what on earth," which implies no awareness at all.

I also don't necessarily agree that you can discuss statistical correlations with poorly-defined or undefinable categories. Sounds like a recipe for bad science. It may work at first, but as you try to really investigate, it will become awkward.

Oh and by the way, I've noticed that the more I talk to you, the more downvotes are starting to appear on my posts here and elsewhere, and it's begun here, specifically, on my replies to you, with no evidence of anyone else doing it in my conversations with them.

Be aware that the moderators do not take kindly to mass downvoting and you will get banned if that's what you're doing.

4V_V
According to Wikipedia, DNA tests can predict people's self-identified race with > 99% accuracy. This looks like a non-trivial fact about the physical world.

First, regarding puns, yes that's how I explain them. But puns and misplacements frequently aren't funny...they usually create humor through 2nd person laughter (at someone else's bold and forced punnery, showing either their lameness or utter disrespect for people who don't like puns), or through being layered with something else (misplacement combined with further physical failure)

Misplacement by itself is kind of like a hamburger patty without any salt, bun, lettuce or tomato. If it's a wrong enough misplacement, it CAN be funny, just like you CAN eat t... (read more)

3gjm
Puns I really don't think you're engaging with the actual points here, which are (1) that puns and similar jokes can be funny simply by being clever, without any "misplacement" required; and (2) that even when a "misplacement" is involved, your theory doesn't appear to identify any reason why the pun should be funnier than a mere plausible mistake that no one would be amused by. I agree that the particular one I cited, which was simply the first I had to hand, has an extra layer to it that enhances the humour. I already drew attention to that and made clear that it wasn't the relevant point. Let me try again without that distraction. I'll take, in fact, one of your own examples, the "kidney beans" joke from your longer paper, which I shall modify a little further to bring out a point. Imagine that you are reading a scholarly article on a cannibalistic tribe in some faraway place, and you find this passage: "The Ougalou people consume human flesh only on special occasions such as a victory over another tribe. Their staple diet otherwise is a dish of kidney beans." I suggest that you might find this quite amusing, if you happened to notice it (I suspect it would be easy to pass over without noticing). There is no "misplacement" here; the dish of kidney beans is (in my hypothetical scenario) perfectly correct. It's just funny that cannibals should turn out to eat kidney beans. There is no one here to lose status (the author hasn't made any kind of mistake; neither has the reader). Now let's take an example more favourable to your theory, where arguably there is a "misplacement". It happens to be due to the same person who made the "flushed" pun; it purports (not very seriously) to be a quotation, and it goes like this: <<< "Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking copse." -- Johnny Appleseed. >>> So, there's a "misplacement" of sorts here: in some sense "copse" is obviously a mistake for "corpse", and with that "corrected" one has the sort of thing that (say

Not worth talking to, not addressing their opinions...I'd put those under the same umbrella.

My replies aren't in the vein of gainsaying other people or baldly declaring that I'm right. I've developed this theory for quite a few months now (after being a writer and working professionally as a story analyst for years)...and I've had conversations with a lot of people about various aspects of it. My responses here aren't "Nope, I'm right." They're more along the lines of..."Yes, that is a valid concern that I've heard before. Here's what I dete... (read more)

1gjm
I'm very happy to discuss the substantive points, at least to the limits of my patience :-). I'd thought you might find it useful to know that you're coming across as crankish. I would, with roles reversed. I haven't called you any names. I suggest you may be being quicker-than-optimal to take offence.

OH, okay I think I get it. You're saying that we might expect to find A, but instead find B in its place, and be may not actually be a bad thing, therefore it's not necessarily a sign of low-quality and this seems odd given the theory? Since "kets" isn't necessarily a stupid thing in and of itself?

In that case, the act of misplacement can be an error even if the thing that's incorrectly there isn't a foolish thing. Like for example, let's say someone signs up for a speech by John Edward, thinking it's the psychic medium, and he wants to investiga... (read more)

0Luke_A_Somers
I guess I just see this broad wide open polydimensional space of ideas and humor, and you're condensing it down into a single line. It just doesn't seem right.

There are many other factors like bone structure (which is also dictated ultimately by environment) and the year-round warm weather that seem quite clearly to contribute, but it would be a digression and wouldn't really be necessary to illustrate the point.

-1A1987dM
Bone structure is an environmental factor? What?
5Azathoth123
Disagree, it illustrates that point that saying "Kenyans are more likely to be great distance runners" is in fact more accurate than saying "People whose ancestors spent uncommonly large amounts of time at great elevation with less oxygen [are more likely to be great distance runners]" since the former doesn't have the burdensome detail of assuming a particular causal mechanism.

I'm pretty sure I agree with what you're saying, but I don't know exactly what you're referring to with this paragraph.

1Luke_A_Somers
You can have two very different ideas of very similar quality. Your theory predicts that finding one instead of the other can't be funny. That seems off to me.

Not every reply is automatically disagreement, some are expanding on or clarifying ideas. I want to clarify and focus on the idea that the actual issue is in the way people phrase things, and show specifically how the phrasing should be changed.

If there is an aspect where I might be disagreeing though, it's in the claim that race should be included at all in these statements. Given how people get confused on this and how dangerous it's proven to be in the past, it's probably better not to use race at all when making these statements about tendencies caused by environment...especially since race itself has no causal relationship.

Can we clear up one thing before we start?

You said I'm "replying dismissively." This would imply that I'm acting as though other people aren't worth talking to. I'm posting this exactly BECAUSE I want to talk to other people about it, and I'm going to great lengths to try explain my idea. I also don't see myself insulting anyone...the worst I've said is that I don't care as much for certain other theories because they aren't clear enough, don't reflect the evidence that I think is important, and aren't as simple as I suspect the answer in this c... (read more)

0gjm
No: as if other people's contrary opinions aren't worth addressing, beyond saying "nope, my theory is right, and here's why". I wasn't intending to suggest that you insulted anyone, and I don't think you have. I wasn't suggesting that you regard anyone as a crank, but that the way you're presenting your theory comes across as rather crankish. And I certainly wasn't suggesting that you are wanting to "engage in insults or slapfights"; not at all.

Well, firstly, this isn't a big deal, but I'll describe it because you asked. In terms of clarity, Dennett has a habit of using unnecessarily complex language, as well as burying his leads and dancing around his points. The end result is that most people don't bother and so he doesn't communicate what may at its core be an interesting thought. A lot of the same happens when people describe his ideas (you don't need to say "coterminous" when you can just say "humor is not the same as laughter," for one example, and be more specific about... (read more)

-1chaosmage
I find that book not just clear, but positively lucid. Your description of it seems so wrong I find it impossible to imagine you've actually read that book. And by the way: Hurley wrote most of this book, Adams did much of the rest. Dennett just helped polish it and promote it (using his status as one of the world's most influential living philosophers) because it is so obviously deserves that.

Jiro,

The problems are that people speak in terms that assign causation to the race factor. Such as "White Men Can't Jump," and that even if you say "A White Man is less likely to be able to jump than a Black Man," you are still assigning cause based on race instead of environment. Environment is what dictates these likelihoods.

For example, people whose ancestry is in Kenya happen to be more likely to be great distance runners essentially because they live in a higher elevation with less oxygen. But to say "Kenyans are more likely t... (read more)

7bramflakes
Actually no. Peruvians spent a long time at high altitude but don't fill the ranks of prodigious distance runners. This is because they evolved a different adaption - barrel-chestedness - instead of more/better haemoglobin.
3Azathoth123
This is what is commonly meant by saying that the outcomes is dictated by genetics. You seem to be intentionally using terminology in non-standard ways in an attempt to confuse the issue.
3Nornagest
I'm not sure this holds water. Kenya contains some reasonably high country, but it's not unusually high by global standards; Nairobi lies in the western highlands at around 1800 meters, comparable for example to northern Spain or Colorado, while Mombasa is essentially at sea level. On top of that, most Kenyans are Bantu, members of an ethnic group that expanded out of West Africa in early historical times, so that population wouldn't have had much time for adaptation. I've heard of high-altitude adaptation in the context of Ethiopia, though, which is higher and inhabited by groups who've been there longer.
-1Jiro
If having such ancestors completely explains why Kenyans have that trait, then that would count as "the correlation between race and bad things is eliminated once you take the other factor into account". So you're not actually disagreeing with me.

To be clear, I stated that there's difficulty in defining the categories (and gave the search suggestion to show Azathoth what I'm talking about). I didn't make any assertion about whether or not you ultimately could, and my actual argument is separate from that issue.

Ah, got it. By the way, I like the "low in search order" concept you mentioned above. This is similar to something I just noticed about this theory, which is that puns that are closer to what we already think (like for example, seeing "ass" in the word Association), are less effective than ones that are further down. I think this has to do with what we label as a joke being "too easy" and thus not as funny. Or I guess a pun being too easy.

Anyway...the third joke.

This "kets" joke is a bit more difficult for me to anal... (read more)

0Luke_A_Somers
The thing is, with a pure 'surprise' interpretation, it doesn't matter that you know there's a joke. There can't be any preparation - there will be a large deviation from expectations because the possibilities are all over the place. If you focus 'quality', then you can get a good estimate in advance and end up with a small difference.

Hi Azathoth,

If you google "Does Race Exist" you'll get a number of results from Nova, Scientific American and other sources that describe this with much more detail than I could in my available time.

1Azathoth123
I'm perfectly aware that their are a lot of really bad arguments out there purporting to show that race doesn't exist. I don't have the time to individually debunk every piece of anti-epistomology available on the subject. For now notice that racially categories as understood by the average person are good enough to start talking about statistical correlations.
5A1987dM
Relevant Slate Star Codex post

The problem with racism is the confusion of correlation and causation. To state that "blacks score lower in IQ" is to imply that being in the Venn Diagram circle "black" automatically lines you up with a "lower IQ circle." But, besides the sheer difficulty of defining racial categories in the first place, this ignores that there are other factors in which you can group people which will cause those circles to line-up far more accurately. Particularly ones based on environmental pressure of a person's ancestors. If a group is p... (read more)

1Azathoth123
What on earth are you talking about here? Racially categories are almost certainly more straightforward than whatever other criteria you want to include here.
3Jiro
If a race is associated with unfavorable traits, it is more likely that someone of that race has those unfavorable traits than someone who is not. Just because another factor provides a more accurate comparison doesn't change this--you should then use the other factor in combination with race, not instead of race. Only if the correlation between race and bad things is eliminated once you take the other factor into account should you then stop using race and switch to the other factor only.

Okay, what we can do is compare the predictions of the two theories in relation to these. If they both have similar results (since they both mention pattern-breaking/misplacement), I think we can look instead for places where they might differ, or look for examples that might apply to one and not the other.

Should we start with one? The first joke is unclear because "QALY" isn't explained, but I think I can fill it in well enough. We'll use a Hippie, Gandhi, and Justin Bieber for the butt of the joke. (apologies if you're a Beiber fan).

Plane break... (read more)

0Luke_A_Somers
Oi, maybe I shouldn't have led with that one. It touches on put-down humor, which is what yours is best at and this is weakest at. (btw, QALY = quality-adjusted life years, a measure often used for comparing the effectiveness of interventions, especially medical or rescue interventions. Basically, 'you have more life left to live') Try the third one. We know it's a joke, so the reason is going to be dumb. This is about middle-of-the-road in just how dumb it might be, so there's no real difference in quality, just content. It went in an unexpected direction - so yes, you have a difference, but since it's not a better or worse direction, it's not a quality difference. If you're anxious, your joy-of-discovery would be swamped by fear-of-loss. I think the two come out around the same on that one.

Well unfortunately we can't reach into each other's brains and experiment on the situations. I've dissected my own humorous laughter relentlessly to find these things, so I have to make some assumptions or estimations when discussing what makes other people laugh...especially given anecotes that naturally have limited information.

Does the Youtube video help demonstrate the general principle I'm referencing though? That the commentator laughs after the dunk, but does so as he says "Excuse me, I'm sorry!" as a clear reference to he himself turning out to be wrong...?

Well, I feel like politics tends to create bad feelings when it's argued...we'd probably have to have some kind of quarantined thread or pre-agreement to be extra polite if we talked about those topics.

But I do like this quote by Alinsky because it's a good habit for everyone on both sides.

This appears to be the same claim as the "misplacement" part of the above theory (errors in patterns vs. errors in "abstractions" which in the link that was provided is referred to as "patterns").

The key difference which stands out now, though (before I see it applied to various forms of evidence and humor) is that this version appears to be less elegant, less clear, and has less connection with our common experiences and understanding of humor, so it doesn't fit any of my own criteria for what would make it better as a hypothesis. I also notice this a lot when it comes to Dennett.

1erratio
In what way is it less elegant or clear? When I read that book, I found the idea of humour being a reinforcement method for getting us to update our mental models to be extremely elegant and insightful, so I would be interested to hear why you don't agree. I should add, my general impression of your theory is that it has a lot in common with Hurley et al's except that you think everything should be reducible to status while they think that status isn't anything special

From this article I see them referencing that there is joy in creating and recognizing new patterns, which I agree with and makes some logical sense. But "abstractions" by itself is very different, which can be just a representation of one thing in another medium, and which doesn't logically generate pleasure.

The words "abstraction" or "abstract," also, according to my search function, don't appear on that page. Given that these can be unclear topics, we sometimes have to take care with our words.

This is actually pretty easy to demonstrate though. You can laugh at your own expectations failing when you're alone, as per the phone example. So we KNOW this can happen.

Now, let's change the expectation, and we can see clearly that the laughter will change or disappear. For example, when I look at Da Vinci's notebook, who I obviously think of as an amazing artist, I don't laugh the least bit at the quality of the drawings contained within, and no one that I know of looks at Da Vinci's notebooks and the amazing quality of his thought as a source of comedy... (read more)

0sediment
There may be such a thing as first-person laughter (laughing at yourself for having a mistaken expectation), but my point is that it seems like a stretch to say that the examples 9eB1 gave fit that pattern (though perhaps your phone example does). I'm working on a longer comment in which I'll explain my points in more detail.

Yes I believe the dogs do, but I haven't spent a lot of time dissecting this or being able to study it (maybe I can figure out something the next time I'm dogsitting for my cousin).

Here's the link... http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner/200911/do-dogs-laugh

Regarding the second idea, that would probably be something good to do. Look at animals (other than humans) with breath control and consistent physical similarity, who thus have similar social situations as early man where they needed to organize themselves without knowing already who was... (read more)

2ChristianKl
If you manage to use your theory of humor to get the dog to laugh, that would show that you nailed some universal essence of humor.

That's likely too. In scenarios where we're supposed to have a high expectation, we tend to laugh harder at anything humorous. The show "Silent Library" from Japan is an example I use, where people give each other harmless but painful punishments in a library while others struggle to conceal their laughter. The expectation of silence and scholarship in the library heightens the humor, and the show is very very successful and has spawned multiple spin-offs.

Being drilled that the customer must be respected and is always right would probably create a similar situation when they reveal themselves to have done totally idiotic things.

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