All of GilPanama's Comments + Replies

I'd say that the incoherent speaker is arguing at DH(-1). DH0 would be an improvement. You would be counterarguing at DH(No) - argument by pointing out conversational emptiness.

(edited to clarify that it is the person who makes the incoherent argument who is arguing badly, and the person arguing against that who is doing something entirely outside the hierarchy.

Other DH(No) arguments-that-are-about-non-argument include "We aren't actually arguing about the same thing" and "let me take some time to do more reading before I reply.")

Point taken - in some cases, the significance of the gaps is more evident to the outside view.

In that case, we can replace "point out where in their argument they went wrong" with "point out where our underlying value judgments seem to diverge."

If they then try to argue that your values are wrong and theirs are right, either you have to move the discussion up a meta-level or, yes, screaming.

An application of this hierarchy:

Jack the Scarecrow. My crystal healing pills will give you eternal life. For $50.00 each, you need never die, suckers.

--

DH0: "I'm not interested for myself, but can I buy you a border collie and give her some? If you're going to live forever, you're going to need a smart friend to make the really tricky decisions."

DH1: What, exactly, is your profit margin on these crystal healing pills? If we don't live forever, would you still make money off of them?

DH2: Any post that ends in the word "suckers" directed... (read more)

6Xom
The DH tier seems to correspond to an upper-bound on the effectiveness of an argument of that tier.
0kpreid
Your example makes me wonder where "Their argument is not even wrong." (i.e. semantically incoherent) fits. It seems to me to be in the vicinity of DH2 and DH3, but not exactly either one.
GilPanama240

Why are my opponents ignoring what I say because I said it angrily, or sadly, or confrontationally, or in passing, or whatever?

The way you say something may signal that you are trying to diminish their status. If you say it with a sufficiently negative tone, it may even be taken as a signal (a generally reliable signal) that you care more about diminishing their status than about having a truth-seeking discussion.

In other words, what wedrifid said, but less simply and more explicitly.

-1wedrifid
Exactly!

I think that in some contexts, like arguing over mathematical proofs (as orthonormal noted), spending a little time arguing with yourself to bring out X'Y'Z' is polite and a sign of good faith. In other cases, I'd rather just trot out A'B'C' early on, as long as it doesn't require too much effort, and deal with both arguments at once without ever explicitly raising X'Y'Z'.

I was aware of the genre it spoofed, but I didn't know that it was so specifically targeted. I'm tempted to try to find that made-for-TV movie and watch clips just to increase my appreciation of Airplane!

4Unnamed
Zero Hour! It's available on Netflix.

In this case, I'd even drop my initial thoughts about rudeness. If you can prove that somebody's gone down mathematical blind alley, it's downright polite to do so, since there's no ambiguity about the relevance of the steel man here.

Ideally, a reasonable counterargument that applies to the strong form will also apply to the weak form without significant editing. If the person one was arguing with would have been receptive to DH7 in the first place, that alone should stop them from making the strong form argument - the countering evidence has already been provided.

Where this fails... well, I said "at first" in my thread-starter for a reason.

I don't ALWAYS have low confidence in the other arguer's ability to tolerate a steel man version of their own argument. I do have low confidence in the ability of most people, especially me, to decide what constitutes a non-gratuitous steel man. I have an unfortunate, but understandable, bias in favor of my own creations, and I suspect that this bias is widely shared.

I can respect the person I'm arguing with, and consider them to be truth-searching, and still not want to antagonize the part of their hardware that likes winning. I also dislike having my primate hardware antagonized unnecessarily; I tolerate it for the sake of truth-seeking, but it's not fun.

I see two likely cases here:

A) I come up with a tougher version of their argument in my head, in order to be as careful as possible, but I still have a good way to refute it. This is DH7.

In this case, announcing the tougher version doesn't get us any closer to the tr... (read more)

3Will_Sawin
Some DH7, or at least DH7-like thinking, can be relatively easy. For instance, there will often be gaps in someone's argument that they do not consider significant, or a general case they hadn't bothered to think of. You can't make it perfect, but you can patch it up a bit.
7gjm
If you come up with a better version of the other person's argument but keep it to yourself and only refute the original version, then later on they may think "Now, in all honesty Gil was right about X ... but no, wait a moment, that's just because I didn't get it quite right. If I'd said X' instead then his argument wouldn't have worked." and stick with their position rather than changing it. I doubt that this outweighs the effect of antagonizing them at the time by saying "You should have said X', and I'm now going to refute that" in most cases, though.
GilPanama510

DH7 should be kept internal, at least at first. Being misinterpreted as trying to construct a straw man when you've been trying to do the opposite can derail a conversation. To actually believe that you've made a steel man, not a straw man, the person you're arguing with would have to admit that you've created a stronger argument for their own position than they could.

It's probably best to practice up to DH7 internally, and only up to DH6 vocally.

If we imagine arguments as soldiers, as they tend to be, the problem becomes even clearer:

(A and B are about t... (read more)

You can be gentle about DH7 by attributing the improved argument to someone with high status. This is my typical strategy and seems to work well. It's a double whammy because you're implicitly associating them with someone of high status e.g. "it's funny you say that, it's very similar to an argument by ". I'm NOT saying that you actually have to know a bunch of famous arguments offhand, the better argument can be attributed fallaciously to anyone who has spoken on a topic and can have little to do with the person's original argument. Few notice and you have the out of being mistaken even if they do.

Jack220

The way this is done in (good) academic philosophy is "6 then 7". First you show that their central point fails for reason x. Then you suggest how their position can be improved upon then you refute the new position.

3HughRistik
This. DH7 is of limited use in an adversarial debate, unless your opponent is open-minded. It could convince fence-sitters, but only if they are open-minded. The problem with DH7 is that it's too easy for your opponent to accuse you of a straw man. Even if that's not true, they may be able to delude some of the audience. Analogies are another debate tactic in this category: they are only useful towards listeners with an open-mind, otherwise, they make you open to attack be the other person rejecting your analogy. A great time to use DH7 or analogies is against the argument of someone who isn't present to convince a third-party. Since your opponent isn't there, they can't reject your attempts at charity or analogies as straw men, and you can use those tools to convince your audience that you are correct, and you've given those arguments the best consideration you can. Of course, if you're going to do this, try to make sure you are right, because if you are wrong (e.g. you misunderstood what your original opponent was saying), then they won't be around to clarify. EDIT: Actually, there is a way to do DH7 with your original interlocutor. You have to lead them to admitting that the steel version actually follows from their argument, and then you knock it down. E.g. you start by "are you suggesting Y?" which you think follows from their original position, X. This can make you look like you are genuinely working to understand them (which, of course, you are). Then when they take the bait, you knock it down, and they can't complain. And you can't be too confrontational or accusatory, because that will tip them off that you are going to knock Y down. If they catch a hint of that, then they will never admit that Y follows from their original position X.
3TheOtherDave
Depends on how it's done, IME. I often find that "Hm. So you're saying XYZ? That doesn't really work, because of ABC. But now that I think about it, X'Y'Z' would be consistent with what you're claiming, and not have that problem. Even there, though, A'B'C' suggests it's false." can work all right, although I'm often tempted to add "But of course by this point I've wandered off into a corner and started arguing with myself, which seems antisocial."

DH7 does happen between mathematicians now and then. Person A has an idea of a proof for X. Person B could show a problem with Person A's proof (DH6) or an unrelated disproof of X (DH4? DH6?), but the best response is to show A a disproof of X that makes it clear why A's strategy is futile.

This is often done well enough that it doesn't even hurt feelings. But math is kind of a special case.

0MarkusRamikin
The danger you point out is real, but an unqualified dictum such as "DH7 should be kept internal, at least at first" is very specific advice that IMO is going too far. A great deal depends on the quality of the sub-argument to do with strengthening the opponent's position, and the opponent's (and/or audience's, if any) receptiveness to that. You seem to be saying we should always have low confidence in both, while I'd say it depends. Maybe let's not. Applying DH7 already assumes we're interested in truth, not just in winning a debate.
7fiddlemath
I'm pretty sure it depends on who you're arguing with. If either of you is trying to /win/, rather than /find the truth/, then DH7 is tough to do. But if you and your interlocutor both care more about being correct than sounding correct, and you both respect each other, then you can and should attempt DH7 aloud.

If the original work is itself a satire, do you try to make a humorless version of it?

Hmm...

"In the seminal Zucker, Zucker, and Abrams opus Airplane!, one character, played by Leslie Nielsen, asks another to pilot an passenger airliner in an emergency. The would-be pilot responds with incredulity, but is coolly rebuffed by the Leslie Nielsen character. This evinces laughter from the audience, as the exchange involves a confusion between two near-homophones."

Heh, heh... still funny.

For less goofy, more drily satirical stuff, I think that making a satire of the satire is still a viable option.

8CronoDAS
You might be interested to know that "Airplane!" was itself essentially a shot-for-shot remake of a "serious" made-for-TV movie with exactly the same plot - with, of course, jokes added in.
GilPanama170

Because I accidentally derailed my last post into pedantry, let me try again with a clearer heuristic:

A TEST FOR ART YOU REALLY LIKE:

Try to make fun of it.

If you can make fun of it, and you still like it, then you don't like it just because it's sacred.

This doesn't have to be a deep parody - I don't really think I could write a deep parody of Bach's Magnificat in D. But I can definitely imagine the parts that move me the most, the sublime moments that touch me to my core, played by a synthesizer orchestra that only does fart noises.

1Sabiola
Deconstructing Johann
4Prismattic
If the original work is itself a satire, do you try to make a humorless version of it?

If somebody enjoys something that they read or experience alone, then they must get some utility from art that isn't connected with the associated social signals. I suspect that there are many people who are capable of appreciating art without talking about it.

(This does not apply if they read something alone, brag about it, and try to signal super-high status and nonconformity by only liking obscure things. THAT is the status game that I associate with hipsters.)

I consider that sort of social signaling basically orthogonal to liking art for being pretty, ... (read more)

That's common to every art, apart from perhaps cinema or literature. Modern art? Just a load of paint thrown at canvases and unmade beds. Modern music? Just a load of random notes strung together. Modern poetry? Doesn't even rhyme.

I'm not sure which is worse - liking all modern art because one is supposed to like it, or hating all modern art because one is supposed to hate it. Either way, the category lines are not being drawn usefully. As the original post notes, there ought to be more to this than just going along with social signals.

hating all modern art because one is supposed to hate it.

I don't think this actually happens. In my experience most people who hate modern art hate it because it's more-or-less uniformly absolutely awful. In my experience even the "good" pieces of modern art are only good compared to the absolute drek that is most modern art.

Edit: By modern art I mean "art belonging the the genre commonly called 'modern art' ", not "any art produced since the mid 20th century".

2Bill_McGrath
I think both are equally bad, to be honest, but that the latter is less common than the former. I think that people, given enough exposure to a diverse selection of some medium or some category, will eventually come to like at least a section of it. The widespread hatred of "modern X" is probably more often down to ignorance than signalling. Most of the signalling that goes on here is from people trying to demonstrate how hip they are; familiarity with current art is good for the image they are trying to promote. I think anti-modern signalling is largely from people who are trying to prove how conservative or old-fashioned they are, as a way of reinforcing other parts of their image. That said, I move in circles that are more artistic than academic, so this is an obvious way in which my results could be skewed.
1Nominull
Why ought there be more to this than going along with social signals? Isn't all of art just one great gameboard on which to play boundlessly complex social status games? When you think of people who are obnoxiously devoted to social status games, the "hipsters", you think of two things, fashion and art. Both are essentially meaningless except to define the rules of the games we play with each other.

W. H. Auden had an excellent heuristic for dealing with this problem:

"Between the ages of 20 and 40, the surest sign that a man has a taste of his own is that he is unsure of it."

I can like or dislike anything I want, as long as I'm willing to update. The space of possible art is huge, and I would cheat my future self if I excluded entire genres from consideration on the belief that they exist solely as pedant-bait.


I was slightly unhappy to see "Prufrock" mentioned in the same rhetorical breath as modern poetry that relaxes the demand... (read more)

-1Bill_McGrath
That's common to every art, apart from perhaps cinema or literature. Modern art? Just a load of paint thrown at canvases and unmade beds. Modern music? Just a load of random notes strung together. Modern poetry? Doesn't even rhyme.

I dislike The Catcher in the Rye, feel as if I ought to like Animal Farm, and genuinely like Moby-Dick. I can see why other people would dislike Moby-Dick, but I still like the damn thing.

My hypothesis: Because I was not taught Moby-Dick in school, I did not associate reading it with work, but with relaxation. This is borne out by my love of David Copperfield (read alone) and only vague enjoyment of Great Expectations (assigned in school).

Downvoted for telling me what I'm arguing for and against, for something like the third time now, when I am fairly certain that our intuitive ideas of how abstraction works are somewhat different. This is one of the few things that breaks my internal set of "rules for a fair argument."t.

(Note: I am NOT downvoting for the paragraph beginning "OF COURSE they do", because it's given me a hunch as to what is going on here, is clearly written, and makes your actual objections to the candy bowl case clearer.

I SHOULD not be downvoting for the ... (read more)

2lessdazed
Is this a matter of degree or of kind? It seems to me like the issue here is how many qualifications should be made in particular contexts, and so is a question of degree, and not at all one of kind. This means that there is a possible mind with standards analogous to yours to the same degree yours are analogous to Logos01. For example, where Logos01 thinks an essay with five paragraphs of content needs one disclaimer, you might think it needs fifty, and some third party might think it needs two thousand and fifty, and some fourth party 125,000. Any criticism you apply to him or her seems applicable to you as well, for all trade off precision for brevity. It therefore seems impossible to muster a strong argument against Logos01's general practice of being imprecise for the sake of finishing sentences despite lack of perfect precision, because you do that as well, and so it seems your argument can't be stronger than a weaker one against a particular balance of trade offs.
-4Logos01
1. I made no "intuitive" statements about "how abstraction works". Ever. 2. Your positional statements made it quite clear that your objection to S-O S's was in the fact that they are an abstraction. 3. You repeatedly made several arbitrary statements about representative symbols and how they would "have" to be that I demonstrated to be inaccurate of how abstraction is done. 4. I never make the statement, "You are arguing X" unless it is factually and demonstrably true. You stated that you "distrusted" "this method" ("this method" being the use of symbols without referents) of abstraction... but unfortunately, that's all abstraction is; "making maps." If you don't like it when someone tells you what you are or aren't arguing for or against, don't put yourself into a position where those statements would be true. If you had said, "The sky is blue", and I told you, "You are saying the sky is blue", would you also react so childishly? The rest of your post is simply too long for me to bother with. This topic has gone beyond my threshold of conversational utility: you demonstrate that you will accept nothing I say at any point and are merely arguing for the sake of arguing. Case in point: They are topical. This is a tautology. And this marks at least the second time I've called out your continuing to riddle the topic with questions that have already been answered or have answers whose very questions demonstrate them. This is not the mark of an honest conversant. Further: This directly contradicts the very definition of the word, "abstraction". Abstraction -- and mental representation is never anything BUT abstraction -- is definitionally constructing simulacra within the mind. I point this out as yet another demonstrative example of your arguing for what I can only describe merely the sake of arguing. Rounding this out: No. This is a flat-out false characterization of my position and I have explicitly disagreed with it. I said nothing of the sort. Ever. An

The article says:

Second-order simulacra, a term coined by Jean Baudrillard, are symbols without referents, that is, symbols with no real object to represent. Simply put, a symbol is itself taken for reality and further layer of symbolism is added. This occurs when the symbol is taken to be more important or authoritative of the original entity, authenticity has been replaced by copy (thus reality is replaced by a substitute).

If I'm reading this correctly, it leaves me even more leery about the value of second-order simulacra.

Also from the article:

B

... (read more)
Jack120

I'm hoping I can butt in and explain all this.

Logos01 probably shouldn't have brought up Baudrillard, who is among the sloppiest and most obscure thinkers of the last century. Baudrillard's model of abstraction is pretty terrible. Much better to user analytic philosophy's terminology rather than post-structuralism's terminology. In analytic philosophy we talk about abstract objects, "types" or "kinds". These are ubiquitous, not especially mysterious, and utterly essential to the representation of knowledge. "Electron", &quo... (read more)

-4Logos01
I habsolutely zero intentions. I had hoped that you would be capable of being a rational agent in this dialogue. If, however, that isn't something you care to do, we can end this conversation here and now. The stereotypical bowl-candy is perfectly safe. It likely has a neighbor that has a razorblade in it. -- In a side-note, why did you feel the need to push this particular variation of your question on me when I had already answered it? What, exactly, did you think the Simulacraton example was? Or did you not make the connection merely because you used candies and ratios and I used people and percents? Of COURSE they do. It's not an applicable or relevant scenario in which one SHOULD use a second-order simulacrum in. 1. The scale is vastly too small to allow for abstraction to be useful. 2. The topic at hand focuses on the group in question rather than some other topic to which the group is tangential. Good luck getting through life without ever constructing a symbolic representation of anything at any time ever under any circumstances: because that's what you are arguing against.

Wait, wait, I think I see something here. I think I see why we are incapable of agreeing.

If and only if you meant "always" in the first place and want to be less than perfectly accurate. "In the majority of cases" is an inaccurate method of expressing how S-O S's work -- as I mentioned above, with "the largest minority" being the representative entity of the body.

This seems more like a description of how S-O S's fail.

Can you offer any reason why I should treat S-O S's as a useful or realistic representational scheme if my... (read more)

2Logos01
There is a town. That town is called Simulacraton. Simulacraton is 40% white, 35% black, and 25% hispanic by population. The Joneses of Simulacraton -- are a semi-affluent suburban couple and live next door to a black man married to a hispanic woman. The Joneses are the second-order simulacrum of the average household in Simulacraton. Second-order simulacra will always fail when you use them in ways that they are not meant to be used: such as actually being representative of individual instantiations of a thing: I.e.;, when you try to pretend they are anything other than an abstraction, a mapping of the territory designed for use as high-level overview to convey basic information without the need for great depth of inspection of the topic. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Second-order_simulacra

Upvoted for clear communication.

I'm sort of puzzled, though, as to how I could have possibly interpreted your statements as applying to anything but the post and the comments on it; I saw no context clues suggesting that you meant "in everyday conversation." Did I miss these?

That said, if one of us had added just three or four words of proviso earlier, limiting our generalizations explicitly, we could have figured the disconnect out more quickly. I could have said that my generalizations apply best to essays and edited posts. You could have said ... (read more)

3Logos01
My language throughout was highly generalized. Consider my opening statement: "I am troubled by the vehemence by which people seem to reject the notion of using the language of the second-order simulacrum -- especially in communities that should be intimately aware of the concept that the map is not the territory." And then also consider the fact that I used the term "discourse". I didn't mean "everyday communication" specifically -- it simply is the venue where such a heuristic is most overtly valuable and noticeable. I did not qualify my generalizations because there were no qualifications to make: I was meaning the general sense. Quite frankly, I did. That would be a modifying element to the "threshold of significance". (I.e.; "Is the cost of adding item X to this conversation greater than the value item X provides to the depth or breadth of information I am attempting to convey? If yes, do not add it. If no, do.") Because I was discussing so highly generalized a principle / heuristic, the fact that situations where added cost of qualifiers cost a higher burden is simply an inexorable conclusion from the assertion.
GilPanama140

When someone adds that proviso "asexual/homosexual" -- they are changing the relevant level of precision necessary to the conversation.

No, they are pointing out that in order to apply to a case they are interested in, the conversation must be made more precise.

For example; if I say "Men and women get married because they love each other", then the fact that some men/women don't marry, or the fact that intersex people aren't necessarily men or women, or the fact that GLBT people who marry are also likely to do so because of love, or

... (read more)
-3Logos01
I want you to understand that you just agreed with me while appending the word "No" to the beginning of your sentence. This is... a less than positive indicator as to whether I am being understood. The statement doesn't allow for counterexamples because it's a statement of fact, at bare minimum: the fact is that men and women do marry because they love each other. Other shit happens too, but that itself is a factual statement. Its informational value as a statement can only be derived from within the text of a given conversation. That doesn't follow. Where do you get this necessity of implication from? Certainly not from the principle I'm espousing here. (Note: "A small minority" is a different statement from "a minority". In several cities in the US, whites are a minority. And yet the second-order simulacrum of those populations would still be a white person -- because whites, while a minority, are the plurality [largest minority].) If and only if you meant "always" in the first place and want to be less than perfectly accurate. "In the majority of cases" is an inaccurate method of expressing how S-O S's work -- as I mentioned above, with "the largest minority" being the representative entity of the body. So you'd be better able to most accurately express the situation by stating that X happens Y percent of the time, but that simply isn't language used in ordinary discourse. That the statement can be revised in this manner does not obviate the example I was pointing to with the previous example. I used an explicit reductio ad absurdum to make the mechanism explicit. From zero to one hundred, as it were. In a more 'realistic' example for your revision: what is meant by "generally"? What is meant by "love"? What is meant by "people who marry"? These are all imprecise statements. Is "generally" "a large majority"? Is "generally" "a small majority"? Is "generally" "the largest minority"? Etc., etc.. You chose not to go to that level of precision because it was not

Each of those little "costs next to nothing" statements actually do have a cost, one that isn't necessarily clear initially.

The cost of omitting them isn't clear initially, either.

Are you familiar at all with how errors propagate in measurements? Each time you introduce new provisos, those statements affect the "informational value" of each dependent statement in its nest. This creates an analogous situation to the concept of significant digits in discourse.

I was generally taught to carry significant figures further than strictly... (read more)

3Logos01
I just now caught this, and... this is, I believe, where we have our fundamental disconnect. By restricting the dialogue to essays the overwhelming majority of the meaningfulness of what I'm trying to say is entirely eliminated: my statements have been aimed at discussing the heuristic of measuring the cognitive burden per "unit" of information when communicating. The fact is that in a pre-planned document of basically any type one can safely assume a vastly greater available "pool of cognition" in his audience than in, say, a one-off comment in response to it, a youtube video comment, or something said over beers on a Friday night with your drinking-buddies. I am struck by the thought that this metaphorically very similar to how Newton's classical mechanics equations manifest themselves from quantum mechanics after you introduce enough systems, or how the general relativity equations become effectively conventional at "non-relativistic" speeds: when you change the terms of the equations the apparent behaviors become significantly different. Just like how there's no need to bother considering your own relativistic mass when deciding whether or not to go on a diet, the heuristic I'm trying to discuss is vanishingly irrelevant to anything that one should expect from a thought-out-in advance, unrestricted-in-length, document.
0Logos01
Which is why I also discussed error propagation, which compounds. I can only say that you are reading the metaphor too literally given the examples I've given thus far. Of course!!! This isn't applicable to dialogue, however, as it has the opposite problem: the degree of cognitive burden to retain the informational value of a statement increases with the increased complexity. There is a limit on how much of this can be done in a given conversation. Increasing complexity of statements to increase their accuracy can cause the ability to comprehend a statement to be reduced. This statement carries a specific assumption of depth of dialogue which may or may not be valid.

I did quite a bit of EEG neurofeedback at the age of about 11 or 12. I may have learned to concentrate a little better, but I'm really not sure. The problem is that once I was off the machine, I stopped getting the feedback!

Consider the following interior monologue:

"Am I relaxing or focusing in the right way? I don't have the beeping to tell me, how do I know I am doing it right?"

In theory, EEG is a truly rational way to learn to relax, because one constantly gets information about how relaxed one is and can adjust one's behavior to maximize rela... (read more)

GilPanama100

A statement like "Women want {thing}" leaves it unclear what the map is even supposed to be, barring clear context cues. This can lead to either fake disagreements or fake agreements.

Fake disagreements ("You said that Republicans are against gun control, but I know some who aren't!") are not too dangerous, I think. X makes the generalization, Y points out the exception, X says that it was a broad generalization, Y asks for more clarity in the future, X says Y was not being sufficiently charitable, and so on. Annoying to watch, but not ... (read more)

0Logos01
I in another subthread referenced the "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" 'fanfic' written by Eliezer, when he mentioned how many fewer digits of Pi rational!Harry knew as compared to rational!Hermione. The point is that I'm concerned not with charity nor with clarity, but rather with sufficiency to the current medium. Each of those little "costs next to nothing" statements actually do have a cost, one that isn't necessarily clear initially. Are you familiar at all with how errors propagate in measurements? Each time you introduce new provisos, those statements affect the "informational value" of each dependent statement in its nest. This creates an analogous situation to the concept of significant digits in discourse. For a topic like lukeprog's, in other words, the difference between 99% and 80% of women is below the threshold of significance. Eliminating it altogether (until such time as it becomes significant) is an important and valuable practice in communication. Failure to effectively exercise that practice will result in needless 'clarifications' distracting from the intended message, hampering dialogs with unnecessary cognitive burden resultant from additional nesting of "informational quanta." In other words; if you add too many provisos to a statement, an otherwise meaningful and useful one will become trivially useless. An example of this in action can be found in another subthread of this conversation where someone stated he felt that there is a 'trend among frequent LessWrongers to over-generalize". This has informational meaning. He later added a 'clarification' that he hadn't intended the statement as an indication of population size, which totally reversed the informational value of his statement from an interesting one to a statement so utterly trivial that it is effectively without meaning or usefulness.

The fact that it sounds accurate is what makes it a funny category error, rather than a boring category error. "2 + 2 = 3 is morally wrong" is not funny. "Deontological ethics is morally wrong" is funny.

It calls to mind a scenario of a consequentialist saying: "True, Deontologist Dan rescued that family from a fire, which was definitely a good thing... but he did it on the basis of an morally wrong system of ethics."

That''s how I reacted to it, anyway. It's been a day, I've had more sleep, and I STILL find the idea funny. Ever... (read more)

GilPanama-10

Cracked you up? Rather than just seeming like a straightforward implication of conflicting moral systems?

I think it is not a straightforward implication at all. Maybe this rephrasing would make the joke clearer:

"A deontological theory of ethics is not actually right. It is morally wrong, in principle."

If that doesn't help:

"It is morally wrong to make decisions for deontological reasons."

What makes it funny is that moment wherein the reader (or at least, this reader) briefly agrees with it before the punchline hits.

2wedrifid
I understand what you intended to be the joke. I just don't think you get it. This is a straightforward implication of having a consequentialist morality. Making moral decisions for deontological reasons and not because of the consequences according to the same value function is, by that standard, immoral. It's not a big deal. Mind you, I have made jokes along the same lines myself at times. With the implication "it's funny 'cos it's true!". I begin to see why it had a mixed reception.

"But what's actually right probably doesn't include a component of making oneself stupid with regard to the actual circumstances in order to prevent other parts of one's mind from hijacking the decision.


What you probably meant: "Rational minds should have a rational theory of ethics; this leads to better consequences."

My late-night reading: "A deontological theory of ethics is not actually right. It is wrong. Morally wrong."

I am not sure what caused me to read it this way, but it cracked me up.

2wedrifid
Cracked you up? Rather than just seeming like a straightforward implication of conflicting moral systems?
5nshepperd
I wonder if it's a coincidence that it's currently late at night and I find myself agreeing with both those readings. "Deontological ethics is morally wrong" sounds about accurate.

This doesn't strike me as an inherently bad objection. Even the post offers the caveat that we're running on corrupt hardware. One can't say that consequentialist theories are WRONG on such grounds, but one can certainly object to the likely consequences of combining ambiguous expected values with brains that do not naturally multiply and are good at imagining fictional futures.

I think the argument can be cut down to this:

  1. In theory, we should act to create the best state of affairs.
  2. People are bad at doing that without predefined moral rules.
  3. Can we at l
... (read more)
GilPanama300

How to step outside the rational box without going off the deep end. Essentially, techniques for maintaining a lifeline back to normality so you can explore the further reaches of the psyche in some degree of safety.

I developed some of these!

I had a manic episode as well, but it was induced by medication and led to hypersocial behavior. I quickly noticed that I was having bizarre and sudden convictions, and started adopting heuristics to deal with them. I thought I was normal, or even better than normal. Then I realized that such a thought was very ab... (read more)

2rysade
Anybody curious about experiencing similar things need only use Marijuana or K-2. Analyzing and overcoming/working around altered mental states is a worthwhile practice, in my opinion. It teaches you to not trust your mind in the way that boot-camp teaches you to be a soldier.
5[anonymous]
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6Skatche
These are great. Do you mind if I incorporate them into the relevant post when the time comes?

This is one reason why I worry about overemphasis on "learning styles" in teaching. Yes, we shouldn't overgeneralize from our own brains to those of others, and different people learn differently. But it's too easy to say that because I am Not a Visual Person, Having Been Born Blind and Treated By Surgery, I therefore can't learn to excel at visual tasks.

This internal sense that I am "not a visual learner" caused me serious difficulty in training to do many tasks, until I learned to just compensate by practicing for a longer period of t... (read more)

1NancyLebovitz
It sounds like generally cultivating an attitude of "how much give is there in this situation?" might be useful.
GilPanama100

In a universe that contained no minds, a clean table and a cluttered table would both be neutral objects, but in the world-simulation that Mary’s brain builds, a cluttered table is obviously bad and cleaning is neutral.

In a universe that contained no minds, a table with an image painted on it that offends most people in this universe's US would also be a neutral object. As it stands, it would not be a good idea to keep such a table uncovered if you were expecting guests and wanted to maintain positive social status.

The same goes for a messy house. It ma... (read more)

0Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
The analogy is good, but I don't think it maps exactly. Second-hand smoke is clinically proven to have negative health effects, whereas mess (in terms of clutter, at least, not filth to the point of arthropod infestation) causes no physical harm. I think that's why I feel strongly that it's NOT okay to smoke in the house as a compromise, but that it should be okay to compromise on cleaning standards.
0Armok_GoB
Arthropod are adorable. ^_^ I don't like to bad messes for other reasons, but I see no disadvantage to roaches, ants, pillbugs, or other free pets and protein sources unless it's that kinds that bits hard enough to hurt.
0Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
Apparently one my roommates and landlady all shared and I didn't. I like clean countertops and clean dishes and I would not like pill-bugs in my room (I almost always did my dishes and I don't leave food or dishes in my room for more than 24 hours) but papers on the desk and clothes on the floor don't bother me at all...in fact, I think I find them vaguely comforting. Messy is not necessarily the same thing as dirty. I think most people don't like dirty, but some people are more okay with messy. If their friends who they have over have higher cleanliness standards, then maybe. Otherwise...most of my friends live in messier houses than I do, and it doesn't bother me at all. Maybe we'll get tidier as we get older and fussier.
2TheOtherDave
FWIW, I've lived with people whose actual preferred level of mess-to-live-in was different. That is, it wasn't that everyone agreed that X level of neatness was better but some people didn't feel like doing the work, it was that person A wanted X level of neatness and was uncomfortable at Y level, and person B wanted Y level of neatness and was uncomfortable at X level. At least, that's how it seemed to me. I suppose if I started out with a stronger prior in favor of the people-prefer-X-level-of-neatness theory, I might find it more plausible that B was either signaling dishonestly or genuinely unaware of their own preferences. (The latter was A's theory about B, expressed as "If they just live in a neat house for a while they'll see how much better it is!") That said, both X and Y were noticeably cleaner than the scavenging-arthropods stage.
GilPanama100

The general US norm is not that drawing the prophet Muhammed is forbidden, it's not that violent videogames are a sin, it's not that the casual treatment of women as nothing but sex objects is unacceptable.

Either I'm being confused by a triple-negative, or we are living in very different contexts. Even people who are avowedly anti-feminist will usually say that casually treating women as nothing but sex objects breaks their norms. They might disagree that a model on a billboard is a sex object.

More generally, the problem is not manufacturing offense whe... (read more)

GilPanama720

Level 1: Trying to deal with problems that cause human suffering.

Level 2: Using programs to help deal with those problems more effectively.

Level 3: Optimizing the way that those programs think and solve problems in general.

Level 4: Figure out better ways to think about programs that think, so that they are not only optimal at problem-solving, but also optimal at not killing us.

Level 5: Sharing essays on how we can be more rational about the level 4 problem without succumbing to bias.

Level 6: Commenting on those essays to support strong conclusions, question weak ones, and make them more memorable and effective by contributing to a community ethos.

Level 7: Upvoting my comment.

1Arkanj3l
Gold.

Thinking of Level 1 actions as maintenance is an excellent analogy.

This talk of swimming suggests another analogy for spending too much time on high level actions:

Overoptimizing is like trying to infer the properties of an optimal raft while you are drowning.

4Strange7
http://robotandghost.com/wp-content/gallery/scp-2010/mindmapping.jpg Like many good ideas, somebody had it before and it was taken as a joke.