I'm not sure what you mean and I'm not sure that I'd let a LWer falsify my hypothesis. There are clear systemic biases LWers have which are relatively apparent to outsiders. Ultimately I am not willing to pay CFAR to validate my claims and there are biases which emerge from people who are involved in CFAR whether as employees or people who take the courses (sunk cost as well as others).
I'd take your bet if it were for the general population, not LWers...
My issue with CFAR is it seems to be more focused on teaching a subset of people (LWers or people nearby in mindspace) how to communicate with each other than in teaching them how to communicate with people they are different from.
I think the Less Wrong website diminished in popularity because of the local meetups. Face to face conversation beats online conversation for most practical purposes. But many Less Wrongers have transitioned to being parents, or have found more professional success so I'm not sure how well the meetups are going now. Plus some of the meetups ban members rather than rationally explaining why they are not welcome in the group. This is a horrible tactic and causes members to limit how they express themselves... which goes against the whole purpose of rationality meetups.
How much will you bet that there aren't better strategies for resolving disagreement?
Given the complexity of this strategy it seems to me like in most cases it is more effective to do some combination of the following:
1) Agree to disagree 2) Change the subject of disagreement 3) Find new friends who agree with you 4) Change your beliefs, not because you believe they are wrong but because other people believe they are wrong. 5) Violence (I don't advocate this in general, but in practice it's what humans do when they have disagreed through history)
Maybe Rand is referering to a specific situation where she knows Branden's thought processes and her statements are correct.
It was about arguing with collectivists (AKA people who were sympathetic to the USSR). Whether she was correct about communism being inferior to capitalism isn't easy to analyze objectively but in a sense history has validated her.
In that case, I wouldn't know. But if it's meant generally enough to be a rationality quote - if it's meant to explain why we get angry at dishonest people - then it's just an unsupported claim
It's s...
I am an intransigent atheist, but not a militant one. This means that I am an uncompromising advocate of reason and that I am fighting for reason, not against religion. I must also mention that I do respect religion in its philosophical aspects, in the sense that it represents an early form of philosophy.
Ayn Rand, to a Catholic Priest.
You lost me at "junk heap."
Sorry you're so averse to negative descriptions of the average person's philosophy.
There is no conscious choice available to a layperson ignorant of philosophy and logic
Yes there is, they can choose what music, TV, movies, videos etc to buy/view/play.
and such ways of life are perfectly copacetic with small-enough communities
Do you mean communities where the leader knows about philosophy and can order people around?
If anything, it is the careful thinker who is more shackled by self-doubt
It's reasonable to ...
Trying to overcome biases takes effort. Wasted effort is bad. It's better to pursue mixed strategies that aim at instrumental rationality
I think you are assuming hyperbolic discounting/short time preference. It requires a lot of effort to overcome bias, perhaps years. But there are times when it is worth it.
than to aim at the perfection described in the Rand quotation
What perfection? Choosing philosophy? You can always update your philosophy.
This argument has gone far away from the original quote. I'm not going to argue about the details. If you want to try to disprove your ability to become successful by using your intelligence, go ahead.
It's very difficult to make economic comparisons between countries while simultaneously acknowledging all of the cultural differences between countries. You can do it, but the results aren't necessarily meaningful.
You just spent half this thread claiming that success is subjective
Really? I'm pretty sure I didn't. Success is hard to define, but that doesn't mean it's subjective.
Bill Gates and James Harrison are going by their own ideas of altruistic success, not yours.
Oh really? Can you read their minds? I've read about Bill Gates motivations and I didn't see the word altruism once. It's all good and well to claim Bill Gates is part of your movement but for all you know he's never heard of it.
Why don't you call Jesus an altruist? Or some other religious figure?
Malnutrition and Starvation are different things. It's much better to be malnourished than to starve. And it's much harder to feed people the optimal food than to just feed them some food...
But you're missing the point. There are successful people in Somalia, if you manage to not be malnourished in Somalia then you are successful (unless you value eating bad food for religious reasons...).
Please tell us more about your inside information on the psychology of Bill and Melinda Gates
I have none. Just an opinion that given my posts downvote counts suggests that I shouldn't share.
Ayn Rand did not invent the term "altruism"?
Neither did the Effective Altruism people. But Ayn Rand's books have sold a lot and are read by influential people, so I'll use her definition until I have a reason not to.
The annual US GDP per capita is $55,036. For Somalia, it's $145
This is availability bias. There are clearly other factors differentiating Somalia and the US. If there weren't, there would be massive starvation in Somalia because you can't get by on $145 a year in the US.
I can assure you that successful people are not born in the US by chance.
Really? Do you think successful people don't have children? And that they don't try to make these children US citizens by 'immigrating' (often illegally) to the USA? I can assure you this happens frequently...
Is that supposed to be funny? The fact that you have a computer means you have won something. I'd be willing to guess that more technologies will emerge and you'll use them. That's like winning a lottery. But you don't get more successful unless you make intelligent decisions. Stupid decisions are punished, there are exceptions to this...
But seriously, lottery is a loaded term. It's often used as a metaphor for 'capitalist trick' (which smart people avoid).
The counterexample is the many people who have succeeded through luck
That's not an example, it's a claim with no evidence to support it. Give me an example of a person who has succeeded with only luck. There are about seven billion candidates so it shouldn't be hard to select one.
Everybody gets lucky sometimes, but they might not get lucky on the really important things
What is really important is subjective.
If you're born to a poor family in Africa, the law of large numbers is not going to make up for this setback.
Time will tell. African peop...
Did you read what you linked to?
"No true Scotsman is an informal fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion.[1] When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim ("no Scotsman would do such a thing"), rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule ("no true Scotsman would do such a thing")"
Where is the counter...
Primarily, by pretending that a "usually" is an "always". "Real success is never accidental" is, empirically, definitely false. "Real success is almost never accidental" would be the less strong, but more correct, version.
That would depend on what you mean by success now wouldn't it? If you believe people who take calculated risks and get unlucky aren't successful, then perhaps you're right. But you can't claim you can make a statement more correct by assuming you know what every word means. Parsing ambiguity is part of rationality. (Though my downvotes would indicate it's not...)
"Don’t let anybody discourage you or tell you that intelligence doesn’t pay or that success in life has to be achieved through dishonesty or through sheer blind luck. That is not true. Real success is never accidental and real happiness cannot be found except by the honest use of your intelligence."
Ayn Rand
Too strong.
Nobody EVER got successful from luck? Not even people born billionaires or royalty?
Nobody can EVER be happy without using intelligence? Only if you're using some definition of happiness that includes a term like "Philosophical fulfillment" or some such, which makes the issue tautological.
"As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown."
Ayn Rand
The only part I object to what you wrote is emotions shouldn't interfere with cognition.
This is an ideal which Objectivists believe in, but it is difficult/impossible to actually achieve. I've noticed that as I've gotten older, emotions interfere with my cognition less and less and I am happy about that. You can define cognition how you wish, but given the number of people who see it as separate from emotion it's probably worth having a backup definition in case you want to talk to those people.
RE: emotions, affect, moods. I do think that emotions s...
If your hunches have a bad track record, then you should learn to ignore them, but if they do work, then ignoring them is irrational.
If your hunches have a good track record, I think you should explore that and come up with a rational explanation, and make sure it's not just a coincidence. Additionally, while following your hunches isn't inherently bad, rational people shouldn't be convinced of an argument merely based on somebody else's hunch.
...Even if emotions are suboptimal tools in virtually all cases (which I find unlikely), that doesn't mean tha
Very interesting... it would seem that Rand doesn't actually define emotion consistently, that was not the definition I was using. But the Ayn Rand Lexicon has 11 different passages related to emotions.
Rand doesn't deny that emotions are part of rationality, she denies that they are tools of rationality. It is rational to try to make yourself experience positive emotions, but to say "I have a good feeling about this" is not a rational statement, it's an emotional statement. It isn't something that should interfere with cognition.
As for emotions affecting humans behavior, I think all mammals have emotions, so it's not easy for humans to discard them over a few generations of technological evolution. Emotions were useful in the ancestral environment, they are no longer as useful as they once were.
I don't know, but if you ask intelligent people what they think about x-risk related to AI it's unlikely they'll come to the exact same conclusions that MIRI etc have.
If you present the ideas of MIRI to intelligent people, some of them will be excited and want to help with donations or volunteering. Others will dismiss you and think you are wrong/crazy.
So to expand on my question... if you find intelligent people who disagree with MIRI on significant things, will you work with them?
OK, so it seems like FLI promotes the conclusions of other x-risk organizations, but doesn't do any actual research itself.
Do you think it's not worth questioning the conclusions that other organizations have come to? Seems to me that if there are four xrisk organizations (each with reasonably strong connections to each other) there should be some debate between them.
MIRI is focusing on technical research into Friendly AI, and their recent mid-2014 strategic plan explicitly announced that they are leaving the public outreach and strategic research to FHI, CSER and FLI. Compared to FHI and CSER, we are less focused on research and more on outreach, which we are well-placed to do given our strong volunteer base and academic connections. Our location allows us to directly engage Harvard and MIT researchers in our brainstorming and decision-making.
What makes facts surprising and is it the same for you and your conversation partner? If they take your question as an insult, you probably have different knowledge of the field in question (they could be completely wrong, or you could be ignorant of something that is well known to some).
I think it's a better idea to explain why you're surprised.
I helped create CFAR, and work every day in the same office as they do, and I still need to talk with the co-founders for several hours before I understand enough detail about CFAR's challenges and opportunities to have advice that I'm decently confident will be useful rather than something they've already tried, or something they have a good reason for not doing, etc.
Having spent a fair amount of time around CFAR staff, in the office and out, I can testify to their almost unbelievable level of self-reflection and creativity. (I recall, several months ago, Julia joking about how much time in meetings was spent discussing the meetings themselves at various levels of meta.) For what it's worth, I can't think of an organization I'd trust to have a greater grasp on its own needs and resources. If they're pushing fundraising, I'd estimate with high confidence that it's because that's where the bottleneck is.
I think donating ...
I think CFAR feels poor enough to prefer money to feedback.
Also they've tried a lot of the obvious things - I had a conversation with Anna where I suggested about 10 things for CFAR to try, they'd already tried about 9, and the 10th wasn't obviously better than the stuff already on their list. Maybe you're smarter than me, though :)
Interesting article. But I do not see how the article supports the claim its title makes.
I think there's a connection between bucket errors and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.