All of Stabilizer's Comments + Replies

If you'd like to learn non-backwards-looking philosophy, which is indeed how most philosophy in mainstream American departments is done, then I highly recommend skipping undergraduate courses, which for some weird reason, kinda "talk down" to the students. Instead, I suggest three things:

(1) Just read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Pick a topic you like, such as causation or time or animal ethics, and just read the article or related articles.

(2) Read or skim academic papers or books. Most of them are surprisingly readable, especi... (read more)

You're right: it was probably wrong of me to ask people to only find errors in his reasoning. It is indeed an invitation to fall under the spell of confirmation bias. It would've been better to also ask people to find places where he makes good arguments.

Where I disagree with you is the claim that attacking someone's epistemological method is necessarily the same as attacking the positions they hold. (Though, I agree with you that it might be interpreted that way.) In a different comment, I try to make it clear that my goal was not necessarily to attack pa... (read more)

Stars become invisible at high altitudes because the Earth becomes very bright compared to the stars. This happens because when you are higher up, you see more of the sunlight reflected by the Earth. This happens because at higher altitudes more of the Earth is visible to you. Thus, your eyes or your cameras cannot distinguish the relatively dim light of the stars. The sky still appears black because there is no atmosphere to make the light scatter and give you feeling of being light outside that you experience on the surface of the Earth. You can see the ... (read more)

Thanks. You're right. I mis-interpreted their experiment as written. I'll try to read it again to see what's going on and see if it's explicable.

Sure. His arguments look pretty easy to refute using some basic physics and some Google searches. Let me know if you find any other argument of his that you find particularly compelling and I'll take a crack at it.

You might want to correct: "And we forget so easily that 50 lifetimes ago we were nothing."

Umm... 12000/25 is 480. Not 48. All the other numbers in the discrete human lifetimes section should be multiplied by ten. Not as impressive as you might've thought. Still, kinda impressive I suppose.

I don't have time to refute each of arguments, because there're too many. But consider number 5 in your list. He describes a laser experiment that he claims cannot be accounted for on the current picture of the Earth. But if you think it through, it is perfectly well accounted for.

Here's the version of the experiment performed by the two Polish guys on a lake. They place two stakes 2km apart. The stakes have lasers attached to them at 30 cm height from the surface of the water. They measure the height above the surface of the point at which the laser beam... (read more)

A general point: I fear Adams attributes positions and beliefs and intentions to Trump which, from Trump's actions and public statements, are not justifiably attributable to Trump.

I don't necessarily disagree with all Dark Arts practitioners. By a Dark Arts practitioner, I just mean someone who uses rhetorical techniques to win debate points, without particular regard for the truth. What they're defending may or may not be true.

In the case of Scott Adams, in my view, most of what he is defending is false. But that's a different debate. In this post, I just wanted to highlight the techniques he uses. I try not take a particular position with respect to his claims; I probably don't succeed.

I'm neither a moral relativist nor an episte... (read more)

I wanted to comment here, but the comment became so long that I decided to make it a separate article.

If they appeal to unforeseen connections in the future, then at least one could plausibly reason consequentially for or against it. E.g., you could ask whether the results they discover will remain undiscovered if they don't discover it? Or you could try to calculate what the probability is that a given paper has deep connections down the road by looking at the historical record; calculate the value of these connections; and then ask if the expected utility is really significantly increased by funding more work?

A semiotic-type fallacy occurs when they simp... (read more)

You're right. Making the decision to put down the rebellion might indeed be the right one. My goal is not to say what the correct decision is, but instead to point out that making the decision purely on the semiotics of the situation is fallacious.

In other words, it is at least plausible that the cost of putting down the rebellion is more than the benefit of increased respect in international diplomacy. The right way to make the judgement is to weigh these costs against the benefits. But often, people and institutions and countries make decisions based purely on the symbolic meaning of their actions without explicitly accounting for whether these symbolic acts have consequential backing.

I agree that any disagreement might come down to what we mean by moral claims.

I don't know Boghossian's own particular commitments, but baseline moral realism is a fairly weak claim without any metaphysics of where these facts come from. I quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia:

Moral realism is not a particular substantive moral view nor does it carry a distinctive metaphysical commitment over and above the commitment that comes with thinking moral claims can be true or false and some are true.

A simple interpretation that I can think of: when you say th... (read more)

Right. Unfortunately, we don't really have any other means of obtaining moral knowledge other than via argument, intuition, and experience. Perhaps your point is that we should emphasize intuition less and argument+experience more.

Actually, I don't know if you and Boghossian really disagree here. I think Boghossian is trying to argue that your normative preferences arise from your opinions about what the moral facts are. So I think he'd say:

IEPB: "People ought to do X" is your preference because you are assuming "People ought to do X" is a moral fact. It's a different issue whether your assumption is true or false, or justified or unjustified, but the assumption is being made nevertheless.

For example, when you exhort IEPB to not make mediocre philosophy arguments... (read more)

True listening requires giving up the prerogative of your own mental model. You have to allow them to set the rules of engagement, no matter how bizarre, so that they let their guard down and realize you are not a threat, because you have no intention of blaming them for anything. The way they set these rules will reveal their assumptions and constraints, which thoughts and actions are open to them. If you can tell an authentic story that speaks to these assumptions, you can break through, because stories speak to emotions expressed in the body, which for

The intuitive standard for rational decision-making is carefully considering all available options and taking the best one. At first glance, computers look like the paragons of this approach, grinding their way through complex computations for as long as it takes to get perfect answers. But as we've seen, that is an outdated picture of what computers do: it's a luxury afforded by an easy problem. In the hard cases, the best algorithms are all about doing what makes the most sense in the least amount of time, which by no means involves giving careful consi

If the question, "Which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct?" is posed to physicists, my guess is that the surprisingly popular opinion would be: the Everett interpretation, which in my opinion – and I consider myself a mild expert in the foundations of QM – is the correct one.

In the United States, constructivist views of knowledge are closely linked to such progressive movements as post-colonialism and multiculturalism because they supply the philosophical resources with which to protect oppressed cultures from the charge of holding false or unjustified views.

Even on purely political grounds, however, it is difficult to understand how this could have come to seem a good application of constructivist thought: for if the powerful can’t criticize the oppressed, because the central epistemological categories are inexorably tied to

Just to be clear: In the section you refer to, he is only pointing out that there is a tension between physics's view of time and the intuitive, everyday view of time. He summarizes the view of some continental philosophers who say that this tension means physical laws are wrong. He never claims that he, personally, believes that therefore physical laws are wrong.

Indeed, he notes that physicists have always countered that they can explain, using their theories, why we have the intuitions that we have about time. And actually, David Albert is just such a p... (read more)

I don't think you and the article's author really have a disagreement here. Notice that the author is not trying to tell you what the correct moral facts are. He'd be happy to accept that many proposed moral facts are actually false. He is simply trying to show that whenever we make moral judgements, we are implicitly assuming the existence of some moral facts – erroneous though they might be.

Your view is consistent with the article's. The assumption that one ought to improve the well-being of humans would be a moral fact. The fact that emotional system 1 acquired noisy and approximate knowledge of moral facts would simply mean that evolution can acquire knowledge of moral facts. This is unproblematic: compare, for example, how evolutionarily evolved humans can obtain knowledge of mathematical facts.

For more on this, I recommend this Stanford Encyclopedia article; especially Section 4.

Thank you for this clear and useful answer!

Thanks! It looks very related, and is perhaps exactly the same. I hadn't heard about it till now. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy has a good article on this with different possible resolutions.

Fair enough. Good examples: Hegel --> Marx --> Soviet Union/China. Hegel --> Husserl --> Heidegger <---> Nazism.

The version of Windows following 8.1 will be Windows 10, not Windows 9. Apparently this is because Microsoft knows that a lot of software naively looks at the first digit of the version number, concluding that it must be Windows 95 or Windows 98 if it starts with 9.

Many think this is stupid. They say that Microsoft should call the next version Windows 9, and if somebody’s dumb code breaks, it’s their own fault.

People who think that way aren’t billionaires. Microsoft got where it is, in part, because they have enough business savvy to take responsibility f

I think he's implicitly restricting himself to philosophy. A "grand mistake" in philosophy has little ill effects.

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not hide them -- especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are. The fundamental reaction to any mistake ought to be this: "Well, I won't do that again!" Natural selection doesn't actually think this thought; it just wipes out the goofers before they can reproduce; natural selection won't do that again, at least not as often.

I wish I could give you another upvote for introducing me to the concept of déformation professionnelle.

$30 donated. It may become quasi-regular, monthly.

Thanks for letting us know. I wanted to donate to x-risk, but I didn't really want to give to MIRI (even though I like their goals and the people) because I worry that MIRI's approach is too narrow. FHI's broader approach, I feel, is more appropriate given our current ignorance about the vast possible varieties of existential threats.

Snowden revelations causes people to reduce sensitive Google searches. (HT: Yvain)

I must say that I called it.

Wait, I think the link is missing.

Nobel Prizes, especially in physiology/medicine and economics, are probably more indicative of social impact (which is what I think Bostrom's colleague meant when he used the word "important").

Wow. I'm in theoretical physics and that quote is like a slap in the face. Not saying it is wrong though.

I dunno, thinking about it in terms of "spiritual system" applying in general, and "spiritual" applying to a specific case does not seem like a conflation, in the same way that "set" and "element of set" are distinct.

Not all things referred to in a spiritual system need be spiritual. For example, a spiritual system could say that drinking is not spiritual -- which is what Islam explicitly says. Indeed, associating the tag "spiritual" or "not spiritual" to different activities is one of the main goals of religions.

You nailed it.

therefore drinking is spiritual.

This is the kind of bullshit logic many religions adopt to get from A to B; where A is something innocuous sounding and B is something that sounds profound. It works because thinking is contaminative. In the above example, there was a simple conflation of the concepts behind the words "spiritual system" and "spiritual." Most people won't pick up on that because the two words sound very similar.

Thus, in getting from A to B via a sequence, C,D,E..., all you have to do is slightly change t... (read more)

That one's a misquote. The original is:

Now, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’ — then you should enter & remain in them.

Not exactly a ... (read more)

While I find Venkatesh Rao to be insightful, his writing can be quite frustrating. He seems to be allergic towards speaking plainly. Here is a possible re-write of the above quote:

Slytherin-adepts use human ideals -- like justice, fairness, equality, talent -- to deceive people. They employ these ideals in rhetoric, often to turn attention away from conflicting evidence.

Well...

Just as eating only what one likes is injurious to health, so studying only what one likes spoils the memory, and what is retained isn't very useful.

-Not Da Vinci

Most of the time what we do is what we do most of the time.

-Daniel Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School. The point is that, quite often the reason we're doing something is that that's what we're used to doing in that situation.

Note: He attributes the quote to some other psychologists.

Surgeons finally did upgrade their antiseptic standards at the end of the nineteenth century. But, as is often the case with new ideas, the effort required deeper changes than anyone had anticipated. In their blood-slick, viscera-encrusted black coats, surgeons had seen themselves as warriors doing hemorrhagic battle with little more than their bare hands. A few pioneering Germans, however, seized on the idea of the surgeon as scientist. They traded in their black coats for pristine laboratory whites, refashioned their operating rooms to achieve the exact

So I did read that line. I understood that you need to make it interact with Facebook in order to get 1000 STR back after donating it to MIRI. What I didn't understand was that you also need to make it interact with Facebook in order to get the free 6000 STR that you get for signing up -- as claimed on MIRI's Facebook page.

What confuses me is that cryptocurrencies are supposed to support anonymity. Facebook is the anti-thesis of anonymity.

In order to receive the free Stellar, you need to have a Facebook account. That sucks, because I don't. And I don't want to join Facebook.

A lot of people are pointing out that perhaps it wasn't very wise for you to engage with such commenters. I mostly agree. But I also partially disagree. The negative effects of you commenting there, of course, are very clear. But, there are positive effects as well.

The outside world---i.e. outside the rationalist community and academia---shouldn't get too isolated from us. While many people made stupid comments, I'm sure that there were many more people who looked at your argument and went, "Huh. Guess I didn't think of that," or at least regist... (read more)

What pragmatist said.

Basically the approach of Sebens and Carroll is to show that if observers are present, then they will see outcomes following the Born rule.

In that sense it seems that observers here are no more problematic than the observers of special relativity, where there are claims like if you use clocks to measure time in a moving frame, then you will see time slowing down relative to mine.

If someone from MIRI is reading this: Having the upper-limit of the donation progress-bar truncate in the middle of the blue box is confusing. It makes one feel that you've reached $200K, and that you have to go the rest of the distance of the blue box to actually reach your goal.

I suggest moving <# of Donors> to below the progress-bar (as opposed to where it currently is, which is to the right of the progress bar) and scaling the progress-bar to fit the width of box.

In other words, use the emotional power of doubt to counteract the bias induced by the emotional power of your desire for that theory to be true.

Well, I find the attempt to save a falsely accused man to be much more morally admirable than the attempt to save a justly accused man. Indeed, the fact that child molestation is considered very morally repugnant and carries huge legal and social costs is part of the reason why I feel that any attempt to protect a man from false accusations of child molestation to be very admirable.

To answer your question, I didn't expect (at least, not till now) people's judgement of guilt to be distorted so much by the moral repugnance of the alleged crime. If indeed people do distort this much, I should carefully rethink my understanding of moral intuitions.