All of whowhowho's Comments + Replies

Phlogiston. Falsified because combusted materials gain weight.

0JoshuaZ
Ah, I was confused by your statement and thought that "it" meant string theory.
whowhowho-10

To a non string theorist, string theory seems like a theory which makes few testable predictions, like phlogiston

it made testable predictions and was falsified for them. There are a lot of retrodictive and purely theoretical constraints on a candidate ToE, they have to be pretty good just to be in the running.

2JoshuaZ
Do you have specific examples in mind?
whowhowho-20

What? I really didn't understand that.

2JohnWittle
To a non string theorist, string theory seems like a theory which makes few testable predictions, like phlogiston. That's the feel I got from it from whenever I read all the relevant Wikipedia articles, anyway. If it is not like phlogiston, but actually useful for designing experiments, then obviously I concede. My annoyance came from the fact that my 06:45:05 comment got a few down votes, while the parent got deleted for reasons unknown. I can't remember who the parent was, or what it said, and it bothers me that they deleted their post, while I feel an obligation to not delete my own downvote-gathering comment for reasons like honesty and the general sense that I really meant what the comment said at the time, which makes it useful for archival purposes.
whowhowho-10

Shminux's arguments have screened off his authority, and then some.

That isn't a fact. I don't see anything going on here except the same blind side-taking as before.

4Eliezer Yudkowsky
I affirm wedrifid's instruction to change your posting style or leave LW.
8Shmi
Please consider whether this exchange is worth your while. Certainly wasn't worth mine.

The majority of physicists working on those kinds of questions are using some form of M-theory of string theory. The next nearest rival is Loop Quantum Gravity. Other theories are minority views. M-theory is favoured because milage can be got out of it in terms of research. The metaphor or a random grab into hypothesis-space isn't appropriate.

2JohnWittle
Without knowing anything in particular about the difference between Quantum Loop Gravity or why M-theory is useful, I concede the point, although I'm a bit annoyed that I feel obligated to leave my comment there to collect negative karma while the parent, whoever they were, felt no similar obligation and removed any context my comment might be placed in.

Except that poor white neighborhoods are much safer then poor black neighborhoods

...in the US.

Um, now that you mention it, this is not a bad description of the politics of a number of African nations.

It's not at all good. A few rich people exploiting a lot of poor ones is not the same as a few poor people robbing a few wealthier ones. And,it is not as if the politics of most African countries now is so very different from the politics of most European ones up until a few centuries ago; There's no gene for fair government either.

is more concerned with politics than truth...is more concerned with politics than truth.

And that's a bad thing? Trying to translate Hard Science directly into real-world action without considering the ethical, social and political consequences would be disastrous. We need something like social science.

0Eugine_Nier
If your goal is having an accurate model of the world, yes. If you're goal is something else, you're still better of with an accurate model of them world. Edit: If you want to do politics, that's also important, just don't pretend you're doing science even "soft science".
whowhowho-10

I will point out, for a third time, that "not on (narrowly construed) facts alone" does not mean "not on facts at all".

0Eugine_Nier
In that case the correct response is the present the relevant additional facts, not attempt to suppress the facts that are too "narrowly construed".

You need to establish some truths before worrying about the consequences. Scientific facts need controls, for instance. When have you shown any interest in controlling for the effects of environment?

2Eugine_Nier
I never said I knew what caused the racial differences in question. There are certainly policy issues where the cause is relevant (incidentally addressing it requires admitting that the differences exist), there are issues where it's less relevant. Incidentally, in the example I sited in the great-grandparent it was the anthropologists who had declared that official policy was to deny all environmental explanations.

[shrugs]. You construed riots in a sweepingly negative way as "blackmail". The fact that I do not agree does not mean I am construing them in a sweepingly positive way. This is as a pattern you have repeated throughout this discussion, and it illustrates how politics mindkills.

2Eugine_Nier
If a policy is good, a riot against it is blackmail. If a policy is bad, you shouldn't be pursuing it riot or no riot. Thus the hypothetical existence of riots shouldn't affect which policies one pursues. Frankly, I have hard time believing "leading to riots" is your true rejection of the policies in question.

there are still good game theoretic/decision theoretic reasons not to respond to blackmail.

I am glad that the tyrants of the past did not know of them, or you and I would not now enjoy freedom and democracy.

0Eugine_Nier
Yes, and I'm also glad Hitler's megalomania interfered with the effectiveness of the German army.
-2Eugine_Nier
Are you also glad the Eisenhower did when he sent the national guard to enforce integration?
whowhowho-20

Please provide proof. Please don't point, yet again, to the highly debatable "solution" to FW.

0Shmi
What kind of proof would you accept?
0Shmi
Yes.
whowhowho-10

"if we implement such-and-such policies, people will riot" is a fact of a sort, but not the sort that is discovered in a laboratory.

-2Eugine_Nier
Then where did you get the evidence to assert it with such high confidence? (This isn't meant to be a rhetorical question.) Also, is this really the best example you could come up with? The problem with this example is that even if the fact in question is true, there are still good game theoretic/decision theoretic reasons not to respond to blackmail.
-2TimS
If you want social science to be taken seriously, you do your cause a disservice by asserting social science is different in kind from so-called "hard science." Edit: In fact, Eugine_Nier's argument here is that social science is not rigorous enough to be worth considering. You don't advance true belief by asserting that social science does not need to be rigorous. And just in case it isn't clear, the ability to replicate an experiment is not required for a scientific field to be rigorous. (Just look at astro-physics: It isn't like we can cue up a supernova on command to test our hypothesis). It is preferable, but not necessary.

If we dont' base policy on (narrowly construed, laboratory-style) facts alone, we use other things in additiojn. Like ethics and practicallity.

0Eugine_Nier
In the great-great-grandparent you make the extremely strong assertion that some facts have such bad implications that reflecting on them causes more harm than good, this raises the question of how can you know which facts have this property without reflecting on them? Also what do you mean by "ethics"? Do you mean the ethics in the LW-technical sense of ethical injunction or in the non-technical sense of morality?
-2TimS
For your reference, I have no idea what Lauryn is talking about.
-2TimS
As an attorney, my experience is that the distinction between literal words and communicated meaning is very artificial. One canon of statutory construction is the absurdity principle (between two possible meanings, pick the one that isn't absurd). But that relies on context beyond the words to figure out what is absurd. Eloquent version of this point here.
whowhowho-30

ETA: What's unclear about "not on facts alone"?

It's the reader's responsibility to read your words, and read all your words, and not to imagine other words. Recently, someone paraphrased a remark of mine with two "maybe"'s I had used deleted and a "necessarily" I hadn't used inserted. Was that my fault?

4TimS
Beware of expecting short inferential distances.
-2Lauryn
Now the thing with that logic is that 97% of the world is made up of idiots (Probably a little higher than that, actually.) I do agree that it's their fault if they misquote it, not your own, but let's say you put an unclear statement in a self help book. Those books are generally read by the, ah, lower 40th percentile (Or around thereabouts), or just by really sad people- either way, they're more emotionally unstable than normal. Now that we have the perfect conditions for a blowup, let's say you said something like 'It's your responsibility to be happy' in that book, meaning that you and only you can make yourself happy. Your emotionally unstable reader, however, read it as it was said and took a huge hit to their self-confidence. Do you see how it isn't always the reader's job?

I don't see why anyone would read "not on facts alone" as "not on facts at all".

2Eugine_Nier
You didn't define what you mean by "narrowly construed" facts, but from context it seems like you're saying I don't like these particular facts therefore I want an excuse to ignore them.
-2TimS
I don't really have a very productive response. The general rule is that your responsibility is to be clear - it is not your reader's responsibility to decipher you.
whowhowho-20

Well, I did say "narrowly construed" facts.

2TimS
Your post is very susceptible to the construction: You could object that this is not a charitable reading. But in the context of this discussion, it is hard to tell how to read you charitably while ensuring that you would still endorse the interpretation.
whowhowho-30

Well, then we have it: they are special.

Subjectively, but not objectively.

Says who?

Whoever failed to equip Clippy with the appropriate oracle when stipulating Clippy.

whowhowho-20

So if we don't base our politics on facts

I was arguing against basing policy on (narrowly construed) facts alone.

0Eugine_Nier
You didn't answer my question.
4TimS
This is a purely terminological point: A substantial percentage of the folks in this forum think moral propositions are a kind of fact. I think they are wrong, but my usage (moral values are not empirical facts) is an idiosyncratic usage in this venue. In short, I'm not sure if you are disagreeing with the local consensus, or simply using a different vocabulary. Until you and your interlocutors are using the same vocabulary, continuing disagreement is unlikely to be productive. In short, I think basically everyone agrees that public policy is the product of the combination of scientific fact (including historical fact and sociological fact) and moral values. But because of disagreements on the meta-ethical and philosophy of science level, there is widespread disagreement on what my applause light sentence means in practice.
whowhowho-10

It could mean you don't translate scientific findings about groups directly into policy without considering ethical and practical implications. It could mean that treating people as individuals should be the default. It could mean there is nonetheless a case for treating people as groups where they were discriminated against as groups in the past.

whowhowho-40

Again; you are observing correlations between socio-economic status and behaviour, and socio economic status happens to coincide with race in the US. African nations are not inhabited by legions of muggers all mugging each other, and there is no gene for mugging.

5wedrifid
Not specifically. There are certainly genes for aggression, impulse control, empathy, violence and sociopathy in general. I make no claims about the distribution thereof by race but this (connoted) argument is terrible. For the intents and purposes used here yes, there are 'genes for mugging'.
-2Eugine_Nier
Except that poor white neighborhoods are much safer then poor black neighborhoods. Um, now that you mention it, this is not a bad description of the politics of a number of African nations.
whowhowho-30

What is specialness, anyway?

I think that breaks down into what is subjective specialness, and what is objective specialness.

Clippy wants there to be as many paper clips as possible.

Which is to implicitly treat them as special or valuable in some way.

Clippy's stopping to care about paper clips is arguably not conducive there being more paperclips, so from Clippy's caring about paper clips, it follows that Clippy doesn't want to be altered so that it doesn't care about paper clips anymore.

Which leaves Clippy in a quandary. Clippy can't predict wh... (read more)

1Creutzer
What kind of answer is that? Well, then we have it: they are special. Clippy does not want them because they are special. Clippy wants them, period. Brute fact. If that makes them special, well, you have all the more problem. Says who?
0wedrifid
And some evidence for fair-mindedness.
whowhowho-30

eg:

  • It's not being upvoted by regulars/believers. It's a magnet for dissidents, and transient visitors with negative perceptions of SI.

  • It's high-profile,so it needs to be upvoted to put on a show of fair-mindedness.

2AlexMennen
I'm a regular, and I was impressed with it. Many other regulars have also said positive things about it, so possible explanation 1 is out. And unless I'm outright lying to you, 2, if true, would have to be entirely subconscious.
6Kawoomba
All possible. However, if you can explain anything, the explanation counts for nothing. The question is which explanation is the most likely, and "there is evidence for fair-mindedness (but it is mostly fake!)" is more contrived than "there is evidence for fair-mindedness", as an explanation for the upvotes of OP.
whowhowho-10

I did not say that non-reductionism is absurd. I said that "recognizing the absurdity of all other proposed hypotheses is another way of coming about the correct beliefs".

Nonetheless, I do think that non-reductionism is absurd. I cannot imagine a universe which is not reductionistic.

Can you explain to me how it might work?

One formulation of reductionism is that natural laws can be ordered in a hierarchy, with the higher-level laws being predictable from, or reducible to, the lower ones. So emergentism, in the cognate sense, not working would... (read more)

1Creutzer
I have a feeling that you're overstretching this notion of objectivity. It doesn't matter, though. Specialness doesn't enter into it. What is specialness, anyway? Clippy doesn't want to do special things, or to fulfill special beings' preferences. Clippy wants there to be as many paper clips as possible. It does. Clippy's stopping to care about paper clips is arguably not conducive there being more paperclips, so from Clippy's caring about paper clips, it follows that Clippy doesn't want to be altered so that it doesn't care about paper clips anymore. Yes, but those people don't try to make such weird arguments as you find in the Groundwork, where Kant essentially tries to get morality out of thin air.

For example, we don't actually evaluate each individual's level of maturity before judging, for that individual, whether they're permitted to purchase alcohol, sign contracts, vote in elections, drive cars, etc...

On the other hand, job interviewers judge by individual quaifications, not group membership..

0TheOtherDave
Or at least, they can do so with minimal investment. Agreed. I'm not sure what the relationship between job interviews and public policy is, though.

If history and practice led to blacks being treated as if the mean IQ was 20 points lower, and the actual difference is 5 points, then the proper public policy is to act as if the difference is 5 points, not zero points to remedy the history and practice.

Why isn't the proper public policy to treat people as individuals?

You didn't answer my question about treating other things as equal. If genetics based discrimination leads to $X million lost in strikes and rioting, shoulnd't that be taken into account?

*

0Eugine_Nier
What does this mean in practice? Does this mean employers should be free to hire any individual they choose?
1TimS
Let's compare two different types of employment discrimination law (in the US). For simplicity, let's ignore the burden of proof. Racial Discrimination: It is illegal to consider an employee's (or potential employee's) race when making an employment decision. If a person is fired, but would not have been fired if the person were a different race, the employer has committed wrongful termination. (Substitute "hire," "promote," or basically any other employment decision - the rule is unchanged). Disability Discrimination: First, the disabled employee must be able to perform the job, with or without accommodations. Then, the employer must make reasonable (but not unreasonable) accommodations. I think it is reasonably clear that disability discrimination law is more individualized. If there really were differences based on race / ethnicity, then I think racial discrimination law ought to look more like disability discrimination law. But I think there aren't such differences, so I think the law as written is basically right. Seems like this is a question of baseline. Who said we should respect rioting? Or rioting is likely to result from treating people differently based on their actual genetic differences. ---------------------------------------- Just to be clear, I don't practice employment law. I practice a very narrow kind of child disability law. Reading this post does not make me your lawyer.
6TheOtherDave
Staying out of the racial-politics discussion, but my answer to this question generally is that it's expensive. For example, we don't actually evaluate each individual's level of maturity before judging, for that individual, whether they're permitted to purchase alcohol, sign contracts, vote in elections, drive cars, etc.... instead we establish age-based cutoffs and allow the occassional outlier. We understand perfectly well that these cutoffs are arbitrary and don't actually reflect anything about the affected individuals; at best they reflect community averages but often not even that, but we do it anyway because we want to establish some threshold and evaluating individuals costs too much. But, sure, bring the costs down far enough (or treat costs as distinct from propriety) and the proper public policy is to separately evaluate individuals.

Are you assuming all other things are equal? They never are.

7TimS
If history and practice led to blacks being treated as if the mean IQ was 20 points lower, and the actual difference is 5 points, then the proper public policy is to act as if the difference is 5 points, not zero points to remedy the history and practice. I suspect that g is not interestingly different between race / ethnicity, and that the IQ test, which seeks to measure g, is culturally biased. But if there is a difference in g that cannot be attributed to environment, then we should consider it in making policy. In the real world, I think all the important observed difference is culturally driven, so this nod towards facts doesn't change my policy preferences. I think the facts are in my favor. I just think that we should be explicit about how policy should change if the facts turn out to be different.

I am not arguing that Affirmative Action/Positice Discrimination is necessarily right. Just that it doesn't necessarily have anything at all to do with any facts about DNA.

4TimS
If actually significant differences in competence have a genetic component, then public policy should reflect that difference. Particularly if the differences are easy / cheap to identify anyway. (I don't think this is true about race / ethnicity, but that's a different issue). Otherwise, our preferred policies won't work in the Least Convenient Possible World.

If someone was wrongfully executed, killed in a medical bliunder, etc, it is typically their families who are compensated.

2TimS
It is morally right to do so. But society is deeply conflicted about doing so (for reasons good and bad), so I'm not sure that "typical" is an accurate description of how often it happens. Regardless of the frequency of compensation, you really should address head on why you think society should do so. The fact that society occasionally does provide such compensation is barely the beginning of the discuss of whether it should and says almost nothing about how much compensation should be provided, or who should pay. To put it slightly differently, Eugine_Nier is not wrong when he asserts anti-discrimination laws impose significant cost on society as a whole. I think the benefits are worth the costs, but that is a fact-bound inquiry, not a statement of first principles.

Politics isn't a value-free reflection of nature. The disvalue of reflecting a fact politically might outweigh the value. For instance, people aren't the same in their political judgement, but everyone gets one vote, for instance.

0Eugine_Nier
So if we don't base our politics on facts, what should we base it on? This isn't a purely rhetorical question, I can think of several ways to answer it (each of which also has other implications) and am curious what your answer is. As for your example, that's because one-man-one-vote is a more workable Schelling point since otherwise you have the problem of who decides which people have better political judgement.
whowhowho-30

But they are still laws of physics,

Microphysical laws map microphysical states to other microphysical states.Top-down causation maps macrophysical states to microphysical states.

Such laws are still fundamental laws, on the lowest level of the universe.

In the sense that they are irreducible, yes. In the sense that they are concerned only with microphyics, no.

Ergo, a reductionistic universe is also deterministic from a probabilistic standpoint, i.e. the lowest level properties and laws can tell you exactly what to anticipate, and with how much s

... (read more)
1JohnWittle
Can you name any examples of such a phenomenon? Oh, well in that case quantum physics throws determinism out the window for sure. I still think there's something to be said for correctly assigning subjective probabilities to your anticipations such that 100% of the time you think something will happen with a 50% chance, it happens half the time, i.e. you are correctly calibrated. An unbounded agent in our universe would be able to achieve such absolutely correct calibration; that's all I meant to imply.
whowhowho-10

"Holistic" seems to label that phenomenon more clearly, for my money.

whowhowho-10

Accurate beliefs about what? If a group (however defined) has been subject to negative discrimination, however arbitrary, then there is an argument for treating them to a period of positive discrimination to compensate. That has nothing to do with how jusitfied the original negative discrimination was.

1A1987dM
But “black people in 1960” (for example) isn't the same group as “black people today”, as many of the former are dead now and many of the latter hadn't been born in 1960, and it's not obvious to me that it makes sense to treat people according on who their grandparents were.
whowhowho-30

eg: being macrscopic, featuring only in the special sciences

whowhowho-10

First, off you needed about 5 "in the US"'s above.

Second: you're part of the problem. If you want to discuss socio-cultural-polical problems in the US, discuss them as such. Say "we have problems with populations of the urban poor". We have problems with the urban poor too, and they don't coincide with race. Given the way you have described the problem above, your initial approach of kicking off discussion of the problem by talking about genetic differences is exactly the wrong one -- it will block off sensible discussion, and it isn't... (read more)

2Eugine_Nier
Mead is just some random blogger. Witness the reaction that occurred when Philadelphia magazine published an article on a similar topic.
whowhowho-30

No it isn't?

Yes it is.

"A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is in some sense more than the "sum" of the properties of the system's parts. An emergent property is said to be dependent on some more basic properties (and their relationships and configuration), so that it can have no separate existence. However, a degree of independence is also asserted of emergent properties, so that they are not identical to, or reducible to, or predictable from, or deducible from their bases. The different ways in which the independence req... (read more)

2JohnWittle
This all this means is that, in addition to the laws which govern low-level interactions, there are different laws which govern high-level interactions. But they are still laws of physics, they just sound like "when these certain particles are arranged in this particular manner, make them behave like this, instead of how the low-level properties say they should behave". Such laws are still fundamental laws, on the lowest level of the universe. They are still a part of the code for reality. But you are right: Which is what I said: Ergo, a reductionistic universe is also deterministic from a probabilistic standpoint, i.e. the lowest level properties and laws can tell you exactly what to anticipate, and with how much subjective probability.
1Kindly
I'm a bit confused. What exactly defines a "higher-level" property, if not that it can be reduced to lower-level properties?
whowhowho-30

That is what it means to posit reductionism; that from an information theoretical standpoint, you can make entirely accurate predictions about a system with only knowledge about its most basic level of perspective.

That's a fusion of reductionism and determinism. Reductionism ins't necessarily false in an indeterministic universe. What is more pertinent is being able to predict higher level properties and laws from lower level properties and laws. (synchronously, in the latter case).

4JohnWittle
No it isn't? I did not mean you would be able to make predictions which came true 100% of the time. I meant that your subjective anticipation of possible outcomes would be equal to the probability of those outcomes, maximizing both precision and accuracy.

That's barely half an argument. You would need to believe that there are significant between-group differences AND that they are significant AND that they should be relevant to policy or decision making in some way. You didn't argue the second two points there, and you haven't elsewhere.

0TimS
I'm with you on the first two, but if the trait is interesting enough to talk about (intelligence, competence, or whatever), isn't that enough for consideration in policy making? If it isn't worth considering in making policy, why are we talking about the trait?
9Creutzer
Well, if you want to put it that way, maybe it does no harm. The crucial thing is just that optimizing for rationality as an instrumental value with respect to terminal goal X just is optimizing for X. I don't have to mean anything by it, I don't use the words "subjectivity" or "objectivity". But if basing beliefs on evidence is what you mean by being objective, everybody here will of course agree that it's important to be objective. So your central claim translates to "In view of the evidence available to Clippy, there is nothing special about Clippy or clips". That's just plain false. Clippy is special because it is it (the mind doing the evaluation of the evidence), and all other entities are not it. More importantly, clips are special because it desires that there be plenty of them while it doesn't care about anything else. Clippy's caring about clips does not mean that it wants clips to be special, or wants to believe that they are special. Its caring about clips is a brute fact. It also doesn't mind caring about clips; in fact, it wants to care about clips. So even if you deny that Clippy is special because it is at the center of its own first-person perspective, the question of specialness is actually completely irrelevant. By being very incomprehensible... I may well be mistaken about that, but I got the impression that even contemporary academic philosophers largely think that the argument from the Groundwork just doesn't make sense.
0[anonymous]
Well, if you want to put it that way, maybe it does no harm. The crucial thing is just that optimizing for rationality as an instrumental value with respect to terminal goal X just is optimizing for X. I don't have to mean anything by it, I don't use the words "subjectivity" or "objectivity". But if basing beliefs on evidence is what you mean by being objective, everybody here will of course agree that it's important to be objective. So your central claim translates to "In view of the evidence available to Clippy, there is nothing special about Clippy or clips". That's just plain false. Clippy is special because it is it (the mind doing the evaluation of the evidence), and all other entities are not it. More importantly, clips are special because it desires that there be plenty of them while it doesn't care about anything else. By being very incomprehensible... I may well be mistaken about that, but I got the impression that even contemporary academic philosophers largely think that the argument from the Groundwork just doesn't make sense.
whowhowho-10

Comparing outcomes of existing systems would be good, assuming that you have multiple systems used by the same population. Some countries have this data, other countries don't. For example, if majority of schools in a country follows a government blueprint, and only a few alternative schools are allowed to coexist, it is not obvious whether the differences between their results are caused by different education, or simply by a selection bias (alternative schools are chosen by parents who are more interested in their child's education).

If one is trying ... (read more)

4Creutzer
No. He just has to care about what he's trying to optimize for. Taboo "objectivity". (I suspect you have a weird folk notion of objectivity that doesn't actually make much sense.) Yes, but it's still weird. Also, no-one who has done (only) moral philosophy 101 has understood it at all; which I think is kind of telling.
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