Open thread, July 28 - August 3, 2014

I recently made a dissenting comment on a biggish, well-known-ish social-justice-y blog. The comment was on a post about a bracelet which one could wear and which would zap you with a painful (though presumably safe) electric shock at the end of a day if you hadn't done enough exercise that day. The post was decrying this as an example of society's rampant body-shaming and fat-shaming, which had reached such an insane pitch that people are now willing to torture themselves in order to be content with their body image.

I explained as best I could in a couple of shortish paragraphs some ideas about akrasia and precommitment in light of which this device made some sense. I also mentioned in passing that there were good reasons to want to exercise that had nothing to do with an unhealthy body image, such as that it's good for you and improves your mood. For reasons I don't fully understand, these latter turned out to be surprisingly controversial points. (For example, surreally enough, someone asked to see my trainer's certificate and/or medical degree before they would let me get away with the outlandish claim that exercise makes you live longer. Someone else brought up the weird edge ... (read more)

[-]pianoforte61110y510

but we had entirely different background assumptions about how one makes a case for said position. There was a near-Kuhnian incommensurability between us.

This is very frustrating and when I realize it is happening, I stop the engagement. In my experience, rationalists are not that different from smart science or philosophy types because we agree on very basic things like the structure of an argument and the probabilistic nature of evidence. But in my experience normal people are very difficult to have productive discussions with. Some glaring things that I notice happening are:

a) Different definitions of evidence. The Bayesian definition of evidence is anything that makes A more likely than not A. But for many people, evidence is anything that would happen given A. For example a conspiracy theorist might say "Well of course they would deny it if were true, this only proves that I'm right".

b) Aristotelianism: the idea that every statement is either true or false and you can prove statements deductively via reasoning. If you've reasoned that something is true, then you've proved it so it must be true. Here is a gem from an Aristotelian friend of mine "The people in ... (read more)

[-]sediment10y200

Sightings:

Arguments that aren't actually arguments: argument by tribal affiliation was certainly in full force, as well as a certain general condescension bordering on insult.
Statistical illiteracy: in an only minor variant of your hypothetical exchange, I said that very few people are doing too much exercise (tacitly, relative to the number of people who are doing too little), to which someone replied that they had once overtrained to their detriment, as if this disproved my point.

I was also struck by how weird it was that people were nitpicking totally incidental parts of my post, which, even if granted, didn't actually deduct from the essence of what I was saying. This seemed like a sort of "argument by attrition", or even just a way of saying "go away; we can tell you're not one of us."

A general pattern I've noticed: when processing an argument to which they are hostile, people often parse generalizations as unsympathetically as they can. General statements which would ordinarily pass without a second thought are taken as absolutes and then "disproved" by citations of noncentral examples and weird edge cases. I think this is pretty bad faith, and it seems common enough. Do we have a name for it? (I have to stop myself doing it sometimes.)

Your symbolic arguments made me laugh.

[-]Toggle10y250

Social justice, apropos of the name, is largely an exercise in the manipulation of cultural assumptions and categorical boundaries- especially the manipulation of taboos like body weight. We probably shouldn't expect the habits and standards of the social justice community to be well suited to factual discovery, if only because factual discovery is usually a poor way to convince whole cultures of things.

But the tricky thing about conversation in that style is that disagreement is rarely amicable. In a conversation where external realities are relevant, the 'winner' gets social respect and the 'loser' gets to learn things, so disagreement can be mutually beneficial happy event. But if external realities are not considered, debate becomes a zero-sum game of social influence. In that case, you start to see tactics pop up that might otherwise feel like 'bad faith.' For example, you win if the other person finds debate so unpleasant that they stop vocalizing their disagreement, leaving you free to make assertions unopposed. On a site like Less Wrong, this result is catastrophic- but if your focus is primarily on the spread of social influence, then it can be an acceptable cost (or... (read more)

6Vulture10y

Upvoted for being a plausible, fully charitable explanation of Social Justice rhetorical norms, which I had been unthinkingly categorizing as "Dumb/Evil For No Reason" despite the many highly intelligent people involved.

3Scott Garrabrant10y

I am very curious to what extent this is true, and would appreciate any evidence people have in either direction. What is the cause of this? Is it just random fluctuation in culture that reinforce themselves? Perhaps I do not notice these problems in non social justice people just because they do not have an issue they care enough about to argue in this way. Perhaps, It is just availability bias as I spend too much time reading things social justice people say. Perhaps it is a function of the fact that the memes they are talking have this idea that they are being oppressed which makes them more fearful of outsiders.

6zedzed10y

I'd call it being uncharitable. Extremely so, in this case. Salviati: blah blah blah Exercise increases lifespan blah blah blah Simplicio: THAT'S NOT TRUE THERE EXISTS AN EXCEPTION YOUR ENTIRE ARGUMENT IS INVALID Because we're talking about being uncharitable, let's be charitable for a moment. Simplicio, in fact, made the mathematically proper counterargument: he produced a counterexample to a for-all claim. And finding one flaw with a mathematical proof is, in fact, sufficient to disregard the entire thing. Clearly, though, Simplicio's argument is horrible and nobody should ever make it. If we check out the errata for Linear Algebra Done Right, we find that Dr. Axler derped some coefficients on page 81. His proof is incorrect, but any reasonable person can easily see how the coefficients were derped and what the correct coefficients were, and it's a trivial matter to change the proof to a correct proof. Analogously, the proper response to an argument that's technically incorrect, but has an obvious correct argument that you know the author was making even if they phrased it poorly, is to replace the incorrect argument with the correct argument, not scream about the incorrect argument. Anyone who does anything differently should have their internet privileges revoked. It's more than a trivial inconvenience to write (and read) "the overwhelming scientific consensus indicates that, for most individuals, increasing exercise increases lifespan, although there's a few studies that may suggest the opposite, and there's a few outliers for whom increased exercise reduces lifespan" instead of "exercise increases lifespan". So, now our argument looks like Salviati: blah blah blah Exercise increases lifespan blah blah blah Simplicio: THAT'S NOT TRUE THERE EXISTS AN EXCEPTION YOUR ENTIRE ARGUMENT IS INVALID Salviati: Principle of charity, bro Now, if Simplicio applies principle of charity, then they'll never make arguments like that again, and we've resolved the probl

[-]A1987dM10y190

In regular English, “exercise increases lifespan” doesn't mean ‘all exercise increases lifespan’ any more than “ducks lay eggs” means ‘all ducks [including males] lay eggs’.

4sediment10y

Well, there's a frustrating sort of ambiguity there: it's able to pivot between the two in an uncomfortable way which leaves one vulnerable to exploits like the above.

8fubarobfusco10y

Sure, and it's also vulnerable to abuse from the other side: "I have bogosthenia and can't exercise because my organs will fall out if I do. How should I extend my lifespan?" "You should exercise! Exercise increases lifespan!" "But my organs!" "Are you saying exercise doesn't increase lifespan? All these studies say it does!" "Did they study people with no organs?" "Why are you bringing up organs again? Exercise increases lifespan. If you start telling people it doesn't, you're going to be responsible for N unnecessary deaths per year, you quack." "... organs?"

3sediment10y

Totally right.

2Jiro10y

I see this in lots of places where it's clearly not an argument by attrition. There's a sizable fraction of people on the Internet who are just over-literal.

2A1987dM10y

There's this issue though -- what matters is not the fraction of people who exercise too much among the general population, is the fraction of people who exercise too much among the people you're telling to exercise more to.

3Luke_A_Somers10y

Not even that. It's the fraction of people who have known someone who thought they exercised too much at least once in their lives.

[-]IlyaShpitser10y120

It's a first contact situation. You need to establish basic things first, e.g. "do you recognize this is a sequence of primes," "is there such a thing as 'good' and 'bad'," "how do you treat your enemies," etc.

3A1987dM10y

“Aren't you afraid of flying after that plane was shot down?” “No; flying is still much safer than driving, even taking terrorist attacks into account.” “But that plane was shot down!!!”

0Creutzer10y

Sorry for being nit-picky, but that is partly linguistic illiteracy on Salviati's part. Natural language conditionals are not assertible if their antecedent is false. Thus, by asserting "If A then B", he implies that A is possible, with which Simiplicio might reasonably disagree.

3pianoforte61110y

Usually in these exchanges the truth value of A is under dispute. But it is nevertheless possible to make arguments with uncertain premises to see if the argument actually succeeds given its premises. "But A isn't true" is also a common response to counterfactual conditionals - especially in thought experiments.

5fubarobfusco10y

Well, sometimes thought-experiments are dirty tricks and merit having their premises dismissed. "If X, Y, and Z were all true, wouldn't that mean we should kill all the coders?" "Well, hypothetically, but none of X, Y, and Z are true." "Aha! So you concede that there are certain circumstances under which we should kill all the coders!" My preferred answer being: "I can't occupy the epistemic state that you suggest — namely, knowing that X, Y, and Z are true with sufficient confidence to kill all the coders. If I ended up believing X, Y, and Z, it's more likely that I'd hallucinated the evidence or been fooled than that killing all the coders is actually a good idea. Therefore, regardless of whether X, Y, and Z seem true to me, I can't conclude that we should kill all the coders." But that's a lot more subtle than the thought-experiment, and probably constitutes fucking tedious in a lot of social contexts. The simplified version "But killing is wrong, and we shouldn't do wrong things!" is alas not terribly convincing to people who don't agree with the premise already.

1Richard_Kennaway10y

There are other ways of saying it. I think Iain Banks said it pretty well.

3sediment10y

Can you give a quick example with the blanks filled in? I'm interested, but I'm not sure I follow.

4Creutzer10y

A: If John comes to the party, Mary will be happy. (So there is a chance that Mary will be happy.) B: But John isn't going to the party. (So your argument is invalid.)

1A1987dM10y

That's what the subjunctive is for. If A had said “If Jon came to the party, Mary would be happy”, ...

1Creutzer10y

The same thing can still happen with a subjunctive conditional, though. A: If John came to the party, Mary would be happy. (So we could make Mary happy by making John come to the party.) B: But John isn't going to the party, no matter what we do. (So your argument is invalid.) Also, pace George R. R. Martin, the name is still spelled John. Sorry, no offense, I just couldn't resist. :)

6gjm10y

Jon -- short for Jonathan -- was a perfectly good name long before George R R Martin.

3Creutzer10y

Ah, thanks. I didn't know that existed as a short form for Jonathan, and inferred that it was merely another instance of his distorting English spelling in names and titles.

1Luke_A_Somers10y

It depends why Salvati is bringing it up. "If X(t), then A(t+delta). If A(t') then B(t'+delta')." "But, not A(now)!"

1Creutzer10y

Even with such a generic conditional (where t and t' are, effectively, universally quantified), the response can make sense with the following implied point: So not "B(now+delta')", hence we can't draw any presently relevant conclusions from your statement, so why are you saying this? It may or may not be appropriate to dispute the relevance of the conditional in this way, depending on the conversational situation.

3Luke_A_Somers10y

Let me rephrase that with more words: "If we do X, then A will happen. If A happens, then B happens." "But A isn't happening."

[-]Viliam_Bur10y320

Here is how to win the argument:

Create another nickname, pretending to be a Native American woman. Say that the idea of precommitment to exercise reminds you that in the ancient times the hunters of your tribe believed that it is spiritually important to be fit. (Then the white people came and ruined everything.) If anyone disagrees with you, act emotional and tell them to check their privilege.

The only problem is that winning in this way is a lost purpose. Unless you consider it expanding your communication skills.

[-]Adele_L10y190

I've actually seen an argument online in which some social justicers (with the same bad habits as in the story above) were convinced that it is acceptable to care about male circumcision on the grounds that it made SRS (sexual reassignment surgery) more difficult for trans women. Typically (in this community), if you thought male circumcision was an issue - you were quickly shouted down as a dreaded MRA (men's rights activist).

5Nornagest10y

Don't think that'd work. Traditional practices and attitudes are a sacred category in this sort of discourse, but that doesn't mean they're unassailable -- it just means that any sufficiently inconvenient ones get dismissed as outliers or distortions or fabrications rather than being attacked directly. It helps, of course, that in this case they'd actually be fabrications. Focusing on feelings is the right way to go, though. This probably needs more refinement, but I think you should do something along the lines of saying that exercise makes you feel happier and more capable (which happens to be true, at least for me), and that bringing tangible consequences into the picture helps people escape middle-class patriarchal white Western consumer culture's relentless focus on immediate short-term gratification (true from a certain point of view, although not a framing I'd normally use). After that you can talk about how traditional cultures are less sedentary, but don't make membership claims and do not mention outcomes. You're not torturing yourself to meet racist, sexist expectations of health and fitness; you're meeting spiritual, mental, and incidentally physical needs that the establishment's conditioned you to neglect. The shock is a reminder of what they've stolen from you. You'll probably still get accusations of internalized kyriarchy that way, but it ought to at least be controversial, and it won't get you accused of mansplaining.

8Viliam_Bur10y

I think this is still too logical to work. Each step of an argument is another place that can be attacked. And because attacks are allowed to be illogical, even the most logical step has maybe 50% chance of breaking the chain. The shortest, and therefore the most powerful argument, is simply "X offends me!" (But to use this argument, you must belong to a group whose feelings are included in the social justice utility function.) Now that I think about it, this probably explains why in this kind of debates you never get an explanation, only an angry "It's not my job to educate you!" when you ask about something. Using arguments and explanations is a losing strategy. (Also, it is what the bad guys do. You don't want to be pattern-matched to them.) Which is why people skilled in playing the game never provide explanations. I hope your rationalist toucan is signed up for cryonics. :P

8NancyLebovitz10y

I'm sure it depends on where you hang out, but I've seen plenty of explanations from social justice people. A sample

5Viliam_Bur10y

Impressive. In the linked article the author mentions that there are multiple definitions of racism and people often aren't clear about which one they use; and then decides to use the one without "..., but only when white people do it" as a default. And says that it is okay if white authors decide to write only white characters, but if they write also non-white characters they should describe their experiences realistically. (Then in the comments someone asks whether saying that every human being is racist doesn't render the word meaningless, and there is no outrage afterwards. Other people mention that calling someone racist is usually used just to silence or insult them.) I am not sure whether this even should be called "social justice". It just seems like a common sense to me. (This specific article; I haven't read more from the same author yet.) Somewhat related -- writing this comment I realized that I am kinda judging the sanity of the author by how much I agree with her. When I put it this way, it seems horrible. ("You are sane if and only if you agree with me.") But I admit it is a part of the algorithm I use. Is that a reason to worry? But then I remembered the parable that all correct maps of the same city are necessarily similar to each, although finding a set of similar maps does not guarantee their correctness (they could be copies of the same original wrong map). So, if you spend some time trying to make a map that reflects the territory better, and you believe you are sane enough, you should expect the maps of other sane people to be similar to yours. Of course this shouldn't be your only criterium. But, uhm, extraordinary maps require extraordinary evidence; or at least some evidence.

7gjm10y

Perhaps social justice done right should just seem like common sense (to reasonable people). I mean, what's the alternative? Social injustice? It would be a pity to use the term "social justice" to describe only facepalming irrationality. I mean, you then get this No True Scotsman sort of thing (maybe we should call it No True Nazi or something) where you refuse to say that someone's engaged in "social justice" even though what they're doing is crusading against sexism, racism, patriarchy, etc., simply because no True Social Justice Warror would engage in rational debate or respond to disagreement with sensible engagement rather than outrage. (Minor vested interest disclosure: I happen to know some people who are both quite social-justice-y and quite rational, and I would find it unfortunate to be unable to say that on account of "social justice" and "rationality" getting gratuitously exclusive definitions.)

[-][anonymous]10y120

even though what they're doing is crusading against sexism, racism, patriarchy, etc., simply because no True Social Justice Warror would engage in rational debate or respond to disagreement with sensible engagement rather than outrage.

Slightly off topic, but can I ask why patriarchy is assumed to be obviously bad?

I can certainly see the negative aspects of even moderate patriarchy, and wouldn't endorse extreme patriarchy or all forms of it, but its positive aspect seems to be civilization as we know it. It makes monogamy viable, reduces the time preferences of the people in a society, makes men invested in society by encouraging them to become fathers and husbands, boosts fertility rates to above replacement, likely makes the average man more attractive to the average woman improving many relationships, results in a political system of easily scalable hierarchy, etc.

1gjm10y

I wasn't assuming it's obviously bad, I was describing it as a thing social-justice types characteristically crusade against. As to whether moderate patriarchy is good or bad or mixed or neutral -- I imagine it depends enormously on how you define the term.

5[anonymous]10y

The post reads very much like you are implying they are bad, but I'll update on your response that you didn't.

7Viliam_Bur10y

So, like with "rationality" and "Hollywood rationality", we could have "social justice" and, uhm, "tumblr social justice"? Maybe this would work. My main objection would be that words "social justice" already feel like a weird way to express "equality" or something like that. It's already a word that meant something ("justice") with an adjective that allowes you to remove or redefine its parts, and make it a flexible applause light.

7NancyLebovitz10y

Historical note, as I understand things-- the emotionally abusive power grab aspects didn't happen by coincidence. A good many people said that if they were polite and reasonable, what they said got ignored, so they started dumping rage.

[-]Viliam_Bur10y100

I propose an alternative explanation. Some people are just born psychopaths; they love to hurt other people.

Whatever nice cause you start, if it gains just a little power, sooner or later one of them will notice it and decide they like it. Then they will try to join it and optimize it for their own purposes. You will recognize that this happened when people around you start repeating memes that hurting other people is actually good for your cause. Now, in such environment people most skilled in hurting others can quickly rise to the top.

(Actually, both our explanations can be true at the same time. Maybe any movement that doesn't open its doors to psychopaths it doomed in the long term, because other people simply don't have enough power to change the society.)

4Azathoth12310y

And then they complain when anybody else is 'uncivil'.

1NancyLebovitz10y

I called it an emotionally abusive power grab because that's how I see it. Nonetheless, I still think they're right about some of their issues.

3Nornagest10y

I'd expect rage to be better at converting people already predisposed to belief into True Believers, but worse at making believers of the undecided, and much worse at winning over those predisposed to opposition.

4NancyLebovitz10y

The rage level actually drives away some of the people who would be inclined to help them, and has produced something that looks a lot like PTSD in some of the people in the movement who got hit by opposition from others who were somewhat on the same side.. Still, they've gained a certain amount of ground on the average. I have no idea what the outcome will be.

0Azathoth12310y

Well, if you can vaguely imply that it might be physically dangerous to disagree, a little rage can work wonders.

4NancyLebovitz10y

As far as I can tell, there's very little in the way of physical threats, but (most) people are very vulnerable to emotional attacks. As I understand it, that's part of what's powering SJWs-- they felt (and I'd say rightly) that they were and are subject to pervasive emotional attack both from the culture and from individuals, and are trying to make a world they can be comfortable in. That "as I understand it" is not boilerplate-- I read a fair amount of SJ material and (obviously) spent a lot of time thinking and obsessing about it, but this is a huge subject (and isn't the same in all times, places, and sub-cultures), and I've never been an insider.

5gjm10y

That would be one option. Or (this is different because "Hollywood rationality" is not actually a variety of rationality) we could say that both those things really are varieties of social justice, but one of them is social justice plus a bunch of crazy ideas and attitudes that unfortunately happen to have come along for the ride in various social-justice-valuing venues. I don't think "social justice" is just a weirdly contorted way to say "equality". The addition of an adjective is necessary because "justice" simpliciter covers things like imprisoning criminals rather than innocent bystanders, and not having kleptocratic laws; "social justice" means something like "justice in people's social interactions". In some cases that's roughly the same thing as equality, but in others equality might be the wrong thing (because different groups want different things, or because some historical injustice is best dealt with by a temporary compensating inequality in the other direction). -- Whether such inequality ever is a good approach, and how often if so, is a separate matter, but unless it's inconceivable "equality" can't be the right word. Still, I'm not greatly enamoured of the term "social justice". But it's there, and it seems like it means something potentially useful, and it would be a shame if it ended up only being applicable where there's a whole lot of craziness alongside the concern for allegedly marginalized groups.

3Lumifer10y

That doesn't seem horrible to me. There are many ways of being insane, but one of them is having a very wrong map (and you can express the one of standard criteria for clinical-grade mental illness -- interferes with functioning in normal life -- as "your map is so wrong you can't traverse the territory well"). I think the critical difference here is whether you disagree about facts (which are, hopefully, empirically observable and statements about them falsifiable) or whether you disagree about values, opinions, and forecasts. Major disagreement about facts is a good reason to doubt someone's sanity, but about values and predictions is not.

1NancyLebovitz10y

I'm glad you liked it. Since I'd have to overcome a really strong ugh field to read it again, I'd like to check on whether my memory of it is correct-- the one thing I didn't like about it was Mohanraj saying (implying?) that if you behave decently you won't be attacked. She was making promises about people who aren't as rational as she is. Why an ugh field? Those essays came out when racefail was going on, and came with the added info that it took Mohanraj two and a half weeks to write them, and (at least as I read it) I should feel really guilty that a woman of color had to do the work. I just couldn't deal. I'm pretty sure the guilt trip wasn't from Mohanraj. I read them later, and thought they were good except for the caveat mentioned above.

6Lumifer10y

I don't think reinforcing stupidity is a good idea. “Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.” ― Mark Twain This is that level:

3Nornagest10y

That line was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I wouldn't go that far over the top in a real discussion, although I might throw in a bit of anti-*ist rhetoric as an expected shibboleth. That being said, these people aren't stupid. They don't generally have the same priorities or epistemology that we do, and they're very political, but that's true of a lot of people outside the gates of our incestuous little nerd-ghetto. Winning, in the real world, implies dealing with these people, and that's likely to go a lot better if we understand them. Does that mean we should go out and pick fights with mainstream social justice advocates? No, of course not. But putting ourselves in their shoes every now and then can't hurt.

1sediment10y

This makes some sense. I think part of the reason my contribution was taken so badly was, as I said, that I was arguing in a style that was clearly different to that of the rest of those present, and as such I was (in Villam Bur's phrasing) pattern-matched as a bad guy. (In other words, I didn't use the shibboleths.) Significantly, no-one seemed to take issue with the actual thrust of my point.

1Lumifer10y

Of course, but only somewhat :-) "These people" are not homogenous and there are a lot of idiots among them. However what most of them are is mindkilled. They won't update so why bother?

6Nornagest10y

Because we occasionally might want to convince them of things, and we can't do that without understanding what they want to see in an argument. Or, more generally, because it behooves us to get better at modeling people that don't share our epistemology or our (at least, my) contempt for politics.

1Lumifer10y

So, um, if you really let Jesus into your heart and accept Him as your personal savior you will see that He wants you to donate 50% of your salary to GiveWell's top charities..? True, but you don't do that by mimicking their rhetoric.

[-]Nornagest10y100

True, but you don't do that by mimicking their rhetoric.

The point isn't to blindly mimic their rhetoric, it's to talk their language: not just the soundbites, but the motivations under them. To use your example, talking about letting Jesus into your heart isn't going to convince anyone to donate a large chunk of their salary to GiveWell's top charities. There's a Christian argument for charity already, though, and talking effective altruism in those terms might well convince someone that accepts it to donate to real charity rather than some godawful sad puppies fund; or to support or create Christian charities that use EA methodology, which given comparative advantage might be even better. But you're not going to get there without understanding what makes Christian charity tick, and it's not the simple utilitarian arguments that we're used to in an EA context.

3Lumifer10y

There is a price: to talk in their language is to accept their framework. If you are making an argument in terms of fighting the oppression of white male patriarchy, you implicitly agree that the white male patriarchy is in the business of oppression and needs to be fought. If you're using the Christian argument for charity to talk effective altruism, you are implicitly accepting the authority of Jesus.

2Nornagest10y

Yes, you are. That's a price you need to pay if you want to get something out of mindkilled people, which incidentally tends to be the first step in introducing outside ideas and thereby making them less mindkilled. Reject it in favor of some kind of radical honesty policy, and unless you're very lucky and very charismatic you'll find yourself with no allies and few friends. But hey, you'll have the moral high ground! I hear that and $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee. (My argument in the ancestor wasn't really about fighting the white male patriarchy, though; the rhetoric about that is just gingerbread, like appending "peace be upon him" to the name of the Prophet. It's about the importance of subjective experience and a more general contrarianism -- which are also SJ themes, just less obvious ones.)

6Lumifer10y

Maybe it's the price you need to pay, but I don't see how being able to get something out of mindkilled people is the first step in making them less mindkilled. You got what you wanted and paid for it by reinforcing their beliefs -- why would they become more likely to change them? I am not going for radical honesty. What I'm suspicious of is using arguments which you yourself believe are bullshit and at the same time pretending to be a bona fide member of a tribe to which you don't belong. And, by the way, there seems to be a difference between Jesus and SJ here. When talking to a Christian I can be "radically honest" and say something along the lines "I myself am not a Christian but you are and don't you recall how Jesus said that ...". But that doesn't work with SJWs -- if I start by saying "I myself don't believe in while male oppression but you do and therefore you should conclude that...", I will be immediately crucified for the first part and no one will pay any attention to the second.

6Nornagest10y

You're not substantially reinforcing their beliefs. Beliefs entangled with your identity don't follow Bayesian rules: directly showing anything less than overpoweringly strong evidence against them (and even that isn't a sure thing) tends to reinforce them by provoking rationalization, while accepting them is noise. If you don't like Christianity, you wouldn't want to use the Christian argument for charity with a weak or undecided Christian; but they aren't going to be mindkilled in this regard, so it wouldn't make a good argument anyway. On the other hand, sneaking new ideas into someone's internal memetic ecosystem tends to put stress on any totalizing identities they've adopted. For example, you might have to invoke God's commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself to get a fundamentalist Christian to buy EA in the first place; but now they have an interest in EA, which could (e.g.) lead them to EA forums sharing secular humanist assumptions. Before, they'd have dismissed this as (e.g.) some kind of pathetic atheist attempt at constructing a morality in the absence of God. But now they have a shared assumption, a point of commonality. That'll lead to cognitive dissonance, but only in the long run -- timescales you can't work on unless you're very good friends with this person. That cognitive dissonance won't always resolve against Christianity, but sometimes it will. And when it doesn't, you'll usually still have left them with a more nuanced and less stereotypical Christianity.

1Lumifer10y

Well, yes, if we're talking about a single conversation, especially over the 'net, you are not going to affect much anything. Still, even if you do not reinforce then you confirm. And there are different ways to get mindkilled, entangling your identity with beliefs is only one of them... True, but the same caveat applies -- if we're talking about one or two conversations you're not going to produce much if any effect. In any case, my line of thinking in this subthread wasn't concerned so much with the effectiveness of deconversion, but rather was more about the willingness to employ arguments that you don't believe but your discussion opponent might. I understand the need to talk to people in the language they understand, but there is a fine line to walk here.

5Azathoth12310y

That works a lot less well arguing against someone who is claiming to be from that culture. So? Most of the "traditional practices" SJ types sanctify are fabrications. That doesn't stop them from sanctifying them.

5Nornagest10y

I've more than once seen people accused of not really being whatever they claim to be. "You're wrong about your culture's traditional practices" isn't a legal move, but "you're obviously an imposter" is.

[-]Stabilizer10y190

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 registered some discomfort with their currently held worldview. Of course, none of them would've commented.

Also, I'm sure your way of argumentation appealed to many people, and they'll be on the lookout for this kind of argumentation in the future. Maybe one of them will eventually stumble upon LW. By looking at the quality of argumentation was also how I selected which blogs to follow. I tried (and often failed) to avoid those blogs that employed rhetoric and emotional manipulation. One of the good blogs eventually linked to LW.

Thus, while the cost to you was probably great and perhaps wasn't worth the effort, I don't think it was entirely fruitless.

8sediment10y

You're right. I was glad to at least disrupt the de facto consensus. I agree that it's worth bearing in mind the silent majority of the audience as well as those who actually comment. The former probably outnumber the latter by an order of magnitude (or more?). I suppose the meta-level point was also worth conveying. Ultimately, I don't care a great deal about the object-level point (how one should feel about a silly motivational bracelet) but the tacit, meta-level point was perhaps: "There are other ways, perhaps more useful, to evaluate things than the amount of moral indignation one can generate in response."

[-]Shmi10y190

I don't think it's a good idea to get into a discussion on any forum where the term "mansplaining" is used to stifle dissent, even (or especially) if you have "a clear, concise, self-contained point".

3Lumifer10y

True for a serious discussion, but such forums make for interesting ethnographic expeditions :-) And if you're not above occasional trolling for teh lulz... :-D

0[anonymous]10y

Seems somehow related: r/drama

0[anonymous]10y

Somehow feels relevant: /r/drama

[-]Richard_Kennaway10y160

I recently made a dissenting comment on a biggish, well-known-ish social-justice-y blog.

Um, why?

I mean, walking through a monkey house when all they're going to do is fling shit everywhere isn't something I would choose to do.

[-]sediment10y180

Only because I had a clear, concise, self-contained point to make and I figured I'd be able to walk away once I was done. I'll know better next time.

7NancyLebovitz10y

I wasn't sure about doing discussion of the specific point, but other people are.... http://www.moveandbefree.com/blog/laziness-doesnt-exist Here's an example from someone who believes strongly in cultivating internal motivation-- the opposite of shocking yourself if you don't do enough crudely monitored exercise. The punishment approach to exercise arguably makes people less likely to exercise at all, and I think it increases the risk of injuries from exercise. There really is a cultural problem-- how popular is the approach from the link compared to The Biggest Loser and boot camps for civilians? Sidetrack: I'm imagining a shock bracelet to discourage involvement in pointless internet arguments. How would it identify them? Would people use it?

4A1987dM10y

That's probably a FAI-complete problem. See also: http://xkcd.com/810/ A thing I would like is this. I would totally enable this on LW if it was an option. (And if someone volunteered to write a Firefox plugin to achieve the same client-side, they'd have all my gratefulness.)

9Bakkot10y

Done. Client-side version, that is.

6ChristianKl10y

The whole idea of optimisation is controversial among some people because they see it as the opposite of being yourself. It's no weird edge case. If I remember right there was a recent study that came to that conclusion that went through the media.

4A1987dM10y

True that.

3Richard_Kennaway10y

The shock bracelet intrigues me. I imagine it could be interfaced to an app that could give shocks under all manner of chosen conditions. Do you have any more details? Is it a real thing, or (like this) just clickbait that no-one intends actually making?

8sediment10y

It's called the Pavlok. It seems to be able to monitor a variety of criteria, some fairly smart.

4Richard_Kennaway10y

Wow, it is indeed a real thing! Thank you for posting this.

2[anonymous]10y

I think this has the same problem than any kind of self-conditioning. I watched the video and the social community and gaming thing seem actually motivating, but I'm not sure about the punishment because you can always take the wristband off. Maybe there's a commitment and social pressure not to take the wristband off, but ultimately you yourself are responsible for keeping the wristband on your wrist and this is basically self-conditioning. Yvain made a good post about it. If the zap had any kind of motivating effect, wouldn't that effect firstly be directed towards taking the wristband off your wrist and not the much more distant and complex sequence of actions like going to the gym? I don't think small zap on its owns could motivate me to do even anything simple, like leaving the computer. Also, I agree with Yvain that rewards and punishments seem only have real effect when they happen unpredictably.

1Pfft10y

A more low-tech solution, which is recommended by countless self-help books/webpages of dubious authority, is to snap a rubber band against your own wrist when you have done something bad. It seems this should work roughly as well as the Pavlov? In theory it should suffer the same "can't condition yourself" problem. On the other hand, if lots of people recommend it, then maybe it works?

3Richard_Kennaway10y

I suspect that if electric zapping or snapping a rubber band work (I don't know if they do), they do so by raising your level of attention to the problematic behaviour. A claim of Perceptual Control Theory is that reorganisation -- learning to control something better -- follows attention. Yanking your attention onto the situation whenever you're contemplating or committing sinful things may enable you to stop wanting to commit them. See also the use of the cilice.

3MathiasZaman10y

I've mostly seen that technique described as a way to cope with self-harm.

-1Lumifer10y

Classic bash.org :-D #4281 +(27833)- [X] <Zybl0re> get up <Zybl0re> get on up <Zybl0re> get up <Zybl0re> get on up <phxl|paper> and DANCE * nmp3bot dances :D-< * nmp3bot dances :D|-< * nmp3bot dances :D/-< <[SA]HatfulOfHollow> i'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet

1Richard_Kennaway10y

I wonder what they think of Beeminder, that allows you to financially torture yourself over anything you want to. Not that I'm going to go over there, wherever it is, to ask.

3sediment10y

I mentioned beeminder and that I use it. Don't think anyone picked up on that part, cash evidently being less triggering than electricity.

[-]Viliam_Bur10y360

Website suggestion: Retracted comments should collapse the thread (just like downvoted comments do now).

[-]A1987dM10y250

“Meditations On Moloch” on Slate Star Codex finally convinced me to donate to MIRI.

3Vulture10y

General comment on that post: I think it really deserves to be officially canonized somewhere. For being moving, beautiful, clear, and lucid, of course; but mostly for introducing, naming, and explaining a very useful concept.

1[anonymous]10y

May I ask why? I don't immediately see the connection.

1satt10y

Skip to section VIII.

[-]Kaj_Sotala10y200

The philosopher John Danaher is doing a series of posts on Bostrom's Superintelligence book. Posts that were up at the time of writing this comment:

Bostrom on Superintelligence (1): The Orthogonality Thesis
Bostrom on Superintelligence (2): The Instrumental Convergence Thesis
Bostrom on Superintelligence (3): Doom and the Treacherous Turn

Danaher has also blogged about AI risk topics before: see here, here, here, here, and here. He's also written on mind uploading and human enhancement.

[-]Metus10y170

Since we are way too confident that bad things won't happen to us I have been researching how to prepare for several rare events with disastrous consequences. Starting the research I realised I have yet to find out what those events exactly are. So far I have found these, remedy given if known:

Own death (write a will specifying how property shall be used and funeral arrangements in the interest of next of kin and close friends, if there are people financially dependent buy life insurance, if you believe in cryonics register as a member and make arrangements to pay for it. Prepare for the near-term possibility and long-term inevitability)
Death of a family member or close friend (see above)
Loss of possibility of legal consent e.g. through brain damage or disease (prepare a document detailing your views and wants in such a case, buy insurance to pay for aid, if people are financially dependent on you buy insurance for them too)
Loss of consciousness and/or dependence on machine-assisted living (see above)
Accidents of any kind such as traffic or work related (ignoring the circumstances above, buy specific insurance)
Unforseen, non-work related liability (buy liability insurance)
D

... (read more)

[-]Gavin10y470

Anytime you're thinking about buying insurance, double check whether it actually makes more sense to self-insure. It may be better to put all the money you would otherwise put into insurance in "rainy day fund" rather than buying ten different types of insurance.

In general, if you can financially survive the bad thing, then buying insurance isn't a good idea. This is why it almost never makes sense to insure a $1000 computer or get the "extended warranty." Just save all the money you would spend on extended warranties on your devices, and if it breaks pay out of pocket to repair or get a new one.

This is a harshly rational view, so I certainly appreciate that some people get "peace of mind" from having insurance, which can have a real value.

[-]Kaj_Sotala10y190

Though note that an insurance may regardless be useful if you have self-control problems with regard to money. If you've paid your yearly insurance payment, the money is spent and will protect you for the rest of the year. If you instead put the money in a rainy day fund, there may be a constant temptation to dip into that fund even for things that aren't actual emergencies.

Of course, that money being permanently spent and not being available for other purposes does have its downsides, too.

8Gavin10y

Agreed on all points.

7Metus10y

I appreciate the extention on my thought process. It is very clear to me that since you have to pay an insurance premium buying insurance is necessarily a net loss. Buying insurance is very meaningful before a rainy day fund is filled up, if emergency financing methods are not available through a credit card or very trustworthy person and if the insurance contracts include other services, e.g. getting liabilities of the other party paid in case of their unwillingness to pay. This is implicit in my phrasing but made explicit by your post and will be included in the end report. Generally I come to the conclusion that buying insurance is a necessity unless you are perversely rich and even then there is some meaning found in insurance as even insurance companies themselves are insured. Just go for contracts with high co-pay to lower the exposition to the insurance premium which is basically just unnecessary bureucracy in case of small claims, as in the example of the $1000 dollar computer. For things in that price class I read an interesting sentence "if you can not afford to buy it twice, you can't afford it in the first place" alluding to self-insurance.

[-]Richard_Kennaway10y120

"if you can not afford to buy it twice, you can't afford it in the first place"

An excellent maxim, which has crystallised for me why I am so reluctant to move to a bigger house, even though I would like one, and I could buy one immediately for cash plus the price I'd get for my current house. It's because I can't afford to do that twice. With an extra cost-of-a-house in the bank I might.

3Gavin10y

It sounds like we're largely on the same page, noting that what counts as "disastrous" can be somewhat subjective.

1[anonymous]10y

I believe that some foreign large-scale catastrophes could also negatively impact one’s well-being. Extreme example: imagine if everyone in the world suddenly died except the citizens of your country. Psychological toll aside, your country’s necessary transition from international trader to autarky would be painful. Losing trading partners = losing ability to specialize = reducing economic efficiency = falling wages. The reinsurance markets often deal in the risks of the disastrous. Maybe you can evaluate reinsurance offering documents and prices in order to extract the market’s implied probability of similar events.

[-]niceguyanon10y110

A quick search for tDCS did not turn up any major discussion newer than 2012 on LW. tDCS devices are now sub $100. Its safety track record seems to be intact. I bought one. There are places to discuss tDCS like on subreddits but I'd like to restart the conversation here with you rationalists.

Recently Radiolab did a piece about it

4ChristianKl10y

I'm not sure that they did run sufficient experiments to demonstrate safety.

4niceguyanon10y

I'll admit that the basis for my statement is from the seemingly lack of much negative user reports or studies that reported high negative reactions regarding safety, rather than experiments specifically demonstrating safety.

1witzvo10y

This seems really interesting. I'd like to learn more about it. So far I'm frustrated with the quality of information I've found. Here's a PMC search and a review behind a firewall.

1gwern10y

Here you go: https://pdf.yt/d/I3KvgDrqP-uVjm0e / https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/2014-priori.pdf

1witzvo10y

Thanks! Lest it confuse anyone else, please note that that review is all about effects of tDCS on the cerebellum and not a review of tDCS on the cerebrum or other brain structures. The cerebelar tDCS itself seems to have many effects including cerebellar motor cortical inhibition, gait adaptation, motor behaviour, and cognition (learning, language, memory, attention), though. Here's a general review of the effect of tDCS on language """ Despite their heterogeneities, the studies we reviewed collect- ively show that tDCS can improve language performance in healthy subjects and in patients with aphasia ( fi gure 4). Although relatively transient, the improvement can be remark- able: Monti and colleagues 52 found an improvement of approxi- mately 30% and Holland and Crinion 63 report a gain of approximately 25% in speech performance in aphasic patients. Intriguingly, no report described negative results in aphasic patients. """ EDIT: Interestingly, there's limited evidence that it can be effective for patients suffering from autism too. E.g. case study finding 40% reduction in abnormal behavior for a severe case and improved language learning for minimally verbal children with autism.

[-]tetronian210y90

This is a followup to a post I made in the open thread last week; apologies if this comes off as spammy. I will be running a program equilibrium iterated prisoner's dilemma tournament (inspired by the one last year). There are a few key differences from last year's tournament: First, the tournament is in Haskell rather than Scheme. Second, the penalty for bots that do not finish their computation within the pre-set time limit has been reduced. Third, bots have the ability to run/simulate each other but cannot directly view each other's source code.

Here are... (read more)

3James_Miller10y

This biases the tournament towards cooperation and makes it no longer a PD. This biases the tournament away from the defect every single round strategy. Consider creating an elimination tournament where you run the game, eliminate the bottom half of the players, then run again, then iterate until only one player remains. If you decide to do this and are willing to go to the effort of programming my entry (since I don't know Haskell) please enter me with a bot that always defects.

7tetronian210y

Thank you! These changes both make sense; I will adjust the tournament structure as you described and enter your bot when the tournament is open.

5tetronian210y

Can you explain the rationale behind the elimination setup a little more? An elimination tournament seems less fair than pure round-robin. Moreover, I ran some tests with various combinations of the example bots from the tutorial, and what generally happens is the bots with strategies along the lines of "I'll cooperate if you do" (i.e. tit-for-tat, justiceBot, mirrorBot) rise to the top and then just cooperate with each other, resulting in a multi-way tie. If the actual pool of submissions contain enough bots with that kind of strategy, a large tie seems inevitable. This result doesn't sound very exciting for a competition, but is there is some sense in which it is theoretically "better" than round-robin? Edit: This outcome doesn't always happen, but it happens most of the time.

[-]James_Miller10y130

The elimination tournament better simulates evolution and capitalism. With a round robin you can have a successful strategy of taking resources from stupid people. But in nature and the marketplace stupid people won't consistently get resources and so a strategy of taking from them will not be a long-term effective one.

6tetronian210y

Thank you, that is an excellent explanation and you have changed my mind; I will implement an elimination tournament as you described.

[-]fubarobfusco10y90

I was thinking about the idea of lost purposes in my kitchen, and a vivid illustration of the idea occurred to me:

You plan to make homemade ice cream for your partner's birthday party next week, so you put "cream" on your shopping list. The next day, you break up with your partner on surprisingly unfriendly terms. You are no longer going to be attending the birthday party. But then you find yourself at the supermarket, with your shopping list in hand, putting a carton of cream into your cart.

EDIT: The birthday-party/break-up thing is a fictional scenario, not something that actually happened to me. Sorry for any worries!

[-]Punoxysm10y90

I feel like parables here on LW, especially the longer and more tortured ones, are pretty much fallacy and bias breeding grounds. A couple egregious offenders, to my mind, include

Blue and Green Martians; about pick-up artistry

and

The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant; about death

Why do I take issue with them? Because while using analogies, including fanciful ones, can help us take the outside view on a problem where we are irrationally biased, these sorts of parables can also be a selective re-telling of the facts, and conclusions drawn from them simply don't tr... (read more)

[-]PeerGynt10y110

I'm fairly sure this comment was not exactly intended as a compliment, but I can think of worse insults than having my writing put in the same category as Nick Bostrom. As the author of the first of these parables, even I recognize that these two stories differ very significantly in quality

The Blue and Green Martians parable was an attempt to discuss a question of ethics that is important to many members of this community, and which it is almost impossible to discuss elsewhere. The decision to use an analogy was an attempt to minimize mindkill. This did not succeed. However, I am fairly sure that if I had chosen not to use an analogy, the resulting flamewar would have been immense. This probably means that there are certain topics we just can't discuss, which feels distinctly suboptimal, but I'm not sure I have a better solution.

8Punoxysm10y

Well I don't like the dragon parable either. It's overlong, a bit condescending and ignores the core problem that anti-aging research has done a pretty poor job of showing concrete achievements, even if it's right that it's under-prioritized. I was not a fan of yours exactly because I think the parable elides the most important parts of the actual topic. Even if a direct discussion would be flamey, it's not better to discuss a poor proxy. I'm not trying to pick on you, I just think you tried to define the problem with some premises that were well worth dispute. There are all sorts of other bad analogies out there though: "If canada launched missiles at the US, how would it respond?", even though the US hasn't turned Canada into a prison-state over the course of 50 years, is one on the news a lot right now. Parables about the danger of nuclear weapons that ignore the fact that this danger was successfully handled (there was something on here using it as an analogy for AI). Also, when parables are kind-of-but-not-really trying to be coy about what they're actually about is a bit annoying, leading to stilted writing (but that's the least of my issues). EY also has a lot of dubious parables, but tackling those is a subject for a bigger post. And of course there's the whole genre of parables where two fictional interlocutors are arguing, the strawman 'loses' the argument, and that's supposed to convince us of something. I think LW manages to avoid overt versions of this. In the realm of politics (both Red/Blue and further-from-mainstream) people often apply "argument by utopia", which suffers similar issues in that it attempts to prematurely define convenient facts and use a narrative to elide gritty, worthwhile details of an issue.

[-]ChristianKl10y180

Parables about the danger of nuclear weapons that ignore the fact that this danger was successfully handled (there was something on here using it as an analogy for AI).

The danger wasn't successfully handled for a lot of values of "successful". The fact that you survive playing Russian roulette doesn't show that you successfully handled danger. Once a nuclear bomb nearly exploded in the US where 3 of 4 safety feature of the bomb failed. If I remember right it would have needed 3 of 3 people in the Russian submarine in the Cuban missle crisis to lunch a nuclear weapon and 2 of them wanted to lunch it. There are various lost nuclear weapons.

-5sediment10y

[-]fubarobfusco10y110

Well I don't like the dragon parable either. It's overlong, a bit condescending and ignores the core problem that anti-aging research has done a pretty poor job of showing concrete achievements, even if it's right that it's under-prioritized.

Hmm. I suppose I thought the point of "Dragon Tyrant" was not to narrowly advocate for the anti-aging research program; but rather to get people to take seriously the "naïve" idea that death is bad.

Or, more specifically, to say that even though ① defeating death seems like an insurmountable goal because death has always been around, and ② there are people advocating on a wide variety of grounds against attempting to defeat death, it is nonetheless reasonable and desirable to consider.

"Dragon Tyrant" uses the technique, common to sociology and "soft" science fiction (e.g. Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams), of making the familiar strange — taking something that we are so accustomed to that it is unquestioned, and portraying it as alien.

2Punoxysm10y

Well, solving death without solving aging wouldn't be that great, so I tend to look at anti-aging as the main path. I think that people who don't get on the "death is bad" train do so because they don't take seriously the idea that there's any alternative. And certainly, if you're 80 years old and in poor health and going around denying your own mortality, you're probably in a worse mindset than somebody who accepts that they will soon die. Until research gets to a certain point, being a proud anti-deathist is just pretentious windmill-tilting. In a few decades maybe technology will hold the serious possibility of living indefinitely, and people will be making choices about whether to receive certain therapies or genetically modify their children in some way; and the arguments to make will be much clearer. But also, "Dragon Tyrant" is definitely kind of narrow because it very transparently calls politicians murderers for not putting more effort and funds into anti-death research, which is a bit more than the broad stuff you're saying.

2blake808610y

I feel like the dragon parable correctly shows, if anything, negative progress being made towards dealing with the dragon, until suddenly, it is dealt with. I suppose one difference is that the anti-dragon projectile seems so much more achievable and imaginable than a cure for aging.

1Punoxysm10y

Right; literally having a "magic bullet" solve the problem of the story, even if it takes a lot of development, is another flaw of the story.

1[anonymous]10y

What would you think of the following solution? Announce 'I would like to have conversations about the controversial topic Pick-up Artistry. Because talking about it publicly can result in problems, If you want to talk with me about that topic, please send me a message stating your position on the topic.' By keeping it open like that and not stating your own position, it seems to be about as not prone to mindkill as you could get. The downside is, private conversations don't have as much bounce effects. For instance in the prior mentioned thread, Viliam_Bur essentially created a post which I don't think would ever get paralleled in a series of private conversations. (Viliam_Bur's post for reference: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/klx/ethics_in_a_feedback_loop_a_parable/b5oz

3pianoforte61110y

The point of a parable is not to de-bias a heated political topic and then draw direct conclusions about the original topic. It is an attempt to extract one or two key ideas that tend to get muddied up by contentious object level issues. It is essentially an extended analogy. If someone makes an argument of the form "If A is X, then Y", then a parable is an attempt to extract this idea form the political arena and then test in on new inputs. "B is X, but is it Y?". It is not an attempt to get rid of the finer details of an issue, but rather to figure out what those details are, and which details are irrelevant.

8Punoxysm10y

I get this. And I think many parables profoundly fail in this. They create a simplistic narrative and conclusion, then make it harder to argue about by transferring the logic over to an analogue. Then it's hard to get the discussion back onto important details. De-biasing and removing words that trigger an immediate emotional response is one major use of analogies too though.

5Lumifer10y

Given how it portrays women as an undifferentiated passive object with no preferences or any input into the process, I'd say this attempt failed.

5A1987dM10y

What? One of the main premises of the story is that humans all other things being equal prefer to be tickled by blue martians than to not be tickled and to not be tickled than to be tickled by green martians. Otherwise there would be no ethical problem at all -- martians could just tickle whomever they wanted.

[-]Lumifer10y100

Okay, women have a preference along a single axis which they do nothing about and do not express at all. The framework as described is all about what active agenty men could or should do to entirely passive npc women. I'm very far from being a feminist, but come on -- this is objectification and "don't worry your pretty head about it".

[-]Viliam_Bur10y120

I have a preference for eating tasty food in restaurants. But I am absolutely not interested in teaching chefs how to cook. If I am not satisfied with the food, I will simply never come back to that restaurant again. There are many restaurants to choose from. I don't really care about what happens to the owner of the bad restaurant; it's their problem, not mine.

Does this make me an entirely passive NPC, because I completely refuse to participate in this "how to get better at cooking" business and merely evaluate my satisfaction with the results? I don't think this would be a fair description. I am not waiting helplessly; my strategy is evaluating different restaurants and choosing the best. Yeah, if we assume that each chef can only make a limited amount of food, I am kinda playing a zero-sum game against other customers here. But still, playing zero-sum games is not passivity.

But a naive chef could complain: "All those customers do is criticize. They never help us, never teach us. How are we supposed to learn? Everyone's first cooked meal is far from perfect. Practice makes perfect, but practice inevitably includes making a few mistakes." From his point of view... (read more)

4Lumifer10y

I don't understand your analogy. First, here you are a consumer. You have no relationships with chefs and are not interested in relationships with chefs. You pay your money, you get your product and its qualities is all you care about. If that product came from a kitchen two blocks down the street, or was flown frozen from overseas, or made by a robot chef -- you don't care as long as it's good. Second, you are active and make decisions. It is not the case that chefs jump on you as you walk down the street and attempt to stuff their food into your mouth. You pick the restaurant you go to. I see no passivity at all, it's just teaching chefs cooking is neither your role nor your desire.

2PeerGynt10y

It is true that some participants in the analogy are "non-player characters". That is because some ethical questions only have implications for the choices of a subset of the agents. It should be permissible to discuss these ethical questions. Doing this properly will require adding information about all stakeholders whenever it is relevant, but it does not necessarily require all stakeholders to be "playable" in the sense that they actively make ethical decisions. It is also true that the women in my story have a preference on a single axis, and that in real life, they also have preferences on other axes. I did not specify those preferences in the analogy, because I did not see the point in adding complications that do not have relevance to the resolution of the ethical question, which is a choice faced only by Martians. If you feel that there is an additional axis which has important implications for the ethical choice that the Green Martians are facing, please specify what that axis is and why it is important. This would be an important contribution to the discussion. Otherwise, this comes across as saying "you should have added additional complications that were not relevant, in order to sufficiently signal that women are important ethical agents and not objects". The fact that women are important ethical agents is so obvious that it is not even worth debating. However, I shouldn't have to signal this at every opportunity as a precondition for taking part in the discussion, especially not when this would require me to add unnecessary information to the story. As for why the women don't express their preference not to be tickled by green martians, this is simply because I took this preference to be obvious and common knowledge to all participants in the analogy.

9Lumifer10y

Your parable is flawed at the core because you made a basic category mistake. Flirting is not an action, not something one person does to another one. It is interaction, something two people do together. Deciding that one person in that interaction controls the encounter and does things, while the other is just a passive receptacle to the extent that not even her consent is required, never mind active participation, is not a useful framework for looking at how men and women interact.

[-]chaosmage10y80

I've started to play with directed graphs kind of like Bayesian networks to visualize my belief structures. So a node is a belief (with some indication of confidence), while connections between graphs indicate how beliefs influence (my confidence in) other beliefs.

This seems useful for summarizing complex arguments, easy to memorize, and (when looking at a belief structure that's bigger than my working memory) for organizing and revising thought.

However, there are a few decisions in how to design the visual language of such graphs that I can't see obvious ... (read more)

3blake808610y

http://systemsandus.com/ uses + and - to denote it, and I guess they just assume you can mostly keep track. I feel like it works on simple diagrams.

1NancyLebovitz10y

Would it work to use red connections to indicate negations? If red is too emphatic, how about connections with dashes crossing the main line? How about thickness of lines to indicate how sure you are of a connection?

[-]MrMind10y70

If I wanted to learn about a precise formulation of UDT, where should I look / who should I ask? Info on the wiki is hopelessly outdated, and there lacks a single clear exposition.

7Manfred10y

Have you read Wei Dai's posts already? E.g. here and here. My one-sentence description is "find the best strategy, then follow it." If you want a more formal approach, cousin it's post is probably a good place to start - if you like that, there are more posts by him that might be a good idea to read.

5cousin_it10y

Yup. The simplest formulation I have is this one.

4Richard_Kennaway10y

Is anyone working on formalising UDT, TDT, and the like, for publication in academic journals? Has any of it appeared there already?

3protest_boy10y

There is this paper, http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Hintze-Problem-class-dominance-in-predictive-dilemmas.pdf which was an honors thesis. More discussion relevant to the state of UDT and TDT in this comment: http://lesswrong.com/lw/k3m/open_thread_2127_april_2014/au6e

[-]mare-of-night10y60

My diet seems to influence my mind and body a lot more strongly than is normal. (Food intolerances that mess with my emotions or focus, apparent hypoglycemia that goes away when I take vitamin B, that sort of thing. I know a lot of people have something like this, but I've got so many that diet is the default first suspect whenever anything goes wrong.) I'm not sure whether this makes me a potentially useful test subject for things like nootropics because the effects might get inflated and easier to notice, or just an outlier whose results won't work on an... (read more)

[-]VAuroch10y120

I have noticed that maintaining a decent diet makes a massive difference to my mental state, but I have no reason to think this is unusual. You may not be either.

In short, consider generalizing from one example more.

3mare-of-night10y

I've suspected that food might have more affect on people in general than general opinion says it does. But I act really differently on my diet vs. when eating what most Americans eat (I haven't tried eating normally since childhood because the effects are too unpleasant, but I've made enough mistakes in a row to come close on one occasion - see my comment to James_Miller), and most other people act more like me on a good diet than me on a bad diet. I've considered generalizing from one example when it comes to people who do act similar to me with a bad diet. I tend to keep quiet about it because it comes off as really insensitive to tell someone that their depression might be caused by the candy they eat, when I don't have any evidence for that besides generalizing from my own experience.

[-]James_Miller10y110

My diet seems to influence my mind and body a lot more strongly than is normal.

Alternative hypothesis: Diet has a huge influence on mind and body but most people lack the mindfulness to notice.

The Food Sense App might help you. http://www.bulletproofexec.com/find-your-kryptonite-with-the-free-bulletproof-food-sense-iphone-app/

4mare-of-night10y

Good hypothesis. I still don't think I'm completely normal, because when I eat a typical American diet I can't function in society, which most people seem to be able to do. (Mainly thinking of a family trip where I ate out a lot and wasn't as careful as usual, and after a couple days I was breaking down crying about once a day, at things that would normally just annoy me.) But then, I could see the more subtle symptoms being things that people assume are chronic problems they can't change. Alternately, my normal is near some kind of borderline for a mental problem and that's why my diet can push it over so easily. I've also wondered how much of mental illness could be caused by this sort of thing. I was told that as a child, a doctor thought I had ADHD and was about to have me tested, and then my mom forgot to buy bananas at the store one week and my behavior suddenly improve. It seems likely that other children with the same problems I have exist, and most of their parents weren't already alert to diet influences. Thanks for the app link. I don't have iphone, but I bet I can find something similar for android. I guess what I should do first is hit up a library database and find out if anyone has already researched this. (I've made a few efforts to look it up before, but mostly just google searches - though I did find that mental symptoms for corn and milk allergies aren't unheard of.) If nutritionists don't think food works this way, but also haven't studied this specifically and found it false, I'm not sure if I should try to do my own experiment or not.

2Lumifer10y

Don't think it'll help you much -- you need to find out how you work, not what happens to some sample of some population of people none of whom are you. In your place I'd start keeping a detailed mood/mental state diary AND a detailed food diary. After a few months you should be able to get a decent idea of what kinds of food do what to you. You might also want to talk to gwern -- he does "how X affects me" mini-studies and has good methodology.

1mare-of-night10y

Sorry, I didn't make the intent clear. I do want to do more experiments on myself, and I need to work on figuring out a non-annoying way to collect data so I can do that. But I'm also really curious how common this sort of thing is in other people. So the library research is for testing your alternate hypothesis, and my hypothesis that some people are strongly influenced by food but mistake it for a chronic problem.

4Lumifer10y

Browse forums for non-mainstream diets, e.g. paleo or vegan. You'll find LOTS of stories by people who found out that a change in their diet massively affects their health and/or mental state. The thing is, though, on paleo forums the stories will be "So I stopped eating carbs and the mental fog just lifted and now I have energy..." and on vegan forums the stories will be "So I stopped eating animal products and the mental fog just lifted and now I have energy..." :-D It's all very individual, you still will need to figure out how you react to stuff.

1mare-of-night10y

Ah, thanks :) I figured that different diets are good for different people, since that's what seemed to happen for people I know. But I wanted to find out how common and how extreme that sort of thing is, since if people are getting results like "I can handle going to school now", then people should be more aware of it than they are. I'm pretty sure I already know the most important reactions for me - I've gotten to the point that there's not anything really really wrong anymore. I didn't expect the rest to just be in a book somewhere, since what I've already found out by experimenting doesn't match up to any known pattern other than "diet does stuff".

5NancyLebovitz10y

You might want to poke around Chris Kresser's blog-- he's a non-doctrinaire paleo guy, and his commenters include a lot of people with unusual symptoms.

1mare-of-night10y

Thanks! I'll have a look.

0NancyLebovitz10y

You might want to poke around Chris Kresser's blog-- he's a non-doctrinaire paleo guy, and his commenters include a lot of people with unusual symptoms.

2Zian10y

You can also try using Eureqa; it's good for finding potential correlations and relationships. It also tries to suggest possible experiments.

1mare-of-night10y

Thanks! That looks interesting.

[-]Ben Pace10y60

Please vote on the removal of the brain/head image from the homepage.

[pollid:741]

[-]gwern10y240

Why discuss it? Wouldn't it be better to A/B test which encourages new visitors to click on a link to another page?

[-]Ben Pace10y100

Yes, you're right. I didn't like the change that's all, and was hoping for a majority to back me. But if anyone wants to do that, that would certainly be a good idea

[-]jackk10y140

I was tasked to replace it, because it apparently tested better. The timing of the reddit thread linked by asd was just coincidence.

3[anonymous]10y

I thought the brain image was removed because it wasn't accurate.

1tut10y

Didn't we have a special poll thread so that the RSS feed for the open thread would work?

1Ben Pace10y

Oops. Did I mess something up?

[-]Scott Garrabrant10y60

For a quick reminder of the power of many independent trials, estimate and then answer the following question:

I have 2 biased coins in my pocket. The first comes up heads with probability 51%, while the second comes up heads with probability 49%. I take a coin out of my pocket, uniformly at random, and flip it a million times. I observe that it comes up heads 508,634 times. What is the probability that it is the first coin?

5Lumifer10y

Under the usual convention of 95% significance, it's neither :-D > binom.test(508634, 1000000, 0.51) Exact binomial test data: 508634 and 1e+06 number of successes = 508634, number of trials = 1e+06, p-value = 0.006304 alternative hypothesis: true probability of success is not equal to 0.51 95 percent confidence interval: 0.5077 0.5096 sample estimates: probability of success 0.5086

5A1987dM10y

Very very close to 1, if the trials are truly independent. But (as Jaynes mentioned in PT:TLoS) there are ways of flipping a coin that systematically favour one side over the other, and you might be unwittingly doing something like that. IOW inside the argument the probability that you took the second coin is negligible, but outside the argument it isn't.

5philh10y

Gut: vg'f tbvat gb or fhssvpvragyl pybfr gb bar gung gur cebonovyvgl vf whfg tbvat gb ybbx yvxr n ohapu bs avarf gb zr. Fermi estimate: VVEP bar qrpvory vf nobhg svsgl fvk creprag, naq crepragf punatr snfgre jura qrpvoryf ner fznyy, fb svsgl bar creprag vf yrff guna unys n qrpvory. Fb yrg'f fnl gung svsgl bar creprag vf nobhg mreb cbvag bar qo. Fb rnpu urnq cebivqrf abhtug cbvag bar qrpvoryf sbe pbva bar, naq rnpu gnvy cebivqrf artngvir gung sbe gur fnzr. Lbh unir nobhg gjragl gubhfnaq zber urnqf guna gnvyf, fb nobhg gjb gubhfnaq qo rivqrapr sbe pbva bar. Rirel gra qrpvoryf pbeerfcbaqf gb vapernfvat gur bqqf ol n snpgbe bs gra, fb cebonovyvgl vf gura fbzrguvat yvxr bar zvahf gra gb gur zvahf gjb uhaqerq. Calculation: svsgl bar creprag vf abhtug cbvag bar frira qrpvoryf. Gurer ner gjb gvzrf rvtug gubhfnaq, fvk uhaqerq naq guvegl sbhe zber urnqf guna gnvyf. Gung znxrf nyzbfg rknpgyl guerr gubhfnaq qrpvoryf sbe urnqf. Fb gur bqqf ner gra gb gur guerr uhaqerq, tvivat cebonovyvgl nyzbfg rknpgyl bar zvahf gra gb gur zvahf guerr uhaqerq. Compared to Manfred's answer: Jr qvssre ol n snpgbe bs gra gb gur gjb uhaqerq naq guerr. V qba'g pheeragyl unir gur gvzr gb jbex bhg jul, naq jura V qb unir gvzr V znl abg pner rabhtu. Edit: I think I did it wrong. No time to correct it currently, but the true answer should be higher than mine. Edit 2: Maybe not? I thought I needed to use both P(H|C1)/P(H|C2) and P(H|C1)/P(T|C1), which are confusingly identical. But when I actually put it on paper, it looks correct.

1Manfred10y

I have us being different by a factor of 10^40, but yeah, that's a bit surprising. Maybe we're far enough out in the tails that the normal approximation is breaking down?

5philh10y

Oh, I misbracketed your formula. Yes, 10^40. I don't offhand have a model for why we expect your method to work, so I don't know why it fails. But another approach using the normal approximation gets within a factor of 10, so that shouldn't be it. Um, I think you're just counting standard deviations in the wrong direction? You're counting standard deviations from 500,000 and doubling them, but the relevant distribution means are 510,000 and 490,000. But no, those should be equivalent. Oh! You're squaring a sum, not summing a square. You're counting the correct number of standard deviations in total, but you need the correct number for each distribution. Dammit LW, stop nerd sniping me.

1Manfred10y

Oh yeah, whoops. And also, muahaha, complete success.

1DanielLC10y

Do you take into account the possibility that you miscounted, or are hallucinating, or any of the other events that are far more likely explanations than that it comes up heads with probability 49% and it came up heads that often just by chance?

4othercriteria10y

When I know I'm to be visited by one of my parents and I see someone who looks like my mother, should my first thought be "that person looks so unlike my father that maybe it is him and I'm having a stroke"? Should I damage my eyes to the point where this phenomenon doesn't occur to spare myself the confusion?

1RowanE10y

If you're being asked to estimate the probability that you're being visited by your father then yes you probably should be considering the possibility that you are seeing him but you're having a stroke.

3othercriteria10y

This comment rubbed me the wrong way and I couldn't figure out why at first, which is why I went for a pithy response. I think what's going on is I was reacting to the pragmatics of your exchange with Coscott. Coscott informally specified a model and then asked what we could conclude about a parameter of interest, which coin was chosen, given a sufficient statistic of all the coin toss data, the number of heads observed. This is implicitly a statement that model checking isn't important in solving the problem, because everything that could be used for model checking, e.g., statistics on runs to verify independence, the number of tails observed to check against a type of miscounting where the number of tosses don't add to 1,000,000, mental status inventories to detect hallucination, etc., is left out of the statistic communicated. Maybe Coscott (the fictional version who flipped all those coins) did model checking or maybe not, but if it was done and the data suggested miscounting or hallucination, then Coscott wouldn't have stated the problem like this. So, yeah, the points you raise are valid object-level ones, but bringing them up this way in a problem poser / problem solver context was really unexpected and seemed to violate the norms for this sort of exchange.

4DanielLC10y

I suppose my point was that assuming normal distribution can give you far more extreme probabilities than could ever realistically be justified. It would probably be better if I just said it like that.

1Manfred10y

Shortcut: Gurfr ner onfvpnyyl abezny qvfgevohgvbaf jvgu fgnaqneq qrivngvba fdeg(a)/2 = svir uhaqerq (gur snpgbe bs 1/2 pbzrf sebz gur c(1-c) grez va gur inevnapr). Gur qvssrerapr orgjrra gur gjb vavgvnyyl-rdhny cbffvovyvgvrf vf gura nobhg 34 fgnaqneq qrivngvbaf. Jung'f bar zvahf r gb gur zvahf 34 fdhnerq bire 2?

[-]Furcas10y60

In his latest newsletter Louie Helm advises taking "activated" vitamin D in the form of Calcitriol or Paricalcitol, to raise one's Klotho levels, which is likely to increase one's IQ and longevity if you don't already have the gene for it. Since Calcitriol and Paricalcitol aren't over-the-counter, what would be the best way to acquire some?

http://rockstarresearch.com/increase-longevity-and-intelligence-with-boosted-klotho-levels/

5niceguyanon10y

Check the comments near the bottom. Not the pet pharmacy link.

2satt10y

Seems Michael Jackson is back from the dead and commenting on Louie's blog. The salubrious powers of vitamin D know no bounds!

4James_Miller10y

If it's true that the GT version gives you increased intelligence then there should be a dating service that matches TT with GG because their children would all be GT.

4ChristianKl10y

How good is the case of ingesting Calcitriol/Paricalcitol over the standard cholecalciferol?

4polymathwannabe10y

Your liver and kidneys already produce the necessary precursors. Eat enough dairy and get enough sunlight, and your body will do the rest.

6A1987dM10y

[-]William_Quixote10y50

Less wrong overlaps overcoming bias which plugs scicast. So there should be a bunch of folks on here competing in scicast. If so how are you folks doing?

[-]Toggle10y50

I tried to think of the most harmless thing. Something I loved from my childhood. Something that could never ever possibly destroy us.

A thought occurred to me a while back. Call it the "Ghostbusters" approach to the existential risk of AI research. The basic idea is that rather than trying to make the best FAI on the first try, you hedge your bets. Work to make an AI that is a)unlikely to disrupt human civilization in a permanent way at all, and b)available for study.

Part of the stress of the 'one big AI' interpretation of the intelligence ... (read more)

6drethelin10y

If you're making AI for study it shouldn't be super-intelligent at all, ideally it should be dumber than you. I can imagine an AGI that can usefully perform some tasks but is too stupid to self-modify itself into fooming if constrained. You can let it be in charge of opening and closing doors!

7Toggle10y

Well, I definitely agree that we should make non-super intelligent AIs for study, and also for a great many other reasons. But it's perhaps less clear what 'too stupid to foom' actually means for an AGI. There was a moment when a hominid brain crossed an invisible line and civilization became possible; but the mutation precipitating that change may not have obviously been a major event from the perspective of an outside observer. It may just have looked like another in a sequence of iterative steps. Is the foom line in about the same place as the agriculture line? Is it simpler? Harder? On the other hand, it's possible to imagine an experimental AGI with values like "Fulfill [utility function X] in the strictly defined spatial domain of Neptune, using only materials that were contained in the gravity well of Neptune in the year 2000, including the construction of your own brain, and otherwise avoid >epsilon changes to probable outcomes for the universe outside the domain of Neptune." Then fill in whatever utility function you'd like to test; you could try this with each new iteration of AGI methodology, once you are actionably worried about the possibility of fooming.

[-][anonymous]10y50

I am looking for methods by which I can gain experience working with state or federal (American) organizations. I plan to begin applying for jobs with government libraries and archives next year, and I would like some experience besides what I am doing for my current job. I do not mean that my current job is pointless, only that I feel no reason not to spend time augmenting it.

As I am not a student, I cannot apply for online internships, which was my first plan. I could enroll in an online class but I do not have the money for the tuition. So, I am looking... (read more)

2VAuroch10y

Are you sure that these online internships have as an explicit condition the requirement that you be a student? Most internships have no such condition.

5[anonymous]10y

The internships I have found so far through resources like the State department and usajobs.gov are all specifically for students. I've also emailed the person in charge of State department internships, asking if she knows of any non-student internships, and she has not heard of any. Of course, this does not mean there is no cache of non-student internships out there. I simply have not found any through the resources I know of.

1VAuroch10y

It's fairly plausible that most/all government internships are specifically for students, so if you've looked carefully and not found things then they may not exist. However, consider looking for local government; it will probably transfer well, especially if you can find internships with large cities or counties/regions.

1[anonymous]10y

From what sources I have found/spoken to, this looks like the case. The only internships appear to be student ones and there does not seem to be any non-student equivalents for getting your foot in the door. Networking and connections seem the best route.

1fubarobfusco10y

If you code, talk to the Code for America folks?

[-]Metus10y40

What are your opinions on professional certificates? Do they actually increase potential earnings or do they only make money for the certifying body? And are there very broad certificates that can be useful in any vaguely quantitative profession that uses mathematical models.

I ask because I am in the later part of studying physics and pretty sure that I neither want to nor be able to make it in academia, so I am working on alternative plans. Figured that some certificates could enhance my employability or show some alternatives I haven't been aware of yet. What do you think?

1ChristianKl10y

Where do you want to be employed?

1Metus10y

I have yet to find out. Currently I am in talks with an IT company for a paid internship where I could acquire some IT-related experience such as setting up and understanding IT infrastructure and working in a larger coding project. There is some appeal to that. On the other hand I love mathematical models which this kind of field would be lacking. A major problem of mine is that I am absolutely not willing to work long hours as I value my time very highly and want to use it to learn about the world around us for the time I am without a family or spend it with my family for the time I am with a family.

1iarwain110y

Have you considered working in an IT support capacity for a company that does things using mathematical models? Done right this might allow you to use your love of math while also not working long hours.

2Metus10y

I have not, thank you for the suggestion. Examples would be IT support for an insurance company or similar I think. Would experience as an actuary be beneficial? I am actually working on an (most probably unpaid) internship as an actuary too.

3iarwain110y

I can't say myself since I'm sort of in the same boat as you are. I love research and abstract thinking, but I value time spent on family and relaxation more, so I decided against going into academia. IT / programming support for a research position is just an idea that I'd seen suggested I think in a few places. For myself I'm hoping to go for data science since that's very closely related to many types of research and if a research job doesn't work out then at least it pays quite well.

[-]Zian10y30

In light of how long it usually takes for statistical models and discoveries to crawl out of academic articles -> practice, the LessWrong community will probably appreciate the efforts by the Consortium of Food Allergy Research (established w/ money from the US National Institutes of Health) to provide online probabilistic calculators for people's long-term prognoses:

[-]Gvaerg10y30

Does anyone know why Stephen Bond's website is down? It's been so for something like a month.

[-]Ixiel10y30

Sorry if this has been addressed, but is there a way to buy a copy of the major sequences (I assume it'd be too long without the word "major?") in a dead tree book form? Further, if not, anyone interested in getting relevant permissions and putting one together on Lulu or some such? I like highlighting my books, and know some folks I'd like to give the major sequences, but stapled copies would make me feel like a crackpot pamphleteer. Thanks in advance if there is a solution.

7[anonymous]10y

As far as I am aware, this is one of those "it's in the works" things. I know that, on MIRI, they are still asking for volunteers to proofread and edit the sequences. So, I assume from that that, no, there is not yet a book form.

3Ixiel10y

Oh nice! I was planning to match my purchase price in a Miri donation so they got a piece anyway. Thanks for speedy reply.

3Viliam_Bur10y

I am not sure about the plan, but I thought only an ebook version was planned. So -- if that is true -- you would have to print your own copy anyway. The biggest change is that someone else has already selected the articles and made a nice layout. Some of those articles were also redacted. It has over 2000 half letter (A5) pages. By the way, if you don't mind a few typos and prefer speed, you could ask them to send you a working version. Also, the book contains a lot of hyperlinks (both internal and external), which will not work in the printed version. So, it will not be perfect either way. -- Unless someone also creates a printable version, which would e.g. replace the hyperlinks with footnotes. Again, I am not sure, but I think they are doing it in TeX, so finding a volunteer TeX expert could increase the probability of having the printable version. (Yet another possibility would be to convert their source files automatically in some other format, such as RTF or HTML, add the hyperlinks, and print it.)

1Ixiel10y

Yeah, the links would be a loss, but worth it to have as a real book. I suppose I'll wait until there's a finished product and pay someone to get it bound if they don't print a real one.

[-][anonymous]10y20

I am looking for a proofreader or three. The thing I would like proofed is short and so could easily be sent over PMs. I would like an outside view before submitting it.

2polymathwannabe10y

I'd be glad to help.

2ChristianKl10y

What's the topic?

2[anonymous]10y

It's the "Saving the World - Progress Report" I mentioned elsewhere.

[-]Qwake10y10

"Memory is the framework of reality" This quote just popped into my head recently and I can't stop thinking about it.

5NancyLebovitz10y

Or... Memory is the framework of "reality". Damn, now I want quote-marks with percentages attached.

5sediment10y

Nabokov: "[reality is] one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes".

[-]DanielLC10y-10

Regarding where to draw the boundary, are R, W, and Y really vowels? The biggest difference I've noticed between vowels and consonants is that vowels don't involve touching parts of your mouth together. This makes it a lot easier to transition between letters. The second thing is that vowels are always voiced. H is otherwise a vowel, but it seems like it might be worth calling a consonant on that basis.

R at least is always considered a consonant, but the sound W makes is considered a vowel if it's a hard U or an OO, and the sound Y makes is considered a vo... (read more)

9polymathwannabe10y

Additional context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximant_consonant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semivowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-colored_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-vocalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabic_consonant

5A1987dM10y

(Whoops, this came out excessively snarky for no good reason; let me make the same points in a more civil manner. I shouldn't comment when tired or stressed out.)

5Richard_Kennaway10y

Upthrust. Backstop. Blackstrap (4 in a row!) Axminster (twice, -ksm- and -nst-). Schatzkammer. Opschrijven . All of these violate this proposed rule. Not to mention things like xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓, in a language that stretches the very idea of a syllable. That should be "consistently pronounced." However the native speakers consistently pronounce something is right. The concept of a consonant has fuzzy edges -- see polymathwannabe's comment. Why is this a problem? If the data persistently fail to conform to rules abstracted from the data, it is the rules that are wrong).

1DanielLC10y

After reading some of these comments, there are more exceptions than that, and I wrote it confusingly. So how about this: you cannot have more than one consonant at the same side of a syllable without extenuating circumstances. Having two of them have the same place of articulation (like the s and t in backstop), is a common one. s and z seem to only be possible to place after consonants that are voiced and unvoiced respectively. Neither can be placed after a ʒ (the second half of a j sound). The pronounce it in a way that violates the theory of what can and cannot be pronounced in Japanese. As far as I can understand, the Japanese alphabet has one character for each syllable. Each syllable has one consonant, then one or more vowels, then possibly an n. There is no syllable "sem". I don't know if they always pronounce it "sempai". I know it is at least sometimes written "senpai". I just meant that it's very common to pronounce that way, even though it shouldn't be possible at all. If they have gratuitous English that has a syllable ending in a consonant, they stick a vowel after it. For example, "red" becomes "redo" (and the d is particularly t-like, and the r is something that has no English equivalent).

1Richard_Kennaway10y

Then the theory is wrong. Whatever is pronounced in Japanese can be. In Japanese, "n" regularly sounds as "m" before "p". It's a rule!

1polymathwannabe10y

1) The clusters in "upthrust" and "backstop" actually have three consonantal sounds, even if some of those sounds are written as digraphs. This debate is going to be very difficult if we're stuck to English or any language whose spelling makes little sense, if at all. Ghoti and all that. 2) Those clusters aren't in a single syllable. Up-thrust. Back-stop. Black-strap. Schatz-kam-mer. Op-schrij-ven. Apart from the exotic example you cite (and that time a Muppet tried to pronounce the entire alphabet as a single word), I haven't seen more than three consonants in a single syllable.

3Richard_Kennaway10y

Yes. I wasn't intending them as examples of more than three, but of counterexamples to the rules that DanielLC proposed. The original comment didn't talk about syllables. "Firsts." On the other hand, a phoneticist might analyse the "ts" part as a single sound; except that on the phonetic level it appears to be two phonemes. So is (the sound represented in English spelling by) "ts" one consonant or two? Is the answer different for "tsetse" and for "firsts"? For "Katz" and for "cats"? Linguistic categories are complicated.

1DanielLC10y

My comment was confusingly written. If it's a single syllable, then you can only have one consonant without extenuating circumstances.

1erratio10y

Syllable-initially they're pretty obviously consonants (yam vs am). There are also lots of languages that have phonological rules that involve replacing semi-vowels with other consonants or vice versa, which is a pretty strong argument for them being part of the class of consonants in those languages. For the other stuff, what polymathwannabe said. This stuff is well-studied in linguistics and particularly in phonetics.

3DanielLC10y

How do you tell if it's a consonant or just part of a diphthong? For example, is the y in may a consonant? If so, how about the y sound in mate? Also, by that reasoning, even the r in beard, which has another vowel in it, would have to be a vowel since it's immediately followed by a consonant.

1erratio10y

You're confusing orthography and phonology. "may" is spelt in IPA as /mei/, so yes, it's a diphthong there that English represents using a vowel + Y for historical reasons. Also, there isn't a y sound in "mate" if you pronounce it at normal speed. I don't understand what you mean by "by that reasoning". But there's no reason for the r in "beard" to have to be a vowel since it's followed by a consonant, since that's never stopped most other consonants before.

1DanielLC10y

I know the difference. They always teach vowels and consonants as letters instead of as phonemes, and most people seem to use them that way, so I just have to talk about the phonemes corresponding to those letters. I also don't know IPA very well, and I can't assume anyone else does, so I tend to just say things like "y sound". http://dictionary.reference.com/ has my as /meɪ/ and mate as /meɪt/. Vowels are a lot more vaguely defined than consonants, so I don't know how consistently dictionaries use the same letter, but it has to have something close to an ɪ in it, or it would just be "met". You can have multiple consonants in a row like that, but there's always caveats. You can't follow an n with a b, for example. This is because consonants are difficult to pronounce consecutively, unless there's some reason that those two work particularly well. r is like a vowel, and can be placed next to any consonant.

1erratio10y

That's the problem right there though, you're assuming that 'y sound' corresponds to the letter Y in English. The letter Y can represent either the phoneme /j/ (pronounced as the syllable-initial y), or the smallcaps i. The general rule is that syllable-initially Y represents /j/, elsewhere it represents the smallcaps i. Same goes for W, it's /w/ syllable-initially, /u/ (or smallcaps omega, or barred-u depending on your dialect) elsewhere. R is similar but there's a lot more variability in how it's pronounced by individual people, for some people "bird" has a distinct consonant in there, for others it's just an r-flavored vowel, for people like me it's not there at all because I speak a non-rhotic dialect but I lengthen the preceding vowel somewhat as compensation.

1DanielLC10y

Linguists tend to be a bit more specific than me. There may be a slight difference between /i/ and /j/, but they're really close. It doesn't seem to be enough to justify one being a vowel and the other being a consonant. I tried listening to the recordings of /i/ vs /j/ on Wikipedia. /i/ just had /i/, but the recording for /j/ is /ja/, so it's hard to concentrate on the /j/. It sure sounds a lot like /ia/. Similarly, /w/ had /wa/, which sounds a heck of a lot like /ua/. I feel like /y/ just means that you start out transitioning from /i/ to another vowel. You tend to emphasize the following vowel more. But since you could be transitioning to any vowel, it doesn't make sense that /y/ represents the transition itself. The only constant is it starts out as /i/. A particularly interesting case is /jiː/ (Old English pronoun that is now spelled "ye"). It's clearly not just /i/, and /ii/ would sound identical. But it does seem to be somewhat of a palindrome. The /i/ at the end is extended longer, but the sounds are the same forwards and backwards. There's a slight change in the sound or emphasis between them, so it might be /ieiː/ or something where it moves to a subtly different vowel and back.

1erratio10y

I am not interested in being an introductory phonology/phonetics textbook, but if you want to know why linguists think that semivowels should be considered a separate category to vowels, there is plenty of writing out there on the subject.I'm bowing out from further participation.

1ChristianKl10y

Take a look at the IPA definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet It quite clearly distinguishes the class of sounds that are consonants and those that are vowels. Given that English orthography is messed up and the sound that letters make isn't always the same sound.

1DanielLC10y

It says that it's the middle part of a vowel. That's not clear at all, considering that you can have more than one vowel in the middle and you don't need consonants at the ends. You don't put a w or a y in the middle of a syllable, but it's frequent to put the corresponding sound there. You just don't spell it with a w or y. r is frequently put in the middle of a vowel with consonants at both ends. There is often no other vowel there. There's always another vowel written there, but the only sound made is an r sound. For example, bird, herd, and turd just have the r sound. Beard has a y sound before the r sound, but since it has a consonant after the r, the r clearly can't be a consonant.

1ChristianKl10y

No the whole article doesn't use the word "middle" even once if you do a quick search. You are still thinking in terms of letter instead of phonemes. Your definition is not the one in that article. If you look at the vowel chart they all follow a similar schema. But there also a definition on wikipedia: ---------------------------------------- In those examples "ir", "er" and "ur" are together the vowel "əː". There no real "r" sound in those words. In contrast words like "rare" or "sorry" actually have the "r" phoneme. "əː" is a vowel and "r" is a consonant. To be more precise "r" is the voiced alveolar fricative while "ə" is the mid-central vowel also known as the schwa and the ":" suggests that it's long. "ə" appears even two times in violet without there being any letter "r" in the word.

3A1987dM10y

Not in American English.

1ChristianKl10y

It's true in the kind of English that Google speaks. Maybe Californian English?

1erratio10y

Google apparently speaks British/Australian/South African or Massachusetts English. In the majority of American and Canadian English "bird" is pronounced with an r-flavoured schwa.

1polymathwannabe10y

The presence of a consonant after the r in "beard" does not make the r any less consonantal. Words like "mast" and "mats" have two consonants at the end of a syllable and both are still fully consonantal.

1ChristianKl10y

The IPA of beard is: "bɪəd" b and d are consonants but the "r" belongs to "ə" which is a vowel.

1polymathwannabe10y

Merriam-Webster gives \ˈbird\, Cambridge gives /bɪərd/, and Wiktionary gives /bɪɹd/. Unfortunately Oxford requires a subscription, but all of the others seem to agree.

1ChristianKl10y

Okay, I was going with Google define with gives /bɪəd/. It seems like the pronunciation various significantly between different English dialects. If you listen to the Merriam-Webster audio file then there an /r/ sound. But if you listen to the audio file on Google define there's only the schwa. Given that all three give different definition of how the word is supposed to be pronounced, "agree"is a bit strong. Even if we only look at the "r" Wiktionary suggests an alveolar approximant for US English suggests that optional in UK English. On the other hand while the British dictionary Merriam-Webster suggest an alveolar trill and Cambridge suggest also a alveolar trill for US English. That means whether not there is a consonant behind the "r" in beard and what consonant that might be depends on the dialect that you speak.

1DanielLC10y

You can have multiple consonants in a row on the same part of a syllable, but it's restricted. Most of them seem to have the same place of articulation. For example, n and t are alveolar. m and p are bilabial. Thus, ant and amp are allowed, but anp and amt are not. s and z don't seem to have to follow alveolar consonants, but s, which is voiced, must follow a voiced consonant, and z, which is unvoiced, must follow a voiced consonant. I also can't help but suspect this has to do with the fact that in English, you make words plural by adding an s or z at the end. There might be a vowel placed before it, like in bridges, but it might have caused us to get better at sticking those letters directly after consonants. Can someone who speaks a language that doesn't do that comment on this? It's hard to stick a bunch of consonants together, so you're only allowed to if there's extenuating circumstances. By contrast, vowels are easy. r is easy, so it's a vowel.

1Richard_Kennaway10y

"Amt" is a word in German. It is pronounced exactly as it looks, plus a glottal stop at the start. Where are you getting these rules?

1DanielLC10y

Surprising. It's not that hard to say "amt", but it's not any easier than just "mt". The syllable has a vowel in it, but I don't know if that's just an odd word, or if Germany has different rules. For all I know, they frequently have syllables without vowels. I would expect them to follow the same rules, since English is a Germanic language, but I guess getting rid of almost all of their words would lead to getting rid of almost all of their rules about what words are possible. They're rules that I noticed English tends to follow, and the rules seem to make words easier to pronounce.

1Richard_Kennaway10y

It only tends to follow them. Exceptions abound; that is not a problem for the exceptions, but for the rules. An exception is not something that fails to obey the rule, it is something the rule failed to explain. I think that not all, but a lot of the causality is the other way around: whatever your native language does is easier for you.

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