I had a dream this post was promoted and got 172 karma, spawning another post calling for DDOS attacks and other cyber-terrorism on Psychology Today by LW. Eliezer promoted that article too, and LW went to war with them. Eliezer got arrested and LW was shut down. It was weird.
Oh, lots of things. "Suspension of moral disbelief," I suppose, causes me to rage the hardest inside, though I rarely get in arguments over it. There's too much inferential distance to close before people change from defense/rationalization mode to actually-goddamn-thinking-about-it mode. So I don't generally go about to my family members screaming "YOUR GOD CONDONES RAPE!" even though every time I hear an argument about how morality comes from god, my blood boils.
Invest in people proportionate to your expected return. Your prior on returns should be very low, most people are a waste of time and resources (Specifically for this particular example, your investment was your emotional reactance to things they do). Low but still positive, so you invest a tiny bit and watch what happens. If you actually get some returns great! Repeat with a slightly larger investment. Otherwise start with a new person.
Your anger is understandable, things are more frustrating when they are close to awesome but then fail in a stupid way than things that were never awesome. These "almost awesome" things give you a glimpse of something amazing before snatching it away. Even though our platonic awesome thing never really existed we still feel loss.
I tend to lose interest after encountering something like "Our current theories of the physical world don't work, and can never be made to work until they account for life and consciousness." (The writer is mentally classified as a hopeless case, so no fun to be had.) This is probably a defensive mechanism developed after 5 years in a physics IRC channel.
Yet I still get frustrated when an apparently elementary error is committed by a person who should know better (especially if, after some careful analysis, this person turns out to be me).
And it amuses me when rationalists get frustrated at the elementary errors, and mistakenly think that they "should know better", despite the overwhelming evidence that they don't. It especially amuses me when that rationalist is me. I should know better, and I do upon reflection, but rarely do in the moment.
Probably the only two examples that I can think of from my personal experience are:
1) A post that one of my old high school classmates made on face book saying (and I paraphrase): "[the existence of a personal god] is literally too good to be true, which is why we should believe it."
2) Being forced to take a class in "critical thinking" which actually turned out to utilize pretty much every dark arts technique in the book to convert you of the professor's political agenda.
2) Being forced to take a class in "critical thinking" which actually turned out to utilize pretty much every dark arts technique in the book to convert you of the professor's political agenda.
That sounds like it could be the final exam in a class on critical thinking.
I wonder why your comment got deleted. Was it potentially inflammatory? Does the website not like people signing things Summer Glau when they aren't Summer Glau? (Unless you are Summer Glau, of course.) Was there a link in it? I don't want to assume they just don't like dissent, but sadly that happens sometimes. If you still have the comment I'd like to see it.
As for examples, I'm currently taking a class in "Science and Religion" that is full of minor instances of this. Yesterday I got deathism and elan vital, plus some arguing by definition over "life". Deathism is more a kick in the morals than a kick in the rationals, but it's the same feeling of "argh this is bad and there's nothing I can do about it".
this particular item got my goat to the point where I had to go and get my goat back.
I am going to steal this phrase.
and signed it Summer Glau.
Awesome. One more xkcd fulfilled, n left to go.
It was very much of the tone "I am now going to explain to you why you are wrong", but it was still civil. Rough outline:
1) Quantum mechanics does not say that.
2) Strong anthropic principle is a bold claim you've failed to substantiate.
3) Saying "our current theories of the physical world don't work" is outrageous coming from a man who attracts other objects towards him with a force proportional to the product of their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
4) The physical processes underlying organic life are perfectly compatible with a lawful physical universe, and fairly well understood by the standards of many academic disciplines (and you should know that, because you're actually an expert on the subject). To date, no mental phenomena have demonstrated properties that violate the laws of physics.
5) "Tree in the forest" is an artefact of the semantic history of our language, and nothing to do with physics.
6) Remaining few paragraphs are presented in a needlessly confusing way to obfuscate some fairly straightforward ideas. Obviously things we label "optical effects" require optical devices in order t...
Mass Effect kicks me in the LW.
Quantum entanglement communication. AI (including superAI) all over the place, life still normal. Bad ethics. Humans in funny suits.
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to scream 'bullshit' and throw the controller at the screen.
Eh. If violations of physics and common sense (never mind unusual cognitive-science concepts) in space opera had the ability to make me angry, I'd have to spend most of my time getting angry. Mass Effect actually seems fairly sane as space opera goes, though its handling of the robot rebellion motif is pretty damned ham-fisted.
The most recent Deus Ex game actually bothered me more, thanks to explicitly tackling transhumanist themes and then completely failing to resolve them in a way that showed any understanding of the subject matter. Very little in media irritates me more than a work rendering complex philosophical issues down into a trite moral quandary and then trying to award itself cool points for knowing about the issue at all.
Fatigue. Large amounts of depressing fatigue.
It's particularly bothersome because I just recently got a very good example of how irrational it makes me. This entire post was originally written before some of the coffee I had kicked in. I was typing up my post, and I read it, and I thought there was a good chance people were going to worry about me being suicidal. And then the caffeine kicked in, and I felt more awake, and I thought "Well, that's not very descriptive. I'm depressed, but I'm not THAT depressed." and then I rewrote everything. And then I realized what I was doing, and then I had to rewrite everything to acknowledge both states.
Basically, the knowledge that "I'm entirely irrational while I'm worn out" and "I'm worn out most of the time." put together, hurts me quite a bit in my Less Wrong parts. Of course, it might just be the availability heuristic. I might actually be less worn out then I remember. But then that brings up "A substantial majority of my recent memories seem to be of me being worn out/irrational." as it's own separate problem.
Using your tool analogy, it would best be described as "My tools are dull. Sometimes...
I know how you feel. I get so much stupider and sadder when I'm tired. Have you found any solutions? I've tried naps and mid-afternoon exercise and dietary changes. The only thing that's ever helped in the long term was giving up coffee 3 years ago - the crashes after the caffeine high were making everything so much worse. It took a lot of nail-biting but it was worth it.
On the plus side, at least you recognise its happening to you so you can try and make sure you don't make important decisions in this state.
I enjoy meditation, especially group meditation. It calms me down and helps me stay a bit more focused. I just want to do without the new age hippy bullshit. My eyes start to glaze over when people start to talk about God, chakras, and auras.
I've noticed many people who practise meditation have a strong belief in meditation and the more 'rational' core of Buddhist practices, but only belief in belief about the new age-y aspects. My meditation teacher, for example, consistently prefaces the new age stuff with "in Buddhist teachings" or "Buddhists believe" ("Buddhists believe we will be reincarnated") while making other claims as simple statements of fact ("mindfulness meditation is a useful relaxation technique").
I wrote a short seven-point response in the comments lucidly explaining its most obvious problems, and signed it Summer Glau. It got removed, and I learned a valuable lesson about productively channeling my anger.
I'd look at what you would have spent your time doing otherwise before you necessarily say (you didn't, but implied) that was a waste of time. Even if exactly 1 person read it (the one who deleted it), you got practice expressing yourself and (hopefully) coherently forming an argument.
Horrible lurching realisation: over the past couple of years, I've avoided unproductive online arguments. This has made me happier. I've also felt, over the past 18 months or so, that my general argument-forming faculties have gotten a little bit shoddy.
This is worrying.
that my general argument-forming faculties have gotten a little bit shoddy.
So long as your truth-discovering faculties are getting enough exercise, that seems like a fair trade.
The other day someone in a class mentioned that intelligence is in the soul, and that humans are rational beings because of this. I politely interjected, explaining cognitive biases, that humans are not inherently rational, and often fail to analyse situations.
My choice example is dilettantes who learned from other dilettantes pontificating with supreme confidence about the subject matter they know little about (Hello, MWI!).
Oh, I got another one, mostly confined to this forum: people making up numbers for probabilities of certain events and feeling so much more Bayesian.
I've occasionally been guilty of that, but I see it less as a magical talisman of +1 to prediction skills and more as a means of improving my calibration after the fact: if I discover I've been systematically overweighting (or, much less likely, underweighting) the probability of some category of events, that's a good clue that my thinking about them is flawed in some way. Can't do that if I don't quantify my uncertainty in the first place, although of course the flaw might come in at the quantification step.
This only works if you actually go back and collect that data, though, and I haven't generally been very good about using PredictionBook or any similar tools.
LW has made me feel this way about general run-of-the-mill Internet stupidity.
Not to mention the pain of the older teen coming out with mindboggling failures of logic when she was studying A-level Philosophy. And not doing too badly on it. (Some LW readers on my Facebook will recall some stunningly scrambled thinking about religion.) Kids, eh.
Kids, eh
Hey, you're the one who sired a human. Don't go blaming her for the resulting failure to think clearly.
She's the loved one's daughter, not mine. My genes are innocent of that one!
Now, the 4yo who is really obviously mine ... she's already got the clever rhetorician skills down pat.
A friend of mine goes to The North American Institute of Medical Herbalism. Today, she and her classmates tried five different "flower essences" (made in basically the same way as homeopathic medicine) and talked about their reactions in what was described as a double-blind trial. Naturally, they all experienced very similar and significant effects from each essence. It's too bad they can't get anyone to thoroughly document these double-blind trials they keep running on energy medicine!
Various cases of NPD online. The NPD-afflicted individuals usually are too arrogant to study or do anything difficult where they can measurably fail, and instead opt to blog on the topics where they don't know the fundamentals, promoting misinformed opinions. Some even live on donations for performing work that they never tried to study for doing. It's unclear what attracts normal people to such individuals, but I guess if you don't think yourself a supergenius you can still think yourself clever for following a genius whom you can detect without relying o...
You know, an uncharitable reading of this would almost sort-of kinda maybe construe it as a rebuke of the LW community. Almost.
Intelligent Design makes me crazy. It's not that it's an argument against evolution, it's that my mind is screaming, "HOW CAN PEOPLE NOT NOTICE THAT WE DON'T KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT UNIVERSES TO TELL WHAT'S PLAUSIBLE?"
The.thing that gets me is in movies or books or whatever. When they do the thing that makes no sense but holds the plot together my brain screams. Not "hold in that's too stupid to exist" my brain says, "Oh, thia is a movie about stupid people doing stupid things" For example in my head in the movie Avatar was about some incompotent division of a mineing corp useing mickeymoused old bootleg clones to try to mine a terrible little planted off in some desolate corner of nowhere before I they get shut down on safety violations
The correct response to that sort of stupidity is immediate tab-closing, unless it comes from an especially important person who can be swayed. Unfortunately, this still really gets me in person, where walking away is harder.
I have a lit-crit friend who I have known for a better part of a decade. We have an ongoing struggle to understand each other, and as part of this we will occasionally trade ideas the other finds incomprehensible. As part of this cultural exchange process, she decided to send me something about one of my subjects (econ) in 'her language', and linked me to this.
Needless to say, this was like a cannonball to my LessWrong Parts.
As much as I do find this sort of stuff distressing, I also find it useful for helping me explain precisely why I'm so confident in dismissing it as informationally bankrupt. The general retort from the literary type is that these sorts of texts contain lots of specialist language and ideas, and just as you wouldn't expect a lay-person to understand a maths or physics paper off the bat, you shouldn't expect to understand something like the above.
To which I respond "my arse". Papers in disciplines I consider to be respectable, but lack any deeper knowledge of, have a recognisable argument structure, even if I don't necessarily understand the arguments. Also, any epistemology worth having should demand claims be provided with means of substantiatin...
The linked essay makes perfect sense to me; and I'm certain the only reason it doesn't to you is indeed just the jargon. I don't think it's a particularly good analysis, ultimately, but for boring reasons that would make any essay weak, not because it's saying nothing. It's also not attempting to be a knock-down argument, not on account of its theoretical stance, but because it's a short blog post firing off some impressions in a perhaps unjustifiably confident tone, which of course Manly Man Rational Economists(tm) do all the time.
That said, my acquired intuition is that within [the cluster of people/ideaspace that the typical LessWrong reader would ugh-field as "pomo"], as within many other clusters, the lack of clarity in language does certainly covary with lack of clarity in actual thought. But I can't really say how much my own tribal academic loyalties (or desire to believe that I can understand anything that means anything) have helped produce that sensation.
I can read it, and I'm pretty sure I can see what it's trying to say, but I can't find a cogent structured argument in it. More pressingly, after I tease apart its wilfully impenetrable written style, so what?
It has a reasonably coherent central idea (albeit one that could have been conveyed in a fifth of the wordcount), but it doesn't present a case for it. It just makes claims, occasionally referencing other people's claims. I can make claims too. Brigitte Bardot has a birthmark on her ankle in the shape of a duck. Does she? I dunno; maybe. It's not now your job to go away and research whether Brigitte Bardot has any birthmarks in the shape of waterfowl. It's mine. It's always mine.
It makes no effort to convince me it's not just some random stuff some dude is saying (cf. timecube.com). Lots of dudes say lots of random stuff. Why should I care about this? Why should I put it in my head and allow it to influence my expectations of what's going to happen? What's the difference between a world where this is accurately describing something and a world where it isn't?
If this structure, this mechanism for saying "here's something, and here's why" actually exists in there, please tell me where it is.
A world where this accurately describes reality, rather than one where it doesn't, is one where 1) most people consent, more or less, to the idea that they should pay their debts, 2) indebtedness is stigmatized, 3) debt is seen primarily as a relationship between individuals, 4) the indebted are less likely to be politically active than they would if they were not indebted, ..., &c. It's intended to resonate with one's phenomenal experience and background assumptions, and no, it doesn't attempt much more than that, so like I said, it's a bad argument.
This may sound like a glib remark, and it is, but it's also a legitimate query: where are they hiding all the good arguments?
My lit-crit friend, a Ph.D. student herself, presumably provided this example in the misguided hope that it would offer an insight into the value of her way of thinking. Was it just a bad choice on her part? Is there some secret trove of critical theory observations on debt that I might look at and think "woah! This is knowledge worth having"?
It's a reasonable question. First, I think that the linked example is not the best of post-modern thought.
More importantly, a lot of post-modern thought is co-opted and the label is forcibly excised. Here are some examples of what I think are good post-modern ideas.
There was a tendency for colonist-era Europeans to ascribe exotic virtues to Near and Far Easterners that had little relationship to the values of those communities. Orientalism is a discussion of this dynamic related to Near Eastern culture. I don't think the dynamic can be well explained by reference to in-group/out-group, but post-modernism does a good job, in my view. Consider also the phenomena of the Magical Negro (warning: TVtropes)
Death of the Author (TVtropes), the view that the author's opinions do not control a work's interpretations, is also heavily influenced by post-modern thought (or so I understand - I'm not very interested in most lit crit of any flavor)
The slogan "The personal is political" is insightful because it highlights that "political" (i.e. partisan electioneering) is not really a natural kind in political-theory conceptspace. Issues of personal identity are just
Personally, I've long been of the opinion that Death of the Author is, if not exactly wrong, still an idea which has been more harmful than useful with respect to its effects on literary criticism.
The central idea of Death of the Author is to judge the text itself without limiting interpretation to that which is imposed by the author's intentions. There are certainly cases where one can glean valuable information from a text which the author did not consciously choose to add to their work. For instance, the author might have views on race which will leak out into their writing, in such a way that a perceptive reader will gain insight about their views even though the author did not intend to make any sort of statement about race whatsoever. However, I think that to divorce the text entirely from the context of its creation is an invitation to abuse the basic principles of communication.
As Roland Barthes put it, "To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text." But imposing limits on a text is necessary in order to extract any information from it at all. It's only by narrowing down our space o...
If the linked essay make perfect sense to you, perhaps you can explain this sentence
In capitalism, all debts finally break free from the sovereign and become infinite by conjoining flows.
If we took fifty literature postgrads from across the English speaking world, and asked them to explain the sentence, would they give consistent answers?
at least, why ignore 'cojoining flows'?
If you ask two questions in one comment, and someone knows the answer to one of the questions, what would you like that person to do?
Does
The most astounding fact about the universe is the knowledge that everything we perceive—color, sound, and even energy itself—is a process that involves our consciousness.
hurt you in your LessWrong Parts? (the article's conclusion)
A month or so ago I stumbled across this. It's a blog piece by one Robert Lanza M.D., a legitimate, respected biologist who has made important contributions to tissue engineering, cloning and stem cell research. In his spare time, he is a crackpot.
I know I shouldn't give any of my time to an online pop-psychology magazine which has "Find a Therapist" as the second option on its navigation bar, but the piece in question could have been *designed* to antagonise a LessWrong reader: horrible misapplication of quantum physics, worshipful treatment of the mysterious, making a big deal over easily dissolvable questions, bold and unsubstantiated claims about physics and consciousness... the list goes on. I'm generally past the point in my life where ranting at people who are wrong on the internet holds any appeal, but this particular item got my goat to the point where I had to go and get my goat back.
If reading LW all these years has done anything, it's trained me to take apart that post without even thinking, so (and I'm not proud of this), I wrote a short seven-point response in the comments lucidly explaining its most obvious problems, and signed it Summer Glau. It got removed, and I learned a valuable lesson about productively channeling my anger.
But this started me thinking about how certain things (either subjects or people) antagonise what I now think of as my LessWrong Parts, or more generally cause me distress on an epistemic level, and what my subjective experience of that distress is like so I can recognise and deal with it in future.
I've seen a few other people make comments describing this kind of distress, (this description of "being forced to use your nicely sharpened tools on a task that would destroy them" seems particularly accurate). Common culprits seem to be critical theory, postmodernism and bad philosophy. I've also noticed some people distress me in this fashion, in a way I'm still struggling to characterise.
Who else has this experience? Do you have any choice examples? What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts?