All of HalMorris's Comments + Replies

Very nice analogy.  Also this bit: "even as it’s continuously accelerating towards the Earth, it continually misses" sounds like Douglas Adams' (Hitchhiker's Guide..) explanation how how to fly: aim to fall to the earth, but miss.

which exactly part of your worldview would say that Western education and living in a city should be incompatible with religious fanaticism?

Cultural development seems not to follow such orderly laws that we can use the word "incompatible" very often if ever. But going to a western university tends to promote individual thought over blind acceptance of whatever you were taught in childhood, and while someone who spent their live in some valley in Afghanistan or northern Pakistan, never exposed to different people, might imagine westerners as c... (read more)

The OP did write:

The history of religions sometimes resembles the history of viruses. Judaism and Islam were both highly virulent when they first broke out, driving the first generations of their people to conquer (Islam) or just slaughter (Judaism) everyone around them for the sin of not being them. They both grew more sedate over time.

Which I think acknowledges some of that early history. I assume what is said about Judaism has to do with the slaughter of Canaanites, which is possibly more than half legendary, unlike the exploits of Islam which ha... (read more)

And if you startle a cat when he's licking his crotch he'll freeze in whatever awkward posture he's in (that's my overgeneralization from one male cat).

To criticize hypocrisy in debate you don't even have to understand the other's argument -- you only have to be able to find a logical contradiction, and you can always find a contradiction, or something you can plausibly claim is a contradiction.

For the debater, it may be very hard to give up. Many of us can find (or generate plausible arguments for) contradictions with 10% of your brain power, thus keeping the other on the defensive, while using the rest of ones mind to search for a deeper argument. But for this reason it makes for tedious unilluminating debate, and ought to be given less encouragement than it gets - that is, if we want more insightful argument.

I wrote as a little part of a comment in the middle of a longish thread:

There is a paper "Experts: Which ones should you trust" addressing this issue by Alvin Goldman -- you need google scholar or JSTOR or something to actually get the article), one of the biggest names in epistemology and specifically social epistemology. Actually I don't think the article does very much to resolve the issue unfortunately.

One article (cited in Goldman "Experts...") that I really like is John Hardwig "The Role of Trust in Knowledge", which... (read more)

This rules out religion, politics, philosophy and most policy proposals as interesting controversies, leaving scientific and epistemological questions.

Slightly problematic unless you don't admit epistemology being part of philosophy. And it seems like almost as big a swamp as the rest of philosophy, though the problems seem much more worth resolving than in most of philosophy.

There is a paper "Experts: Which ones should you trust" addressing this issue by Alvin Goldman (http://philpapers.org/rec/GOLEWO -- you need JSTOR or something to actual... (read more)

I think it is a very good question. Forget ideas you may have had about UX 10 or 20 years ago. Google is a user interface to the rest of the internet. "Unfriendly" might not be the word for it, but the impression that it is there to serve me is an illusion. It is becoming too much like the "friendly" used car salesman.

Whatever we want to access on the internet is increasingly mediated by highly intelligent interfaces that have their own agendas, and I doubt we have thought enough about what constraints it would take to keep these ag... (read more)

I think it's still useful to point out when its done, and that was what I was trying to do here with that point. Just because it's an endemic everywhere doesn't mean it shouldn't be understood and is not a problem towards this one mentality.

Black-and-white thinking is more dangerous the more important the area of thinking is. This area (one's perceived 'purpose' in life) is quite important, so I believed that this was dangerous enough to point out and think about.

I totally agree it's dangerous and worth pointing out. And humankind is is serious danger.... (read more)

Basically, I am in total agreement, although w.r.t.

Problem 2: ‘Changing the World’ Creates Black and White Thinking

Actually, I think human beings can't help being drawn to black and white thinking of one kind or another. Even while thinking this, an insidious something in my mind is trying to turn it into some kind of black and white thinking: There are two kinds of people in the world: people who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and people who don't.

So I suggest you have the causation backwards, and rather, the reason so many heated ... (read more)

So if I understand what you're suggesting, mice might have inherited a self-gene-modification facility that for smells passing certain criteria (highly associated with a threat somehow), can splice into the genome a representation of a receptor for that smell directly engineered from the molecular structure that "is" that smell. By modifying the genome, it seems we must mean modifying the genome in some or all sperm cells in males, and some or all egg cells in females.

Alternatively, mice sperm or egg cells might contain a previously unknown orga... (read more)

Militant atheism is of course more than just not believing in god There is also believing that terrible things are almost sure to happen when people believe in god (largely true with the collection of esp Abrahamic gods we have running around these days) AND believing that getting people not to believe in god will make it so much better

The USSR helped prove that "godless religions" can have all the worst characteristics of the worst religions (of course they didn't truly wipe out religion, but the dominant ideology didn't involve a theistic god... (read more)

Thanks. I appreciate the additional point of view and observations.

I'm extremely intellectually compulsive if I do say so perhaps immodestly

To break a little bad news, calling yourself "intellectually compulsive" really isn't complimenting yourself.

Generally I expect (and get) a higher quality of sarcasm than this from LW.

In your prev. post to which I was responding -- headed "Not everything is signaling", you seemed to be reading me as thinking everything is signalling,

In saying

Some people are just intellectually compulsive, and don't spend their days saying or doing things primarily to presen

I'm pretty new to this although I've read Kurzweil's book and Bostrom's Superintelligence, and a couple of years worth of mostly lurking on LW, so if there's if there's a shitload of thinking about this I hope to be corrected civilly

If friendly AI is to be not just a substitute for but our guardian against unfriendly AI, won't we end up thinking of all sorts of unfriendly AI tactics, and putting them into the friendly AI so it can anticipate and thwart them? If so, is there any chance of self-modification in the friendly AI turning all that against us? U... (read more)

I am deeply suspicious when people try to explain away their opponents' beliefs, rather than defeat them intellectually

Part of your misunderstanding, I think, is to assume I have an "opponent". I've read 3 of Taleb's books, and will probably read him again -- maybe some of the more technical stuff he puts on his facebook page, when I'm willing to work hard enough to understand it, but sometimes I take him with a grain of salt, or think to myself "Oh I wish you wouldn't do that". I think I've read enough of Paglia (which isn't much)... (read more)

Actually I suspect there are a few more self-aware ones who just have a grand old time dazzling people.

In order of decreasing likelihood:

Norman Mailer (and I was trying to think of someone probably living or more recently deceased who's more Norman Mailer than Norman Mailer -- any clues?)

Camille Paglia

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

The easiest way to filter out 99 percent of this is to ignore anything that has no impact on your life (ie doesn't pay rent).

Eh? If I was renting, I think that would have an impact on my life -- so maybe this is yet another metaphor I never heard of.

If everyone was processing reality to the best of their analytical (and other) abilities, and honestly passing on the conclusions they reach then virtuosity at recognizing rational fallacies would go a lot further than I think it actually does; I'm afraid much of what we need is a social understanding of ot... (read more)

I'm extremely intellectually compulsive if I do say so perhaps immodestly; just for example, I read a lot of books by people I expect to disagree with, and in fields I start out with no clue about; but I'm trying to get better and better at knowing where to draw the line -- and to share some of thoughts on on this in part so they can be criticized.

With less diligence, you simply stop when you cease interacting with people who can beat your kung fu.

Well, here I am, still interacting with you. Maybe my kung fu is being beaten, maybe not (by the way, sad... (read more)

I like that - probably a good rule of thumb, although it a stock-picker starts off saying they're a contrarian, I wouldn't necessarily stop listening. I'd also be more specific and say that labeled "contrarian" in an approving way by someone I trust might be worth paying attention to.

But rules of thumb aren't meant to be so wordy, so I still like yours.

That's a much broader (and vaguer) class.

Ah, another irregular verb. I am a deep and original thinker, synthesising good ideas from multiple sources without regard to ideology.

I'm going over the verbs trying to locate what you're referring to as an irregular verb. Am I making a mistake? Does "irregular verb" have some metaphorical connotation I'm not aware of?

You seem to follow with 3 likely different interpretations of the same behavior. If I understand it correctly, that is kind of interesting, I'll warrant

I am deeply suspicious when people try to explain away their opponen

Thanks for a good humored response.

Yeah, awesome is one that gets me.

That was impressively opaque.

By the way, is it really "bog-standard"? I thought it was "hog-standard".

Well, now I feel bludgeoned. To refer to your judgement or theory about what is going on with me as simply "seeing", and embed it in a subordinate clause is an old rhetorical trick, which I think we should avoid here.

But really, I am very interested in the problem of knowing (and somehow having that knowledge be transmittable) who it is profitable to listen to, and who will lead one astray, because I see a breakdown of common sense about this in the face of the profusion of "information" sources we have these days. This concern starte... (read more)

When you call it the "Brahmin class" dismissing it becomes redundant.

I think we need institutions though, in which the "marketplace of ideas" isn't just the marketplace. Lesswrong is one of them, as are universities.

I believe that the rules of the game in academic research can be very productive as long as there is a there there. I tried to model this as "discovering natural machines", which is what I think Newton did, or "Finding your Invisible Elephant" -- if the blind men actually have an elephant then they may ... (read more)

I don't rate it highly; it's just that it's typical of what I notice a concerted chorus of people saying insistently, and I can see that it has an effect on public opinion - mostly it reinforces general distrust of "intellectual elites"). Maybe I shouldn't have used that link at all -- anyway, it seems to be detracting some attention from the questions I was asking.

Actually, I hope someone else will respond to the original question of 'what's been your recent experience', and we don't get totally bogged down in "micro-debates"

That's a bit snarky, but yes, "correct style" may be arbitrary, but without it, we'd drift towards not being able to understand each other. All told, I think a professor (esp. in a thesis writing prep class) is expected to correct students' grammar, and this one was treated shabbily.

No contradiction there, in my opinion.

personal strategies for being more resilient and assertive in the face of perceived slights

I totally agree that we need that.

I think you're right that a lot of par for the course friction between groups is being cherry-picked and made to look like a broad trend, when it isn't nearly so broad if it is anything.

There's a lot of cherry picking, and a lot of making up out of whole cloth.

An example of the latter: http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2014/07/myths-about-saul-alinsky-and-obama.html with an addendum: http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-did-saul-alinsky-really-say.html

Note that the mythical "8 levels" were so well established, in a way, that... (read more)

I'm 62 and have seen a lot, but what falenas108 describes sounds kind of horrific to me. Also I don't see "cherry picking" in part because he/she's just giving a couple of points of data, not using a couple of points of data to draw broad conclusions. If you haven't looked at the link http://assets.feministing.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Screen-Shot-2014-11-19-at-10.26.55-AM.png I suggest you do. It seems to me many people's fears and rages are being played on, and many people find themselves agreeable "echo chambers" where they ... (read more)

Thanks, a very interesting response. But what do you mean by "SJ" types? Actually the whole sentence "This article is construing actions taken to be issues SJ types are complaining about to be ones that are not serious or concerning" is a bit hard to parse though I think I understand all but "SJ types".

Sometimes a black box approach works, sometimes not. Through neuroscience we are learning many things about how the mind works, and the varieties of human minds that the old black box behaviorist approach never came close to. In the stock market, technical investors (vs the Warren Buffet types) are the black boxers. Sometimes they are going along very nicely when they encounter a big exception to what they think they know and their strategy crashes. Ideally we'd like to know the structure of a thing, but black box analysis can play a big role when the thing is for some reason opaque.

I'll take that as constructive criticism. Lately my time is very fragmented and scarce but I've been frustrated by a strong desire to express certain insights that I think/hope I have.

Postmodernism is anti-Enlightenment and views Marxism as an unfortunate result of the Enlightenment the same as capitalism.

(ChristianKI) Could you name people that argue that position explicitly?

Here is an article that addresses the issue pretty directly: http://www.merip.org/mer/mer187/marxism-postmodernism

It starts off with

*During the Thatcher-Reagan-Bush era, just as critical intellectuals and left political activists had won a small place for the concepts of political economy and class analysis in academia, postmodernism and post-structuralism

Our estimate of Putin's estimate of Obama's view on the U.S. empire is critical to calibrating our beliefs.

That is true, and how much of Putin's estimate of Obama is due to relentless right-wing propaganda saying he's weak on everything?

I'm not convinced he's failed to do anything useful that say GWB would have done (or any up and coming GOP leader). I think a big problem we have now is we're in umpteen situations in which there's hardly any clear cut winning move.

Obama clearly wants to pull the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan, which under Bush were big parts of the U.S. empire.

If Iraq was ever part of the U.S. empire, we might have done what it took to govern it, and would be getting cheap oil from Iraq, which I thought was just a fantasy of the left. Maybe you'd like the U.S. to act as an old fashioned Empire, but nobody except maybe Dick Cheney wants to do that. It might work but I doubt it, but most important it has no chance of happening and if part of your critique of Obama is that he's not an old fashio... (read more)

If you thought something like this you confirmed how prejudices dominate our mind.

You might have written "If you thought something like this then you're not reading this line".

There are two kinds of people in the world, people who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and people who don't.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Good luck finding the right image to project to the world. It's not easy.

Thank you for posting that. I like this quote very much, having started thinking about Alinsky when I started noticing references to his supposed "8 levels of control" for turning the world into a totalitarian zombie factory, beginning with "Control healthcare and you control the people". Does this sound like the same Saul Alinsky? No - it's a myth that started circulating in 2013, and I showed just how far it is from the truth (and how widely it is circulated) in http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2014/07/myths-about-saul-alinsky... (read more)

This discussion would surely be incomplete without some mention of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so I am hereby mentioning it.

There's no hard and fast rule, but if you've downvoted someone more than 8 times in one day or read through someone's comment history and downvoted past the first page, you are doing something wrong.

It's not wrong if most of what the user writes is bad.

I tend to agree with the first statement as a rule of thumb. If you're reading and downvoting 8 postings in a day that you think are not worth reading (apparently), it seems like you're taking it upon yourself to punish that person, whereas I think it is better if we try to read what we consider to ... (read more)

Having looked at "Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields", I'm not convinced. I am grappling towards my own ideas for heuristics in this essay: http://ontologicalcomedian.blogspot.com/2010/07/what-is-machine.html Alternatively, I would ask the question whether the blind men are really feeling up an elephant or not. Perhaps one really is caressing a huge floppy leaf and another is hugging a tree trunk, etc. In some disciplines, I would say there really is an elephant, ergo explorations and ... (read more)

Thanks. I'll have a look at the links you provided. I haven't found any work in Social Epistemology that was up to my hopes and expectations, but not treating at least half of epistemology in a social context seems like utter blindness. Goldman is good at laying out what should be included in SE, including a "systems oriented" branch, and perhaps less good at realizing the program.

BTW I'm sure I've proposed general principals based on things of which I have a tenuous knowledge, but I'd rather somebody tell me how I've gone too far out on a limb than be in some space where everybody nods along -- that tends to be boring.

I think it's worth quoting some of the Wikipedia article on Aufhebung that you link to:

Aufheben or Aufhebung[1] is a German word with several seemingly contradictory meanings, including "to lift up", "to abolish", "cancel" or "suspend", or "to sublate".[2] The term has also been defined as "abolish", "preserve", and "transcend".

No Wonder we're confused.

I'm afraid it all sounds too pat, and the historic analysis is poor and superficial. I really don't relish being so blunt but I don't see how to avoid it while saying what seems true to me.

Mormonism and Scientology were each also founded largely by a single person who had, let us say, an idealistic exterior and a pragmatic, manipulative interior, combining the two roles in one person.

Mormonism would be perfect for this thesis if only the writer knew something about it. It was founded by Joseph Smith, who conveyed the ideological vision (and presumably... (read more)