It seems hard to envision a society wherein belonging and esteem could be satisfied via physical cognition
Not hard to envision at all; only hard, perhaps, to implement. It shouldn't take all that much imagination to summon the thought of a society in which people were better rewarded with status (and all its trappings) for things like solving mathematical problems, or composing complexly-structured music, as opposed to all the various generalized forms of pure politics that determine the lion's share of status in the world we know, than they actually ar...
Like others, you seem to be interpreting my comments as if they were stating conclusions intended to be only one or two inferential steps away (from your current epistemic state). This is not at all necessarily the case!
In particular, when I state a proposition X, I expect readers not only to ask themselves whether they already think X is true (i.e. conditioned on all their knowledge before my statement), but also to ask themselves why I might believe X. To engage, in other words, in at least a cursory search for inferential chains leading to X -- resultin...
With no more context than your earlier comment where (so far as I know) you first used the term [...] I am just saying that it seems unreasonable to complain of someone "rounding off concepts" when you have made no apparent effort to clarify what you do mean
In my original comment, I linked to the essay that was the source of the concepts of "physical" and "social cognition" as I used them in that comment. Without the context of that essay, there is no reason to expect my remarks in this discussion to be intelligible.
The expected return from a reader doing something like that is way too low, even in a community like this one. Most new ideas are wrong, and if your idea is wrong then people trying to traverse the same inferential path will get nowhere
I disagree with these statements. (Even in the case of "most new ideas are wrong", I would ADBOC.)
You're basically just stating the view that "false positives are a bigger problem than false negatives", which I already disagreed with explicitly (as applied to this context) in my previous comment.
...why
From the fourth paragraph:
These programs seem to have been disfavored by history's great scientific innovators, who tend to make statements like "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble..." or "What do you care what other people think", which sound like endorsements of physical over social cognition.
As I said above,
populism seems anticorrelated with both good aesthetics and good science
Thus, by "a society that tied status more closely to such skills", I do not mean the typical conditions leading to, and resulting from, a peasant revolt.
Do you think you use the term physical cognition in the way it's used in the literature?
"The literature" that is relevant here consists of Michael Vassar's 2013 Edge essay.
I don't understand what "physical cognition" in this context points to
See here. (This was linked in the original comment...)
I do mean ballet and piano, and also the kind of "the kind of hacking background that Wei Dai has".
I did not expect this to be completely outside of your hypothesis space, in the way it appears to be. This is worth reflecting on.
Creating a distinct new concept in one's mind is an expensive operation (with both short term and long term costs), so I think it's only to be expected that people will try to match a supposedly new concept to an existing one and see if they can get away with just reusing the existing concept.
Right, but I was reacting to a prior history with that particular commenter, who has been especially prone to doing this (very often where, in my view, it isn't appropriate).
But also: I regard concept-creation as being a large part of what we're in the business of ...
Thanks for the link; that'll be useful to refer to.
Of course, I on the contrary do think the hierarchy of needs is suggestive of this, as evidenced by the fact that I specifically interpreted it that way!
Is this approximately right?
Probably close enough for present purposes.
I still think that if someone is doing math or programming, they already have their dose of "games with nature" there.
Of course, but these pursuits themselves are often described as artistic in character, especially by their most elite practitioners.
I update that if actual upper-class people want their child to play piano, there may be actually a very healthy instinct behind that. (Or may be just blindly copying what their neighbors do.)
They probably are copying w...
Mao prohibited farm ownership and no amount of understanding the actual skill of baking or growing crops would have convinced him that private ownership is a good idea.
What makes you so sure of this? More to the point, what makes you sure that a society that tied status more closely to such skills wouldn't have promoted someone better than Mao to the top?
Lysenko's success is also not simply about lack of farming knowledge but about having an intellectual climate that's not well-fitted from separating true theories from those that aren't.
The point he...
It seems like the ideal leisure activities, then, should combine the social games with games against nature.
Exactly! Hence arts (and sports).
Generally speaking, whenever we think of something as being "technical", we're talking about the involvement of physical cognition. Art is social, yes, but it is also highly technical.
(in the sense in which I understand "physical cognition" -- the body is intimately involved
That is not what I meant -- as the excerpt you quoted was intended to communicate.
Musical composition is one of the archetypal instances of a physical-cognition-loaded activity (in the sense that I mean), and yet there your physical tools are a pencil/pen and paper (or, sometimes, indeed, a mouse).
I would describe this more generally as real-world achievement, which is a lot clearer than a label like "physical cognition"
There you go again, compulsively trying to round concepts off to something else!
"Real-world achievement" is considerably less clear as a way of pointing to what I am trying to point to than "physical cognition". It evokes all kinds of distracting side-issues about what constitutes the "real world". (Is pure mathematics "real-world achievement"? et cetera, et cetera).
I can't tell w...
Maybe it would help if we taboo art. What do you mean with the term when ballet and playing the piano are art but the kind of hacking you find at a hackerspace isn't?
I was not, in fact, using the term in such a way, but you failed to notice this! This is cliché-rounding.
You seem to have misunderstood my comment as some kind of salvo in a STEM vs. arts rivalry, with the result that your comment reads like a counter-attack in such a battle. This is probably due to cliché-rounding.
In point of fact, a perceived opposition between STEM and arts is a manifestation of the very thing I was complaining about. Thus, to have written the kind of comment that you appear to be responding to would have been the very last of my intentions.
I would direct your attention to the sentence immediately following the excerpt you quoted:
...That is
Why do artistic pursuits constitute practice in physical cognition as opposed to social cognition? It seems obvious to me that artistic pursuits are (among other things) a type of status signaling, so I'm confused why you're contrasting the two
Artistic pursuits involve a synthesis of physical and social cognition. (This is essential to their nature and is what makes them special among human activities.) There is certainly a social aspect, but it's crucial that that isn't all there is. That there is also a physical aspect is also pretty obvious, if you c...
Basically, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a myth, and everyone would be better off forgetting about it entirely.
Not necessarily; it depends on what one's default or alternative theory would be. Let's be Bayesian, after all.
As I interpret it, "Maslow's hierarchy of needs" is little more than the claim that people's goals depend on their internal sense of security and status (in addition to whatever else they might depend on).
When I speak about it, I'm usually talking about something like a spectrum of exogenous vs. endogenous motivation: at one...
The first and last sentences of the parent comment do not follow from the statements in between.
That sort of subject is inherently implicit in the kind of decision-theoretic questions that MIRI-style AI research involves. More generally, when one is thinking about astronomical-scale questions, and aggregating utilities, and so on, it is a matter of course that cosmically bad outcomes are as much of a theoretical possibility as cosmically good outcomes.
Now, the idea that one might need to specifically think about the bad outcomes, in the sense that preventing them might require strategies separate from those required for achieving good outcomes, may depend on additional assumptions that haven't been conventional wisdom here.
What Alex said doesn't seem to refute or change what I said.
But also: I disagree with the parent. I take conventional wisdom here to include support for MIRI's agent foundations agenda, which includes decision theory, which includes the study of such risks (even if only indirectly or implicitly).
As the expression about knowing "how the sausage is made" attests, generally the more people learn about it, the less they like it.
Of course, veganism is very far from being an immediate consequence of disliking factory farming. (Similarly, refusing to pay taxes is very far from being an immediate consequence of disliking government policy.)
Decision theory (which includes the study of risks of that sort) has long been a core component of AI-alignment research.
I feel a weird disconnect on reading comments like this. I thought s-risks were a part of conventional wisdom on here all along. (We even had an infamous scandal that concerned one class of such risks!) Scott didn't "see it before the rest of us" -- he was drawing on an existing, and by now classical, memeplex.
It's like when some people spoke as if nobody had ever thought of AI risk until Bostrom wrote Superintelligence -- even though that book just summarized what people (not least of whom Bostrom himself) had already been saying for years.
I guess I didn't think about it carefully before. I assumed that s-risks were much less likely than x-risks (true) so it's okay not to worry about them (false). The mistake was that logical leap.
In terms of utility, the landscape of possible human-built superintelligences might look like a big flat plain (paperclippers and other things that kill everyone without fuss), with a tall sharp peak (FAI) surrounded by a pit that's astronomically deeper (many almost-FAIs and other designs that sound natural to humans). The pit needs to be compared to the peak, not the plain. If the pit is more likely, I'd rather have the plain.
Was it obvious to you all along?
Piano and ballet seem like upper-class costly signalling. "I am so rich I can spend tons of time doing unproductive activities."
Well, no need to speculate about a future Malthusian dystopia, since it appears to be already here, psychologically!
Allow me to refer you to this comment of mine, and the ensuing discussion, on Sarah Constantin's blog. Artistic pursuits may be "upper-class", but they are not unproductive. They serve to keep the upper classes practiced in physical cognition, counteracting a tendency to shift entirely into soc...
You don't seem to be addressing what I said very much if at all, but rather to mostly be giving your reaction to 18239018038528017428's comments. This is demonstrated by the fact that you take for granted various assumptions that it was the purpose of my comment to call into question.
In particular, the speech is not being allowed "to the chagrin of all other users". I am notably non-chagrinned by the speech being allowed, and I advocate that people be less chagrinned by such speech being allowed.
Needless to say, to be allowed is not to be approved.
Positive reinforcement for noticing your confusion. It does indeed seem that we are working from different models -- perhaps even different ontologies -- of the situation, informed by different sets of experiences and preoccupations.
communities where conversations are abrasive attract a lower caliber of person than one where they aren't. Look at what happened to LW.
To whatever extent this is accurate and not just a correlation-causation conversion, this very dynamic is the kind of thing that LW exists (existed) to correct. To yield to it is essentially to give up the entire game.
What it looks like to me is that LW and its associated "institutions" and subcultures are in the process of dissolving and being absorbed into various parts of general society. You are basically ...
All of these are reasonable points, given the fixed goal of obtaining and sharing as much truth as possible.
Is the implication that they're not reasonable under the assumption that truth, too, trades off against other values?
What the points I presented (perhaps along with other things) convinced me of was not that truth or information takes precedence over all other values, but rather simply that it had been sacrificed too much in service of other values. The pendulum has swung too far in a certain direction.
Above, I made it sound like it the overshoot...
I don't think "Did you know symptoms X and Y are signs of clinical mental illness Z?" is appreciably different from "You very possibly have mental illness Z", which is the practical way that "You have mental illness Z" would actually be phrased in most contexts where this would be likely to come up.
Nevertheless, your first and third paragraphs seem right.
Because you've publicly expressed assent with extreme bluntness
Who said anything about "extreme"?
You are unreasonably fixated on the details of this particular situation (my comment clearly was intended to invoke a much broader context), and on particular verbal features of the anonymous critic's comment. Ironically, however, you have not picked up on the extent to which my disapproval of censorship of that comment was contingent upon its particular nature. It consisted, in the main, of angrily-expressed substantive criticism of the "Ber...
My other comment should hopefully clarify things, as least with regard to politicization in particular.
To spell out the implications a bit more: the problem with political discourse, the reason it kills minds, is not that it gets heated; rather, it freezes people's mental categories in ways that prevent them from making ontological updates or paradigm shifts of any kind. In effect, people switch from using physical cognition to think about arguments (modus ponens, etc.), to using social cognition instead (who wins, who loses, etc.). (Most people, of course...
Your principal mistake lies here:
"socially punishing them by making claims in a certain way, when those claims could easily be made without having that effect
Putting communication through a filter imposes a cost, which will inevitably tend to discourage communication in the long term. Moreover, the cost is not the same for everyone: for some people "diplomatic" communication comes much more naturally than for others; as I indicate in another comment, this often has to do with their status, which, the higher it is, the less necessary dire...
What convinced you of this?
A constellation of related realizations.
A sense that some of the most interesting and important content in my own field of specialization (e.g. the writings of Heinrich Schenker) violates, or is viewed as violating, the "norms of discourse" of what I took to be my "ingroup" or "social context"; despite being far more interesting, engaging, and relevant to my concerns than the vast majority of discourse that obeys those norms.
A sense that I myself, despite being capable of producing interestin
Cool. Let's play.
I notice you make a number of claims, but that of the ones I disagree with, none of them have "crux nature" for me. Which is to say, even if we were to hash out our disagreement such that I come to agree with you on the points, I wouldn't change my stance.
(I might find it worthwhile to do that hashing out anyway if the points turn out to have crux nature for you. But in the spirit of good faith, I'll focus on offering you a pathway by which you could convince me.)
But if I dig a bit, I think I see a hint of a possible double crux....
I'm gonna address these thoughts as they apply to this situation. Because you've publicly expressed assent with extreme bluntness, I might conceal my irritation a little less than I normally do (but I won't tell you you should kill yourself).
...A sense that some of the most interesting and important content in my own field of specialization (e.g. the writings of Heinrich Schenker) violates, or is viewed as violating, the "norms of discourse" of what I took to be my "ingroup" or "social context"; despite being far more interest
norms of good discourse are more important than the content of arguments
In what represents a considerable change of belief on my part, this now strikes me as very probably false.
For the record: at the risk of being a lonely dissenter, I strongly disagree with any notion that any of this discussion should have been censored in any way. (I was even grateful for the current impossibility of downvoting.)
Five years ago, or even two, my opinion would have been quite different. By this point, however, I have undergone a fairly massive update in the direction of thinking people are far, far too sensitive about matters of "tone" and the like. These norms of sensitivity are used to subtly restrict information flow. Ultimately Dunc...
I agree, and wish to state for the record, that to be told one is "overthinking" is about the least helpful (certainly least actionable) criticism one can receive.
In many cases, the one who says this wishes to communicate that their knowledge is tacit, and to contrast this with the other's attempt to use explicit reasoning. But tacit knowledge does not magically appear when you stop "thinking"!
What is the best way? It's not like you can trick them into it.
A more serious issue, I would have thought, would be that the "professional help" won't actually be effective.
Here's what it looks like to me, after a bit of reflection: you're in a state where you think a certain proposition P has a chance of being true, which it is considered a violation of social norms to assert (a situation that comes up more often than we would like).
In this sort of situation, I don't think it's necessarily correct to go around loudly asserting, or even mentioning, P. However, I do think it's probably correct to avoid taking it upon oneself to enforce the (epistemically-deleterious) social norm upon those weird contrarians who, for whatever ...
I do not reach the point of telling the...humans I know that they're e.g. dumb or wrong or sick or confused
If you'll allow me, I would like to raise a red-flag alert at this sentence. It seems poorly worded at best, and in worse scenarios indicative of some potentially-bad patterns of thought.
Presumably, as a member of a community of aspiring rationalists, not to mention the staff of CFAR, telling the people you know when (you think) they're wrong or confused is, or should be...your daily bread. (It goes without saying that this extends to noticing your...
"Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?"
It plays back at the link! (Synthesized rendering, but not too bad.)
This was the point of putting it on MuseScore (otherwise I would have just linked a PDF I had already typeset with Finale).
how does this compare to your other work?
If we take this piece to be broadly similar to works like this or this (yes I know: as if), then my other work might be compared to something like this or this.
At least, it will once it exists. (I currently only really have an undergraduate portfolio's worth of "other work", and barely that. In progress!)
Oh, you meant "might made right".
might makes right
Might is perhaps a necessary condition for right, but I would not be inclined to call it a sufficient one.
This is also why the distinction between "triad" and "modality" is rather beside the point, in practical usage.
Not at all. It strongly implicates the distinction between the chord model and the line model of musical data; thinking of the Stufe as a triad has the severely unfortunate effect of encouraging the chord model. This is why almost no one has noticed that Schenkerian theory, like Westergaardian theory, uses the line model. It is for this reason that I am so insistent on the distinction between Stufen and triads, and what you...
From the perspective taken in this post, "location" means observer-moment: the entire submanifold of "simultaneous" locations in your sense is represented by a single point in the space I mean.
(To be sure, both your space and mine are "Tegmark V" spaces; "Tegmark V" here is not a specific mathematical object, but an interpretation-type.)
A subsequent post may provide helpful context.