All of Science's Comments + Replies

Suppose that you notice that on average, green shows up twice as often as red, but you can’t see a pattern to it. If you want to maximise your winnings, should you on average bet on green twice as often as red to match the frequencies you’re seeing? No, you should strictly bet on green every time.

(Anyone know where I might have read about this before? Pretty sure it’s somewhere on LW, but I can’t find it.)

Similarly, if a random black person is statistically more likely to be a criminal than a white person, then a police officer’s or prosecutor’s career i

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Per your ad-hominem attacks, I now perceive you as a troll

So you admit that your motivated perception is more important than reality.

Your linked definition of 'post-truth' is:

relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief

Note, the implicit inference that such circumstances are more common now than in the past, when this is almost certainly not true.

Rather, it's intended to side-step the former temporarily, while still being useful by creating better frameworks for deliberation, mediation and similar good practices

The problem is that it's frequently used as an attempt to reach conclusions while side-stepping the whole messy "looking at the facts on the ground" thing.

"I disagree with X and took it to PMs" to avoid giving the impression that his assertion was unchallenged.

What would be the point of that. To convince the other guy to see his mistakes? That only works if the person you're debating is well meaning and exceptionally rational.

Otherwise, the point of debating in public is so that observers can see for themselves who's being rational.

0The_Jaded_One
Yeah but that kind of debating tends to massively incentivize techniques for sophistry, leads to long pointless debates that take up time and yield no new knowledge. Here on LW we aim higher than that, and that is why there are norms to try and prevent it.

but even if he wasn't I would still attack his arguments rather than attack the man.

Didn't you also just say you don't want object level political discussions?

0The_Jaded_One
Well if you have to choose between attacking someone's object-level arguments about politics or attacking their person, I would say the latter is a greater evil even when the topic is controversial. In the comments to this post I would avoid both, it's reasonable to agree to disagree or just take the argument to PMs or something, or maybe have a special 'politics' thread. I mean you can even say "I disagree with X and took it to PMs" to avoid giving the impression that his assertion was unchallenged.

I wouldn't go ad-hominem against Gleb_Tsipursky

Well, right here I'm not debating Gleb, I'm debating you.

He seems to me to be an earnest debater with a lot to offer

Really, to me he looks like a standard cargo cult rationalist of the kind that Rational Wiki is full of.

0The_Jaded_One
Yeah I mean cargo cult rationality is definitely a risk. But still, it's better to sink the argument than chase the guy, and as I said in a 'no political debate' setting, someone has to rise above it a bit. I have actually been thinking about posting about politics here, I think there are interesting things going on in our politics but people making personal attacks against other commenters makes it harder to have a good debate.

I think the real problem here is that the pejorative term "Fake news" is succumbing to an effect I mentioned down in the comments earlier.

"succumbing"? It succumbed to that effect decades ago.

Attempting to "rise above" object level discussion does not get you closer to truth. It means the conversation gets dominated by charlatans like Gab.

0bogus
Meta-level discussion is never intended to "rise above" ground-level politics - that is indeed an illusion as you say. Rather, it's intended to side-step the former temporarily, while still being useful by creating better frameworks for deliberation, mediation and similar good practices. It's very important to understand this - any talk of "rising above" the actual, real-world issues is illusory and potentially dangerous.
1The_Jaded_One
I wouldn't go ad-hominem against Gleb_Tsipursky, ad-hominem is never a good idea. He seems to me to be an earnest debater with a lot to offer, but even if he wasn't I would still attack his arguments rather than attack the man.

In particular, you're not interested in reaching the voters who don't want say Muslim migrants raping and occasionally murdering girls in their neighborhoods. Good to know.

0The_Jaded_One
Well, there is a more serious flaw than that particular issue: if you reach out to a very small slice of humans in our world and persuade them that they should be more rational in politics, politics will not get more rational. You have to appeal to everyone or almost everyone. So, for example, people who read Breitbart have to be on board, as well as people who read the guardian and the daily kos.

I would like to caution commenters that it seems to me like the comment section of this post is at risk of becoming an object-level political argument of the sort specifically proscribed by the rules.

And the (false) object level political statements in the OP aren't proscribed by the rules?

0gwillen
I am suggesting that people comment and vote a certain way; I don't have control over the moderators, who would be the ones with the power to do anything about the post itself. Let me explicitly state that I think people probably shouldn't upvote this post, even if it contains things they like, if they think (as I do) that it will promote and increase object-level political discussion. Unfortunately, because downvoting is disabled (for unrelated good reasons I support), it's hard for me and others to formally note disapproval (by downvoting) of the politics, so I'm asking other people to try to avoid noting (in the upvote sense) approval of it unless they really mean it.
1The_Jaded_One
Well I mean let him have his jab, the point of the site is to rise above too much unproductive object-level stuff. For an unproductive debate to be avoided, someone usually has to rise above it. Let that person be you.

Can you be comfortable saying that Trump lies more often, and more intensely, than prominent liberal politicians

I'm not sure about The_Jaded_One, he seems to be willing to assert false things under peer pressure. However, that statement is in fact false. Where by "false" I mean it doesn't correspond to mapping to external observable reality. Specifically, I mean that Trump's statements tend to map to reality better than those of liberal politicians.

1Gleb_Tsipursky
At this point, I'm finished engaging with you, since you're clearly not making statements based on reality. Good luck with growing more rational!

I am comfortable with saying that my post is anti-post truth politics. I think most LWs would agree that Trump relies more on post-truth tactics than other politicians.

Are you comfortable providing actual evidence for the claim that "Trump relies more on post-truth tactics than other politicians" or are you trying to argue for an epistemology of truth based on whatever the consensus by "experts" is?

Washington Post and The New York Times - do you call them fake news as well?

Yes, as I mentioned in my other comment. Now care to explain why you cited them in an article supposedly devoted to opposing fake news. Or is your definition of "fake news", news that contradicts something written in an "official true news source" as opposed to something that contradicts reality?

0The_Jaded_One
I think the real problem here is that the pejorative term "Fake news" is succumbing to an effect I mentioned down in the comments earlier. Now that's not to say that there isn't a real phenomenon of inaccurate or totally fabricated news, but I think the term "Fake News" ("Fake News Outlet") particularly lends itself to being used as a bludgeon to attack the other side, because it's really satisfying to catch one inaccurate story on a site you disagree with and thereby write the rest of the content off as "Fake News".

Men have a "higher propensity to commit crimes" compared to women, and we don't call them "objectively bad" for this.

On the other hand we do have a "violence against women" act, and a whole section of the justice department dedicated to crimes committed by men against women.

Or another example, suppose you belief that Global Warming is a hoax but questioning the word of certified expert scientists(tm) is not allowed in your social circle, so you come up with an elaborate meta-political explanation for why one can support the people calling Global Warming a hoax without believing it.

0The_Jaded_One
lol, very meta

It's probably counterproductive to discuss object level politics.

So how do you propose to make politics more rational and better correspond to truth without discussing which policies are in fact rational and which political statements are true?

I think it suffices to say that Gleb_Tsipursky has something of an anti-Trump political angle in the post (which may or may not be objectively correct), and agree to disagree as much as is possible on the object level.

And yet he claimed his project is "non-partisan".

2The_Jaded_One
Well, I mean you could argue that he is looking for a Trump supporter who likes good epistemology to join his team so that their biases would cancel out? But you're right, it's shaky ground. I'd probably start by making a new post called "Object-level contemporary political discussion open thread". I wouldn't do this because I expected a successful resolution, I would do it to contain the mess somewhere away from meta-level discussion.

After all, conservatives have relied much more (1, 2, 3) on lies

The fact that your siting fake news sites like politifact when describing this project does not bode well for it.

1Gleb_Tsipursky
Um, Breitbart news is hardly a credible site to use to attack Politifact. Besides, that citations also had Washington Post and The New York Times - do you call them fake news as well?

Such information often comes from the quickly-growing number of fake news sources.

Um, fake news sources, like the New York Times have existed for at least a century and probably for as long as news existed. If anything is different in 2016 it's that it's becoming easier to check them and find out that their false.

Without intervention, these outcomes will most likely grow worse over time, as future politicians learn from the results of the 2016 election season and double down on this strategy of lies and manipulation.

Um, the candidate of lies and ma... (read more)

4James_Miller
Calling the New York Times a fake news source is racist since the paper is controlled by the Mexican oligarchy.
5The_Jaded_One
.. It's probably counterproductive to discuss object level politics. I kind of half-agree with you actually, but still, I can imagine this comment thread turning into an unproductive one. I think it suffices to say that Gleb_Tsipursky has something of an anti-Trump political angle in the post (which may or may not be objectively correct), and agree to disagree as much as is possible on the object level.

In particular, as most people will know, "rationalism" in politics has some unfortunate connotations of ivory-tower over-intellectualism and disregard for most real-world issues and dynamics. Avoiding this impression, however misguided in this particular case,

Is it in fact misguided? Certainly looking at the OP the impression appears to be correct.