It's nonspecific on purpose; a general factor of causes of "this conversation is making me mad". This could be caused by tone: concretely, an occasion where someone is trying to explain something, any topic, and using negatively charged words to describe people who hold my position, or just any other position, making my interlocutor sound smug. It can also be caused by a sense that the interlocutor isn't really engaging with my arguments, making me feel like I should be giving up on the conversation. Concretely, an occasion where I make a very extensive explanation of what I mean on some point, and the interlocutor completely denies acknowledging it, giving me no... (read more)
You've given a plausible account of what might be happening in at least some cases that people use the rhetoric of "you'll never persuade anyone like that". I would like to give an alternate account--one that other posters have pointed to already, but that I'd like to highlight--and explore the possible consequences that adopting the strategy you've gestured at here, "going for the throat", might have.
When I say "you'll never persuade anyone like that", often what I'm feeling is something close to anger. I am "pissed off". Anger can be a sign of cognitive dissonance. If an argument makes you angry, you should try to explore the reasons for that anger; does... (read more)
[Epistemic status: Speculation][1]
Generative AI (GenAI)[2] is getting pretty good. Using it involves a certain amount of technical skill; getting a stable diffusion model to do what you want can take all kinds of byzantine prompt engineering. It’s getting better, though, and I don’t doubt that soon we’ll have all kinds of automated or assisted methods for generating prompts. ChatGPT is still a little spotty for some use cases, and it’s not quite as impressive compared to a human artist as stable diffusion, but the technology is getting a lot stronger.
Full disclosure: I read this post, and wanted to distill one particular aspect of it: the idea that novelty—particularly, “subjectively interesting novelty”, or “useful... (read 1074 more words →)
Understandable! I recommend the "solution to free will" sequence, since you've gotten this far. The core stuff is here and here if you're in a hurry.
I think there are some important aspects to it; if you want to develop your moral thinking about personal responsibility and blame, you might want to reflect a lot on what "freedom" means to you. You might also not care about it at all due to some other a priori considerations, but in my experience this is the sort of thing that can push people one way or the other in ethics.
I'm curious--is this your attempt to "do your homework", according to Eliezer? I ask because it doesn't seem like you're addressing the question he actually asked. I would really try to do that before opening this spoiler. The question is: what is the belief in free will? How does it work? What does it actually do?
I see people converge onto this kind of view all the time, but I have to admit (a strong personal failing!) that I still don't understand how it happens. When you say you feel like you have free will, what do you actually mean by that? It doesn't seem the case to me--certainly, I don't think I
This is difficult to pick apart. Can you say more? I could imagine, say, thinking of someone's contributions as assholeish introducing sentiment to the conversation in a way that cascades into making the whole thing even worse. In fact, I think I've seen that happen over and over again. I can imagine a framing of that as hyperstitional.