I think you are fighting a strawman here. By using the word “wave” physicists are not suggesting that something moves along a sinusoidal path. That was your intepretation, an incorrect one, and you have successfully disproved it, which is great. Just please don’t assume that physicists are doing the same mistake.
When you look at the waves on the water, yes, there is a kind of sinusoidal shape. But the word “wave” in physics means that at some places the density of something is higher, and at other places, the density is lower, and the map of the densities looks and moves… well, like the waves on the water.
The waves on the water make a sinusoidal shape, because there is an air above the water, so the higher density of water creates a “wave” in a layman’s meaning of the word. But imagine an explosion deep below the ocean surface, and how the density of the surrounding water changes in time. This is also called “waves” in physics, but there is nothing moving along the sinusoidal path. Similarly, sound makes “waves” (areas of different density) in the air. And a photon also makes some kind of a “wave” (some its properties measured in space and time show the same kind of pattern).
Instead of talking about details, I’d like to remind you of the big picture.
You think physicists get it wrong and you get it right. That is not completely impossible. However, based on the theories of physicists we have a lot of stuff that works: planes that fly, microwaves that heat, GPS devices that measure your position. So if their theories are wrong, how do you explain that all this stuff, built on their theories, works? Their theories, if not completely correct, must be at least approximately correct, or mathematically equivalent to correct, right? So even if they make errors, they surely do not make obvious errors. However, what you write, suggests that there is a big difference. How is it possible, if you are right, that a theory so different from yours can still produce all the stuff that works?
(To compare, LW contains a few discussions on many-worlds hypothesis versus collapse hypothesis, but those two are mathematically equivalent. In other case, an experiment could be done that decides between them, and someone would probably have done it decades ago.)
So if their theories are wrong, how do you explain that all this stuff, built on their theories, works?
In short, the hypothesis User:Monkeymind advanced (somewhere in that rambling mess) was that engineers do not base their technological work on math, but instead on trial-and-error. This is obviously an empirical question. Monkeymind offered as evidence that he himself has a bad grasp of mathematics and yet has built various devices using trial-and-error.
It’s a potentially interesting idea. Do we have any real evidence that mathematics is a necessary component of the development of these devices? Anecdotally Norbert Wiener used mathematics to shoot down Japanese planes using radar.
Not that we have a really good alternative. Physical theories have been preferred for being more mathematically elegant ever since Newton, and before that we didn’t really have physical theories. I think that Monkeymind’s insistence that science is not for making predictions might be a hint that we’re just talking about different things here.
Agreed, it’s not definitive. The best way to answer this would probably be to round up a bunch of engineers and ask them how much they use math. That would give us a quick average estimate of how today’s engineers use math. Unless you’re interested in specific important discoveries in engineering, in which case it would make more sense to examine the most influential breakthroughs case-by-case.
I personally am a programmer, but the software I write (as well as other software, written by smarter people) is used by genetic engineers. They engineer plants for specific desired traits (stronger drought resistance, bigger fruit, whatever). To do this, they use a ton of conventional math (statistics, specifically), as well as numerical optimization methods (such as neural networks) in order to determine (simplistically speaking) which nucleotides on the genome have an effect on which trait.
A single chromosome of corn consists of about 200,000,000 nucleotides. Good luck with that trial and error !
Yes, and a grain of rice has more genetic material than a human (almost double). So what?
With the simple understanding of emergent complexity, and without any automata or math at all, I can tell you (predict) what any plant or animal will look like on a mountain above 14k feet, or in a tundra. It is because there are only a few configurations for plants or animals in those conditions. We know this because we have observed it over and over again. So I can predict various life forms quite easily.
Although an electron microscope and a great deal of programming was needed at various stages, Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics has synthesized an e-coli bacteria. Using four chemicals they created a synthetic bacterial chromosome and used yeast to assemble the gene sequences. They were copying nature, not actually creating anything from scratch. Lots and lots of trial and error was involved. Watch his press conference and let him tell you himself. Professor Cronin of Glascow University has created self replicating, evolving inorganic (metal-based) iCHELLS almost entirely by trial and error mixing.
I’m very excited about their accomplishments and have corresponded with both of them to let them know. I’m not knocking science or those respectable persons involved in the scientific process, I merely want to help make it better.
I am not for getting rid of theory and replacing it with trial and error. Try to actually read what I have written in toto instead of taking a few phrases out of context.
In short, the hypothesis User:Monkeymind advanced (somewhere in that rambling mess) was that engineers do not base their technological work on math, but instead on trial-and-error.
A hypothesis that collapses into category-erroneous incoherence as soon as you realize that math can also be done via trial-and-error.
With minus 373 Karma points for the last 30 days under your belt, I think you should take a hint and stop posting. If this comment is upvoted/not convincingly disputed (by others), I’m going to start removing some of the worse comments you make in the near future.
Please crack down earlier, harder, and more often. Nobody is going to die from it. Higher average comment quality will attract better commenters in a virtuous circle. There’s no excuse for tolerating the endless nonsense that some commenters post, and those enabling them by responding to them should stop.
those enabling them by responding to them should stop.
This seems to be the main problem, but my recent attempts to discourage those who make high-quality contributions to hopeless or malignant conversations didn’t stir much enthusiasm, so it’d probably take a lot of effort to change this.
(A specific suggestion I have is to establish a community norm of downvoting those participating in hopeless conversations, even if their contributions are high-quality.)
Please crack down earlier, harder, and more often.
This is something new for LW, in fact this appears to be the first time when a non-Eliezer moderator stepped forward to implement this measure (in this case prompted by Eliezer’s recent statement that deleting posts by a chronically downvoted user who doesn’t stop is to be considered a general policy).
This is the first time I’ve come across the suggestion to downvote well-thought-out contributions to silly conversations, actually, and I like it. I’ll keep that in mind.
A specific suggestion I have is to establish a community norm of downvoting those participating in hopeless conversations, even if their contributions are high-quality
How do you define “hopeless”, exactly ? Sometimes, a high-quality post in response to a troll’s or idiot’s thread can be quite helpful to other readers (and lurkers), who aren’t trolls or idiots, but who are just misinformed or new to the topic. I personally have been such a lurker on several sites, but I do acknowledge that my personal experience is not statistically significant.
Just a few reasons: Removing comments happens silently and without a trace. Such tools can be used by the establishment to quiet dissent. They can break existing conversations. We need more contrarians, not fewer. By removing examples of what not to do, we can no longer point at them as examples. Even if the comments were on the whole annoying, there might be interesting stuff in there worth responding to. Bans, more than downvotes, outright discourage participation amongst those who are in particular need of our help. Freedom of speech is valuable in itself, and its presence here is aesthetically pleasing.
The current procedure: (1) banning mode is only triggered by a user systematically accumulating some crazy amount of negative Karma quickly, (2) you get an explicit statement of banning-mode having been triggered, where others can appeal/discuss the decision, (3) you are free to continue participating if you somehow manage to produce the kind of comments that don’t get downvoted (so it’s more of a parole). In no other cases do the comments get banned.
Yes, and it’s carried out by Vladimir_Nesov and his ilk, which makes me not worry at all about the application in this particular case. I still needed to register my general objection, and I fear for our children’s children who might suffer under an oppressive fascist regime based on the Less Wrong moderation policy.
If this is where we are at, then please advise me of it so I can take appropriate steps to avoid getting banned.
I don’t think I got an explicit statement of banning mode having been triggered, but I want to be sure since there is talk of the ban hammer going down.
I am not trying to be contrary, I just am, so it comes out that way. I truly think that what I have to offer has merit. Of course, if the community does not think so then it is within their power to down vote me into non-existence. That is fair, as I have no right to force my ideas on another person. It just seemed that this would be a place to share ideas. Perhaps not.
The “statement of triggering the banning mode” is this. The steps to avoid triggering it (in your case, to get out of it) are here. This is the conversation where the procedure is getting established.
Removing comments happens silently and without a trace. Such tools can be used by the establishment to quiet dissent.
So let’s have a policy that banned commenters get to post a link to their anti-LW blog. We could list all the anti-LW blogs on a wiki page or something.
They can break existing conversations.
By removing examples of what not to do, we can no longer point at them as examples.
I don’t think anyone is proposing to delete past comments.
We need more contrarians, not fewer.
If I promise to be a high-quality contrarian, can we ban the next five low-quality contrarians?
discourage participation amongst those who are in particular need of our help
This is a good thing. LW’s positive impact is likely to lie mostly in building an effective movement, figuring out what issues are important, and pushing on those issues; all of these are helped by a high average level of rationality. LW’s positive impact is unlikely to lie in trying to fix whatever hopeless cases wander by.
Freedom of speech is valuable in itself, and its presence here is aesthetically pleasing.
I disagree on both counts, and I suspect your other arguments may be rationalizations springing from this value judgement.
I’m generally in favor of more contrarians on LW, but a commenter who rejects empiricism across the board and cannot make any comments trying to understand the arguments in favor of empiricism adds no value here—especially if rejecting empiricism is all he is willing to talk about AND his comments dominate the sidebar for days.
In short, banning is a reasonable measure in this case. That said, I agree with your general points below.
...but a commenter who rejects empiricism across the board and cannot make any comments trying to understand the arguments in favor of empiricism adds no value here...
You are probably right about this particular case, but I’d hesitate to generalize it to all possible cases. I personally would find it quite interesting to engage in conversation (or debate) with a staunch anti-empiricist, assuming such a thing was even possible. I have talked to a few anti-empiricists before, and I find their position fascinating… listening to them feels like getting a glimpse of an utterly alien mind.
If you’ll start a discussion topic or a thread somewhere on the issue, I’ll argue against empiricism. We should trade understandings of what we take empiricism to be first though. Let me know if you’re game.
I’m totally game, but I am unskilled in the ways of LW. How do I “start a discussion topic” ? I thought that discussion topics had to be full-fledged articles, according to LW etiquette. I could probably sum up my position in a few bullet points, but I don’t think I have a full article’s worth of material.
But I could be overthinking the whole deal, let me know if that’s the case.
Alternatively, y’all could just have this conversation offline, via email or PM. If it turns out to be valuable, you could turn the conversation into an article.
I guess you could start an article in the discussion section? I don’t know the etiquette very well here either.
The empiricist claim that I would attack is one which says something like this: we have two ways of coming to know something. First, we come to know things by making inferences from other things we already know, and second we come to know things by direct experience of them. The second way, direct experience, is of something like sense-data. At root, everything else we come to know, we come to know by way of sense-data, and our access to sense-data is independent of whatever we infer from it.
That’s the view that I’d attack. I think any theory of empiricism weaker than that isn’t really distinctively empiricist, or distinguishable from, say, many versions of coherentism. But I’d be willing to debate that too.
That sounds like a good starting point to me. We could discuss this via PM, as TheOtherDave suggested; this way, if our discussion turns out to be nothing but noise, we would at least spare the other LWers the aggravation. Alternatively, I could create a discussion post containing the above paragraph, and my response, and we could go from there.
Both of these approaches sound good to me, so let me know what you want to do and I’ll get crackin’… by which I mean, I will write up a response when I have time :-/
On the contrary, the karma system exists in order to make such “cracking down” unnecessary. If comments are downvoted sufficiently, they are hidden. This system is supposed to replace moderator action. If moderators are going to control content then we may as well not have voting.
I’m speaking up in this instance in particular because it seems to me that the only problem with the commenter in question is an intellectual one. The person isn’t behaving badly in any sense other than arguing for an incorrect view and not noticing the higher level of their opponents (which after all can hardly be expected). It’s exactly the kind of thing that downvotes alone are supposed to handle. We’re not talking about a troll or spammer.
The reason it’s important to make this distinction is that censoring for purely viewpoint-based reasons is a Rubicon that we need not cross.
(EDIT: I’ll also point out, for clarity, that I myself have not responded to any of Monkeymind’s comments. Being opposed to banning a commenter is not to be confused with being in favor of engaging them.)
True, but it would discriminate less well. It would hide many OK comments that happened to be downvoted once or twice.
Note that for this solution to be an argument against the banning solution, it would need to actually be implemented. Are you predicting that will happen?
I’m saying it ought to be done, if the problem is as described. Or, in other words, that I prefer such a solution over the alternative being proposed (moderator intervention to remove comments).
There are some corpses in the street. Some people are proposing to bury them, because they’ll rot and cause diseases. Others are proposing to leave them there, because haha, corpses. In this situation, you may prefer cryopreservation to burial and at the same time prefer burial to non-burial, because cryo probably won’t happen. (Maybe this is an insane alien hypothetical world where cryo is just really unpopular.) If you’re facing a “bury yes or no” button, it may well be rational to push yes. This is true even though the probability of cryopreservation depends on your preferences. Now substitute bad commenters for corpses, banning for burial, and sidebar change for cryo. I’m not saying the parameter values are the same, but do you agree with the qualitative point?
I agree with the qualitative point but think it irrelevant. Not only are we not facing a “yes or no” button, but all that you claim in the above is that it “may well be rational to push yes” (emphasis added) in the event that we are faced with such a button. This says very little.
Again, I reiterate the point made in the grandparent. A hypothetical about a yes-or-no button is no answer to someone specifically advocating a third alternative. If you don’t think the third alternative is possible, argue against it directly; don’t pretend it was never proposed.
The question isn’t whether it “exists in order to” make cracking down unnecessary, or whether it “is supposed to” replace moderator action. The question is whether it actually does those things. And it’s far from perfect at doing them. Yes, heavily downvoted comments take up a little less space in the recent comments and in the thread (at least if you have the willpower not to click on them! virtue of curiosity!) But they still take up some space; they take time to be downvoted enough to be hidden; I’m pretty sure they still appear in the sidebar; and the responses to them tend to appear in full, even though these too tend to be valueless. On a more abstract level, I’m worried that such comments influence a collective sense of what the current topic of the site is.
There are intellectual problems other than arguing for the wrong views, and ways of being ban-worthy other than being a troll or spammer. I haven’t read most of the exchanges, but it was certainly my impression that Monkeymind has been communicating in ways that downvotes had made very clear weren’t working for the audience, that he’s been reasoning badly, and that he’s been responding with hostility to downvotes. Are you sure that nobody has been banned for such behavior previously, and that a genuine Rubicon is being crossed here?
If the current system is so perfect that the comments being banned weren’t attracting any attention anyway, is it really a big additional problem for them to be censored?
At the risk of exposing myself to a severe dose of negative karma, I have to say I don’t agree with that approach. This is supposed to be a blog devoted to the art of refining human rationality. If we crack down on people too heavily and too early on, before explaining why we disagree with them, I think it defeats the entire purpose of the blog. What would the point be if we just ostracized people who are not already on board with the Less Wrong view of rationality before explaining why we believe that our own approach is the best approach?
He’s making some interesting points, and he gets extra credit in my view for taking so radical a view while usually remaining reasonable. I find his railing against prediction to be puzzling, but his semantic points and discussion of Ptolemaic explanations have given me a lot to think about.
I also noticed that even some of his friendly, reasoned posts were being downvoted to the same extreme negative levels, which seems unwarranted. He has posted too much without familiarizing himself with the norms here, but he shows sincerity and willingness to learn and adapt. He got a little testy a few times, but he also apologized a lot.
All in all, with a few notable exceptions, it looks like he is getting downvoted mainly for unfamiliarity with LW posting style and for disagreeing with “settled science” (I myself am not too partial to that term). Perhaps also for some unconventional spellings and other idiosyncrasies.
I’m open to being corrected on this, but I think I have read this entire thread and I am pretty sure Monkeymind is not deliberately trolling. High inferential distance feels like trolling so often that it’s almost a forum trope. I myself am enjoying some of his posts and the responses.
I’ll change my mind if he continues with the present posting style, though.
If you prefer not having disagreement, I’ll just have to read and not participate. I can’t simply agree because others think differently. Surely that is not what this is about.
But that’s mostly a technicality; the correct interpretation/application of the theorem is of some controversy, you’re not obliged to expect us to be rational truthseeking agents, and I don’t think you can rationally expect us to expect you to be a rational truthseeking agent in any event.
BTW, I will go by whatever the house rules are. I am not here to be argumentative or disagreeable. I am here to learn. I do not argue for the sake of argument. I argue to become Less Wrong!
Originally I thot this was a physics forum. I came to this thread and got into the discussion w/o reading through the website. My bad! I have tapped out of the thread and will leave it alone. If you must censor me can you please delete all my posts, to be fair. It is hard enough to get people not to take things out of context as it is.
I’m asking you to not make comments that get downvoted (yes, it’s a confusing hard-to-comply-with rule). Since this currently seems to be most of them, a good heuristic is to almost completely stop commenting and switch to the lurker-mode for at least a few months.
“To compare, LW contains a few discussions on many-worlds hypothesis versus collapse hypothesis, but those two are mathematically equivalent. In other case, an experiment could be done that decides between them, and someone would probably have done it decades ago.”
Math can, and in the case of QM, must use infinities and 0-dimensional particles which can not exist in reality.
One can describe Hilbert’s Hotel with infinite rooms, but construction of one is impossible. One can mathematically divide in half infinitely, but can not walk halfway to a wall forever. Math can do many things that reality can not.
Math can, and in the case of QM, must use infinities and 0-dimensional particles which can not exist in reality.
I’m a little confused by this objection to say the least. Could you express your views on the following topics in mathematics, particularly when they are used for real world applications, whether it be physics, computer science or engineering?
The use of the “null vector” in linear algebra
Limits approaching 0 in calculus
Generalizing the rules of 3 dimensional space to represent 4 dimensional space
Complex numbers and their various applications, particularly if you think we shouldn’t use the square root of negative one if it has no identifiable physical properties
I think you are fighting a strawman here. By using the word “wave” physicists are not suggesting that something moves along a sinusoidal path. That was your intepretation, an incorrect one, and you have successfully disproved it, which is great. Just please don’t assume that physicists are doing the same mistake.
When you look at the waves on the water, yes, there is a kind of sinusoidal shape. But the word “wave” in physics means that at some places the density of something is higher, and at other places, the density is lower, and the map of the densities looks and moves… well, like the waves on the water.
The waves on the water make a sinusoidal shape, because there is an air above the water, so the higher density of water creates a “wave” in a layman’s meaning of the word. But imagine an explosion deep below the ocean surface, and how the density of the surrounding water changes in time. This is also called “waves” in physics, but there is nothing moving along the sinusoidal path. Similarly, sound makes “waves” (areas of different density) in the air. And a photon also makes some kind of a “wave” (some its properties measured in space and time show the same kind of pattern).
x
Instead of talking about details, I’d like to remind you of the big picture.
You think physicists get it wrong and you get it right. That is not completely impossible. However, based on the theories of physicists we have a lot of stuff that works: planes that fly, microwaves that heat, GPS devices that measure your position. So if their theories are wrong, how do you explain that all this stuff, built on their theories, works? Their theories, if not completely correct, must be at least approximately correct, or mathematically equivalent to correct, right? So even if they make errors, they surely do not make obvious errors. However, what you write, suggests that there is a big difference. How is it possible, if you are right, that a theory so different from yours can still produce all the stuff that works?
(To compare, LW contains a few discussions on many-worlds hypothesis versus collapse hypothesis, but those two are mathematically equivalent. In other case, an experiment could be done that decides between them, and someone would probably have done it decades ago.)
In short, the hypothesis User:Monkeymind advanced (somewhere in that rambling mess) was that engineers do not base their technological work on math, but instead on trial-and-error. This is obviously an empirical question. Monkeymind offered as evidence that he himself has a bad grasp of mathematics and yet has built various devices using trial-and-error.
It’s a potentially interesting idea. Do we have any real evidence that mathematics is a necessary component of the development of these devices? Anecdotally Norbert Wiener used mathematics to shoot down Japanese planes using radar.
Not that we have a really good alternative. Physical theories have been preferred for being more mathematically elegant ever since Newton, and before that we didn’t really have physical theories. I think that Monkeymind’s insistence that science is not for making predictions might be a hint that we’re just talking about different things here.
We’ve been over this already.
Doesn’t look like a definitive answer to me, though it does answer somewhat for that particular example.
Agreed, it’s not definitive. The best way to answer this would probably be to round up a bunch of engineers and ask them how much they use math. That would give us a quick average estimate of how today’s engineers use math. Unless you’re interested in specific important discoveries in engineering, in which case it would make more sense to examine the most influential breakthroughs case-by-case.
I personally am a programmer, but the software I write (as well as other software, written by smarter people) is used by genetic engineers. They engineer plants for specific desired traits (stronger drought resistance, bigger fruit, whatever). To do this, they use a ton of conventional math (statistics, specifically), as well as numerical optimization methods (such as neural networks) in order to determine (simplistically speaking) which nucleotides on the genome have an effect on which trait.
A single chromosome of corn consists of about 200,000,000 nucleotides. Good luck with that trial and error !
Yes, and a grain of rice has more genetic material than a human (almost double). So what?
With the simple understanding of emergent complexity, and without any automata or math at all, I can tell you (predict) what any plant or animal will look like on a mountain above 14k feet, or in a tundra. It is because there are only a few configurations for plants or animals in those conditions. We know this because we have observed it over and over again. So I can predict various life forms quite easily.
Although an electron microscope and a great deal of programming was needed at various stages, Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics has synthesized an e-coli bacteria. Using four chemicals they created a synthetic bacterial chromosome and used yeast to assemble the gene sequences. They were copying nature, not actually creating anything from scratch. Lots and lots of trial and error was involved. Watch his press conference and let him tell you himself. Professor Cronin of Glascow University has created self replicating, evolving inorganic (metal-based) iCHELLS almost entirely by trial and error mixing.
I’m very excited about their accomplishments and have corresponded with both of them to let them know. I’m not knocking science or those respectable persons involved in the scientific process, I merely want to help make it better.
I am not for getting rid of theory and replacing it with trial and error. Try to actually read what I have written in toto instead of taking a few phrases out of context.
A hypothesis that collapses into category-erroneous incoherence as soon as you realize that math can also be done via trial-and-error.
x
With minus 373 Karma points for the last 30 days under your belt, I think you should take a hint and stop posting. If this comment is upvoted/not convincingly disputed (by others), I’m going to start removing some of the worse comments you make in the near future.
Please crack down earlier, harder, and more often. Nobody is going to die from it. Higher average comment quality will attract better commenters in a virtuous circle. There’s no excuse for tolerating the endless nonsense that some commenters post, and those enabling them by responding to them should stop.
This seems to be the main problem, but my recent attempts to discourage those who make high-quality contributions to hopeless or malignant conversations didn’t stir much enthusiasm, so it’d probably take a lot of effort to change this.
(A specific suggestion I have is to establish a community norm of downvoting those participating in hopeless conversations, even if their contributions are high-quality.)
This is something new for LW, in fact this appears to be the first time when a non-Eliezer moderator stepped forward to implement this measure (in this case prompted by Eliezer’s recent statement that deleting posts by a chronically downvoted user who doesn’t stop is to be considered a general policy).
FWIW, you brought me around on this point.
This is the first time I’ve come across the suggestion to downvote well-thought-out contributions to silly conversations, actually, and I like it. I’ll keep that in mind.
How do you define “hopeless”, exactly ? Sometimes, a high-quality post in response to a troll’s or idiot’s thread can be quite helpful to other readers (and lurkers), who aren’t trolls or idiots, but who are just misinformed or new to the topic. I personally have been such a lurker on several sites, but I do acknowledge that my personal experience is not statistically significant.
I generally regard it as a norm that one should not respond to trolls and the like.
But I ignore that norm when I see the opportunity to help someone.
I’m generally against ban-level measures, as such measures are very damaging and the comments don’t seem particularly so.
Why?
Just a few reasons: Removing comments happens silently and without a trace. Such tools can be used by the establishment to quiet dissent. They can break existing conversations. We need more contrarians, not fewer. By removing examples of what not to do, we can no longer point at them as examples. Even if the comments were on the whole annoying, there might be interesting stuff in there worth responding to. Bans, more than downvotes, outright discourage participation amongst those who are in particular need of our help. Freedom of speech is valuable in itself, and its presence here is aesthetically pleasing.
The current procedure: (1) banning mode is only triggered by a user systematically accumulating some crazy amount of negative Karma quickly, (2) you get an explicit statement of banning-mode having been triggered, where others can appeal/discuss the decision, (3) you are free to continue participating if you somehow manage to produce the kind of comments that don’t get downvoted (so it’s more of a parole). In no other cases do the comments get banned.
Yes, and it’s carried out by Vladimir_Nesov and his ilk, which makes me not worry at all about the application in this particular case. I still needed to register my general objection, and I fear for our children’s children who might suffer under an oppressive fascist regime based on the Less Wrong moderation policy.
Oh, there’s no need to fear that: LWers don’t have children.
Upvoted for sheer hubris alone.
If this is where we are at, then please advise me of it so I can take appropriate steps to avoid getting banned. I don’t think I got an explicit statement of banning mode having been triggered, but I want to be sure since there is talk of the ban hammer going down.
I am not trying to be contrary, I just am, so it comes out that way. I truly think that what I have to offer has merit. Of course, if the community does not think so then it is within their power to down vote me into non-existence. That is fair, as I have no right to force my ideas on another person. It just seemed that this would be a place to share ideas. Perhaps not.
The “statement of triggering the banning mode” is this. The steps to avoid triggering it (in your case, to get out of it) are here. This is the conversation where the procedure is getting established.
So let’s have a policy that banned commenters get to post a link to their anti-LW blog. We could list all the anti-LW blogs on a wiki page or something.
I don’t think anyone is proposing to delete past comments.
If I promise to be a high-quality contrarian, can we ban the next five low-quality contrarians?
This is a good thing. LW’s positive impact is likely to lie mostly in building an effective movement, figuring out what issues are important, and pushing on those issues; all of these are helped by a high average level of rationality. LW’s positive impact is unlikely to lie in trying to fix whatever hopeless cases wander by.
I disagree on both counts, and I suspect your other arguments may be rationalizations springing from this value judgement.
I’m generally in favor of more contrarians on LW, but a commenter who rejects empiricism across the board and cannot make any comments trying to understand the arguments in favor of empiricism adds no value here—especially if rejecting empiricism is all he is willing to talk about AND his comments dominate the sidebar for days.
In short, banning is a reasonable measure in this case. That said, I agree with your general points below.
You are probably right about this particular case, but I’d hesitate to generalize it to all possible cases. I personally would find it quite interesting to engage in conversation (or debate) with a staunch anti-empiricist, assuming such a thing was even possible. I have talked to a few anti-empiricists before, and I find their position fascinating… listening to them feels like getting a glimpse of an utterly alien mind.
If you’ll start a discussion topic or a thread somewhere on the issue, I’ll argue against empiricism. We should trade understandings of what we take empiricism to be first though. Let me know if you’re game.
I’m totally game, but I am unskilled in the ways of LW. How do I “start a discussion topic” ? I thought that discussion topics had to be full-fledged articles, according to LW etiquette. I could probably sum up my position in a few bullet points, but I don’t think I have a full article’s worth of material.
But I could be overthinking the whole deal, let me know if that’s the case.
Alternatively, y’all could just have this conversation offline, via email or PM. If it turns out to be valuable, you could turn the conversation into an article.
I guess you could start an article in the discussion section? I don’t know the etiquette very well here either.
The empiricist claim that I would attack is one which says something like this: we have two ways of coming to know something. First, we come to know things by making inferences from other things we already know, and second we come to know things by direct experience of them. The second way, direct experience, is of something like sense-data. At root, everything else we come to know, we come to know by way of sense-data, and our access to sense-data is independent of whatever we infer from it.
That’s the view that I’d attack. I think any theory of empiricism weaker than that isn’t really distinctively empiricist, or distinguishable from, say, many versions of coherentism. But I’d be willing to debate that too.
That sounds like a good starting point to me. We could discuss this via PM, as TheOtherDave suggested; this way, if our discussion turns out to be nothing but noise, we would at least spare the other LWers the aggravation. Alternatively, I could create a discussion post containing the above paragraph, and my response, and we could go from there.
Both of these approaches sound good to me, so let me know what you want to do and I’ll get crackin’… by which I mean, I will write up a response when I have time :-/
On the contrary, the karma system exists in order to make such “cracking down” unnecessary. If comments are downvoted sufficiently, they are hidden. This system is supposed to replace moderator action. If moderators are going to control content then we may as well not have voting.
I’m speaking up in this instance in particular because it seems to me that the only problem with the commenter in question is an intellectual one. The person isn’t behaving badly in any sense other than arguing for an incorrect view and not noticing the higher level of their opponents (which after all can hardly be expected). It’s exactly the kind of thing that downvotes alone are supposed to handle. We’re not talking about a troll or spammer.
The reason it’s important to make this distinction is that censoring for purely viewpoint-based reasons is a Rubicon that we need not cross.
(EDIT: I’ll also point out, for clarity, that I myself have not responded to any of Monkeymind’s comments. Being opposed to banning a commenter is not to be confused with being in favor of engaging them.)
There is a point at which not getting the message from karma is sufficiently damaging to the community that moderator action is called for.
Karma does not merely send messages to the user, but actually does the work of moderation by causing comments to be hidden.
On the sidebar too? That’s the most aggravating issue, to me.
If that’s the problem, shouldn’t the solution be to implement comment-hiding on the sidebar?
Comments in the sidebar tend to be too new to have been voted below −3 or whatever the threshold is.
One could make the sidebar-threshold lower than the ordinary threshold....
True, but it would discriminate less well. It would hide many OK comments that happened to be downvoted once or twice.
Note that for this solution to be an argument against the banning solution, it would need to actually be implemented. Are you predicting that will happen?
I’m saying it ought to be done, if the problem is as described. Or, in other words, that I prefer such a solution over the alternative being proposed (moderator intervention to remove comments).
So you’re not saying that you prefer no banning to banning (given whatever you predict will actually happen to the sidebar)?
I thought I was saying that.
Preferring sidebar change to banning does not imply preferring no banning to banning given actual probability of sidebar change. Do you agree?
Actual probability of sidebar change is, I would hope, dependent on such preferences.
There are some corpses in the street. Some people are proposing to bury them, because they’ll rot and cause diseases. Others are proposing to leave them there, because haha, corpses. In this situation, you may prefer cryopreservation to burial and at the same time prefer burial to non-burial, because cryo probably won’t happen. (Maybe this is an insane alien hypothetical world where cryo is just really unpopular.) If you’re facing a “bury yes or no” button, it may well be rational to push yes. This is true even though the probability of cryopreservation depends on your preferences. Now substitute bad commenters for corpses, banning for burial, and sidebar change for cryo. I’m not saying the parameter values are the same, but do you agree with the qualitative point?
I agree with the qualitative point but think it irrelevant. Not only are we not facing a “yes or no” button, but all that you claim in the above is that it “may well be rational to push yes” (emphasis added) in the event that we are faced with such a button. This says very little.
Again, I reiterate the point made in the grandparent. A hypothetical about a yes-or-no button is no answer to someone specifically advocating a third alternative. If you don’t think the third alternative is possible, argue against it directly; don’t pretend it was never proposed.
I guess I’m hereby tapping out of the discussion.
Fair enough.
It is nonetheless some number smaller than 1.
The question isn’t whether it “exists in order to” make cracking down unnecessary, or whether it “is supposed to” replace moderator action. The question is whether it actually does those things. And it’s far from perfect at doing them. Yes, heavily downvoted comments take up a little less space in the recent comments and in the thread (at least if you have the willpower not to click on them! virtue of curiosity!) But they still take up some space; they take time to be downvoted enough to be hidden; I’m pretty sure they still appear in the sidebar; and the responses to them tend to appear in full, even though these too tend to be valueless. On a more abstract level, I’m worried that such comments influence a collective sense of what the current topic of the site is.
There are intellectual problems other than arguing for the wrong views, and ways of being ban-worthy other than being a troll or spammer. I haven’t read most of the exchanges, but it was certainly my impression that Monkeymind has been communicating in ways that downvotes had made very clear weren’t working for the audience, that he’s been reasoning badly, and that he’s been responding with hostility to downvotes. Are you sure that nobody has been banned for such behavior previously, and that a genuine Rubicon is being crossed here?
If the current system is so perfect that the comments being banned weren’t attracting any attention anyway, is it really a big additional problem for them to be censored?
This. We should have been done with this several days ago.
At the risk of exposing myself to a severe dose of negative karma, I have to say I don’t agree with that approach. This is supposed to be a blog devoted to the art of refining human rationality. If we crack down on people too heavily and too early on, before explaining why we disagree with them, I think it defeats the entire purpose of the blog. What would the point be if we just ostracized people who are not already on board with the Less Wrong view of rationality before explaining why we believe that our own approach is the best approach?
He’s making some interesting points, and he gets extra credit in my view for taking so radical a view while usually remaining reasonable. I find his railing against prediction to be puzzling, but his semantic points and discussion of Ptolemaic explanations have given me a lot to think about.
I also noticed that even some of his friendly, reasoned posts were being downvoted to the same extreme negative levels, which seems unwarranted. He has posted too much without familiarizing himself with the norms here, but he shows sincerity and willingness to learn and adapt. He got a little testy a few times, but he also apologized a lot.
All in all, with a few notable exceptions, it looks like he is getting downvoted mainly for unfamiliarity with LW posting style and for disagreeing with “settled science” (I myself am not too partial to that term). Perhaps also for some unconventional spellings and other idiosyncrasies.
I’m open to being corrected on this, but I think I have read this entire thread and I am pretty sure Monkeymind is not deliberately trolling. High inferential distance feels like trolling so often that it’s almost a forum trope. I myself am enjoying some of his posts and the responses.
I’ll change my mind if he continues with the present posting style, though.
Good intentions don’t always save the day.
Just tell me what you want, and I’ll comply.
If you prefer not having disagreement, I’ll just have to read and not participate. I can’t simply agree because others think differently. Surely that is not what this is about.
Actually, you might be able to.
But that’s mostly a technicality; the correct interpretation/application of the theorem is of some controversy, you’re not obliged to expect us to be rational truthseeking agents, and I don’t think you can rationally expect us to expect you to be a rational truthseeking agent in any event.
If you interpret his comments in light of his disbelief in prediction, empiricism, and the practical mathematics, then his posts have no value.
BTW, I will go by whatever the house rules are. I am not here to be argumentative or disagreeable. I am here to learn. I do not argue for the sake of argument. I argue to become Less Wrong!
Originally I thot this was a physics forum. I came to this thread and got into the discussion w/o reading through the website. My bad! I have tapped out of the thread and will leave it alone. If you must censor me can you please delete all my posts, to be fair. It is hard enough to get people not to take things out of context as it is.
If you were looking for a physics forum, this is probably more along the lines of what you were looking for.
Are you asking me not to post anywhere in the community or just this thread?
I’m asking you to not make comments that get downvoted (yes, it’s a confusing hard-to-comply-with rule). Since this currently seems to be most of them, a good heuristic is to almost completely stop commenting and switch to the lurker-mode for at least a few months.
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“To compare, LW contains a few discussions on many-worlds hypothesis versus collapse hypothesis, but those two are mathematically equivalent. In other case, an experiment could be done that decides between them, and someone would probably have done it decades ago.”
Math can, and in the case of QM, must use infinities and 0-dimensional particles which can not exist in reality.
One can describe Hilbert’s Hotel with infinite rooms, but construction of one is impossible. One can mathematically divide in half infinitely, but can not walk halfway to a wall forever. Math can do many things that reality can not.
I’m a little confused by this objection to say the least. Could you express your views on the following topics in mathematics, particularly when they are used for real world applications, whether it be physics, computer science or engineering?
The use of the “null vector” in linear algebra
Limits approaching 0 in calculus
Generalizing the rules of 3 dimensional space to represent 4 dimensional space
Complex numbers and their various applications, particularly if you think we shouldn’t use the square root of negative one if it has no identifiable physical properties
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