A philosophy professor elicits college students’ reactions to Less Wrong
Link.
Given the positive reactions, I think the professor seeded them with a positive impression of the site’s content.
Link.
Given the positive reactions, I think the professor seeded them with a positive impression of the site’s content.
Guys, these are students in an intro philosophy class who looked at a few introductory and recently promoted articles. Expecting them to genuinely struggle with the weird views expressed here would require them to a) encounter the weird views which they likely didn’t do and b) feel that they in any way have the expertise to challenge those views. What is noteworthy about this is that the comments were mandatory. If you make everyone who read a few introductory articles write comments these are about the results you’re going to get. The people who write comments on the internet are the small minority who feel strongly about something said here and competent enough to add or criticize. But that is a small fraction of the possible audience. So seeing comments that don’t pattern match to the comments one normally reads on the Internet is not a good reason to conclude the students did not have genuinely positive reaction to what they read.
Most intro to philosophy classes are not made up of kids with any significant CS, cog sci, mathematical or physics background. Yes, they’re taking Less Wrong to be authoritative. But they read a bunch of good, non-controversial articles and have little prior expertise to fall back on. Yeah, the comments are written in bullshitty language and tone because that’s how one writes for authority figures you can’t trust yet. That does not mean the sentiments expressed are bullshit- it is very common for undergrads to criticize assigned reading.
Many of the negative comments in this thread strike me as spouting cached thoughts about higher education, in many cases from people who may not have a lot of experience with higher ed.
I can’t stress on how important this is. Imagine that instead of up voting or down voting every LWer who read a popular article commented on it in a few sentences. What would that thread look like? Now imagine forcing a fraction of the people who didn’t vote to write up a comment.
Now imagine you do this with a bunch of intelligent people who most definitely have not read the sequences.
+1
I don’t understand why Jack’s comment hasn’t been up voted more. LWers aren’t being realistic in their expectations here. Also considering the odds I think we will likley be getting at least one new commenter out of this and perhaps several regular readers who liked the site and will be returning here.
Edit: When I commented it had just 3 up votes.
I hope one of the students takes away the message that, “Hey, maybe learning is actually enjoyable and schools just do a bad job of it.”
Agreed; I think at least one may have done so.
Greetings, Colin and friends! We come in peace!
Though I agree with the many commenters who have pointed out the abundance of password-guessing, I don’t share their cynicism. The end result of all of this is that ~30 people who otherwise wouldn’t have heard of LW have now given it a cursory glance. And look at the first comment here—it seems like we have prompted a handful people to enjoy thinking about rationality who might not have done so otherwise. Isn’t that part of why the community exists, after all?
Listen, blog, if I never see another comment starting with something like “After reading lesswrong.com I believe I have a better understanding of rationality”, I’ll spare this cute innocent kitten I’m holding out the window.
a few seconds pass
Ah, well, I never liked kittens.
I think the positive reactions are probably mostly a case of guessing the teacher’s password. Perhaps the teacher conveyed a positive impression beforehand, but the default password guessing behavior would probably be to guess “teacher wants us to write about this appreciatively” regardless of whether he said anything additional about the site—that would be expected for a community blog devoted to refining the art of {rationality, wisdom, justice, aesthetics, …}.
After having read the comments, I can definitely sympathize with the students. It brought back memories of when I was in the same position in history or English class when we had to read something and write our reaction to it but with little clear direction about what was expected of us or how the teacher would grade, and not really caring about the subject matter. I know the process that produced the comments, and I would probably write the same things in their position, but not out of deficient intelligence or writing skill—rather, because I don’t see the point, and I’m just trying to make it through the class.
When it’s something I have to do to graduate, I am particularly resentful, even if I would have otherwise liked reading it.
Edit: Except for the grammar. Although if I never proofread my work, it would look bad, and for the reasons above I might not be motivated to do that much.
Most of the rationality minded people I know, especially including myself, have a strong tendency to dispute the status quo, and disagree with authority just for the fun of it. So I imagine that if I came across LW in that setting, I would have criticized it in my blog comment just because it was non-conformist and required more original thinking. So the ones saying the most positive things about it are either the smartest ones, who realize how great we are, or the conformist ones, who just want the professor to like them.
I feel the same way. I think that intelligent people tend to do that because intelligent-sounding disagreement is more difficult than intelligent-sounding agreement, and thus a better way of signaling their intelligence to other smart people.
I would say it was the other way around. It’s easy to be against something, and it sets you above whatever you’re criticising. It’s much more difficult to sound smart while agreeing with something.
I discount the smart-soundingness of whatever I read accordingly.
ETA: Maybe that’s one reason for this phenomenon: people trying to sound smart instead of trying to be smart.
IMHO there are two things to consider:
agreeing is easier than disagreeing
disagreeing is a stronger signal of intelligence than agreeing
If you agree, you signal that you are on the same level as the one you review. When people agree with authorities, it raises their status.
If you disagree, you signal that you are on higher level than the one you review. When you disagree with someone in your circle, you challenge them to status fight. But when you disagree with an outsider, you are only collecting free karma.
Agreeing is easier, you simply write: “After reading the article, I have realized that (summary of the article) is true, and it impressed me deeply.” (A few responses on the professor’s blog are exactly like this.) If you disagree, you must have some contrary opinion: “I disagree with X, because the truth is Y.” In some situations, you can use some cached wisdom for Y, so it may be easy… unless then someone challenges you to fight by disagreeing with Y.
My guess is that the professor liked LW. Therefore students understand that agreeing with LW means agreeing with the professor. For most people, safety comes first, so I would expect most people to agree with LW, and only one or two to signal intelligence by disagreeing. (If the professor would be critical of LW, I would expect most students to disagree, and perhaps one to agree. My expectations are a bit assymetrical, because disagreeing with criticism is weaker signal than disagreeing with praise.)
Truly, “status” is as productive of just-so stories as evolutionary psychology.
Tabooing the word “status”, I simply mean that it is SAFE to guess your teacher’s password, but it is COOL to criticize. I expect most people to prefer SAFE to COOL. These are my expectations:
If group of people who know each other reads a new website… most people will not care (but may wait for group consensus, to be safe), some people will criticize it to be COOL.
If group of people who know each other reads a new website, because their professor told them so, and it seems like the professor likes the website… most people will write savourless praise, because it’s SAFE, one or two will criticize, because it’s COOL. -- This is what I believe has happened.
If group of people who know each other reads a new website, because their professor told them so, and it seems like the professor dislikes the website… most people will write hasty criticism, because it is both SAFE and COOL. Only an exceptional meta-contrarian will write careful praise, because he has a different definition of COOL. -- This is irrelevant to article, I just followed my thoughts further.
Now I am not sure if I did the tabooing thing correctly; seems like I just replaced “status” with “cool”. Well, at least it was a move in good direction, because “status” is a hypothesis, while “cool” is something we emotionally perceive.
I’m not so sure about the label “exceptional meta-contrarian”. I mean, I do this, but generally just because I disrespect my professors and enjoy getting in arguments with them if I think I can win. Does that count?
I am not qualified to answer this, because I do have no idea how dangerous your professors are or what are the possible consequences of disrespecting them. Or how socially dangerous is in your group to praise things that others criticize.
This is a general problem when speaking about real-life things—many words (e.g. “dangerous” and “cool” in my comment) do have meaning, but at the same time they cover such a large spectrum of intensity that what you can say about one end of spectrum is often not true about the other end of spectrum. Disagreeing with some professors is dangerous (can significantly lower your chance of successfully finishing the school), disagreeing with others is harmless, and there are many shades of gray between (e.g. they can make your next hours somehow unpleasant, but no long-term consequences).
On a second thought, I should not have used the word “meta-contrarian”. It just seemed cool and related. What I really meant was this—if professor likes the page, it is usually COOL to criticize it. But if the professor dislikes the page, then it is both COOL to criticize it (you oppose the page) and to praise it (you oppose professor), so in that situation the cool-maximizing crowd will be divided, resulting with less people who oppose the professor.
Agree about ‘spectrum of intensity’ - my first reaction to “I have no idea how dangerous your professors are” was “Well it’s not like they carry shivs or anything.”
I meant as a judgement, not an action. I actually find myself more conscientious about displaying signals of respect (addressing them as “Dr. Such-and-such”, quietly paying attention, etc) to a professor I think is stupid. To use the language of “status” just-so stories, if I believe myself demonstrably more intelligent than someone, I only benefit by making them out to be high status—because that must mean I’m even higher status.
Agree. Intelligent sounding agreement that doesn’t sound awkward is hard. I find it stretches the creativity far more and all else being equal leaves you sounding less impressive than the original speaker.
Agree technically. Yes, that is one reason that our kind can’t cooperate. Of course I would reverse the connotation that our kind makes that particular mistake more than others.
My impression is that we—geekish people in general—do this a lot more than others. Uttering any generalisation seems to trigger people to respond with an exception, no matter how nugatory or irrelevant.
ETA: See also Well, actually.
Who is the philosopher, and where is this course being taught? The site contains no information about any of this.
Also, why doesn’t the blog have a title? And what about the art? Who is depicted, and why was this picture chosen?
I think this is related enough and useful to mention. Feel free to downvote if I am wrong.
I am a student in this class taught by Scott Aaronson. Our class blog is linked there too, which may be of some value to LW readers. I think comments from people who are not enrolled in the class are okay, as long as they are sparse. The main point is for students to hash out their reactions to readings and in-class discussions, so if it becomes saturated with remote user comments, it may take away from the cohesive debate aspect.
The course is based around this essay which offers a lot of food for thought. I definitely think LW will get mixed into our discussions; I know a few other students who also regularly read LW.
I really like that essay, and it was linked here before. I would have liked to enroll in the course.
The key insights I took away from the paper are:
No, a waterfall isn’t simulating a chess program, because the mapping from one to the other would be “doing all the work”. IOW, you can only say one computation implements another if there’s a polynomial time reduction between the two that benefits from having the other as an oracle, which is not the case for waterfalls and chess.
Different choices of language have no asymptotic impact on complexity of descriptions, except to the extent that it limits expressive power. If you couldn’t represent the concept of a differential equation, then Newton’s gravitation would be no simpler than Ptolemy’s epicycles: both would require a lot of table lookups to predict motion.
The Turing Test, as well as human-run tests in general (like a quiz in school) can be subsumed into the concept of interactive proofs, where assumptions about the subject plus random probes of their knowledge suffice to prove what they are capable of, without knowing how they implement or represent it.
When considering whether a machine can pass the Turing Test, the relevant question is not if it’s theoretically possible, but if you could do it while only using resources that increase polynomially in the length of the test (rather than e.g. a superexponential lookup table).
That is a very concise and informative way of stating it.
These are interesting points of view, which I tried to probe more deeply, or at least offer some counter views here. I think most people felt I was just bashing Watson, which wasn’t my intention. Chapter 7 of the new book The Beginnings of Infinity by David Deutsch also spells out a good reason why hardware and software concerns beyond the guarantees made by an interactive proof Turing test might be necessary to really capture what we might want to mean by intelligence.
Copy over my email comment:
Yes, interesting.
Some of them read like the student did not do much reading at all; a number echo strongly previous comments; and some put way too much stock on one post (eg. the Google one). They are overall suspiciously positive—we all should know that there is some extremely wrong or extremely unobvious or extremely unpopular positions taken on LW, so to see only positive or very luke-warm reactions...?
This is probably related to apparently you not providing any specific pointers or articles into LW. If you try it in the future, it’d be interesting to see if you get significantly better results by linking to a mix of the best and the most controversial articles, or even just a list of random articles.
The responses are almost entirely bullshit. The students want to earn the maximum amount of credit for their responses; the maximum amount of credit is small compared to the exams; they’re uncertain about how their comments will be evaluated; and the context of the blog doesn’t encourage them to put much thought into them. Less Wrong is presented as a homework reading and is therefore authoritative. Thinking critically about the material on Less Wrong would require too much time and effort for such a trivial assignment, and comes with the risk of falling out of favor with an instructor who might not like critical thinking.
College is weird.
People keep making this sort of claim and friends seem to have a lot of anecdotes backing it up. But I don’t think all college experiences are like this. In college I had a fair number of professors who seemed to delight in arguments going against their ideas. This was especially true with the philosophy professors although the phil professor I interacted with most was an expert in philosophy of science who had a physics degree so that may be relevant. (She did come out of the semester apparently worried that I had a gambling problem because in a discussion about probability related issues I corrected her on what the valid bets in roulette were.)
When I was an undergraduate, I had many professors who were open to debate and encouraged students to disagree with them. I had 2 professors (Keith Gallagher and some Jesuit theologian whose name I forget) who responded negatively to disagreement from their students. I received As and Bs in every other class, but Cs in classes from those 2 professors, seriously damaging my GPA.
So, it only takes a small number of such professors, to make the rational decision by a student be to always agree with the professor.
Sorry, Gallagher is a CS professor. How could he have graded you poorly for disagreement? I can see how that can happen in the social sciences or humanities but it isn’t clear to me what that would even mean for a CS prof.
It’s not as if all CS classes have to use objective standards of grading.
It’s also not the case that objective standards of grading can’t be gamed.
It’s also, also not the case that objective standards of grading exist beyond, say, multiple-choice exams, which are more or less useless for testing practical knowledge.
My confusion is more how one can disagree with someone in a CS class given that almost every issue is pretty objective.
Whether a program or a proof is “correct” is fairly objective. But there’s a couple places where subjectivity enters in.
Suppose you have an incorrect program/proof. How much partial credit does it deserve? How bad is one mistake versus another?
Suppose the student’s answer is correct but ugly. Classes routinely factor “good programming style” into the grade.
Some work requires written answers or explanations; these can be good or bad.
Upper level courses often require students to present a topic to the class. (Often by guiding the class through an important research paper.) Quality of presentation is graded subjectively.
In practice, there are important mitigating factors. Big lower-division or required upper-division undergraduate courses are autograded as much as possible, reducing subjectivity. Elective upper-level and graduate courses tend to give As to everybody anyway, since the professors want to keep people in the class and don’t want to make trouble for “their” students.
(In American universities, often there’s a rough division between first-two-years (lower division) and last-two-years (upper division). Upper division classes are normally for students who’ve already been admitted to the major, lower division will include prospective majors as well as interested outsiders.)
There are plenty of issues to disagree over. I remember some argument over what issues were important in program efficiency. He was probably right about that. I was dismissive of the practicality of pure LISP with no extralogicals and no sequencing (no ‘seq’ or indexed iteration). I was probably right about that.
It didn’t help that I was a bit of an arrogant twit at the time.
But, the key wasn’t grading. The most important factor was his claiming, at the end of the semester, not to have received an important homework from me. I had thrown it out by then, so I couldn’t prove I’d done it; and he gave me a zero on it.
This could have been accidental. But it never happened to me in any other class.
I feel you on the arrogant twit past. I stumbled across one of my old pseudonyms, call him paper-machine_2004. It was massively embarrassing.
Definitely there are many college professors who will appreciate a well-thought out and coherent attack on their views. I have in my time profited by this. However, not all professors will (I have in my time lost because of this), and nobody appreciates a poorly-thought out and incoherent attack on their views. Given this payoff matrix you would have to be supremely confident in how well-thought out and coherent you were in order to make speaking up have better expected value than smiling and nodding.
Very few professors appreciate poorly-thought out and incoherent defenses of their views.
It’s easy to say what is basically a glorified “Yes Socrates” and get away with not going into detail. It’s harder to get away with that if you’re contradicting.
Keep in mind that the problem with contemporary academic philosophy is not that it is insufficiently tolerant of dissent. The field practically self-defines as an unresolvable argument and the archetypal intro to philosophy curriculum involves learning and analyzing the debates between philosophers who disagree with each other about the most fundamental issues one can disagree about. Students are usually graded on 1) how well they learned the philosophies they studies and 2) their ability to put forward interesting thoughts of their own on the subjects discussed. The grading spectrum for a paper looks something like: Incoherent (F) → Failed to understand source material (D) → Repeated Source Material without saying anything interesting about it (C) → Makes an interesting, but derivative or tangential point (B) → Makes a central or extremely insightful point (A). Whether or not the student flatters the professor’s own views is at worst good for half a letter grade in my experience.
Now the situation may be worse in other subjects and that may well affect the strategies the students are using—but this says more about the situation in high school (where these students learned to write like this) than it does about college. Indeed, in my experience students often do poorly on their first philosophy paper precisely because they’ve failed to recognize the need to change strategies.
Also, the grading for blog comments is very likely to be only a participation grade and the students are likely to know this.
I agree with this. Academic philosophy may represent an example of a field not being dogmatic enough, which is a relatively rare failure mode.
Exactly. It is also seems like a relatively new failure mode- all the examples that come to mind are in the last 60 years. The anti-dogmatism meme seems to be very well adapted to the recent changes in the cultural environment.
In the academy, it’s not enough to be sensible: there is an expectation that you should have convincing reasons for your view and be aware of objections. If a student is trying to end up near where the instructor is, the instructor will notice if the student got there by a route the instructor thought about but rejected for being overly simplistic or worse.
I’ve also noticed this in my daily life. I wince when somebody I agree with at a high level gets horribly tripped up in the details. I assume it’s because I want to believe that people who agree with me do so for good reasons.
This is pretty much the whole point, isn’t it?
(And this is ignoring the other obvious factor, which is how much you care about what professors appreciate.)
Nisan’s description sounds more like elementary school or high school than college to me. That said, the comments also looked more like something that I’d have expected from high schoolers than college students...
As an American college student, I’m shocked by how poorly some of my peers write; I suspect that many American high schools didn’t put enough emphasis on writing.
This example seems to support that conclusion, but then again, these are comments on a blog rather than formal essays, so maybe the students were told not to worry about grammar or spelling.
And yet, somehow, we seem to manage basic grammar, spelling and word choice on this blog, even though there’s more anonymity and less incentive.
This is a fact about the map, not a fact about the territory. You just need to calibrate your expectations downward.
I think the karma system has a lot to do with this, along with the fact that good grammar and style are community norms here.
ETA: The most important thing, though, is the instructions the students were given—if the professor advised them not to worry about grammar, then that’s what the students will do.
Agreed, and I have drastically adjusted my expectations since I started reading my peers’ work. Upon reflection, what I really meant by “I’m shocked by how poorly some of my peers write” is “I used to be surprised at how poorly they write, and even though I have come to expect it, it still bothers me.” Sorry if this was ambiguous or misleading.
Grades aren’t equivalent to the karma system? Good grammar and style aren’t community norms in a college philosophy class? Edit: Well, maybe it’s just me, but I’d be embarrassed to make such basic grammar errors in any situation, whether I was ‘advised not to worry’ or not.
Now this I agree with. I had the unfortunate experience of an entry-level English class that practiced peer review / cooperative editing; it can be effectively summed up as this repeated fifteen or so times over the course of a semester.
Same here, but I’ve observed that this just isn’t the case for a lot of other students. I took a philosophy class last year, and I quickly learned that some people just don’t care.
I strongly agree, and I’ve had a few similar experiences (though not as bad the one as you described).
Well, this is an introductory class, so a lot of the students probably started their first semester of college this month. That said, I’ve done peer editing for graduating seniors whose work I would have been ashamed to hand in in middle school.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard that European college students are more mature than American college students.
I find it interesting that you’re only actually disagreeing with the last and most trivial claim. (Well, except “College is weird”, which I personally don’t agree with—all life is like this in my experience.)
Well, I’ll quibble with this claim as well:
I have been given homework reading (in a history class, and a class typically taken just to fulfill requirements, no less) that was not intended by the professor to be reliable, and I would expect that to be especially common in philosophy classes. Of course, I could just be wrong about that, and it may actually be rare; and regardless of whether I’m correct, the students may be new and still thinking of homework reading in general as authoritative.
Edit: I see now that a similar point has been made by other commenters who point out that this sort of bullshit tends to not be very helpful in philosophy courses, and that the students are probably still thinking in high-school mode.
I spent the majority of a semester arguing with a philosophy professor over epistemology; I undoubtedly came out of that as her favorite student of the year, but likely only out of appreciation that I was the only one in the course who actually understood the material well enough to actually have an opinion.
I estimate p=.8 that the set [do not find these facts intuitively obvious] has a 90% overlap with the set [have not attended college in the last twenty years]. Anyone disagree?
Most students will just jump through the hoop the way they’ve been trained. But a few will actually think about it seriously, whether they agree or disagree with what they find. I predict we’ll get at least two LW participants who acknowledge finding the site through the course.
How did you know whom to email? I can’t find any identifying info on the blog; it almost appears deliberately suppressed.
OP was posted to OB-NYC ML as well.
But the OP doesn’t contain any information either.
Is there a reason the rest of us can’t know who and where this is?
The professor did link his name/email to the post by mailing us; and he specifically said “Please do not leave a comment on the class blog.”
I am guessing he wants students to feel free to write what they think without worrying about being criticized or corrected on every point by aggrieved LWers.
But did he say “please don’t tell anybody who I am or where I teach?” This is completely orthogonal to the question of preventing comments from LWers, aggrieved or otherwise.
I wasn’t interested in writing a comment on the blog (except possibly to ask where the course was—and I might very well have done so, since Luke’s post does not contain any instruction to the contrary! So if info was somehow being hidden with the goal of preventing comments, it would have directly backfired.).
No, but it is a closed list and the public materials are, as you noted, apparently sanitized. What is the reasonable inference?
Indeed; Luke is perhaps lacking in discretion, or someone passed the URL on to him without also passing on the request.
I have no idea. It just looks like bizarre crypticness to me; like there’s some inside joke that I’m not in on.
If it is a closed list, then why is it being posted to LW? And especially, why is it being posted without acknowledgment of the fact that the source was a closed list?
Conspicuous secrecy is rude.
The fact that the list itself is closed is not a good argument by itself not to post the link given that the link is to a public and easily accessible website. However, it probably would have made sense of it had included the request not to the post to the blog.
The post should have included an explanation of the lack of information (e.g. “the instructor posted this to a private mailing list that I subscribe to, and does not wish himself or his institution to be identified”—if this is in fact the case; otherwise, the information should have been included).
He really should edit the OP to contain the “please don’t comment on the class blog” instructions.
I’m already imagining a foaming at the mouth angry LWer vivisecting with sadistic glee a post of a poor freshman yelling at him “how dare you say you like us for the wrong reasons!”. And once LWers see one such comment, the scent of blood will drive them into a commenting frenzy.
My model of typical LWers disagrees. I don’t think the student comments there look like tempting targets even to those among us who like to correct people.
The typical LWer wouldn’t do this agreed, but there are plenty of LWers.
But no true LWer would do this.
[dons his kilt]
I was able to figure out what university the course is from information in the comments with high probability and an trivial amount of googling but I’m not sure if it would be socially appropriate to share the results.
What bothers me more at this point is the apparent expectation on the part of at least three people (the anonymous professor, lukeprog, and gwern) that we wouldn’t be curious.
But it was socially appropriate to share the method for coming to those results?
Not sure that it was, but there is a limit to how much I’m willing to limit myself to avoid violating social norms that may not even exist.
For fun though: Can you introspect what considerations you applied to come to that limit? Why exactly was the limit drawn at the method rather than the results?
My guess would be that that is a convenient Schelling point. (Edit: And not exactly a Schelling point but there seems to be some history on the internet of it being more acceptable to post methods than results that lead to privacy issues.) It makes it so that there’s still a barrier to get the information but limits that so that someone still needs to do the work. Moreover, it only goes in one direction. That is, it allows someone here to get the prof’s name but it doesn’t make it easier for someone else who already knows the prof’s name to find the blog.
I did that before I made the first post and came up with a pretty satifactory conclusion. I almost included it in my first post , but I decided not to include it due to length and other considerations.
I see. Upvoted.
Overcoming Bias—New York City Mailing List. The referenced email was a response to an email about the blog, not to the professor.
I can’t say I found it surprising, but it’s still depressing how many of the commenters referenced a few points from a Less Wrong article to demonstrate that they read it, and rounded it off with interpretations that were simply regurgitations of some cached thoughts they could have output equally well without reading any of Less Wrong at all.