I haven’t visited these threads for nearly a year; please forgive me if someone else has shared a similar prediction in the meantime.
I predict that Quirrell’s goal is to start a war between magical people and non-magical people.
The student armies have been taught combat skills, organization, and discipline but they have not been indoctrinated. The text does not show that the student armies have been guided toward one faction or another within Magical Britain. Quite the opposite, they have been taught to work together across the ‘house’ lines that may have divided them in the past.
It would be counter-productive to prepare tools that could be as easily used by your enemies as yourself. So we may reason that all members of the student armies are already on the side Quirrell wants them on. One thing all members of the student armies have in common is that they are members of Magical Britain.
I have found nothing to suggest international tensions, so a war against another magical nation would be out of place in the text, as I understand it.
On the other hand, Quirrell had a downright emotional reaction when Harry declared his aspiration to be a scientist in chapter 20. After the end, when we read through the story from the beginning, we will see that as the point where the villain’s motivations are revealed: Quirrell wants to save the world from scientists and their careless exploration of powers they cannot contain.
Quirrell has been pushing Harry down a path of isolation. He created situations that built up Harry’s distrust of authority. He cut Harry off from his friends. I believe he means for Harry to trigger the Great Muggle War by doing something grand and ill-advised that makes sense in the desperate state Quirrell intends to put him in.
My prediction of Quirrell’s overall goal does not depend on my prediction of his intentions regarding Harry, and I am less certain of those. I feel there are pieces I am missing there.
I think Quirrell wants the leader of the magical side to be Harry rather than himself. Quirrell doesn’t seem to recognize that Harry would side with the non-magical side instead. (Harry has noted some peculiarities in Quirrell’s model of the world on several occasions, and based on Quirrell being both a Robin Hanson stand-in and Voldemort I suspect those peculiarities can be summarized as Quirrell failing to account for, for lack of a better word, “love.”)
Quirrell doesn’t seem to recognize that Harry would side with the non-magical side instead. (Harry has noted some peculiarities in Quirrell’s model of the world on several occasions, and [...] I suspect those peculiarities can be summarized as Quirrell failing to account for, for lack of a better word, “love.”)
Agree that Quirrell doesn’t recognize this; agree that Quirrell’s model is peculiar in failing to account for, for lack of a better word, “love”; disagree that the latter is the reason for the former. I don’t think Quirrell would be wrong in predicting that even many Muggleborns will join him.
I haven’t been following these threads enough to know whether it’s even worth spelling out the obvious theory of what the “power the Dark Lord knows not” is in the Verresverse, but it seems pretty clear that it’s neither “love” as in canon nor “science” as Harry suggests (and Snape disputes) in Ch. 86, but Harry’s belief that a good future can actually be made to happen (and is worth fighting for), i.e. an interstellar transhumanist rationalist ethical civilization that has left death behind. That may not sound like “power”, but it really is … not primarily because it means that Harry can cast the True Patronus charm and Voldemort cannot, but because it means that Harry can try and make an interstellar transhumanist rationalist civilization happen that has left death behind, and Quirrellmort—who wants to beat death, who wants to be safe from nuclear weapons, who hates being around pretty much everybody because he finds people hypocritical and stupid, who wants to go to the stars—can not.
Which is relevant here because this is deeply intervowen with Harry’s rock-solid morality:
No one knew quite how many wizards there were in the world. He’d done a few estimates with Hermione and come up with numbers in the rough range of a million.
But there were six billion Muggles.
If it came down to a final war...
Professor Quirrell had forgotten to ask Harry which side he would protect.
A scientific civilization, reaching outward, looking upward, knowing that its destiny was to grasp the stars.
And a magical civilization, slowly fading as knowledge was lost, still governed by a nobility that saw Muggles as not quite human.
It was a terribly sad feeling, but not one that held any hint of doubt.
I don’t think it can be usefully summarized into one punchy word (ETA: I don’t think hope is quite the right way to describe what Quirrellmort is missing that’s preventing him from creating and ruling over an intergalactic dark empire), but now that I thought for one minute about which one I would choose if I had to pick one, it would be one that doesn’t at first brush sound like it fits into that slot at all:
After thinking about this for a minute I have to confirm my first impression: This is nonsense. The Dark Lord knows craptons of ambition. Any definition of ‘ambition’ for which the Dark Lord does not know it is a ridiculous definition. And if we’re talking about Quirrellmort we’ve even heard him share his ambitions. Maybe he has somewhat less ambition than Harry but that’s not sufficient for the claim to be reasonable.
*shrugs* So my opinion is that when one ambition is so much greater that the other isn’t even distinguishable from zero unless you plot them on a log scale, it makes poetic sense to call the Dark Lord “not ambitious”, even though I of course agree that Quirrellmort is ambitious compared to the median human. But if you don’t agree that this is poetically appropriate, sure, fine.
(I’ll recall my disclaimer that I don’t actually think that it makes sense to use just a single word to describe the concept—seriously trying to do that strikes me as trying to make the discussion compliant with Dumbledorian thought-by-cliché.)
I agree with the concept above. Moreover, so does Quirrell:
I expect that you will grasp at any opportunity for advancement which falls into your hands. But there is no great ambition that you are driven to accomplish, and you will not make your opportunities.
Now, every model I’ve made of Quirrellmort’s prior actions do show him making his own opportunities, but the point remains—none of those opportunities (that I’ve modeled, predicted, or learned about) have aimed anywhere near any kind of genuine improvement of humanity in the way that Harry desires, not even fixing the flaws he himself observes. They’ve all just been about him achieving power.
This feels odd to type, but it feels as though Quirrellmort’s ambitions are...shallow.
Is there more to be said about Quirrell being a Robin Hanson stand-in? Was this covered in another thread? Does anyone have handy links to the relevant posts?
My infatuation with Quirrell might have faded a bit due to inactivity, but that thread has mortally wounded it. This Hanson guy is so deeply unmarketable that he made me stop liking a fictional character that might have been based on him.
The part where he marginalizes the suffering of rape victims and that fact that this site still associates with him solidifies the “Less Wrong is not a place I can bring people” feeling I’ve kind of struggled with for a couple years now.
That’s two cringe-inducing passages of text in one day. Honestly, I liked the one where Hermione died better.
Robin often displays unusual confusions. I think that stems from a reliance on his explicit memory over implicit memory. If he doesn’t have a theory to account for why society fails to distinguish songs by whether their lyrics are fictional, as we do with literature, then he considers that a puzzle to solve, even if he’s never wanted society to draw that category to aid him in selecting songs.
So when Robin asks, “Why do we appear to value X more than Y”, he’s not making any claim about how he feels about X and Y. He disregards his feelings and intuitions, because they would mask opportunities to improve his explicit, formal, verbal, theoretical understanding.
Had you not heard of Robin Hanson before, and are you now basing your opinion of him largely on that thread? I think this is a bad way to get an accurate impression of a person.
I’d heard of him, of course. I’d never followed up. Naïvely, I didn’t think I needed to.
I’m basing my opinion of the penalty for being thought to associate with him based on a number of posts he made that were linked in that thread. The one about rape is the one that is likely to stick with me,
The creepy face he makes in the picture doesn’t help.
To the sort of people with whom I aspire to keep company, insensitivity on certain topics signals lack of status, a lack of class.
In coarser terms, he stepped in it. Then he went back to step in it again. When his steps were criticized he defended the quality of his shoes.
I don’t want to walk on the carpets he wiped it on.
To the sort of people with whom I aspire to keep company,
I think a question you should be asking yourself is why are you aspiring to keep company with people who would insist that you not associate with a website merely because it associates with someone who has politically incorrect ideas?
I suppose there might be success to be had, here. There might be network opportunities. There might be opportunities for friendship and other things I value.
But the bar to entry is too high. I don’t have a strong academic background. I was once close to math. I’d hold up two cross fingers and say, “Like this.” But years, decades have come between us. My only education in philosophy is by proxy.
I don’t mean to paint a picture without hope, I’m a bright guy. I could maybe catch up if I applied myself, if I worked at it, if I let some other things slide for a while.
I just mean to turn it around. I ask myself why I keep company with people who don’t recognize how socially toxic it is to marginalize the suffering of rape victims. I ask myself if it is enough that they are one of many groups who espouse a form of self-improvement. Could it ever be enough?
I suppose it’s because the author of HP&tMoR is here, and might respond to someone’s post on the topic. And I suppose it helps, too that no one has to know I’m here, participating.
You guys really fail on the outreach. I hope that one day each and every one of you that hurts this community in that way understands the role you play in undoing something nice that could have been something beautiful. I admit to being evil, and am unashamed to look forward to your suffering.
Um, LW is growing very well, thank you. In fact at this point I’m more worried about the ‘unwilling to consider controversial ideas due to signaling’ failure mode than the ‘stop growing due to being too controversial’ failure mode.
You guys really fail on the outreach. I hope that one day each and every one of you that hurts this community in that way understands the role you play in undoing something nice that could have been something beautiful. I admit to being evil, and am unashamed to look forward to your suffering.
On the contrary, I’m already here. The decision I shared, that stirred up so much hostility, wasn’t that I was leaving. It’s that I wasn’t going to tell other people about Less Wrong.
Only one of the dozen or so people I call friends in meatspace identifies as ‘evil.’ None of the scores of friendly acquaintances I have do. It’s pretty uncommon.
No, what “stirred up so much hostility” was you’re suggestion that we censor people for being “unmarketable”.
Thanks. It’s rather obvious once you point it out. Not the first time my self-centeredness has blinded me to the real reason people were cross with me, won’t be the last.
Censorship is necessary. The poison that kills your garden and undermines your movement won’t always be the new blood or the outsider. Sometimes it will be someone you respect who steps out of bounds.
That post was about deleting people who refuse to engage in rational argument, not deleting posts that use rational argument in ways that are “unmarketable” as you put it.
Let’s put it this way, would you also suggest we delete all the posts critical of religion because it also puts of a lot of people?
That post was about deleting people who refuse to engage in rational argument, not deleting posts that use rational argument in ways that are “unmarketable” as you put it.
Let’s put it this way, would you also suggest we delete all the posts critical of religion because it also puts of a lot of people?
the utility of censorship is not exclusive to the situations described in that post.
But in the end, no. This conversation didn’t start when I issued a call to action, but when I expressed a difficult decision I had made for myself. I didn’t know that people were reading it as a directive until someone pointed that out.
Anyway, it’s far too late to change: that rape article is over two years old. “Better late than never” doesn’t mean that late is always good enough. In this case, it’s definitely not.
In a world with wishes—but where I didn’t immediately wish for a world without wishes—maybe I’d wish that Less Wrong would be image conscious enough to distance itself from people who unapologetically marginalize the suffering of rape victims, maybe not. But the call I get to make is whether or not to facilitate the process by which my friends and the people with whom I would like to be friends forget that I have any contact with Less Wrong. It is not whether or not to facilitate the process by which Less Wrong rehabilitates its status as a haven for creeps, creep enablers, or creep apologists.
In a world with wishes—but where I didn’t immediately wish for a world without wishes—maybe I’d wish that Less Wrong would be image conscious enough to distance itself from people who unapologetically marginalize the suffering of rape victims, maybe not. But the call I get to make is whether or not to facilitate the process by which my friends and the people with whom I would like to be friends forget that I have any contact with Less Wrong. It is not whether or not to facilitate the process by which Less Wrong rehabilitates its status as a haven for creeps, creep enablers, or creep apologists.
This ad hominem filled screed, is an example of the kind of refusal to engage in rational argument that is worthy of censorship.
I just mean to turn it around. I ask myself why I keep company with people who don’t recognize how socially toxic it is to marginalize the suffering of rape victims. I ask myself if it is enough that they are one of many groups who espouse a form of self-improvement. Could it ever be enough?
I think that in certain cases he does know he comes across as a jerk, but he just doesn’t care. (Not sure about the rape post specifically.)
The vast majority of Less Wrong users are NPCs. They claim to have learned and internalized all of the ~rationality skills~ discussed here, but none of them have anything to protect, and for some reason a large number of uplifted humans all care exclusively about the goals of the celebrities here. Less Wrong is a horrible community filled with middle-class white men who hate women.
But occasionally, someone posts something useful. You seem like you have a goal, or at least a thing to protect; don’t let sub-human scum like that keep you from that, in any way.
Using an RSS reader helps; you can see the main post without seeing the comments, and you can pass over the circlejerking that takes up most of the space.
Thank you for the sympathetic perspective. But I do what to clarify that am not the crusader. I am one who sees the crusade coming and gets out of the way.
I have been defending a decision I made, here. It hasn’t been my convictions about good and evil or right and wrong, but rather about prudence and discretion.
I will admit that I let it get personal, but all I’ve been defending is myself.
He only stepped in it because its a hot-button political topic, much like abortion. The chaotic and frankly insane responses to his posts makes me suspect that most of the readers are completely unable to divorce political and gut moral feelings from internal analytical processing.
As an experiment, ask yourself how many dollars a rape is worth, how many dollars should be paid to prevent one. I suspect many of the posters in that thread will simply refuse to give a numerical answer. This is a clear indicator of mindkill.
Or an issue of how most humans are not willing to signal extreme utilitarianism because it is used easily to portray people as cold and hard. Moreover, most humans don’t distinguish between “things I say for signaling” and “things I say because I believe them.” So there are a lot of reasonable explanations for this without it being mindkilling. Also, some people really are just deontologists. Not being willing to answer such a question makes a lot more sense if one has a deontological rule that rape is always bad and wrong.
There’s also the issue that talking about certain things in public in a particular way (and the internet counts as public) causes actual mental harm to people.
He only stepped in it because its a hot-button political topic, much like abortion.
When someone is controversial for the sake of being controversial, it would be foolish for them to not anticipate consequences like no longer being accepted in mainstream company. Or ever company one or two standard deviations of ‘daring’ away from the mainstream in some cases.
I get that it take bravery to do this kind of thing. (Or it could take foolishness. I’m not saying that’s what happened here, but I wouldn’t tell someone who believed to to be so that I had strong reason to believe they were wrong: I don’t know the guy.) But being brave isn’t a free pass to not deal with the consequences.
And sometimes those consequences mean you aren’t able to do as much good (or as much whatever you want) as you otherwise might.
He took that risk in writing it. This site is taking a risk in continuing to associate with him. I am making the choice not to take the risk of reminding anyone not involve in Less Wrong that I read stuff here and sometimes post a trifle bit.
As an experiment, ask yourself how many dollars a rape is worth, how many dollars should be paid to prevent one. I suspect many of the posters in that thread will simply refuse to give a numerical answer. This is a clear indicator of mindkill.
Actually, thinking you can simplify and generalize human behavior down to rules like that is a clear indicator of mindkill.
Let me break it down differently, not like anyone else is going to see this since they’re all in the new thread.
Person A is hurt because their authority to control sexual access to person B is violated.
Person C is hurt because their authority to control sexual access to themselves is violated.
Claiming equivalency between the injury to person A and the injury to person C is very insensitive. Hinting that person A’s suffering is greater takes a few steps further. It’s kind of dumb, too.
The people I’m talking about don’t shy away from rape. They might have, at one point, but one of them was a student to Craig Palmer, who has been rather vilified for writing a frank book on the topic. Yeah, it’s an anecdote, but it’s in answer to your anecdote for whatever that’s worth.
I get that it take bravery to do this kind of thing. (Or it could take foolishness. I’m not saying that’s what happened here, but I wouldn’t tell someone who believed to to be so that I had strong reason to believe they were wrong: I don’t know the guy.) But being brave isn’t a free pass to not deal with the consequences.
As far as I know Robin Hanson never uses “bravery” to justify himself, that was an argument attributed to him by loserthree as a way to justify shutting him up.
I won’t address the first part of your post; I think it is largely correct. We are, after all, responsible for our own actions.
However, for the second part, I don’t think that anyone is even remotely trying to claim the equivalency you’re describing above. It’s most definitely a straw man argument.
If nothing else, the first claim should read more properly as “Person A is hurt because they have become legally responsible for a new human being and half of all associated costs and maintenance for that new human being for a period of no less than 21 years, in a situation where person A is not responsible for the creation of said new human being.”
After all, we are responsible for our own actions. Not necessarily those of someone else.
(Side note: the ‘control of sexual access’ part doesn’t make any sense, other than to construct a strawman. I don’t understand at all why you felt that to be a legitimate argument or position.)
If nothing else, the first claim should read more properly as “Person A is hurt because they have become legally responsible for a new human being and half of all associated costs and maintenance for that new human being for a period of no less than 21 years, in a situation where person A is not responsible for the creation of said new human being.”
Comparing the best-case scenario outcome of one thing with the worst-case scenario outcome of another thing sounds disingenuous to me.
If you (generic “you”) must compare being raped to being cuckolded, you don’t get to compare the least bad case of the former (“gentle, silent rape” of an unconscious woman leading to no physical injury, no STD, no pregnancy, and no memory) with one of the worst possible outcomes for the latter (your wife gets pregnant, gives birth to a child, and you never find out it’s not yours until you’ve spent a bajillion dollars).
(I wish I could downvote myself.)
Edit: from the upvotes and the asterisk, it looks like I had already submitted the comment hours ago and was editing it, as opposed to being composing it in the first place. I don’t remember what the original submitted version looked like.
If you don’t take some time to explore Robin Hanson’s ideas in good faith you will miss out on a lot. What you see as a weakness is in fact his great strength as a rationalist. “Curiosity about humans and unconstrained by social norms.” You may object, saying that you don’t mind this, but any such response basically boils down to “I like X when it isn’t too X.”
The red flags aren’t there because he is unaware of their existence. Indeed I bet Hanson can win quite well at social games. They are there because he systematically relies on his explicit/theoretical rather than implicit knowledge to expose where the gaps of the former are and then tries hard to fill them.
I don’t object to the investigation. I object to the indiscretion.
Paula Dean’s sponsors and distributors did not cut her off because she used racial slurs. They cut her off because she was allowed to answer a question that she never should have been asked: something like, “Have you ever used the N-word and what were the circumstances?” Once she answered that honestly (which is kind of had to because it was a legal deposition), she lost marketability.
The difference between an actor and a star isn’t talent, it’s marketability.
I was disputing your claim that she lost marketability. While I agree that her sponsors cutting her off hurt her, I dispute your claim that it was a business decision based on marketability, in particular her publisher’s decision to cancel her book while it’s preorder was number 1 on Amazon.
That path will lead you and any you influence to isolation and obscurity.
If you seek only to better yourself then that monastic sort of approach might actually help you out. But if you want to change the world you need to first change your attitude toward social status signaling.
Surely there are better ways to change the world then bringing more people into movements!
I’m only tangentially involved with this rationality stuff, but I’ve gotten the impression that one of its great strengths is in bringing together a lot of very smart people, who can then go on to have more concrete impacts in other ways. If that’s accurate, bringing in people who’d be scared off by Hanson would be actively detrimental to the goal of changing the world.
What goals do you have that are better served by quantity than quality? (I have both goals that I need to think about quantity for and goals that I need to think about quality for. I try to keep them separate.)
But you’re talking about bringing in people known to fail at rationality due to signaling games. Do you think they can be eventually brought around, or?
No, but enough people do that it’s an important consideration.
I don’t mean that a “little guilt by association with anyone saying politically incorrect things” is enough to immediately roll back whatever one was doing. But it’s enough to reevaluate. And, on reevaluation, it added more weight to a damning line of thought that already existed.
So I’ve weighed both sides and found yours wanting. Your hostile reaction isn’t doing you any favors. In fact, it convinces me all the more that the path I’m turning away from, the one where I introduce friends to Less Wrong, was not a worthwhile path.
One of my myriad goals is to share the concepts and (ah-hem) methods of rationality with future students of mine, through mere source linking in the beginning and with a more interwoven manner after I am already established in my teaching career. This is not only better served by quantity, it’s designed specifically to increase quantity, for the benefits that having a more rational population bring.
I haven’t visited these threads for nearly a year; please forgive me if someone else has shared a similar prediction in the meantime.
I predict that Quirrell’s goal is to start a war between magical people and non-magical people.
The student armies have been taught combat skills, organization, and discipline but they have not been indoctrinated. The text does not show that the student armies have been guided toward one faction or another within Magical Britain. Quite the opposite, they have been taught to work together across the ‘house’ lines that may have divided them in the past.
It would be counter-productive to prepare tools that could be as easily used by your enemies as yourself. So we may reason that all members of the student armies are already on the side Quirrell wants them on. One thing all members of the student armies have in common is that they are members of Magical Britain.
I have found nothing to suggest international tensions, so a war against another magical nation would be out of place in the text, as I understand it.
On the other hand, Quirrell had a downright emotional reaction when Harry declared his aspiration to be a scientist in chapter 20. After the end, when we read through the story from the beginning, we will see that as the point where the villain’s motivations are revealed: Quirrell wants to save the world from scientists and their careless exploration of powers they cannot contain.
Quirrell has been pushing Harry down a path of isolation. He created situations that built up Harry’s distrust of authority. He cut Harry off from his friends. I believe he means for Harry to trigger the Great Muggle War by doing something grand and ill-advised that makes sense in the desperate state Quirrell intends to put him in.
My prediction of Quirrell’s overall goal does not depend on my prediction of his intentions regarding Harry, and I am less certain of those. I feel there are pieces I am missing there.
I think Quirrell wants the leader of the magical side to be Harry rather than himself. Quirrell doesn’t seem to recognize that Harry would side with the non-magical side instead. (Harry has noted some peculiarities in Quirrell’s model of the world on several occasions, and based on Quirrell being both a Robin Hanson stand-in and Voldemort I suspect those peculiarities can be summarized as Quirrell failing to account for, for lack of a better word, “love.”)
Agree that Quirrell doesn’t recognize this; agree that Quirrell’s model is peculiar in failing to account for, for lack of a better word, “love”; disagree that the latter is the reason for the former. I don’t think Quirrell would be wrong in predicting that even many Muggleborns will join him.
I haven’t been following these threads enough to know whether it’s even worth spelling out the obvious theory of what the “power the Dark Lord knows not” is in the Verresverse, but it seems pretty clear that it’s neither “love” as in canon nor “science” as Harry suggests (and Snape disputes) in Ch. 86, but Harry’s belief that a good future can actually be made to happen (and is worth fighting for), i.e. an interstellar transhumanist rationalist ethical civilization that has left death behind. That may not sound like “power”, but it really is … not primarily because it means that Harry can cast the True Patronus charm and Voldemort cannot, but because it means that Harry can try and make an interstellar transhumanist rationalist civilization happen that has left death behind, and Quirrellmort—who wants to beat death, who wants to be safe from nuclear weapons, who hates being around pretty much everybody because he finds people hypocritical and stupid, who wants to go to the stars—can not.
Which is relevant here because this is deeply intervowen with Harry’s rock-solid morality:
(Ch. 35)
In other words, the power the Dark Lord knows not is hope.
I don’t think it can be usefully summarized into one punchy word (ETA: I don’t think hope is quite the right way to describe what Quirrellmort is missing that’s preventing him from creating and ruling over an intergalactic dark empire), but now that I thought for one minute about which one I would choose if I had to pick one, it would be one that doesn’t at first brush sound like it fits into that slot at all:
The power the Dark Lord knows not is ambition.
The power the Dark Lord Knows Not is optimism?
After thinking about this for a minute I have to confirm my first impression: This is nonsense. The Dark Lord knows craptons of ambition. Any definition of ‘ambition’ for which the Dark Lord does not know it is a ridiculous definition. And if we’re talking about Quirrellmort we’ve even heard him share his ambitions. Maybe he has somewhat less ambition than Harry but that’s not sufficient for the claim to be reasonable.
*shrugs* So my opinion is that when one ambition is so much greater that the other isn’t even distinguishable from zero unless you plot them on a log scale, it makes poetic sense to call the Dark Lord “not ambitious”, even though I of course agree that Quirrellmort is ambitious compared to the median human. But if you don’t agree that this is poetically appropriate, sure, fine.
(I’ll recall my disclaimer that I don’t actually think that it makes sense to use just a single word to describe the concept—seriously trying to do that strikes me as trying to make the discussion compliant with Dumbledorian thought-by-cliché.)
I agree with the concept above. Moreover, so does Quirrell:
Now, every model I’ve made of Quirrellmort’s prior actions do show him making his own opportunities, but the point remains—none of those opportunities (that I’ve modeled, predicted, or learned about) have aimed anywhere near any kind of genuine improvement of humanity in the way that Harry desires, not even fixing the flaws he himself observes. They’ve all just been about him achieving power.
This feels odd to type, but it feels as though Quirrellmort’s ambitions are...shallow.
Is there more to be said about Quirrell being a Robin Hanson stand-in? Was this covered in another thread? Does anyone have handy links to the relevant posts?
Well, it was mentioned in this comment thread, and I thought it made a lot of sense.
Thanks.
My infatuation with Quirrell might have faded a bit due to inactivity, but that thread has mortally wounded it. This Hanson guy is so deeply unmarketable that he made me stop liking a fictional character that might have been based on him.
The part where he marginalizes the suffering of rape victims and that fact that this site still associates with him solidifies the “Less Wrong is not a place I can bring people” feeling I’ve kind of struggled with for a couple years now.
That’s two cringe-inducing passages of text in one day. Honestly, I liked the one where Hermione died better.
Robin often displays unusual confusions. I think that stems from a reliance on his explicit memory over implicit memory. If he doesn’t have a theory to account for why society fails to distinguish songs by whether their lyrics are fictional, as we do with literature, then he considers that a puzzle to solve, even if he’s never wanted society to draw that category to aid him in selecting songs.
So when Robin asks, “Why do we appear to value X more than Y”, he’s not making any claim about how he feels about X and Y. He disregards his feelings and intuitions, because they would mask opportunities to improve his explicit, formal, verbal, theoretical understanding.
This distinction between questions as a tool to point out when the audience is wrong and as a tool of apolitical inquiry closely mirrors the difference between questions as requests for favors and questions as inquiries. It’s also similar to questions as argumentative challenges vs questions as inquiries.
Had you not heard of Robin Hanson before, and are you now basing your opinion of him largely on that thread? I think this is a bad way to get an accurate impression of a person.
I’d heard of him, of course. I’d never followed up. Naïvely, I didn’t think I needed to.
I’m basing my opinion of the penalty for being thought to associate with him based on a number of posts he made that were linked in that thread. The one about rape is the one that is likely to stick with me,
The creepy face he makes in the picture doesn’t help.
To the sort of people with whom I aspire to keep company, insensitivity on certain topics signals lack of status, a lack of class.
In coarser terms, he stepped in it. Then he went back to step in it again. When his steps were criticized he defended the quality of his shoes.
I don’t want to walk on the carpets he wiped it on.
Disliking Hanson is not about.…
I think a question you should be asking yourself is why are you aspiring to keep company with people who would insist that you not associate with a website merely because it associates with someone who has politically incorrect ideas?
I suppose there might be success to be had, here. There might be network opportunities. There might be opportunities for friendship and other things I value.
But the bar to entry is too high. I don’t have a strong academic background. I was once close to math. I’d hold up two cross fingers and say, “Like this.” But years, decades have come between us. My only education in philosophy is by proxy.
I don’t mean to paint a picture without hope, I’m a bright guy. I could maybe catch up if I applied myself, if I worked at it, if I let some other things slide for a while.
I just mean to turn it around. I ask myself why I keep company with people who don’t recognize how socially toxic it is to marginalize the suffering of rape victims. I ask myself if it is enough that they are one of many groups who espouse a form of self-improvement. Could it ever be enough?
I suppose it’s because the author of HP&tMoR is here, and might respond to someone’s post on the topic. And I suppose it helps, too that no one has to know I’m here, participating.
You guys really fail on the outreach. I hope that one day each and every one of you that hurts this community in that way understands the role you play in undoing something nice that could have been something beautiful. I admit to being evil, and am unashamed to look forward to your suffering.
Um, LW is growing very well, thank you. In fact at this point I’m more worried about the ‘unwilling to consider controversial ideas due to signaling’ failure mode than the ‘stop growing due to being too controversial’ failure mode.
Or perhaps in this case we excel at screening.
On the contrary, I’m already here. The decision I shared, that stirred up so much hostility, wasn’t that I was leaving. It’s that I wasn’t going to tell other people about Less Wrong.
Only one of the dozen or so people I call friends in meatspace identifies as ‘evil.’ None of the scores of friendly acquaintances I have do. It’s pretty uncommon.
No, what “stirred up so much hostility” was you’re suggestion that we censor people for being “unmarketable”.
Thanks. It’s rather obvious once you point it out. Not the first time my self-centeredness has blinded me to the real reason people were cross with me, won’t be the last.
Censorship is necessary. The poison that kills your garden and undermines your movement won’t always be the new blood or the outsider. Sometimes it will be someone you respect who steps out of bounds.
That post was about deleting people who refuse to engage in rational argument, not deleting posts that use rational argument in ways that are “unmarketable” as you put it.
Let’s put it this way, would you also suggest we delete all the posts critical of religion because it also puts of a lot of people?
the utility of censorship is not exclusive to the situations described in that post.
But in the end, no. This conversation didn’t start when I issued a call to action, but when I expressed a difficult decision I had made for myself. I didn’t know that people were reading it as a directive until someone pointed that out.
Anyway, it’s far too late to change: that rape article is over two years old. “Better late than never” doesn’t mean that late is always good enough. In this case, it’s definitely not.
In a world with wishes—but where I didn’t immediately wish for a world without wishes—maybe I’d wish that Less Wrong would be image conscious enough to distance itself from people who unapologetically marginalize the suffering of rape victims, maybe not. But the call I get to make is whether or not to facilitate the process by which my friends and the people with whom I would like to be friends forget that I have any contact with Less Wrong. It is not whether or not to facilitate the process by which Less Wrong rehabilitates its status as a haven for creeps, creep enablers, or creep apologists.
This ad hominem filled screed, is an example of the kind of refusal to engage in rational argument that is worthy of censorship.
I think that in certain cases he does know he comes across as a jerk, but he just doesn’t care. (Not sure about the rape post specifically.)
The vast majority of Less Wrong users are NPCs. They claim to have learned and internalized all of the ~rationality skills~ discussed here, but none of them have anything to protect, and for some reason a large number of uplifted humans all care exclusively about the goals of the celebrities here. Less Wrong is a horrible community filled with middle-class white men who hate women.
But occasionally, someone posts something useful. You seem like you have a goal, or at least a thing to protect; don’t let sub-human scum like that keep you from that, in any way.
Using an RSS reader helps; you can see the main post without seeing the comments, and you can pass over the circlejerking that takes up most of the space.
Thank you for providing the subhuman masses an example of warmth and love. I am truly touched by your radiating compassion.
Thank you for the sympathetic perspective. But I do what to clarify that am not the crusader. I am one who sees the crusade coming and gets out of the way.
I have been defending a decision I made, here. It hasn’t been my convictions about good and evil or right and wrong, but rather about prudence and discretion.
I will admit that I let it get personal, but all I’ve been defending is myself.
He only stepped in it because its a hot-button political topic, much like abortion. The chaotic and frankly insane responses to his posts makes me suspect that most of the readers are completely unable to divorce political and gut moral feelings from internal analytical processing.
As an experiment, ask yourself how many dollars a rape is worth, how many dollars should be paid to prevent one. I suspect many of the posters in that thread will simply refuse to give a numerical answer. This is a clear indicator of mindkill.
Or an issue of how most humans are not willing to signal extreme utilitarianism because it is used easily to portray people as cold and hard. Moreover, most humans don’t distinguish between “things I say for signaling” and “things I say because I believe them.” So there are a lot of reasonable explanations for this without it being mindkilling. Also, some people really are just deontologists. Not being willing to answer such a question makes a lot more sense if one has a deontological rule that rape is always bad and wrong.
There’s also the issue that talking about certain things in public in a particular way (and the internet counts as public) causes actual mental harm to people.
When someone is controversial for the sake of being controversial, it would be foolish for them to not anticipate consequences like no longer being accepted in mainstream company. Or ever company one or two standard deviations of ‘daring’ away from the mainstream in some cases.
I get that it take bravery to do this kind of thing. (Or it could take foolishness. I’m not saying that’s what happened here, but I wouldn’t tell someone who believed to to be so that I had strong reason to believe they were wrong: I don’t know the guy.) But being brave isn’t a free pass to not deal with the consequences.
And sometimes those consequences mean you aren’t able to do as much good (or as much whatever you want) as you otherwise might.
He took that risk in writing it. This site is taking a risk in continuing to associate with him. I am making the choice not to take the risk of reminding anyone not involve in Less Wrong that I read stuff here and sometimes post a trifle bit.
Actually, thinking you can simplify and generalize human behavior down to rules like that is a clear indicator of mindkill.
Let me break it down differently, not like anyone else is going to see this since they’re all in the new thread.
Person A is hurt because their authority to control sexual access to person B is violated.
Person C is hurt because their authority to control sexual access to themselves is violated.
Claiming equivalency between the injury to person A and the injury to person C is very insensitive. Hinting that person A’s suffering is greater takes a few steps further. It’s kind of dumb, too.
The people I’m talking about don’t shy away from rape. They might have, at one point, but one of them was a student to Craig Palmer, who has been rather vilified for writing a frank book on the topic. Yeah, it’s an anecdote, but it’s in answer to your anecdote for whatever that’s worth.
See also
As far as I know Robin Hanson never uses “bravery” to justify himself, that was an argument attributed to him by loserthree as a way to justify shutting him up.
I won’t address the first part of your post; I think it is largely correct. We are, after all, responsible for our own actions.
However, for the second part, I don’t think that anyone is even remotely trying to claim the equivalency you’re describing above. It’s most definitely a straw man argument.
If nothing else, the first claim should read more properly as “Person A is hurt because they have become legally responsible for a new human being and half of all associated costs and maintenance for that new human being for a period of no less than 21 years, in a situation where person A is not responsible for the creation of said new human being.”
After all, we are responsible for our own actions. Not necessarily those of someone else.
(Side note: the ‘control of sexual access’ part doesn’t make any sense, other than to construct a strawman. I don’t understand at all why you felt that to be a legitimate argument or position.)
Comparing the best-case scenario outcome of one thing with the worst-case scenario outcome of another thing sounds disingenuous to me.
What does this have to do with the quoted point?
Trigger warning: comparisons involving rape
If you (generic “you”) must compare being raped to being cuckolded, you don’t get to compare the least bad case of the former (“gentle, silent rape” of an unconscious woman leading to no physical injury, no STD, no pregnancy, and no memory) with one of the worst possible outcomes for the latter (your wife gets pregnant, gives birth to a child, and you never find out it’s not yours until you’ve spent a bajillion dollars).
(I wish I could downvote myself.)
Edit: from the upvotes and the asterisk, it looks like I had already submitted the comment hours ago and was editing it, as opposed to being composing it in the first place. I don’t remember what the original submitted version looked like.
If you don’t take some time to explore Robin Hanson’s ideas in good faith you will miss out on a lot. What you see as a weakness is in fact his great strength as a rationalist. “Curiosity about humans and unconstrained by social norms.” You may object, saying that you don’t mind this, but any such response basically boils down to “I like X when it isn’t too X.”
The red flags aren’t there because he is unaware of their existence. Indeed I bet Hanson can win quite well at social games. They are there because he systematically relies on his explicit/theoretical rather than implicit knowledge to expose where the gaps of the former are and then tries hard to fill them.
I don’t object to the investigation. I object to the indiscretion.
Paula Dean’s sponsors and distributors did not cut her off because she used racial slurs. They cut her off because she was allowed to answer a question that she never should have been asked: something like, “Have you ever used the N-word and what were the circumstances?” Once she answered that honestly (which is kind of had to because it was a legal deposition), she lost marketability.
The difference between an actor and a star isn’t talent, it’s marketability.
No she didn’t.
What she gets from book sales will be a pittance compared to what her little business empire brought in over the past few years.
Yes, she has a fall back position. And that’s fine. But it doesn’t mean she didn’t lose greater things than those book sales will ever make up for.
I was disputing your claim that she lost marketability. While I agree that her sponsors cutting her off hurt her, I dispute your claim that it was a business decision based on marketability, in particular her publisher’s decision to cancel her book while it’s preorder was number 1 on Amazon.
Driving away people who are going to care more about social status signaling than about rationality is a feature, not a bug.
That path will lead you and any you influence to isolation and obscurity.
If you seek only to better yourself then that monastic sort of approach might actually help you out. But if you want to change the world you need to first change your attitude toward social status signaling.
Surely there are better ways to change the world then bringing more people into movements!
I’m only tangentially involved with this rationality stuff, but I’ve gotten the impression that one of its great strengths is in bringing together a lot of very smart people, who can then go on to have more concrete impacts in other ways. If that’s accurate, bringing in people who’d be scared off by Hanson would be actively detrimental to the goal of changing the world.
What goals do you have that are better served by quantity than quality? (I have both goals that I need to think about quantity for and goals that I need to think about quality for. I try to keep them separate.)
Why dither when you can have both? The indiscreet have no monopoly on either intelligence or rationality.
But you’re talking about bringing in people known to fail at rationality due to signaling games. Do you think they can be eventually brought around, or?
Everyone fails at rationality due to signaling games.
Yes, but not everyone insists on guilt by association with anyone saying politically incorrect things.
No, but enough people do that it’s an important consideration.
I don’t mean that a “little guilt by association with anyone saying politically incorrect things” is enough to immediately roll back whatever one was doing. But it’s enough to reevaluate. And, on reevaluation, it added more weight to a damning line of thought that already existed.
So I’ve weighed both sides and found yours wanting. Your hostile reaction isn’t doing you any favors. In fact, it convinces me all the more that the path I’m turning away from, the one where I introduce friends to Less Wrong, was not a worthwhile path.
Going by your description of your friends, I’m inclined to agree.
I just want to say that I like this comment, and you are a pretty cool guy.
Thanks.
One of my myriad goals is to share the concepts and (ah-hem) methods of rationality with future students of mine, through mere source linking in the beginning and with a more interwoven manner after I am already established in my teaching career. This is not only better served by quantity, it’s designed specifically to increase quantity, for the benefits that having a more rational population bring.
Harry would be on his own side, and Quirrell would not be particularly welcome there even without the information Harry lacks.
Doesn’t that sound a little familiar to you? Like there’s someone around here like that?
I… disagree with this. More likely he is disgusted with the failure of scientists to utilize their powers.