Can you please explain a bit more what the point is? I’m having trouble figuring out why I would want to try to understand something, if not to get “okay” ideas.
There are many, but unfortunately I only have enough motivation to list a few:
If talking to someone with strange beliefs in person, legitimately trying to engage with their ideas is an easy way to signal all kinds of positive things. (Maturity, charity, epistemic seriousness, openness to new experiences or ideas, and things like that, as opposed to common alternatives like abrasiveness, superficiality, pedantry, and the like.)
Reading things by smart folk who believe things that at least initially appear to be obviously false is a way to understand how exactly humans tend to fail at epistemic reasoning. For example, when I read Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis—not to learn about his religion, but to read about sehnsucht, something I often experience—it was very revealing how he described his conversion from unreflective atheism to idealist monadology-esque-ness/deism-ness to theism to Christianity. Basically, he did some basically sound metaphysical reasoning—though of course not the kind that constrains anticipations—which led him all the way nigh-deism. ‘We are all part of a unified universe, our responsibility is to experience as much of the universe as possible so it can understand itself’ or something like that. All of a sudden he’s thinking ‘Well I already believe in this vague abstract force thingy, and the philosophers who talk about that are obviously getting their memes from earlier philosophers who said the same thing about God, and this force thingy is kinda like God in some ways, so I might as well consider myself a theist.’ Then he learns that Jesus Christ probably actually existed in an off-the-cuff conversation with an atheist friend and scholar, and then he gets very vague and talks about how he suddenly doesn’t remember much and oh yeah all of a sudden he’s on his way to the zoo and realizes he’s a Christian. It’s not really clear what this entails in terms of anticipations, though he might’ve talked about his argument from sehnsucht for the existence of heaven. Anyway, it’s clear from what he wrote that he just felt uncomfortable and somewhere along the line stopped caring as much about reasons, and started just, ya know, going with what seemed to be the trend of his philosophical speculations, which might I remind you never paid rent in anticipated experience up until that very last, very vague step. I found it to be a memorable cautionary tale, reading the guy’s own words about his fall into the entropy of insanity. Whether or not Christianity is correct, whatever that means, it is clear that he had stopped caring about reasons, and it is clear that this was natural and easy and non-extraordinary. As someone who does a fair bit of metaphysical reasoning that doesn’t quite pay rent in anticipated experience, or doesn’t pay very much rent anyway, I think it is good to have Lewis’s example in mind.
Building the skill of actually paying attention to what people actually say. This is perhaps the most important benefit. Less Wrong folk are much better at this than most persons, and this skill itself goes a long, long way. The default for humans is of course to figure out which side the other person is arguing for and then either spout a plausibly-related counterargument for your chosen side if it is the opposite, or nod in agreement or the like if they’re on your team. Despite doing it much less than most humans, it still appears to be par for the course for aspiring rationalists. (But there may be some personal selection bias ‘cuz people pattern match what I (Will_Newsome) say to some other stupid thing and address the stupid generator of that stupid thing while bypassing whatever I actually said, either because I am bad at communication or because I’ve been justifiably classified as a person who is a priori likely to be stupid.) It is worth noting that sometimes this is a well-intentioned strategy to help resolve others’ confusions by jumping immediately to suggesting fixes for the confusion-generator, but most often it’s the result of sloppy reading. Anyway, by looking carefully at what smart people say that disagrees with what you believe or value, you train yourself to generally not throw away possibly countervailing evidence. It may be that what was written was complete tosh, but you won’t know unless you actually check from time to time, and even if it’s all tosh it’s still excellent training material.
Practice learning new concepts and languages. This is a minor benefit as generally it would be best to learn a directly useful new conceptual language, e.g. category theory.
Cultural sophistication, being able to signal cultural sophistication. Though this can easily implicitly endorse negative sum signalling games and I personally don’t see it as a good reason if done for signalling. That said, human culture is rich and complex, and I personally am afraid of being held in contempt as unsophisticated by someone like Douglas Hofstadter for not having read enough Dostoyevsky or listened to enough Chopin, so I read Dostoyevsky and listen to Chopin (and generally try to be perfect, whatever that means). Truly understanding spirituality and to a lesser extent religion is basically a large part of understanding humans and human culture. Though this is best done experientially, just like reading and listening to music, it really helps, especially for nerds, to have a decent theoretical understanding of what spiritualists and religionists might or might not be actually talking about.
Related to the above, a whole bunch of people assert that various seemingly-absurd ideas are incredibly important for some reason. I find this an object of intrinsic curiosity and perhaps others would too. In order to learn more it is really quite important to figure out what those various seemingly-absurd ideas actually are.
I could probably go on for a while. I would estimate that I missed one or two big reasons, five mildly persuasive reasons, and a whole bunch of ‘considerations’. Opportunity costs are of course not taken into account in this analysis.
Let me rephrase my question. You decided, on this particular occasion, taking into account opportunity costs, that it was worth trying to understand somebody, for a reason other than to get “okay” ideas. What was that reason?
You mean my original “let’s talk about Jesus!” comment? I think I bolded the answer in my original comment: having fun. (If I’d known LW was going to interpret what I wrote as somehow representative of my beliefs then I wouldn’t have written it. But I figured it’d just get downvoted to −5 with little controversy, like most of my previous similar posts were.)
Why is it fun? (That is, can you take a guess at why your brain’s decided it should be fun? This way of posing the question was also the primary intended meaning for my assertion about countersignaling, although it assumed more introspective access. You gave what looked like an excuse/justification on how in addition to being fun it’s also an exercise of a valuable skill, which is a sign of not knowing why you really do stuff.)
Bleh, I think there may be too much equivocation going on, even though your comment is basically correct. My original “insane” comment is not representative of my comments, nor is it a good example of the skill of charitable interpretation.
When I give justifications they do tend to be pretty related to the causes of my actions, though often in weird double-negative ways. Sometimes I do something because I am afraid of the consequences of doing something, in a self-defeating manner. I think a lot of my trying to appear discreditable is a defense mechanism put up because I am afraid of what would happen if I let myself flinch away from the prospect of appearing discreditable, like, afraid of the typical default failure mode where people get an identity as someone who is “reasonable” and then stops signalling and thus stops thinking thoughts that are “unreasonable”, where “reason” is only a very loose correlate of sanity. My favorite LW article ever is “Cached Selves”, and that has been true for two years now. Also one of my closest friends co-wrote that article, and his thinking has had a huge effect on mine.
I think saying it was “fun” is actually the rationalization, and I knew it was a rationalization, and so I was lying. It’s a lot more complex than that. I wrote it more because I was feeling frustrated at what I perceived to be an unjustified level of contempt in the Less Wrong community. (/does more reflection to make sure I’m not making things up.) Okay. Also relatedly part of it was wanting to signal insanity for the reasons outlined above, or reasons similar to the ones outline above in the sense of being afraid of some consequence of not doing something that I feel is principled, or something that I feel would make me a bad person if I didn’t attempt to do. Part of it was wanting to signal something like cleverness, which is maybe where some of the “fun” happens to be, though I can only have so much fun when I’m forced to type very quickly. Part of it was trolling for its own sake on top of the aforementioned anti-anti-virtuous rationale, though where the motivation for “trolling for its own sake” came from might be the same as that anti-anti-virtuous rationale but stemming from a more fundamental principle. I would be suspicious if any of these reasons claimed to be the real reason. Actions tend to follow many reasons in conjunction. (/avoids going off on a tangent about the principle of sufficient reason and Leibniz’s theodicy for irony’s sake.)
It’s interesting because others seem to be much more attached to certain kinds of language than I am, and so when they model me they model me as being unhealthily attached to the language of religion or spirituality or something for its own sake, and think that this is dangerous. I think this may be at least partially typical mind fallacy. I am interested in these languages because I like trolling people (and I like trolling people for many reasons as outline above), but personally much prefer the language of algorithmic probability and generally computationalism, which can actually be used precisely to talk about well-defined things. I only talk in terms of theism when I’m upset at people for being contemptuous of theism. Again there are many reasons for these things, often at different levels of abstraction, and it’s all mashed together.
Can you please explain a bit more what the point is? I’m having trouble figuring out why I would want to try to understand something, if not to get “okay” ideas.
There are many, but unfortunately I only have enough motivation to list a few:
If talking to someone with strange beliefs in person, legitimately trying to engage with their ideas is an easy way to signal all kinds of positive things. (Maturity, charity, epistemic seriousness, openness to new experiences or ideas, and things like that, as opposed to common alternatives like abrasiveness, superficiality, pedantry, and the like.)
Reading things by smart folk who believe things that at least initially appear to be obviously false is a way to understand how exactly humans tend to fail at epistemic reasoning. For example, when I read Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis—not to learn about his religion, but to read about sehnsucht, something I often experience—it was very revealing how he described his conversion from unreflective atheism to idealist monadology-esque-ness/deism-ness to theism to Christianity. Basically, he did some basically sound metaphysical reasoning—though of course not the kind that constrains anticipations—which led him all the way nigh-deism. ‘We are all part of a unified universe, our responsibility is to experience as much of the universe as possible so it can understand itself’ or something like that. All of a sudden he’s thinking ‘Well I already believe in this vague abstract force thingy, and the philosophers who talk about that are obviously getting their memes from earlier philosophers who said the same thing about God, and this force thingy is kinda like God in some ways, so I might as well consider myself a theist.’ Then he learns that Jesus Christ probably actually existed in an off-the-cuff conversation with an atheist friend and scholar, and then he gets very vague and talks about how he suddenly doesn’t remember much and oh yeah all of a sudden he’s on his way to the zoo and realizes he’s a Christian. It’s not really clear what this entails in terms of anticipations, though he might’ve talked about his argument from sehnsucht for the existence of heaven. Anyway, it’s clear from what he wrote that he just felt uncomfortable and somewhere along the line stopped caring as much about reasons, and started just, ya know, going with what seemed to be the trend of his philosophical speculations, which might I remind you never paid rent in anticipated experience up until that very last, very vague step. I found it to be a memorable cautionary tale, reading the guy’s own words about his fall into the entropy of insanity. Whether or not Christianity is correct, whatever that means, it is clear that he had stopped caring about reasons, and it is clear that this was natural and easy and non-extraordinary. As someone who does a fair bit of metaphysical reasoning that doesn’t quite pay rent in anticipated experience, or doesn’t pay very much rent anyway, I think it is good to have Lewis’s example in mind.
Building the skill of actually paying attention to what people actually say. This is perhaps the most important benefit. Less Wrong folk are much better at this than most persons, and this skill itself goes a long, long way. The default for humans is of course to figure out which side the other person is arguing for and then either spout a plausibly-related counterargument for your chosen side if it is the opposite, or nod in agreement or the like if they’re on your team. Despite doing it much less than most humans, it still appears to be par for the course for aspiring rationalists. (But there may be some personal selection bias ‘cuz people pattern match what I (Will_Newsome) say to some other stupid thing and address the stupid generator of that stupid thing while bypassing whatever I actually said, either because I am bad at communication or because I’ve been justifiably classified as a person who is a priori likely to be stupid.) It is worth noting that sometimes this is a well-intentioned strategy to help resolve others’ confusions by jumping immediately to suggesting fixes for the confusion-generator, but most often it’s the result of sloppy reading. Anyway, by looking carefully at what smart people say that disagrees with what you believe or value, you train yourself to generally not throw away possibly countervailing evidence. It may be that what was written was complete tosh, but you won’t know unless you actually check from time to time, and even if it’s all tosh it’s still excellent training material.
Practice learning new concepts and languages. This is a minor benefit as generally it would be best to learn a directly useful new conceptual language, e.g. category theory.
Cultural sophistication, being able to signal cultural sophistication. Though this can easily implicitly endorse negative sum signalling games and I personally don’t see it as a good reason if done for signalling. That said, human culture is rich and complex, and I personally am afraid of being held in contempt as unsophisticated by someone like Douglas Hofstadter for not having read enough Dostoyevsky or listened to enough Chopin, so I read Dostoyevsky and listen to Chopin (and generally try to be perfect, whatever that means). Truly understanding spirituality and to a lesser extent religion is basically a large part of understanding humans and human culture. Though this is best done experientially, just like reading and listening to music, it really helps, especially for nerds, to have a decent theoretical understanding of what spiritualists and religionists might or might not be actually talking about.
Related to the above, a whole bunch of people assert that various seemingly-absurd ideas are incredibly important for some reason. I find this an object of intrinsic curiosity and perhaps others would too. In order to learn more it is really quite important to figure out what those various seemingly-absurd ideas actually are.
I could probably go on for a while. I would estimate that I missed one or two big reasons, five mildly persuasive reasons, and a whole bunch of ‘considerations’. Opportunity costs are of course not taken into account in this analysis.
Let me rephrase my question. You decided, on this particular occasion, taking into account opportunity costs, that it was worth trying to understand somebody, for a reason other than to get “okay” ideas. What was that reason?
You mean my original “let’s talk about Jesus!” comment? I think I bolded the answer in my original comment: having fun. (If I’d known LW was going to interpret what I wrote as somehow representative of my beliefs then I wouldn’t have written it. But I figured it’d just get downvoted to −5 with little controversy, like most of my previous similar posts were.)
Why is it fun? (That is, can you take a guess at why your brain’s decided it should be fun? This way of posing the question was also the primary intended meaning for my assertion about countersignaling, although it assumed more introspective access. You gave what looked like an excuse/justification on how in addition to being fun it’s also an exercise of a valuable skill, which is a sign of not knowing why you really do stuff.)
Bleh, I think there may be too much equivocation going on, even though your comment is basically correct. My original “insane” comment is not representative of my comments, nor is it a good example of the skill of charitable interpretation.
When I give justifications they do tend to be pretty related to the causes of my actions, though often in weird double-negative ways. Sometimes I do something because I am afraid of the consequences of doing something, in a self-defeating manner. I think a lot of my trying to appear discreditable is a defense mechanism put up because I am afraid of what would happen if I let myself flinch away from the prospect of appearing discreditable, like, afraid of the typical default failure mode where people get an identity as someone who is “reasonable” and then stops signalling and thus stops thinking thoughts that are “unreasonable”, where “reason” is only a very loose correlate of sanity. My favorite LW article ever is “Cached Selves”, and that has been true for two years now. Also one of my closest friends co-wrote that article, and his thinking has had a huge effect on mine.
I think saying it was “fun” is actually the rationalization, and I knew it was a rationalization, and so I was lying. It’s a lot more complex than that. I wrote it more because I was feeling frustrated at what I perceived to be an unjustified level of contempt in the Less Wrong community. (/does more reflection to make sure I’m not making things up.) Okay. Also relatedly part of it was wanting to signal insanity for the reasons outlined above, or reasons similar to the ones outline above in the sense of being afraid of some consequence of not doing something that I feel is principled, or something that I feel would make me a bad person if I didn’t attempt to do. Part of it was wanting to signal something like cleverness, which is maybe where some of the “fun” happens to be, though I can only have so much fun when I’m forced to type very quickly. Part of it was trolling for its own sake on top of the aforementioned anti-anti-virtuous rationale, though where the motivation for “trolling for its own sake” came from might be the same as that anti-anti-virtuous rationale but stemming from a more fundamental principle. I would be suspicious if any of these reasons claimed to be the real reason. Actions tend to follow many reasons in conjunction. (/avoids going off on a tangent about the principle of sufficient reason and Leibniz’s theodicy for irony’s sake.)
It’s interesting because others seem to be much more attached to certain kinds of language than I am, and so when they model me they model me as being unhealthily attached to the language of religion or spirituality or something for its own sake, and think that this is dangerous. I think this may be at least partially typical mind fallacy. I am interested in these languages because I like trolling people (and I like trolling people for many reasons as outline above), but personally much prefer the language of algorithmic probability and generally computationalism, which can actually be used precisely to talk about well-defined things. I only talk in terms of theism when I’m upset at people for being contemptuous of theism. Again there are many reasons for these things, often at different levels of abstraction, and it’s all mashed together.
I’m still not clear on what makes it unjustified.
Okay.