Why do you expect difficulty thinking of explanations to correlate with the only one you can think of being correct? It seems obvious to me that if you have a general issue with thinking of explanations, the ones you do think of will also be worse than average.
I worded that a bit badly, I meant I had a hard time thinking of better (meaning kinder) explanations, not better (meaning more likely) explanations. Across all websites I’ve been on in my life, I have posted more than 100000 comments (resulting in many interactions), so while things like psychoanalyzing people, assuming intentions, and making stereotypes is “bad”, I simply have too much training data, and too few incorrect guesses not to do this. I do, however, intentionally overestimate people (since I want to talk to intelligent people, I give people the benefit of doubt for as long as possible) but this means that mistakes are attributed to their intentions, personality or values, rather than careless mistakes or superficial heuristics. In this situation, I’ve assumed that they’re offended by the idea that traditional socities rival the science method in some situations. But it may be something more superficial like “I find short comments to be effortless”, “somebody else already said that” or “I didn’t understand your explanation and I consider it your fault”. But like I said in another comment, I remember the first downvotes being disagreements (red X) rather than regular downvotes, so I took it as meaning “this is wrong” rather than “I don’t like this comment”. Not that any of this matters very much, admittedly
Across all websites I’ve been on in my life, I have posted more than 100000 comments (resulting in many interactions), so while things like psychoanalyzing people, assuming intentions, and making stereotypes is “bad”, I simply have too much training data, and too few incorrect guesses not to do this.
On the contrary, your guess did not take context into account and was bad. They were downvoted for answering in a way which didn’t answer the question, had many typos, and otherwise took more effort to read than the information it contained was worth.
Your comment “added more heat than light” for no reason, with no prompting. I explicitly am only making this comment because you posted a long paragraph explaining why you are so sure that you did a good job analyzing when it looks like you did a very poor one. Perhaps people in the past have not given useful feedback, so I will give a short piece: do not do this psycho-analysis until you have generated at least 2 alternate theories for what happened.
They did answer the question, there’s just a little bit of deduction required? I understood it at a glance and didn’t even notice any typos. Situations in which agents can learn something without understanding the reasons behind what they learn are quite common, it’s not a novel idea, it just raises a red flag in people who are used to scientific thinking. The general bias in society against tradition/spirituality/religion is too strong compared to the utility (even if not correctness) of these three.
That useless extra text in my previous comment saves a future comment or to by taking things into account in advance. I even wrote the “I didn’t understand the explanation” reaction above (as something one might have thought before downvoting the comment), so it’s not that I didn’t think of it, I just considered it an unlikely reaction as I disagree with it
The explanation is bad both in the sense of being unkind and in the sense of being unlikely. There are many explanations which are likelier, kinder, and simpler. I think you overestimate your skill at thinking of explanations, and commented for that reason. (Edit: that is, I think you should, if your likeliest explanation is of this quality, consider yourself not to know the true explanation, rather than believing the one you came up with).
I don’t see it as unkind, and I don’t think “trial and error” is a wrong explanation either. It seems very unlikely that ideas which are strictly harmful stick around for a very long time. So much that it must necessarily tend in the other direction (I won’t attempt to prove this though)
I’m good at navigating hypothesis space, so any difficulties are likely related to theory of mind of people who are very different from myself (being intelligent but out of sync in a way). Still, I don’t buy the idea that people can’t or shouldn’t do this. You’re even guessing at my intentions right now, and if somebody is going to downvote me for acting in bad faith, they’ll also need to guess at my intentions. So this seems like a common and sensible thing to do in moderation, rather than an intellectual sin of sorts
You don’t think the entire western world is biased in favor of science to a degree which is a little naive? In addition to this, I think that people idolize intelligence and famous scientists, that they largely consider people born before the 1950s to have repulsive moral values, that they dislike tradition, that they consider it very important to be “educated”, that they overestimate book smarts and underestimate the common sense of people living simple lives, and that they believe that things generally improve over time (such that older books are rarely worth bothering with), and I believe that social status in general make people associate with newer ideas over older ones. There’s also a lot of people who have grown up around old, strict and religious people and who now dislike these. It doesn’t help it that more intelligent people are higher in openness in general, and that rationalism correlates with a materialistic and mechanical worldview.
Many topics receive a lot more hostility than they deserve because of these biases, and usually because they’re explained in a crazy way (for instance, Carl Jungs ideas are often called pseudoscience, and if you take the bible literally then it’s clearly wrong) or because people associate them with immorality (say, the idea that casual sex is disliked by traditional because they were mean and narrow-minded, and not because casual sex caused problems for them, or because it might cause problems for us)
A lot of things are disliked or discarded despite being useful, and a lot of wisdom is in this category. All of this was packed in the message that “people dislike old things because it sounds irrational or immoral” (people tend to dislike long comments)
… No, I mean I’m discussing your statement “I’m curious why you were downvoted.… I will just assume that they’re rationalists who dislike (and look down on) traditional/old things for moral reasons. This is not very flattering of me but I can’t think of better explanations.” I think the explanation you thought of is not a very likely one, and that you should not assume that it is true, but rather assume that you don’t know and (if you care enough to spend the time) keep trying to think of explanations. I’m not taking any position on Anders’ statement, though in the interests of showing the range of possibilities I’ll offer some alternative explanations for why someone might have disagree-voted it. -They might think that stuff that works is mixed with stuff that doesn’t -They might think that trial and error is not very powerful in this context -They might think that wisdom which works often comes with reasonably-accurate causal explanations -They might think that ancient wisdom is good and Anders is being unfairly negative about it -They might think that ancient wisdom doesn’t usually apply to real problems Et cetera. There are a lot of possible explanations, and I think being confident it’s the specific one you thought of is unwarranted.
I’ve reread the comment thread and I think I’ve figured out what went wrong here. Starting from a couple posts ago, it looks like you were assuming that the reason I thought you were wrong was that I disagreed with your reasons for believing that people sometimes feel that way, and were trying to offer arguments for that point. I, on the other hand, found it obvious that the issue was that you were privileging the hypothesis, and was confused about why you were arguing the object-level premises of the post, which I hadn’t mentioned; this led me to assume it was a non-sequiter and respond with attempted clarifications of the presumed misunderstanding. To clarify, I agree that some people view old things negatively. I don’t take issue with the claim that they do; I take issue with the claim that this is the likeliest or only possible explanation. (I do, however, think disagree-voting Anders’ comment is a somewhat implausible way for someone to express that feeling, which for me is a reason to downweight the hypothesis.) I think you’re failing to consider sufficient breadth in the hypothesis-space, and in particular the mental move of assuming my disagreement was with the claim that your hypothesis is possible (rather than several steps upstream of that) is one which can make it difficult to model things accurately.
That sounds about right. And “people sometimes feel that way” is a good explanation for the downvote in my opinion. I was arguing the object-level premises of the post because the “disagree” downvote was factually wrong, and this factual wrongness, I argue, is caused by a faulty understanding of how truth works, and this faulty understanding is most common in the western world and in educated people, and in the ideologies which correlate with western thought and academia.
If you disagree with something which is true, I think the only likely explanations are “Does not understand” and “Has a dislike of”, and the bias I pointed out covers both of these possibilities (the former is a “map vs territory” issue and the latter is a “morality vs reality” issue).
I think you figured out what went wrong nicely, but in the end the disagreement remains. I still consider my point likely. If somebody comes along and tells me that they disagreed with it for other reasons, I might even argue that they’re lying to themselves, as I’m way to disillusioned to think that a “will to truth” exists. I think social status, moral values and other such things are stronger motivators than people will admit even to themselves.
I refered to that too (specifically, the assumption). By true I meant that the bias which I think is to blame certainly exists, not that it was certain to be the main reason (but I’d like to push against this bias in general, so even if this bias only applies to some of the people to see my comment, I think it’s an important topic to bring up, and that it likely has enough indirect influence to matter)
To address your points:
1: Of course it’s mixed. But the mixed advice averages out to be “wise”, something generally useful. 2: I think it’s necessarily trial and error, but a good question is “does the wisdom generalize to now?”. 3: This of course depends on the examples that you choose. A passage on the ideal age of marriage might generalize to our time less gracefully than a passage on meditation. I think this goes without saying, but if we assume these things aren’t intuitive, then a proper answer would be maybe 5 pages long. 4: Would interpreting it as “negative” not mean that it has been misunderstood? That one can learn without understanding is precisely why they could prosper with a level of education which pales to that of modern times. We learned that bad smells were associated with sickness way before we discovered germs. If our tech requires intelligence to use, then the lower quartile of society might struggle. And with the blind approach you can use genius strategies even if you’re mediocre.
5: along with 4, I think this is an example of the bias that I talked about above. What we think of as “real” tends to be sufficiently disconnected from humanity. Religion and traditional ways of living seem to correlate with mental health, so the types of people who think that wealth inequality is the only source of suffering in the world are too materialistic and disconnected. Not to commit the naturalistic fallacy, but nature does optimize in its own way, and imitating nature tends to go much better than “correcting” it.
Why do you expect difficulty thinking of explanations to correlate with the only one you can think of being correct? It seems obvious to me that if you have a general issue with thinking of explanations, the ones you do think of will also be worse than average.
I worded that a bit badly, I meant I had a hard time thinking of better (meaning kinder) explanations, not better (meaning more likely) explanations. Across all websites I’ve been on in my life, I have posted more than 100000 comments (resulting in many interactions), so while things like psychoanalyzing people, assuming intentions, and making stereotypes is “bad”, I simply have too much training data, and too few incorrect guesses not to do this. I do, however, intentionally overestimate people (since I want to talk to intelligent people, I give people the benefit of doubt for as long as possible) but this means that mistakes are attributed to their intentions, personality or values, rather than careless mistakes or superficial heuristics. In this situation, I’ve assumed that they’re offended by the idea that traditional socities rival the science method in some situations. But it may be something more superficial like “I find short comments to be effortless”, “somebody else already said that” or “I didn’t understand your explanation and I consider it your fault”. But like I said in another comment, I remember the first downvotes being disagreements (red X) rather than regular downvotes, so I took it as meaning “this is wrong” rather than “I don’t like this comment”. Not that any of this matters very much, admittedly
On the contrary, your guess did not take context into account and was bad. They were downvoted for answering in a way which didn’t answer the question, had many typos, and otherwise took more effort to read than the information it contained was worth.
Your comment “added more heat than light” for no reason, with no prompting. I explicitly am only making this comment because you posted a long paragraph explaining why you are so sure that you did a good job analyzing when it looks like you did a very poor one. Perhaps people in the past have not given useful feedback, so I will give a short piece: do not do this psycho-analysis until you have generated at least 2 alternate theories for what happened.
They did answer the question, there’s just a little bit of deduction required? I understood it at a glance and didn’t even notice any typos. Situations in which agents can learn something without understanding the reasons behind what they learn are quite common, it’s not a novel idea, it just raises a red flag in people who are used to scientific thinking. The general bias in society against tradition/spirituality/religion is too strong compared to the utility (even if not correctness) of these three.
That useless extra text in my previous comment saves a future comment or to by taking things into account in advance. I even wrote the “I didn’t understand the explanation” reaction above (as something one might have thought before downvoting the comment), so it’s not that I didn’t think of it, I just considered it an unlikely reaction as I disagree with it
The explanation is bad both in the sense of being unkind and in the sense of being unlikely. There are many explanations which are likelier, kinder, and simpler. I think you overestimate your skill at thinking of explanations, and commented for that reason. (Edit: that is, I think you should, if your likeliest explanation is of this quality, consider yourself not to know the true explanation, rather than believing the one you came up with).
I don’t see it as unkind, and I don’t think “trial and error” is a wrong explanation either. It seems very unlikely that ideas which are strictly harmful stick around for a very long time. So much that it must necessarily tend in the other direction (I won’t attempt to prove this though)
I’m good at navigating hypothesis space, so any difficulties are likely related to theory of mind of people who are very different from myself (being intelligent but out of sync in a way). Still, I don’t buy the idea that people can’t or shouldn’t do this. You’re even guessing at my intentions right now, and if somebody is going to downvote me for acting in bad faith, they’ll also need to guess at my intentions. So this seems like a common and sensible thing to do in moderation, rather than an intellectual sin of sorts
Sorry, to clarify, your explanation is the one I’m talking about, not Anders’.
You don’t think the entire western world is biased in favor of science to a degree which is a little naive? In addition to this, I think that people idolize intelligence and famous scientists, that they largely consider people born before the 1950s to have repulsive moral values, that they dislike tradition, that they consider it very important to be “educated”, that they overestimate book smarts and underestimate the common sense of people living simple lives, and that they believe that things generally improve over time (such that older books are rarely worth bothering with), and I believe that social status in general make people associate with newer ideas over older ones. There’s also a lot of people who have grown up around old, strict and religious people and who now dislike these. It doesn’t help it that more intelligent people are higher in openness in general, and that rationalism correlates with a materialistic and mechanical worldview.
Many topics receive a lot more hostility than they deserve because of these biases, and usually because they’re explained in a crazy way (for instance, Carl Jungs ideas are often called pseudoscience, and if you take the bible literally then it’s clearly wrong) or because people associate them with immorality (say, the idea that casual sex is disliked by traditional because they were mean and narrow-minded, and not because casual sex caused problems for them, or because it might cause problems for us)
A lot of things are disliked or discarded despite being useful, and a lot of wisdom is in this category. All of this was packed in the message that “people dislike old things because it sounds irrational or immoral” (people tend to dislike long comments)
… No, I mean I’m discussing your statement “I’m curious why you were downvoted.… I will just assume that they’re rationalists who dislike (and look down on) traditional/old things for moral reasons. This is not very flattering of me but I can’t think of better explanations.” I think the explanation you thought of is not a very likely one, and that you should not assume that it is true, but rather assume that you don’t know and (if you care enough to spend the time) keep trying to think of explanations. I’m not taking any position on Anders’ statement, though in the interests of showing the range of possibilities I’ll offer some alternative explanations for why someone might have disagree-voted it.
-They might think that stuff that works is mixed with stuff that doesn’t
-They might think that trial and error is not very powerful in this context
-They might think that wisdom which works often comes with reasonably-accurate causal explanations
-They might think that ancient wisdom is good and Anders is being unfairly negative about it
-They might think that ancient wisdom doesn’t usually apply to real problems
Et cetera. There are a lot of possible explanations, and I think being confident it’s the specific one you thought of is unwarranted.
I’ve reread the comment thread and I think I’ve figured out what went wrong here. Starting from a couple posts ago, it looks like you were assuming that the reason I thought you were wrong was that I disagreed with your reasons for believing that people sometimes feel that way, and were trying to offer arguments for that point. I, on the other hand, found it obvious that the issue was that you were privileging the hypothesis, and was confused about why you were arguing the object-level premises of the post, which I hadn’t mentioned; this led me to assume it was a non-sequiter and respond with attempted clarifications of the presumed misunderstanding.
To clarify, I agree that some people view old things negatively. I don’t take issue with the claim that they do; I take issue with the claim that this is the likeliest or only possible explanation. (I do, however, think disagree-voting Anders’ comment is a somewhat implausible way for someone to express that feeling, which for me is a reason to downweight the hypothesis.) I think you’re failing to consider sufficient breadth in the hypothesis-space, and in particular the mental move of assuming my disagreement was with the claim that your hypothesis is possible (rather than several steps upstream of that) is one which can make it difficult to model things accurately.
That sounds about right. And “people sometimes feel that way” is a good explanation for the downvote in my opinion. I was arguing the object-level premises of the post because the “disagree” downvote was factually wrong, and this factual wrongness, I argue, is caused by a faulty understanding of how truth works, and this faulty understanding is most common in the western world and in educated people, and in the ideologies which correlate with western thought and academia.
If you disagree with something which is true, I think the only likely explanations are “Does not understand” and “Has a dislike of”, and the bias I pointed out covers both of these possibilities (the former is a “map vs territory” issue and the latter is a “morality vs reality” issue).
I think you figured out what went wrong nicely, but in the end the disagreement remains. I still consider my point likely. If somebody comes along and tells me that they disagreed with it for other reasons, I might even argue that they’re lying to themselves, as I’m way to disillusioned to think that a “will to truth” exists. I think social status, moral values and other such things are stronger motivators than people will admit even to themselves.
I refered to that too (specifically, the assumption). By true I meant that the bias which I think is to blame certainly exists, not that it was certain to be the main reason (but I’d like to push against this bias in general, so even if this bias only applies to some of the people to see my comment, I think it’s an important topic to bring up, and that it likely has enough indirect influence to matter)
To address your points:
1: Of course it’s mixed. But the mixed advice averages out to be “wise”, something generally useful.
2: I think it’s necessarily trial and error, but a good question is “does the wisdom generalize to now?”.
3: This of course depends on the examples that you choose. A passage on the ideal age of marriage might generalize to our time less gracefully than a passage on meditation. I think this goes without saying, but if we assume these things aren’t intuitive, then a proper answer would be maybe 5 pages long.
4: Would interpreting it as “negative” not mean that it has been misunderstood? That one can learn without understanding is precisely why they could prosper with a level of education which pales to that of modern times. We learned that bad smells were associated with sickness way before we discovered germs. If our tech requires intelligence to use, then the lower quartile of society might struggle. And with the blind approach you can use genius strategies even if you’re mediocre.
5: along with 4, I think this is an example of the bias that I talked about above. What we think of as “real” tends to be sufficiently disconnected from humanity. Religion and traditional ways of living seem to correlate with mental health, so the types of people who think that wealth inequality is the only source of suffering in the world are too materialistic and disconnected. Not to commit the naturalistic fallacy, but nature does optimize in its own way, and imitating nature tends to go much better than “correcting” it.