You should also remember that part of the sequences are posts about quantum mechanics and many worlds where Eliezer does argue that he thinks his understanding is superior to that of physicists.
Arguments from authority are no better than ad hominem arguments. I don’t see why I should care what Eliezer thinks, except to the extent he has evidence and good reasoning to back it up. (Having not read the quantum mechanics posts recently I shall have to suspend judgment about that.)
Also I wasn’t making an ad hominem argument; a better way to express what I meant is, “My prior for claims about quantum physics made by people who are not themselves quantum physicists is very low.”
I can explain the fact that I slept well on some days by saying that I was too warm. I can also explain it by saying that the walls of my flat radiated too much energy. Both explanations can be true at the same time.
Those are the same explanation worded differently. My point is that the total set of causal influences going into any event is unique. And it is redundant and contrary to Occam’s Razor to posit some special extra cause beyond what is necessary to explain the facts, as it feels like dadadarren is doing here.
If you want to talk to a community and caring for the norms and assumptions of the community matters a great deal. It tells you a lot about which assumptions it makes sense to make in a community without explicitly defending them. Things are not true because they are written in the sequences but if you make an assumption that disagrees with the sequences it’s on you to explain why you think differently.
My point is that the total set of causal influences going into any event is unique.
That sounds like a naive and unreflective claim for which you do no work of backing it up. If you engage with the literature about causality from Judea Pearl you learn that causality is inherently about counterfactuals. The total set of causal influences, therefore, depends not only on the facts in the world but also on what counterfactual scenarios you have in your model. Models that include looking at different counterfactuals both can be valid.
It seems to me that you have an intuition that making claims about Quantum Physics is something that should only be made by people who not only read the relevant literature but are experts in it while you make big claims about things like causality and assume them to be true because they feel so intuitively but haven’t read the relevant literature.
My first instinct is to experience this as a personal attack—more specifically, an attempt to make yourself look smarter at my expense in order to win status points—and get angry. I am going to try to make myself believe that this instinct is wrong, or at least unhelpful for the purpose of increasing my reputation within this community.
My second instinct is to feel despondent, stupid, incapable, unworthy of being here, and to start talking about how I’m just not as smart as you people and never will be and wish I’d never said anything. Getting myself to believe that this instinct is also wrong is more of a challenge.
Even though I’ve expressed those two facts, thus getting them out of my head and possibly clarifying my thinking a bit by openly recognizing them as traps (at least, according to the unemotional logic other people here use, which I have a hard time trusting but am trying hard to in order to fit in), I nonetheless still have no idea how to respond to this comment in any sensible-sounding way that would rehabilitate my loss of face as a result of your claim that I am naive and unreflective etc.
So, instead of responding to the topic itself, which, you’re right, I probably cannot effectively speak about due to lacking whatever background you have on it, I’m going to just show this sequence of thought patterns and try to analyze my own thinking out loud, to give you a sense of what I’m dealing with whenever I try to communicate here, and why it’s difficult for me to do so in a useful way.
My credence for that first instinct was roughly 80%, then dropped to maybe 50% as the second instinct rose to replace it, and now it’s somewhere around 20%. This isn’t Reddit but I still wouldn’t put it past rationalists to be condescending on purpose to put a newbie in their place or whatever, because they’re humans and my prior for humans being kind is quite low.
My second instinct peaked at a sufficiently high value, at least 70%, that I had to “pull back on the reins” so to speak to stop myself from impulsively going to my profile and deleting my account. After writing them both out and committing myself to share them, I felt like I had been sufficiently epistemically virtuous as to renew my own faith that I’m capable of getting along here, at least to some extent, so P(“I’ll never fit in on LessWrong”) is now something like… I’m not very calibrated, maybe 25%? It’s hard to say. All these numbers are pulled out of nowhere but that’s how I have to do it for now.
What all this tells me is that as a result of my extreme emotional shifts I massively overestimate the quality of evidence that has emotional implications and I probably also hallucinate “evidence” that isn’t there. I knew this already, of course, but emotional-me doesn’t know it, and has to be reminded every single time. These mood swings are particularly driven by an intense fear of social rejection and abandonment which evokes a trigger response of trying to devalue and abandon the other person or group first, preemptively, to deflect the shame of being unworthy onto them.
Now, on to trying to actually respond to your comment. I do not think I can actually directly address anything you said as it still has a “this must not parse in order to avoid pain” aura around it making my mind come up completely blank when I reread it, but I can say that my initial response to dadadarren was not rooted in any kind of forethought, but rather in intuition trained over a long time of hearing and reading New Agers invoking quantum physics and consciousness to explain and provide “evidence” for their beliefs.
This evoked a kneejerk response of disgust and distrust, wherein I felt as if something simply must be terribly wrong in his reasoning and he must be trying to manipulate me into believing something false and dangerous to my sanity, because it fit the regex for “woo”. I then confabulated an explanation for what that wrong thing must be. My response to him was more like a frantic attempt to get a slimy creature off of me than an actual reasoned reply. Same sort of pattern as my first instincts when replying to you—I just had the sense to notice what was happening this time. (It’s this exact paranoid pattern of thinking and communicating that has gotten me banned from so many discord servers and subreddits.)
This is been somewhat exhausting. But <sarcasm> at least now I can virtue signal about how self aware I am. Look at me, critiquing the ways my emotions override my rationality! I’m smart, right?! I’m good enough, right?! Please like me again!!! </sarcasm>
Do you think there is a causal reason why you are MSRayne? Meaning why you are experiencing the world from that particular physical person’s perspective? Instead of you being Bill Gates, or an astroid, or a quark?
Arguments from authority are no better than ad hominem arguments. I don’t see why I should care what Eliezer thinks, except to the extent he has evidence and good reasoning to back it up. (Having not read the quantum mechanics posts recently I shall have to suspend judgment about that.)
Also I wasn’t making an ad hominem argument; a better way to express what I meant is, “My prior for claims about quantum physics made by people who are not themselves quantum physicists is very low.”
Those are the same explanation worded differently. My point is that the total set of causal influences going into any event is unique. And it is redundant and contrary to Occam’s Razor to posit some special extra cause beyond what is necessary to explain the facts, as it feels like dadadarren is doing here.
If you want to talk to a community and caring for the norms and assumptions of the community matters a great deal. It tells you a lot about which assumptions it makes sense to make in a community without explicitly defending them. Things are not true because they are written in the sequences but if you make an assumption that disagrees with the sequences it’s on you to explain why you think differently.
That sounds like a naive and unreflective claim for which you do no work of backing it up. If you engage with the literature about causality from Judea Pearl you learn that causality is inherently about counterfactuals. The total set of causal influences, therefore, depends not only on the facts in the world but also on what counterfactual scenarios you have in your model. Models that include looking at different counterfactuals both can be valid.
It seems to me that you have an intuition that making claims about Quantum Physics is something that should only be made by people who not only read the relevant literature but are experts in it while you make big claims about things like causality and assume them to be true because they feel so intuitively but haven’t read the relevant literature.
My first instinct is to experience this as a personal attack—more specifically, an attempt to make yourself look smarter at my expense in order to win status points—and get angry. I am going to try to make myself believe that this instinct is wrong, or at least unhelpful for the purpose of increasing my reputation within this community.
My second instinct is to feel despondent, stupid, incapable, unworthy of being here, and to start talking about how I’m just not as smart as you people and never will be and wish I’d never said anything. Getting myself to believe that this instinct is also wrong is more of a challenge.
Even though I’ve expressed those two facts, thus getting them out of my head and possibly clarifying my thinking a bit by openly recognizing them as traps (at least, according to the unemotional logic other people here use, which I have a hard time trusting but am trying hard to in order to fit in), I nonetheless still have no idea how to respond to this comment in any sensible-sounding way that would rehabilitate my loss of face as a result of your claim that I am naive and unreflective etc.
So, instead of responding to the topic itself, which, you’re right, I probably cannot effectively speak about due to lacking whatever background you have on it, I’m going to just show this sequence of thought patterns and try to analyze my own thinking out loud, to give you a sense of what I’m dealing with whenever I try to communicate here, and why it’s difficult for me to do so in a useful way.
My credence for that first instinct was roughly 80%, then dropped to maybe 50% as the second instinct rose to replace it, and now it’s somewhere around 20%. This isn’t Reddit but I still wouldn’t put it past rationalists to be condescending on purpose to put a newbie in their place or whatever, because they’re humans and my prior for humans being kind is quite low.
My second instinct peaked at a sufficiently high value, at least 70%, that I had to “pull back on the reins” so to speak to stop myself from impulsively going to my profile and deleting my account. After writing them both out and committing myself to share them, I felt like I had been sufficiently epistemically virtuous as to renew my own faith that I’m capable of getting along here, at least to some extent, so P(“I’ll never fit in on LessWrong”) is now something like… I’m not very calibrated, maybe 25%? It’s hard to say. All these numbers are pulled out of nowhere but that’s how I have to do it for now.
What all this tells me is that as a result of my extreme emotional shifts I massively overestimate the quality of evidence that has emotional implications and I probably also hallucinate “evidence” that isn’t there. I knew this already, of course, but emotional-me doesn’t know it, and has to be reminded every single time. These mood swings are particularly driven by an intense fear of social rejection and abandonment which evokes a trigger response of trying to devalue and abandon the other person or group first, preemptively, to deflect the shame of being unworthy onto them.
Now, on to trying to actually respond to your comment. I do not think I can actually directly address anything you said as it still has a “this must not parse in order to avoid pain” aura around it making my mind come up completely blank when I reread it, but I can say that my initial response to dadadarren was not rooted in any kind of forethought, but rather in intuition trained over a long time of hearing and reading New Agers invoking quantum physics and consciousness to explain and provide “evidence” for their beliefs.
This evoked a kneejerk response of disgust and distrust, wherein I felt as if something simply must be terribly wrong in his reasoning and he must be trying to manipulate me into believing something false and dangerous to my sanity, because it fit the regex for “woo”. I then confabulated an explanation for what that wrong thing must be. My response to him was more like a frantic attempt to get a slimy creature off of me than an actual reasoned reply. Same sort of pattern as my first instincts when replying to you—I just had the sense to notice what was happening this time. (It’s this exact paranoid pattern of thinking and communicating that has gotten me banned from so many discord servers and subreddits.)
This is been somewhat exhausting. But <sarcasm> at least now I can virtue signal about how self aware I am. Look at me, critiquing the ways my emotions override my rationality! I’m smart, right?! I’m good enough, right?! Please like me again!!! </sarcasm>
Do you think there is a causal reason why you are MSRayne? Meaning why you are experiencing the world from that particular physical person’s perspective? Instead of you being Bill Gates, or an astroid, or a quark?
I am unable to rationally engage in this conversation, see my response to ChristianKI above. I’m sorry if I insulted you.
That’s quite alright, none taken. All I was getting at was a uniquely “physically real” analysis is actually an additional assumption.