A few years ago, in my introductory psych class in college, the instructor was running through possible explanations for consciousness. He got to Roger Penrose’s theory of quantum computations in the microtubules being where consciousness came from (replacing another black box with another black box, oh joy). I burst out laughing, loudly, because it was just so absurd that someone would seriously propose that, and that other scientists would even give such an explanation the time of day.
The instructor stopped midsentence, and looked at me. So did 200-odd other students.
I kept laughing.
In hindsight, I think the instructor expected more solemnity.
Because there is nothing in neural activity or structure that even suggests that anything having anything to do with macroscopic quantum states has even a little bit to do with it. You don’t need to invoke anything more exotic than normal cellular protein and electrochemistry to get very interesting behavior.
Penrose is grasping at straws trying to make his area of study applicable to something he considers capital M Mysterious, with (apparently, to those that actually work with it) little understanding of the actual biology. It’s a non-sequiter, as if he were suggesting that resonant vibrations in the steel girders of skyscrapers in manhattan were what let the people there trade stocks.
You don’t need to invoke anything more exotic than normal cellular protein and electrochemistry to get very interesting behavior.
True, but not consciousness. While I agree that Penrose’s model is a wild unsubstantiated speculation, until we have a demonstration of algorithmic consciousness without any quantum effects, his approach deserves a thoughtful critique, not a hearty laugh.
Thing is, it’s no more clear how quantum fluctuations give rise to subjective experience than how chemistry gives rise to subjective experience. So why claim that it’s in the quantum instead of in the chemicals?
Because he thinks that human’s are capable of some form of hypercomputation (He bases this on some Goedelian stuff mainly), and that quantum gravitational effects are what allows it.
Quantum gravity doesn’t help with hypercomputation, which doesn’t help with Goedel, which doesn’t help with consciousness. The most plausible part is that quantum gravity allows hypercomputation, but no one but Penrose believes that.
I still don’t understand the assertion that humans actaully think with logic that is vulnerable to Godelian stuff. Why should we blow up at the Godel incompleteness theorem at all?
If we are a TM computation (which is the standard reductionist explanation), we are vulnerable to the halting problem (which he also argue we can solve), and if we are a formal system of some kind (also standard, although maybe not quite so commonly said), Godel etc applies.
(I was using Godelian in the broader sense, which includes Halting-esque problems.).
I would argue strenuously against the idea that we resemble a formal system at all. Our cells act like a network of noisy differential equations that with enough training can approximate some of its outputs to resemble those of mathematically defined systems—AKA, what you do once you have learned math.
We also aren’t turing machines. Not in the sense that we aren’t turing complete or capable of running the steps that a turing machine would do, but in the sense that we, again, are an electrochemical system that does a lot of things natively without resorting to much in the way of turing-style computation. A network grows that becomes able to do some task.
We are not stuck in the formal system or the computation, we are approximating it via learned behavior and when we hit a wall in the formal system or the computation we stop it and say ‘well that doesn’t work’. That deosn’t mean we transcend the issues, it means that we go do something else.
Because we are more confused, collectively, about quantum fluctuations than we are about chemistry. And we’re also confused about the causes of subjective experience. So “quantum explains consciousness” feels more compelling than “chemistry explains consciousness”. See also: god of the gaps.
I agree, and I would bet a priori 10:1 that chemistry is enough, no quantum required, but until and unless it’s experimentally confirmed/simulated, other ideas are worth considering.
You should be embarrassed by this story. Behaving this way comes across as very smug and disrespectful because it is disruptive and wastes the time of hundreds of people.
I’m honestly not embarrassed by this story because it’s “smug and disrespectful”, I’m embarrassed because the more I stare at it the more it looks like a LWy applause light (which I had not originally intended).
It’s an applause light for actual working neuroscientists too. One which richly deserves its status. Seriously you will get eye rolls and chuckles if you mentioned something like that at a neuroscience talk where I work.
Behaving like this in classroom is probably not a good way to communicate knowledge to one’s classmates or to the instructor. (Although sometimes the first signal of disrespect communicates an important fact.)
But if the instructor told the quantum mysteriousness hypothesis as one worth considering (as opposed to: “you know, here is a silly idea some people happen to believe”), then the instructor was wasting the time of hundreds of people. (What’s next? Horoscopes as a serious hypothesis explaining human traits?)
He ‘should’ feel embarassment if the if interfered with his social goals in the context. All things considered it most likely did not, (assuming he did not immediately signal humiliation and submission, which it appears he didn’t). He ‘should’ laugh at your attempt to shame him and treat the parent as he would any other social attack by a (social distant and non threatening) rival.
Behaving this way comes across as very smug and disrespectful because it is disruptive and wastes the time of hundreds of people.
Your causal explanation is incorrect—it is a justification not a cause. Signalling implications other than disruption and time wasting account for the smug and disrespectful perception.
He ‘should’ feel embarassment if the if interfered with his social goals in the context.
Right, assuming he doesn’t care about the fact that hundreds of his peers now think he’s the kind of person who bursts into loud, inappropriate laughter apropos of nothing. (i.e. assuming he isn’t human.)
Right, assuming he doesn’t care about the fact that hundreds of his peers now think he’s the kind of person who bursts into loud, inappropriate laughter apropos of nothing. (i.e. assuming he isn’t human.)
My model of the expected consequences of the signal given differs from yours. That kind of attention probably does more good than harm, again assuming that the description of the scene is not too dishonest. It’d certainly raise his expected chance of getting laid (which serves as something of a decent measure of relevant social consequences in that environment.)
Incidentally, completely absurd nonsense does not qualify as ‘nothing’ for the purpose of evaluating humor potential. Nerds tend to love that. Any ‘inappropriateness’ is a matter of social affiliation. That is, those who consider it inappropriate do so because they believe that the person laughing does not have enough social status to be permitted to show disrespect to someone to whom the authority figure assigns high status, regardless of the merit of the positions described.
getting laid … serves as something of a decent measure of relevant social consequences in that environment
In the very short term maybe, but in the longer term not pissing professors off is also useful.
completely absurd nonsense
I don’t think Penrose’s hypothesis is so obviously-to-everybody absurd (for any value of “everybody” that includes freshmen) that you can just laugh it off expecting no inferential distances. (You made a similar point about something else here.)
In the very short term maybe, but in the longer term not pissing professors off is also useful.
Sometimes. I was drawing assuming that in a first year philosophy subject the class sizes are huge, largely anonymous, not often directly graded by the lecturer and a mix of students from a large number of different majors. This may differ for different countries or even between universities.
As a rule of thumb I found that a social relationship with the professor was relevant in later year subjects with smaller class sizes, more specialised subject matter and greater chance of repeat exposure to the same professor. For example I got research assistant work and scholarship for my postgrad studies by impressing my AI lecturer. Such considerations were largely irrelevant for first year generic subjects where I could safely consider myself to be a Student No. with legs.
I don’t think Penrose’s hypothesis is so obviously-to-everybody absurd (for any value of “everybody that includes freshmen) that you can just laugh it off expecting no inferential distances.
You are right that the inferential distance will make most students not get the humour or understand the implied reasoning. I expect that even then the behaviour described (laughing with genuine amusement at something and showing no shame if given attention) to be a net positive. Even a large subset of the peers who find it obnoxious or annoying will also intuitively consider the individual to be somewhat higher status (or ‘more powerful’ or ‘more significant’, take your pick of terminology) even if they don’t necessarily approve of them.
I was drawing assuming that in a first year philosophy subject the class sizes are huge, largely anonymous, not often directly graded by the lecturer and a mix of students from a large number of different majors.
[re-reads thread, and notices the OP mentioned there were more than 200 students in the classroom] Good point.
Even a large subset of the peers who find it obnoxious or annoying will also intuitively consider the individual to be somewhat higher status (or ‘more powerful’ or ‘more significant’, take your pick of terminology) even if they don’t necessarily approve of them.
That kind of status is structural power, not social power in Yvain’s terminology, and I guess there are more people in the world who wish to sleep with Rebecca Black than with Donald Trump. [googles for Rebecca Black (barely knew she was a singer) and realizes she’s not the best example for the point; but still] And probably there’s also a large chunk of people who would just think the student is a dork with little ability to abide by social customs. But yeah, I guess the total chance for them to get laid would go up—high-variance strategies and all that.
That kind of attention probably does more good than harm, again assuming that the description of the scene is not too dishonest. It’d certainly raise his expected chance of getting laid
I’ve done some classroom teaching, and I’ve seen how other students react to students who behave similarly (eye rolling, snickering, etc.) I’ve also seen this from the student side, people like to heap scorn on students who act like this (when they aren’t around.)
To be clear, I’m not saying everything PUA’s say is nonsense. They’ve said so much that by sheer random chance some of it is probably good. But most of PUA stuff is terrible armchair theorizing by internet people who seem very angry at women.
ETA: It’s interesting how much of a perspective change classroom teaching gives you. In a typical classroom, students can’t easily see the faces of most of their peers, and their peers reveal a lot because of this.
I’ve done some classroom teaching, and I’ve seen how other students react to students who behave similarly (eye rolling, snickering, etc.) I’ve also seen this from the student side, people like to heap scorn on students who act like this (when they aren’t around.)
It depends on, among other things, how much the students like the lecturer and what kind of subject is being taught (I gather that honesty is valued more, and politeness less, in the hard sciences than in humanities).
To be clear, I’m not saying everything PUA’s say is nonsense. They’ve said so much that by sheer random chance some of it is probably good. But most of PUA stuff is terrible armchair theorizing by internet people who seem very angry at women.
PUA isn’t the only thing that Sturgeon’s Law applies to, though.
I’ve done some classroom teaching, and I’ve seen how other students react to students who behave similarly (eye rolling, snickering, etc.) I’ve also seen this from the student side, people like to heap scorn on students who act like this (when they aren’t around.)
My experience classroom teaching suggests two things:
Hesperidia’s cocky laughter is not the sort of thing that makes students heap scorn on other students except, perhaps, the most sycophantic teacher’s pets or sometimes among cliques of less secure rivals who want to reassure each other.
The behaviours knb is equivocating with are not the same thing. They have different social meaning and different expected results. While for knb the most salient factor may be that each of those behaviours signals lack of respect for authority not all things that potentially lower the status of the teacher are equal or equivalent. Amused laughter that is not stifled by attention is not the same thing as eye rolling.
I agree with your implicature and wonder whether we have correctly resolved the ambiguity in ‘nonsense’. It seems it could either mean “It is not the case that this would raise his chance of getting laid” or “It is not the case that chance of getting laid is sufficiently correlated with social status as to be at all relevant as a measure thereof”. I honestly don’t know which one is the most charitable reading because I consider them approximately equally as wrong.
As an aside, my motive for throwing in ‘chance of getting laid’ was that often ‘status’ is considered too ephemeral or abstract and I wanted to put things in terms that are clearly falsifiable. It also helps distinguish between different kinds of status and the different overlapping social hierarchies. The action in question is (obviously?) most usefully targeted at the “peer group” hierarchy than the “academia prestige” hierarchy. If you intend to become a grad student in that university’s philosophy department silence is preferred to cocky laughter. If you intend to just complete the subject and and continue study in some other area while achieving social goals with peers (including getting high quality partners for future group work) then the cocky laughter will be more useful than silence.
“It is not the case that chance of getting laid is sufficiently correlated with social status as to be at all relevant as a measure thereof”
Is social status the only thing you care about when in a classroom?
And “sufficiently correlated” isn’t good enough, per Goodhart’s law. You can improve your chances of getting laid even more by getting drunk in a night club in a major city, and you can bring them close to 1 by paying a prostitute.
Is social status the only thing you care about when in a classroom?
It’s a minor concern, often below getting rest, immediate sense of boredom or the audiobook I’m listening to. I’m certainly neither a model student (with respect to things like lecture attendance and engagement as opposed to grades) nor a particularly dedicated status optimiser.
I think you must have interpreted my words differently than I intended them. I would not expect that reply if the meaning had come across clearly but I am not quite sure where the confusion is.
And “sufficiently correlated” isn’t good enough, per Goodhart’s law. You can improve your chances of getting laid even more by getting drunk in a night club in a major city, and you can bring them close to 1 by paying a prostitute.
I think there must be some miscommunication here. There is a difference between considering a metric to be somewhat useful as a means of evaluating something and outright replacing one’s preferences with a lost purpose. I had thought we were talking about the first of these. The quote you made includes ‘at all relevant’ (a low standard) and in the context was merely a rejection of the claim ‘nonsense’.
I think you must have interpreted my words differently than I intended them. I would not expect that reply if the meaning had come across clearly but I am not quite sure where the confusion is.
So, you said:
He ‘should’ feel embarassment if the if interfered with his social goals in the context. All things considered it most likely did not, (assuming he did not immediately signal humiliation and submission, which it appears he didn’t).
ISTM this doesn’t follow unless you assume he had no goals other than social ones that his burst of laughter could have interfered with; am I missing something?
I think there must be some miscommunication here. There is a difference between considering a metric to be somewhat useful as a means of evaluating something and outright replacing one’s preferences with a lost purpose. I had thought we were talking about the first of these. The quote you made includes ‘at all relevant’ (a low standard) and in the context was merely a rejection of the claim ‘nonsense’.
ISTM this doesn’t follow unless you assume he had no goals other than social ones that his burst of laughter could have interfered with; am I missing something?
Ahh, pardon me. I was replying at that time to the statement “You should be embarrassed by this story.”, where embarrassment is something I would describe as an emotional response to realising that you made a social blunder. It occurs to me now that I could have better conveyed my intended meaning if I included the other words inside my quotation marks like:
He “should feel embarrassment” if the if interfered with his social goals in the context.
Thank you for explaining. I was quite confused about what wasn’t working in that communication.
The ‘nonsense’ part of your claim is false. The ‘PUA’ title is (alas) not something I have earned (opportunity costs) but I do expect this is something that a PUA may also say if the subject came up.
By way of contrast I consider this to be naive moralizing mixed with bullshit. Explanation:
There is a claim about what hesperidia ‘should’ do. That means one of:
Hesperidia’s actions are not optimal for achieving his goals. You are presenting a different strategy which would achieve those goals better and he would be well served to adopt them.
Hesperidia’s actions are not optimal for achieving your goals. You would prefer it if he stopped optimising for his preferences and instead did what you prefer.
As above but with one or more of the various extra layers of indirection around ‘good for the tribe’, ‘in accordance with norms that exist’ and ‘the listener’s preferences are also served by my should, they can consider me an ally’.
It happens that the first meaning would be a false. When it comes to the latter meanings the question is not ‘Is this claim about strategy true?’ but instead ‘Does knb have the right to exert dominance and control over hesperidia on this particularly issue with these terms?‘. My answer to that is ‘No’.
I prefer it when social advice of this kind is better optimised for the recipient, not the convenience of the advice giver. When the ‘should’ is not about advice at all but instead setting and enforcing norms then I insist that the injunction should, in fact, benefit the tribe. In this case the tribe isn’t the beneficiary. We would be better off if the nonsense the professor was citing could be laughed at rather than treated with deference. The tribe isn’t the beneficiary, the existing power structure is. I oppose your intervention.
(Nothing personal, I am replying mostly because I am curious about the theory, not because I think the issue is dramatically important.)
Right, assuming he doesn’t care about the fact that hundreds of his peers now think he’s the kind of person who bursts into loud, inappropriate laughter apropos of nothing. (i.e. assuming he isn’t human.)
Ignoring that that is not what happened (and that he probably explained the laughter to anyone there that he actually cared about, like friends), you are entirely too eager to designate someone who lacks this property as ‘not human’.
This sort of utilitarian thinking focused entirely on ones own goals without considering the goals of others is what leads people to believe that they should cheat on all of their tests as much as they want. If tests in school are only for signalling and the knowledge is unimportant, then you should do as little work as possible to maximize your test scores, including buying essays, looking over shoulders, paying others to take tests for you, the whole works.
Edit: I am not saying I totally disagree with this sort of thinking. I would describe myself presently as on the fence over whether one should just go ahead and be a sociopath in favor of utilitarian goals. It makes me a little bit uncomfortable, but on the other hand it seems to be the logical result. Many people bring in other considerations to try to bring it back to moral “normalcy” but they generally strike me as ad hoc and not very convincing.
A few years ago, in my introductory psych class in college, the instructor was running through possible explanations for consciousness. He got to Roger Penrose’s theory of quantum computations in the microtubules being where consciousness came from (replacing another black box with another black box, oh joy). I burst out laughing, loudly, because it was just so absurd that someone would seriously propose that, and that other scientists would even give such an explanation the time of day.
The instructor stopped midsentence, and looked at me. So did 200-odd other students.
I kept laughing.
In hindsight, I think the instructor expected more solemnity.
Would you care to explain why it’s absurd? :-)
Because there is nothing in neural activity or structure that even suggests that anything having anything to do with macroscopic quantum states has even a little bit to do with it. You don’t need to invoke anything more exotic than normal cellular protein and electrochemistry to get very interesting behavior.
Penrose is grasping at straws trying to make his area of study applicable to something he considers capital M Mysterious, with (apparently, to those that actually work with it) little understanding of the actual biology. It’s a non-sequiter, as if he were suggesting that resonant vibrations in the steel girders of skyscrapers in manhattan were what let the people there trade stocks.
True, but not consciousness. While I agree that Penrose’s model is a wild unsubstantiated speculation, until we have a demonstration of algorithmic consciousness without any quantum effects, his approach deserves a thoughtful critique, not a hearty laugh.
Thing is, it’s no more clear how quantum fluctuations give rise to subjective experience than how chemistry gives rise to subjective experience. So why claim that it’s in the quantum instead of in the chemicals?
Because he thinks that human’s are capable of some form of hypercomputation (He bases this on some Goedelian stuff mainly), and that quantum gravitational effects are what allows it.
Quantum gravity doesn’t help with hypercomputation, which doesn’t help with Goedel, which doesn’t help with consciousness. The most plausible part is that quantum gravity allows hypercomputation, but no one but Penrose believes that.
I still don’t understand the assertion that humans actaully think with logic that is vulnerable to Godelian stuff. Why should we blow up at the Godel incompleteness theorem at all?
If we are a TM computation (which is the standard reductionist explanation), we are vulnerable to the halting problem (which he also argue we can solve), and if we are a formal system of some kind (also standard, although maybe not quite so commonly said), Godel etc applies.
(I was using Godelian in the broader sense, which includes Halting-esque problems.).
I would argue strenuously against the idea that we resemble a formal system at all. Our cells act like a network of noisy differential equations that with enough training can approximate some of its outputs to resemble those of mathematically defined systems—AKA, what you do once you have learned math.
We also aren’t turing machines. Not in the sense that we aren’t turing complete or capable of running the steps that a turing machine would do, but in the sense that we, again, are an electrochemical system that does a lot of things natively without resorting to much in the way of turing-style computation. A network grows that becomes able to do some task.
We are not stuck in the formal system or the computation, we are approximating it via learned behavior and when we hit a wall in the formal system or the computation we stop it and say ‘well that doesn’t work’. That deosn’t mean we transcend the issues, it means that we go do something else.
Because we are more confused, collectively, about quantum fluctuations than we are about chemistry. And we’re also confused about the causes of subjective experience. So “quantum explains consciousness” feels more compelling than “chemistry explains consciousness”. See also: god of the gaps.
I agree, and I would bet a priori 10:1 that chemistry is enough, no quantum required, but until and unless it’s experimentally confirmed/simulated, other ideas are worth considering.
That sounds like privileging the hypothesis to me.
You should be embarrassed by this story. Behaving this way comes across as very smug and disrespectful because it is disruptive and wastes the time of hundreds of people.
I’m honestly not embarrassed by this story because it’s “smug and disrespectful”, I’m embarrassed because the more I stare at it the more it looks like a LWy applause light (which I had not originally intended).
For your next act, you should take physics and start guffawing at a professor’s description of the Copenhagen interpretation.
Upvoted for mention of “applause lights”.
It’s an applause light for actual working neuroscientists too. One which richly deserves its status. Seriously you will get eye rolls and chuckles if you mentioned something like that at a neuroscience talk where I work.
Behaving like this in classroom is probably not a good way to communicate knowledge to one’s classmates or to the instructor. (Although sometimes the first signal of disrespect communicates an important fact.)
But if the instructor told the quantum mysteriousness hypothesis as one worth considering (as opposed to: “you know, here is a silly idea some people happen to believe”), then the instructor was wasting the time of hundreds of people. (What’s next? Horoscopes as a serious hypothesis explaining human traits?)
He ‘should’ feel embarassment if the if interfered with his social goals in the context. All things considered it most likely did not, (assuming he did not immediately signal humiliation and submission, which it appears he didn’t). He ‘should’ laugh at your attempt to shame him and treat the parent as he would any other social attack by a (social distant and non threatening) rival.
Your causal explanation is incorrect—it is a justification not a cause. Signalling implications other than disruption and time wasting account for the smug and disrespectful perception.
Right, assuming he doesn’t care about the fact that hundreds of his peers now think he’s the kind of person who bursts into loud, inappropriate laughter apropos of nothing. (i.e. assuming he isn’t human.)
My model of the expected consequences of the signal given differs from yours. That kind of attention probably does more good than harm, again assuming that the description of the scene is not too dishonest. It’d certainly raise his expected chance of getting laid (which serves as something of a decent measure of relevant social consequences in that environment.)
Incidentally, completely absurd nonsense does not qualify as ‘nothing’ for the purpose of evaluating humor potential. Nerds tend to love that. Any ‘inappropriateness’ is a matter of social affiliation. That is, those who consider it inappropriate do so because they believe that the person laughing does not have enough social status to be permitted to show disrespect to someone to whom the authority figure assigns high status, regardless of the merit of the positions described.
In the very short term maybe, but in the longer term not pissing professors off is also useful.
I don’t think Penrose’s hypothesis is so obviously-to-everybody absurd (for any value of “everybody” that includes freshmen) that you can just laugh it off expecting no inferential distances. (You made a similar point about something else here.)
Sometimes. I was drawing assuming that in a first year philosophy subject the class sizes are huge, largely anonymous, not often directly graded by the lecturer and a mix of students from a large number of different majors. This may differ for different countries or even between universities.
As a rule of thumb I found that a social relationship with the professor was relevant in later year subjects with smaller class sizes, more specialised subject matter and greater chance of repeat exposure to the same professor. For example I got research assistant work and scholarship for my postgrad studies by impressing my AI lecturer. Such considerations were largely irrelevant for first year generic subjects where I could safely consider myself to be a Student No. with legs.
You are right that the inferential distance will make most students not get the humour or understand the implied reasoning. I expect that even then the behaviour described (laughing with genuine amusement at something and showing no shame if given attention) to be a net positive. Even a large subset of the peers who find it obnoxious or annoying will also intuitively consider the individual to be somewhat higher status (or ‘more powerful’ or ‘more significant’, take your pick of terminology) even if they don’t necessarily approve of them.
[re-reads thread, and notices the OP mentioned there were more than 200 students in the classroom] Good point.
That kind of status is structural power, not social power in Yvain’s terminology, and I guess there are more people in the world who wish to sleep with Rebecca Black than with Donald Trump. [googles for Rebecca Black (barely knew she was a singer) and realizes she’s not the best example for the point; but still] And probably there’s also a large chunk of people who would just think the student is a dork with little ability to abide by social customs. But yeah, I guess the total chance for them to get laid would go up—high-variance strategies and all that.
This is PUA nonsense.
So?
Why do you think it did not raise his chance of getting laid?
I’ve done some classroom teaching, and I’ve seen how other students react to students who behave similarly (eye rolling, snickering, etc.) I’ve also seen this from the student side, people like to heap scorn on students who act like this (when they aren’t around.)
To be clear, I’m not saying everything PUA’s say is nonsense. They’ve said so much that by sheer random chance some of it is probably good. But most of PUA stuff is terrible armchair theorizing by internet people who seem very angry at women.
ETA: It’s interesting how much of a perspective change classroom teaching gives you. In a typical classroom, students can’t easily see the faces of most of their peers, and their peers reveal a lot because of this.
It depends on, among other things, how much the students like the lecturer and what kind of subject is being taught (I gather that honesty is valued more, and politeness less, in the hard sciences than in humanities).
PUA isn’t the only thing that Sturgeon’s Law applies to, though.
My experience classroom teaching suggests two things:
Hesperidia’s cocky laughter is not the sort of thing that makes students heap scorn on other students except, perhaps, the most sycophantic teacher’s pets or sometimes among cliques of less secure rivals who want to reassure each other.
The behaviours knb is equivocating with are not the same thing. They have different social meaning and different expected results. While for knb the most salient factor may be that each of those behaviours signals lack of respect for authority not all things that potentially lower the status of the teacher are equal or equivalent. Amused laughter that is not stifled by attention is not the same thing as eye rolling.
I agree with your implicature and wonder whether we have correctly resolved the ambiguity in ‘nonsense’. It seems it could either mean “It is not the case that this would raise his chance of getting laid” or “It is not the case that chance of getting laid is sufficiently correlated with social status as to be at all relevant as a measure thereof”. I honestly don’t know which one is the most charitable reading because I consider them approximately equally as wrong.
As an aside, my motive for throwing in ‘chance of getting laid’ was that often ‘status’ is considered too ephemeral or abstract and I wanted to put things in terms that are clearly falsifiable. It also helps distinguish between different kinds of status and the different overlapping social hierarchies. The action in question is (obviously?) most usefully targeted at the “peer group” hierarchy than the “academia prestige” hierarchy. If you intend to become a grad student in that university’s philosophy department silence is preferred to cocky laughter. If you intend to just complete the subject and and continue study in some other area while achieving social goals with peers (including getting high quality partners for future group work) then the cocky laughter will be more useful than silence.
Is social status the only thing you care about when in a classroom?
And “sufficiently correlated” isn’t good enough, per Goodhart’s law. You can improve your chances of getting laid even more by getting drunk in a night club in a major city, and you can bring them close to 1 by paying a prostitute.
It’s a minor concern, often below getting rest, immediate sense of boredom or the audiobook I’m listening to. I’m certainly neither a model student (with respect to things like lecture attendance and engagement as opposed to grades) nor a particularly dedicated status optimiser.
I think you must have interpreted my words differently than I intended them. I would not expect that reply if the meaning had come across clearly but I am not quite sure where the confusion is.
I think there must be some miscommunication here. There is a difference between considering a metric to be somewhat useful as a means of evaluating something and outright replacing one’s preferences with a lost purpose. I had thought we were talking about the first of these. The quote you made includes ‘at all relevant’ (a low standard) and in the context was merely a rejection of the claim ‘nonsense’.
So, you said:
ISTM this doesn’t follow unless you assume he had no goals other than social ones that his burst of laughter could have interfered with; am I missing something?
OK, I see it now.
Ahh, pardon me. I was replying at that time to the statement “You should be embarrassed by this story.”, where embarrassment is something I would describe as an emotional response to realising that you made a social blunder. It occurs to me now that I could have better conveyed my intended meaning if I included the other words inside my quotation marks like:
Thank you for explaining. I was quite confused about what wasn’t working in that communication.
The ‘nonsense’ part of your claim is false. The ‘PUA’ title is (alas) not something I have earned (opportunity costs) but I do expect this is something that a PUA may also say if the subject came up.
By way of contrast I consider this to be naive moralizing mixed with bullshit. Explanation:
There is a claim about what hesperidia ‘should’ do. That means one of:
Hesperidia’s actions are not optimal for achieving his goals. You are presenting a different strategy which would achieve those goals better and he would be well served to adopt them.
Hesperidia’s actions are not optimal for achieving your goals. You would prefer it if he stopped optimising for his preferences and instead did what you prefer.
As above but with one or more of the various extra layers of indirection around ‘good for the tribe’, ‘in accordance with norms that exist’ and ‘the listener’s preferences are also served by my should, they can consider me an ally’.
It happens that the first meaning would be a false. When it comes to the latter meanings the question is not ‘Is this claim about strategy true?’ but instead ‘Does knb have the right to exert dominance and control over hesperidia on this particularly issue with these terms?‘. My answer to that is ‘No’.
I prefer it when social advice of this kind is better optimised for the recipient, not the convenience of the advice giver. When the ‘should’ is not about advice at all but instead setting and enforcing norms then I insist that the injunction should, in fact, benefit the tribe. In this case the tribe isn’t the beneficiary. We would be better off if the nonsense the professor was citing could be laughed at rather than treated with deference. The tribe isn’t the beneficiary, the existing power structure is. I oppose your intervention.
(Nothing personal, I am replying mostly because I am curious about the theory, not because I think the issue is dramatically important.)
Ignoring that that is not what happened (and that he probably explained the laughter to anyone there that he actually cared about, like friends), you are entirely too eager to designate someone who lacks this property as ‘not human’.
This sort of utilitarian thinking focused entirely on ones own goals without considering the goals of others is what leads people to believe that they should cheat on all of their tests as much as they want. If tests in school are only for signalling and the knowledge is unimportant, then you should do as little work as possible to maximize your test scores, including buying essays, looking over shoulders, paying others to take tests for you, the whole works.
Edit: I am not saying I totally disagree with this sort of thinking. I would describe myself presently as on the fence over whether one should just go ahead and be a sociopath in favor of utilitarian goals. It makes me a little bit uncomfortable, but on the other hand it seems to be the logical result. Many people bring in other considerations to try to bring it back to moral “normalcy” but they generally strike me as ad hoc and not very convincing.
At least it woke up everyone who was sleeping in the lecture.