Rationality Quotes November 2012
Here’s the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
On the error of failing to appreciate your opponents’ three-dimensionality:
Source: Milton Friedman, “Schools at Chicago,” from The Indispensable Milton Friedman
H/T David Henderson at EconLog
Note: The final sentence of the passage, as presented by Henderson, is missing closing quotation marks. I have added them.
Of course, even in this case, you often cannot be very sure.
--Borderlands 2
(House, MD deals with moral grandstanding)
Is the expected number of people you’d save by doing that actually greater than 1?
I checked the numbers on this recently. An average heart transplant costs about 1.1 million dollars, and has a mean survival time of about five years (at a very poor QoL). I think there’s a pretty strong case that they shouldn’t be done at all.
Kidney transplants have a much better RoI, but they don’t require the death of the donor.
Does that include the cost of finding a donor?
There are other estimates available on the web, but I worked off this one:
http://www.transplantliving.org/before-the-transplant/financing-a-transplant/the-costs/
Cost of finding a donor is under ‘procurement’. As far as I can tell, the immunosuppressant entry only covers the first year of post-transplant care, so factoring in a five-year mean survival time gives the $1.1 million figure I mentioned.
$1.1M was at least an order of magnitude larger than my guesstimate for the price of the transplant itself, so I wondered if that figure included something else. [follows link] OK, the figure for “physician during transplant” was indeed within an order of magnitude of what I expected, but hardly any of the other expenses had even occurred to me.
Correction: the median post-heart-transplant survival time seems to be a little over 10 years now, so the mean is probably close to that.. However, it’s important to note that organ transplants aren’t performed just before the patient dies of natural causes, so there’s overlap between post-transplant survival and the lifespan the patient would have had without a transplant.
Case in point: An acquaintance with COPD had a lung transplant, then died a year later of related causes. His condition at the time of the lung transplant wasn’t good but wasn’t that dire; it’s quite possible he would have lived longer and had a better QoL without the transplant.
The national registry on solid organ transplants is at http://www.srtr.org/, if anyone wants to do some data mining.
What do you mean by ‘shouldn’t be done’? Do you mean it’s imprudent for an individual to spend that much money on a heart transplant, even though she values her own life?
Or do you mean it’s immoral for an individual to spend that much money on herself, rather than on greater utility for others?
Or do you mean it’s imprudent or immoral for medical practitioners and researchers to invest so much time and effort into performing heart transplants and gradually improving the technology? Or do you mean it’s imprudent or immoral for the state to fund such efforts?
Or do you mean it’s imprudent or immoral for the state to permit individuals to purchase heart transplants?
If it’s moral for someone to spend that much of their money on a house or a yacht, it’s moral for them to spend it on a heart transplant, but it may be a net utility loss for the patient.
The first heart transplant was performed 45 years ago. Almost half a century of effort has yielded a state of affairs that could politely be described as ‘dire’. Immoral, no, imprudent yes.
Yes and yes. The return on investment is appalling. A back of the envelope estimate I did a while ago, IIRC, showed that public health investment had a RoI 6 to 8 orders of magnitude better than organ transplants.
I also think it’s immoral that the donor’s estate is denied even a tiny share of the revenue.
See above, re: houses and yachts.
But the RoI for the patient himself is great. You present an argument against publicly funded research into heart transplants, but not against doing them at all.
If the patient is spending her own money, the RoI is still terrible compared to comparable interventions like hiring a personal trainer, diet coach, personal chef, etc. that could have forestalled the need for a heart transplant. Furthermore, the actually existing health infrastructure, particularly organ procurement, is so deeply entangled with the state, that it’s difficult to speak meaningfully of strictly privately funded efforts.
Even having purchased all those, a person may need a heart transplant. Genes, disease, accidents, and nurture while young (and unable to choose one’s own lifestyle) all strongly influence the eventual need for a heart transplant. So for many people, even a lot of lifetime investment into their health won’t mean the RoI on a heart transplant will be bad.
Also, at the point where you choose whether to have a heart transplant, the RoI needs to be compared with other things you can do with that money during the time you have left to live without a transplant. If you have a lot of money, and the transplant improves your QALY, then the RoI is likely good.
Why? What’s the mean survival time and QoL for people who need a transplant but don’t get one?
Then by killing the donor, you get two kidneys and twice as much RoI. Is it worth the death yet?
The information is available, but takes time and work to interpret. I gave a link with data. From that page, you can get to http://publications.milliman.com/research/health-rr/pdfs/2008-us-organ-tisse-RR4-1-08.pdf which provides much more detail. Please consult it, and if you need more, I’m available starting at $100/hr.
Point is, these discussions are kind of pointless without quantitative context. If you can give someone 80 years of healthy lifespan for a dollar, few people would object. If you can give someone one day of agony for a billion dollars, few people would support. Most medical interventions fall somewhere in between. Vaccinations are closer to the former, organ transplants closer to the latter.
That’s not how RoI works.
Why not? The investment here being the death of the donor.
The benefit is doubled in the second case, but the investment is much larger (obviously), so RoI is not doubled. In fact, the investment is more than doubled (you have to pay for two transplants instead of one, as well as killing someone), so the RoI plummets.
Thanks, it’s clear to me now. It seems obvious but I didn’t understand it correctly the first time around.
What IainM said. RoI is the ratio return/investment. The return is doubled, the investment is (substantially) more than doubled, thus the ratio decreases.
AFAIK yes. Up to 8 people.
Does it means “8 people saved (for unspecified time)” or “the saved people gain 8 times as much QALYs as the donor lost”?
AFAIK, the there are some problems with transplanted organs which require repeated medical attention and sometimes a lot of painkillers, so we convert X years of a healthy person to Y years of people with bad health.
On the other hand, a person willing to follow this advice and kill themselves probably suffers from depression, so we should reduce their remaining years estimate by a probability of suicide (other than the specific one recommended in this thread).
And if they don’t actually commit suicide but still suffer from depression, or dislike living for any reason so much that they want to die, we should reduce their QALY in the equation.
When do we hit diminishing returns?
Let’s find out.
You mean by calculation, right?
I mean, if every suicidal person saves the lives of up to eight people who want to live, it might be worth outright encouraging this approach, rather than having suicidal people kill themselves in ways that damage their bodies for this purpose, and then spend effort and money trying to bring them back.
Once a certain number of people is reached, though, there might be a degree of overabundance of organs compared to the needs, and unless you want to make the jurisdiction that allows this some sort of exporter of literal human resources, you should probably stop there.
Do you mean saving figuratively? (Also addressed at drethelin who used “save a life”.)
Heart, lungs, liver, left kidney, right kidney = 5, and that’s being generous.
Pancreas and corneas certainly improve quality of life, but aren’t life savers. For skin grafts there’s alternatives AFAIK.
Is there a stash of secret organs I’m missing?
You can give a small part of the liver, which grows to a functioning liver in the recipient. Presumably that means that you could get multiple liver transplants from one suicide by organ donations.
Yes, to my knowledge that was only done with living donors, but you are correct:
Interestingly, “living donor liver transplantation for pediatric recipients involves removal of approximately 20% of the liver”, but you can’t just take any 20% unfortunately.
If only there were more focused, high-scale, no-holds-barred research efforts on growing organs in the vat, xenotransplants from engineered e.g. pigs, for all of which proofs-of-concept and actual human trials by isolated low-funded groups exist (e.g. artificially grown trachea for a swedish girl if I recall correctly)! We have the technology, as they say, we’re just too reluctant to use it.
I have no idea where to find quantified data on average lives saved. Most of the people involved have an incentive to exaggerate.
Up to?
Not all of your organs will be usable or near enough to save a life. A lot depends on the way you choose to kill yourself.
I’d realized as much, but that still left me wondering what actual average “Up to 8” signifies. After allowing for different suicide methods and such, that “Up to 8″ might be 8, or it might be something like 1.1. The result of a utilitarian calculation would probably be sensitive to the real world average being ≈8 versus ≈1.
Excellent game BTW. It’s better than Diablo 3 at what Diablo 3 is supposed to be (kill-loot-repeat), and it has good and actually funny writing, and passable shooter mechanics.
Alex Tabarrok
In which Winnie-the-Pooh tests a hypothesis about the animal tracks that he is following through the woods:
A. A. Milne (via John Regehr)
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The real irony of the story is a historical context I think most readers these days miss: that when the real Plato paid court to a ‘king’ - Dionysius II, tyrant of Syracuse—it went very poorly. Plato was arrested, and barely managed to arrange his freedom & return to Athens.
Twice.
And supposedly Plato was sold into slavery by the previous tyrant.
Another from the same site — on free will:
This works until the king sends armed men to confiscate your vegetables.
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Damn near every one of them through the systemical implementation of taxation?
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You can dynamite stones as an example to other would be stones.
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“Would be”. As in, “don’t become a stone; if I can’t get blood from you I’m liable to blow you up instead”.
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Which would be a problem if the dynamiter was trying to minimize the number of stones rather than maximizing the amount of blood, I suppose.
But you can destroy the stone, and put something you can get blood from in its place.
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Well, you might be bulldozing the whole area.
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Maybe you can destroy the stone, but you can’t explain moral arguments to it.
“Once, Chuang Tzu was fishing the P’u River when the King of Ch’u sent two of his ministers to announce that he wished to entrust to Chuang Tzu the care of his entire domain.
Chuang Tzu held his fishing pole and, without turning his head, said: ‘I have heard that Ch’u possesses a sacred tortoise which has been dead for three thousand years and which the king keeps wrapped up in a box and stored in his ancestral temple. Is this tortoise better off dead and with its bones venerated, or would it be better off alive with its tail dragging in the mud?’
‘It would be better off alive and dragging its tail in the mud,’ the two ministers replied.
‘Then go away!’ said Chuang Tzu, ‘and I will drag my tail in the mud!’”
Translation recommendation for Zhuangzi? (I’ve been reading Burton Watson’s.)
Maybe undignified, but my favorite translations are from Tsai Chih Chung’s series of manhua interpretations of the Chinese classics, specifically Zhuangzi Speaks: the Music of Nature and The Dao of Zhuangzi: the Harmony of Nature
The kind of formal distance one usually sees in academic translations distorts Zhuangzi’s message. The comic book form suits it very well.
Robert Anton Wilson
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I think people tell you that when you aren’t as good at the inside the box things as your competitors and need to take a risk to set yourself apart. Thinking outside the box is a gamble, which may be the only shot for someone in a losing position. Of course, that’s from a business perspective, where I’ve tended to hear it more. For a science/truth seeking perspective I’d say “Don’t forget to look at the box from outside from time to time.”
Therefore, the first and most important duty of philosophy is to test impressions, choosing between them and only deploying those that have passed the test. You know how, with money—an area where we believe our interest to be at stake—we have developed the art of assaying, and considerable ingenuity has gone into developing a way to test if coins are counterfeit, involving our senses of sight, smell, hearing, and touch. The assayer will let the denarius drop and listen intently to its ring; and he is not satisfied to listen just once: after repeated listenings he practically acquires a musician’s subtle ear. It is a measure of the effort we are prepared to expend to guard against deception when accuracy is at a premium.
When it comes to our poor mind, however, we can’t be bothered; we are satisfied accepting any and all impressions, because here the loss we suffer is not obvious. If you want to know just how little concerned you are about things good and bad, and how serious about things indifferent, compare your attitude to going blind with your attitude about being mentally in the dark. You will realize, I think, how inappropriate your values really are.
Epictetus, Discourses I.20.7-12 (pages 51-52 of this edition) (original Greek, with alternate translations at the link)
Edited to correct a typo.
It is somewhat amazing to me that there are people who much less concerned about their ability to recognize false reasoning than their ability to recognize counterfeit currency. It seems pathetically obvious to me that sloppiness in the former, meta level would tend to be expensive at the latter, object level—for example, you end up with people placing their trust in tools like iodine pens to detect counterfeit notes when almost no evidence exists that such a measure is effective.
Currency is binary, either genuine or counterfeit. Ideas are on a continuum, some less wrong than others. Generally, bad ideas are dangerous because there’s some truth or utility to them; few people are seduced by palpable nonsense. Parsing mixed ideas is a big part of rationality, and it’s harder than spotting fake money.
A technicality: Officially, currency is binary, but in practice that’s not the case. Fake currency that is convincing still has value. A fake dollar bill with a 50% probability of going un-noticed is in practice worth 50 cents (ignoring social consequences of passing off fake money). Fake currency with 100% convincingness is 100% as valuable as real currency (until you make enough to cause inflation).
Why?
Because it’s immaterial to the central point. For a high enough level of “convincingness”, fake money has significant real-world value.
In most societies this is more than outweighed by the sanctions for using it. As it should be.
You’ve got to multiply those sanctions by the probability of getting caught, though. (ISTM that robertskmiles is thinking purely CDTically/act-consequentialistically, ignoring acausal/Kantian/golden rule/rule-consequentialist concerns.)
That’s accurate, yes.
Admittedly, there is a certain point where the odds of discovery are low enough that it balances out and can even have a net positive. Those are pretty rare, though—remember that the punishment for discovery usually vastly outweighs the benefit received. And, of course, higher denominations are subject to greater scrutiny.
I remember having a conversation with my mother where she recounted an experience of having a twenty dollar bill examined at a store, and wondering who on earth bothers counterfeiting twenties anyway. I said that if I were going to counterfeit money, that’s the denomination I’d pick, because it’s the largest bill that most people spend regularly and casually. Hardly anyone seriously examines them, so your chances of getting caught are that much smaller.
Related quote from the Buddha.
Keith E. Stanovich, How to Think Straight About Psychology, 10th ed. (2013), 14.
ETA: Should have included the subsequent paragraph:
Lazarsfeld is also discussed here under http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/
These aren’t exactly opposed - ‘out of sight, out of mind’ is generally applied to things and problems, not, say, warm relationships.
Some of the others aren’t exactly opposed either—I’ve generally heard not crossing a bridge before you get to it referring to trying to solve a problem you anticipate before it’s possible to actually start solving the problem.
Really? I’ve seen it used twice for non-relationship contexts, but too many times to care to count (on the order of 50-80) in the context of long-distance relationships, usually as a warning that a couple should not hope to remain steady and trust eachother if they become far apart for a long period of time (months or more) for the first time since entering a relationship.
In fiction, this either turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy or becomes the whole reason the main character can complete the main quest.
In reality, the causal influence doesn’t seem to be there, but anecdotally I observe that the drifting-apart usually happens regardless of whether any such prediction was made. Knowledge of this leads a significant fraction of couples to break-up preemptively when they’re about to enter such a situation.
That’s interesting. I’d more seen it used with annoyances. Maybe because I haven’t seen much of LD relationships, and those that I did see, worked. And it was clear they were going to work from the outset because they were really serious about each other.
Yeah. The advice applies mostly to “Let’s get married when you return!”-style relationships, where the couple met in meatspace, dated in meatspace, became a “couple” in meatspace, and then have to separate for a long period of time and things will all be better once they get back together… all of which often fails horribly.
From three data points, it seems like those that survive the first separation might have no trouble with subsequent ones, or at least that the risk of repeat separations is greatly diminished (though if one cheated the first time, they’ll likely be cheating the other times too, AFAIK, but that’s 1 more datapoint + folk wisdom).
7⁄7 relationships I’ve seen that were started in cyberspace, stayed long distance for a while, then met in meatspace, then had to have a long-distance period, all survived (and are still healthy couples to this day as far as I’m aware). Seems like the filtering effect applies long before anyone ever meets eachother for cyberspace-started relationships, especially for long-distance ones.
-Sennett Forell, Foundation and Empire
-John Maynard Keynes
--xkcd.
What is he alluding to? (I don’t watch lots of mass media these day, let alone American mass media.)
Traditional pundits are intimidated and frightened by Nate Silver’s quantitative analysis. They see their comfy job pandering to the beliefs-as-attire market, with no expectation of accuracy, disappearing if pundits who can actually predict things take over.
edit: This comment, further down the page, explains well.
Exactly. Here is an excellent article elaborating further. (Only quibble is that is was not just Silver; other data-based analysts like Sam Wang and Josh Putnam made essentially the same predictions):
A dataset including Wang & Putnam, with scoring of accuracy:
http://www.gwern.net/2012%20election%20predictions
http://appliedrationality.org/2012/11/09/was-nate-silver-the-most-accurate-2012-election-pundit/
I assume he is referring to the tendency of the media to call a persistent but small lead “too close to call.” It’s confusing the margin of lead with the likelihood of winning.
Either that, or the tendency of partisan commentators to make predictions for their side that were totally unconnected to state-by-state polling results.
Many Republican pundits had elaborate theories about how polls were understating Romney’s chances in the recent US presidential election, but the results turned out to match polls quite well.
Republicans talking about skewed polls were the most egregious example, but nonpartisan media was generally calling the election “razor tight”, “a tossup” and similar things, too. In their case, the reason seems to be an ignorance of how statistics works. E.g. seeing polls with Obama up by 2% and a margin of error of 3, they would label it “a statistical tie”, even though a) even with a single such poll, it implies a much higher chance of Obama winning, and b) with many polls giving numbers in that range, the chances of Romney being actually ahead drop to near-zero, barring systematic error.
True, also the media will tend to exaggerate the tightness of any race to make their news more exciting. Who will say up until the wee hours of the morning watching commercials and news, if the outcome is certain?
Assuming the “margin of error” is one sigma, that’s a 75% probability of Obama winning, which hardly qualifies as “much higher” IMO.
EDIT: Retracted. If, as James_K says, the margin of error is 1.96 sigma, that’s a 90% probability for Obama.
The normal margin of error on a political opinion poll would be 1.96 sigma—a 95% confidence interval (that’s how you’d get a margin of error of just over 3 percentage points on a poll of 1000 people.
If you look at the picture it seems to be: Numbers are better than fancy visualsations.
Paul Graham
False.
I mean, grain of truth, yes, literally true, no. You can shock the hell out of people and distinguish yourselves quite well by doing rational things.
Paul Krugman says something similar
(Very close to the end of Ricardo’s Difficult Idea] )
Well, it is similar insofar as “reciting the contents of a standard textbook” and “doing rational things” are similar.
Mileage varies.
Krugman’s talking about Ricardo’s Law in particular, very basic, very old, not disputed so far as I know, and not known to the general populace.
You can shock many people by doing some rational things—those preselected for not being done by most people already, and also those that are explicitly counter to important irrational things that many people do. And these specific rational actions have an availability bias. Conversely, once something is “normal”, it’s not a highly available mental example of “especially rational”.
But can you really shock many people by doing a randomly selected rational thing? By giving the right answer on a test? By choosing the deal that gains you the most money? By choosing a profession, a friend, a place to live, based on expectations of happiness? By choosing medical treatment based on scientific evidence? By doing something because it’s fun?
It might shock people that the choice is in fact rational; they may disagree that the deal you chose will earn you the most money. But when people agree about predictions, why would they be shocked by most rational choices? I think a random (but doable) irrational act is much more shocking than a random rational one.
You are correct, but I just want to point out that the original quote talks about distinguishing yourself, not shocking people. And I think most of what you said still applies.
Sometimes, yes, but only along certain dimensions. If your group performs rituals, they can’t be rational because then they will be the same as other groups’. For example, the Jewish practice of eating flat bread on Passover is arbitrary [1], but it only works because it is arbitrary.
[1] It’s not entirely arbitrary if you believe the story of Passover, but that’s a somewhat different point. Actually, it may be interesting to examine whether it’s rational in that case—I can see arguments for both sides.
Interestingly, group rituals purely for the sake of group bonding needn’t be irrational. It’s irrational to believe that God is going to punish you if you eat leavened bread during Passover—I am caricacturizing Jewish theology here but the general point is sound—but it can be useful to set a test for group membership, or an action to marks you as part of a group, to help group cohesion. This is particularly useful if you’re up against other groups that would like to exploit you and you need as much help as possible to stay together so your group can put up a united front. Arbitrary dietary restrictions seem like a decent way to do that.
Not that anyone actually sat down and thought it out like this before deciding that Jews should abstain from leavened bread for a week every spring, or that Mormons shouldn’t drink alchohol, and so on. But I think there’s value in having an arbitrary ritual explicitly for the sake of group cohesion.
Sure, but that’s a lot more difficult. There are so many arbitrary things to do, and wrong things to believe, that they’re going to be the default because they’re easy.
I’m shocked, because I expect Yudkowsky to be rational and deep.
The original quote should be read in context, where it’s almost a tautology. What shocks me is the immediate “False.”
Sure, within the definitions here, it’s false. But within the context, I don’t want to say that it’s “true,” because I don’t believe in true/false as absolutes, but it is not false. It’s only when it is converted to some general statement, by being abstracted here, that it takes on an obviously false character, because, of course, a group may be “distinguished” by “doing rational things” that differ from expectations.
Yudkowsky then goes on to recognize “grain of truth.”
The statement wasn’t made about just any group, though. It was made about what might be called “sects.” Graham considers truth to be common property. You can’t distinguish a sect, in the conversation Graham is creating, by what’s true about it, i.e., what is common among all, or among all rational thinkers. Sects—predefined group affiliations—are distinguished by the characteristic lies they tell. Or at least the characteristic stories, i.e., beliefs that are not falsifiable.
The original should be read. There is plenty to distinguish in it as to logical errors, but this statement was insightful.
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Partial duplicate
I think it’s still worth leaving up, because the previous post left off the second half of the quote. The quote I posted is more comprehensive.
David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
I think he vastly overestimates the affect of optimism on technological development, vs say population size, disease levels and food supply.
And yet they couldn’t even defeat the Spartans or keep Savonarola from taking power.
To be fair, with a general like Napoleon, how could the Spartans lose?
Fixed typo.
Or, more accurately, you and I would be non-existent and some other group of beings would be quasi-immortal.
What is this “moral progress” you speak of Earth monkey?
It usually means we now have a greater understanding of what we value.
[edited for clarity.]
Eh, no we don’t.
See how easy it is to simply assert something? Let’s now try actual arguments. First read the comments I linked to in the daughter comment, also feel free to provide links and references to material you think I should read. Then once we’ve closed the inferential gap and after we restate the other’s case without straw manning it we can really start talking.
You asked. I answered. Whether it is correct is one thing, but you asked what it meant.
Ok. In the context of the question I assumed you believed in moral progress. Do you?
I believe we better understand our utility function and how to implement it than most civilizations have historically.
That is probably true, but in my experience this is not what everyone else calls “moral progress”. Usually people use “moral progress” to mean “a changing of morals to be closer to my current morals”.
That’s what I was arguing against, that the appearance of moral progress (as I defined it) is merely an illusion caused by the CEV of our civilization changing over time.
Note: I responded to my best guess as to your meaning, but could you taboo “morals” for me to be on the safe side?
So why is this down voted? If anyone is confused by this challenge to moral progress which they consider perfectly obvious they should read Against Moral Progress and a related text dump, then argue their case there.
If this is about the tone, well we disagree on taste. I think applause lights need to be challenged on their emotional affect as well as their implied argument.
I would call “moral progress” the process whereby a society’s behaviours and their CEV get closer to each other than they used to be. And this looks pretty much like it, to me.
What? So would you call an incorruptibly evil society highly “morally progressed”? What about the baby eaters since they both believe they should and do in fact eat babies?
Babyeater babies don’t want to be eaten, or particularly want to eat their peers, and those who will never develop a desire to eat babies constitute a majority of the sapient population at any given time, so “eat babies” isn’t the ‘coherent’ part of the babyeater CEV.
Using the observation that being dead precludes wanting to (and endorsing) eating babies as an adult as a technical reason that “those who will never develop a desire to eat babies constitute a majority of the sapient population at any given time” is highly misleading. I’d go as far as to call it bullshit.
We could equally as accurately say “those who will never develop into non-paperclipping adults constitute a majority of the sapient population at any given time” (therefore CEV means paperclipping!)
Any attempted implementation of CEV that does not result in the eating of babies sounds like a catastrophic failure. It would seem to result in the sneaking in of non-babyeater values at every excuse.
Insert abortion debate: Right to choose is morally coherent, and right to life is morally coherent. It is debatable which of these would constitute moral progress.
However, what is not morally coherent, is that women have sole power over reproductive decisions, but men have an obligation to support those choices whatever they may be, that husbands don’t have a say, that unmarried men can be forced to support babies, but women cannot.
This is not moral progress, but anti white male democratic coalition.
One could coherently argue that right to choose, but no right to child support is moral progress
One could coherently argue that right to life, plus right to child support is moral progress.
One cannot argue that right to choose plus right to child support is moral progress. It is morally right that he who pays the piper, calls the tune, and that she who calls the tune, gets stuck with the piper’s bill.
On second thoughts, let’s not!
I agree that the current system is inconsistent. If women are allowed to abort babies because babies are an expensive burden, men should either have an equal say in that decision or men shouldn’t be obligated to support those children. Either one would make sense.
Speaking as a pro-lifer, that’s nonsense. Men aren’t the ones using their bodies as life support. Also, “anti white male”? Really? I’m pretty sure you don’t have to be white to get an abortion.
EDIT: Is this seriously being downvoted?
I agree with your statements as written. However:
This is not nonsense, as far as I can tell.
Given “Accidental Pregnancy”, the woman’s decision tree (A) goes:
A1 - Keep the baby, support it, including whatever costs and benefits.
A2 - Get an abortion, costs and benefits are avoided.
The man’s decision tree (B), according to the quoted statement, goes:
A1 - The woman kept the baby; (Bx|A1) - Support the woman and baby. What this man thinks or wants or would have decided is irrelevant.
A2 - The woman got an abortion; (Bx|A2) - No baby, no costs, no benefits. What this man thinks or wants or would have decided is irrelevant.
Once you’ve boiled down the calculations, given unforeseen pregnancy, the men have zero decision power according to such a system in theory, and must pay a cost independently of whatever they could possibly do in exactly half of the possible outcomes.
In other words, whether you pay a cost or not is entirely not up to you, for no specific reason whatsoever other than “aren’t the ones using their bodies as life support”. Does this sound like a fair setting, and more importantly, does it sound like an optimal system to play in?
Ok, the quoted position is not nonsense. But it is totally rejected by society’s decisions about involuntary medical procedures and economic support of children. Once those decisions are made, there is no space for anything like what the quote advocates for.
First point: Abortion is a medical procedure. Society is generally unwilling to force anyone to undergo a medical procedure. Given the special moral issues arising out of abortion, why do you expect a different result here?
Second point: society has decided that a child’s economic support should come from all biological parents, rather than the people raising the child. There are (and have been) other decisions made by other societies. So what? That doesn’t make the current position incoherent (as sam seems to argue). Men know (or should know) the risks when deciding whether to have sex.
I mostly agree on all of this, at the very least denotationally agree on everything.
I’m quite on a different end of the spectrum when it comes to whether this is morally optimized, but of course this is because I work from different assumptions and when I picture it, I also imagine a completely different social framework than most people who think this is the “right” way to do it would imagine around it.
Errh. Not sure how I could rephrase the above to make it less confusing, but hopefully your model already knows the gist of what I’m saying.
I’m not sure I understand your position—more specifically, I’m not sure what connotations you disagree with. I was trying in this instance to make statements without relevant connotation at all, but it seems that my attempts fell short.
Well, for one example:
This pattern-matches to the noncentral fallacy described by Yvain, and can be very easily read as an attempt to categorically identify abortion as nothing other than what people generally identify as “medical procedures”, while abortion clearly has some elements (even in flat-out physical materialistic terms, let alone social, moral, legal, etc.) that are not quite like most medical procedures.
If I want to push the meta-analysis a bit further...
This seems dismissive of the issues. At this point in the paragraph, it holds some connotation of “Your arguments are worthless, society is right because that’s what society decided”, which is clearly not intended (or so I would presume) but still sneaks into the reader’s stream-of-consciousness.
In general the tone of the comment feels a bit like you’re saying that society has decided something, nothing can be done about it by one individual, the Enemy’s arguments are invalid, and thus society is right. This (probably unintended) connotation is very much one I strongly disagree with.
Doesn’t this support my position? Even if an abortion was only a medical procedure, it wouldn’t be available to vindicate the man’s choice over the woman’s choice. And you correctly note that it isn’t only a medical procedure
Sam says there’s only one correct moral choice. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been, but I was dismissive of that position.
Fully true. It’s the pattern-matching connotation of “Here, I argue using known fallacies” that was off-putting, more than the facts stated and the actually-implied reasoning.
I cringe at the phrase “vindicate the man’s choice over the woman’s choice”, because it’s clear to me that this isn’t a mutually exclusive two-choices-only scenario (there are more than two possible solutions to this “problem”, if one wants to think of it in these terms), but that reaction is a matter of gender-equality humanism (which most people, due to historical circumstance, refer to as “feminism”) more than the actual issue at hand.
We’re assuming false dichotomies here. We could have a society where women get to decide whether or not to abort, but if they don’t they are encouraged to give the child up for adoption if they can’t afford to raise it, and if they choose not to, rhat’s their business and they aren’t entitled to demand that anyone else help them out financially. EDIT: that way, a woman is not forced to undergo a medical procedure if she doesn’t want the child.
I haven’t seen anyone assuming that you can’t have abortion and no childcare, or childcare and no abortion. The main point of contention is that the grandparent is arguing that those are the only coherent options—that abortion and childcare is self-contradictory/discriminatory.
Exactly so: Moral and social decay. People behaving badly, bad behavior being encouraged, and frequently enforced. Hurtful consequences, decadence, and all that. “Society” is making wrongful decisions to advance the interests of one group at the expense of another, a characteristic flaw and failing of democracy.
A previous society decided that women and their children were not entitled to support except by a contract voluntarily entered into by both parties, whose terms differed strikingly from current terms. The question then is, which society was right?
The question at issue is moral progress. That society has decided X is not, in the context of this debate, evidence that X is right, since a previous society decided Y.
The question is, which society was right? I argue that this society’s decisions constitute evil, decadence, moral decay, and are an indictment of democracy.
Maybe people (e.g. MileyCyrus, I guess) are just objecting to this conversation and downvoting everything.
Well, if so, their cynical exploitation of the karma mechanics is working; it’s at −3, soon all discussion will be silenced by the Toll.
EDIT: Well, there it goes. To defend my point, deliberately invoking mechanics designed to discourage feeding trolls to prevent discussion on topics you disagree with is cynical exploitation. Karma is intended to rate the quality of a comment, not to censor certain topics of discussion. I personally would consider this just as reprehensible as creating new thread to reply to comments in a Karma Tolled old one, which has been met with severe sanctions.
Cynical exploitation? The point of the karma mechanics is to downvote comments you don’t want to see more of.
“I don’t want see more of this” != “I don’t want people to reply to this” (though the two are correlated); the Toll is about the latter.
Yes.
The problem is not nine months servitude, but twenty years servitude.
Who the blazes upvoted this comment? I was hoping the troll toll would cut back on troll feeding, but it won’t work if people keep upvoting trollish behavior.
(And yes, sam0345 behavior is trollish, even if they earnest hold these views. There is no reason hijack a conversation about CEV into a MRA talking point regarding an explosive political issue)
Would one of the mods please kill this thread before we get a pile-up?
Edit: Looks like I’ve been karmassinated, as several of my old comments in unrelated threads are getting downvoted.
Downvoted; if discussing things is trolling, what exactly is the point of the site? This is not an assassination attempt.
That’s actually the best definition of “moral progress” that I’ve seen. A big step up from “more like the values that I currently wish to signal having”, the default definition.
People on Lesswrong saying their CEV includes X or leads to Y, are not using the term technically but as a poetic way of saying X and Y look about right to me and I’m confident I’m not wrong. Substituting that into the definition makes it much less impressive for human use. And if you check writing on CEV you see the definition is nearly circular for technical use in FAI design.
Just not true. The writing on CEV does a lot to constrain technical thinking about FAI design. It isn’t a complete solution, nor is it presented as one but it certainly does rule out a lot (most) proposals for how an FAI should be designed and created. It simply doesn’t fit the definition “circular”.
(I had previously ignored this comment but upvotes as of now suggest that it may be successful in being actively misleading! As such, rejecting it seems more important.)
We seem to have a misunderstanding. Lots of writing on CEV refers to something called moral development or moral progress. I was criticizing the usefulness of the quoted definition of this something to CEV development not work on CEV in general. I’ve edited the sentence somewhat to clarify that.
Perhaps. If so we can curse our shared language. I was replying to the below quote but I notice “its” isn’t a unique reference!
Is this a possible use of ‘CEV?’ So far as I understand CEV, it’s not possible that it could change: our CEV is what we would want given all the correct moral arguments and all the information. Assuming that ‘all the information’ and ‘all the correct moral arguments’ are constants, how could the CEV of one society differ from that of another?
The only way I can think of is if the two societies are composed of fundamentally different kinds of beings. But the idea of moral progress you describe assumes that this is not the case.
Yes. Society’s behaviors and their CEV can get closer together without the CEV changing at all. Also note that while CEV is a (very slightly) different thing to CEV even though neither of those “CEVs” change at all.
A potential criticism of army’s definition is that it allows for “cultural wireheading” and as such would be a lost purpose if “moral progress” was substituted in as a all-purpose goal or measure of achievement. (That said, I’ve never really thought of “moral progress” as that-which-should-be-optimised anyhow.)
Then why is “moral progress” a useful concept?
Shoes aren’t that-which-should-be-optimized either, but that doesn’t mean that the concept of shoe is not useful.
It describes how to compute that-which-should-be-optimized.
EDIT: Replied to wrong message. (Curse my android!)
As a descriptor that people find useful when analyzing cultures.
Because not being itself my entire utility function doesn’t mean it or related components thereof doesn’t have a significant part in it.
It’s still only marginally useful. For example I don’t believe I have ever used the phrase before and if I have it was because it was necessary to guess the password of a teacher.
Very nearly everything does not happen to be that-which-should-be-optimised.
So we’re not saying that the CEV of a culture changes (this is a constant), but that the culture’s actual moral practices and reasoning can change in relation to its CEV. And change such that it is closer or further away. Do I have that right?
Presumably, we wouldn’t want to optimize moral progress, but rather morality.
The CEV of a culture changes (a little bit) every day. CEV is a constant. This is because humans (and groups of humans) aren’t stable, consistent optimisers. From what I understand the CEV of a culture is relatively stable, certainly more stable than the culture itself. Nevertheless it is not a fixed. We, all things considered and collectively want (very nearly tautologically) for our CEV to be stable because that (approximately) maximises our current CEV. We just aren’t that consistent.
That is one way in which the previously quoted proposition could be valid, yes.
I want to optimise whatever my preferences are. Morality seems to get a weight in there someplace.
I thought the whole point of CEV was to extrapolate forwards in time towards the ultimate reflectively-consistent set of values to formulate one single coherent utility function (with multiple parameters and variables, of course) that represents the optimal equilibrium of all that humans would want if they were exactly as they would want to be and would want exactly that which they would wish to want.
This reminds me more of CAV (Coherent Aggregated Volition) than CEV. CEV is, IIRC, intended as a bootstrap towards “Whatever humans would collectively find the best possible optimization after infinite re-evaluations”, if any such meta-ethics exists.
The Coherent Extrapolated Volition of one group of humans is not the same thing as the Coherent Extrapolated Volition of another group of humans. Humans populations change and even evolve over time due to forces that are not carefully constructed to move the population in the same direction as the CEV of their ancestors and so later generations will not have the same CEV as previous ones.
Eliezer has a lot to answer for when it comes to encouraging magical thinking along the lines of “all (subsets of) humans have the same Coherent Extrapolated Volition”. He may not be confused himself but his document certainly encourages it.
Thank you. I had slightly misunderstood what you were saying, but I also hadn’t looked at all the variables and you pointed right at what I was missing.
Who knows? It’s possible EY thinks it will be. There doens’t seem to be any authoritative answer to that.
Poll here
No, his argument is that CEVs of any (subset of) humans is a tiny cluster in value space.
He has, in fact, made that argument (as well). I repeat the claim:
It depends on how you define “humans”, but considering how old some of the references to the Golden Rule are at least some of our utility function is older than most civilizations. Do you have any proof that previous generations were fundamentally different to us, and not, like most (all?) humans today, confused about how to implement their utility function (if we give the poor healthcare, they wont have an incentive to work!)
It is trivially true that restricting the definition of ‘human’ can reduce the possible differences between the CEVs of subsets of humans. This is just a matter of shifting the workload into the ‘human’ definition. Unless you plan to restrict the definition of human to one individual, however, there are still going to be differences between the CEV of subsets (except by coincidence).
Having a weak-to-moderate norm in favour of doing things that you would consider helpful or at least not harmful to others in your social group does seem to be popular (not as consistent or as strong as norms against excreting waste products in public but right up there!). That CEVs of various combinations of humans are similar isn’t the point. Of course they will be. In fact, on average I’d expected them to be more similar than the groups of humans themselves are. But they are not identical (except by coincidence).
No!
That isn’t a dichotomy. Clearly both past humans and current humans aren’t effectively optimising toward their respective CEVs. But those CEVs are also going to be different because there isn’t any magic (or focused expenditure of optimisation power) holding the CEV constant!
(I’m not sure what “fundamental” means exactly so I’ll just note that I’ve never proposed any kind of difference beyond “not the same”).
It would be great if you wrote up a short discussion level post to clear up what seems to be a common misconception. Please consider doing so.
I’m not sure how useful that would be, or rather whether I’m the right person to be doing it. I thought I said everything that needed to be said in this thread already but it wasn’t necessarily successful at reaching the target audience. Perhaps someone more in tune with the idealism behind the disagreement could explain better.
I meant that, say, Neanderthals have a good chance of a serious CEV difference. However, your statement that all humans have different CEVs is unsupported by any evidence. For example:
Historically, dumping waste products was considered relatively harmless; sure it smells a little but hey, what doesn’t? These people lacked the germ theory of disease, remember. No-one thought deliberately spreading disease was OK.
That is not a fully general counterargument against your lack of any evidence at all.
But there’s no magic changing it! If you assume human morality evolved, why would our ethics have changed much more than, say, our diet?
It is, but my prior that two logically different things turn out to be exactly identical is pretty small. EDIT: OTOH, I think that almost all humans’ CEVs would be so similar that a world with a FAI optimizing for CEV would be very unlikely to feel like a dystopia to Group B, unless the membership criteria to Group A are deliberately gerrymandered to achieve that.
Of course there will be some variation between individuals, yes. But, as you say, probably not enough to matter; unless you’re actively filtering it should average out the same for most large groups.
Nobody said that they would have.
You are arguing against a straw man. Please read some of the message you replied to or the ones preceding it. Even, say, 1⁄3 of the sentences is likely to be sufficient—I’ve been repeating myself to make this clear.
You are claiming that the CEV of any group of humans—including all humanity—changes over time, yes? You seem to think this is a self-evident truth, but I have yet to see any examples of such a change. You removed the first half of that sentence—as I pointed out, if human morality evolved (which I assume you believe) then there is no reason to think that it would change any more than human dietary preferences—a child may discover sweets taste better than cabbage, and henceforth refuse cabbage in favor of sweets, but this is true for all children. What you are suggesting the same as if I claimed our taste buds had rearranged themselves, and that is why the Romans ate roast dormouse and we don’t.
Both sides of this debate are hamstrung by failing to distinguish between basic values and extrapolated volition. There have been major shifts in ethics within living memory, regarding race, gender, the environment and sexuality. Whether they are shifts in basic valiues or in the way basica values are extrapolated is not obvious.
Except that it is. You don’t dissuade a racist or a misogynist or whatever with brain surgery. You just show them that their model of minorities/women/homosexuals/whatever is flawed. You don’t alter their brain to terminally value, say, preventing slavery, you just show them that to satisfy their existing terminal value of avoiding human suffering they should prevent slavery. That has no effect on Coherent Extrapolated Volition.
Except that it does, because having been persuaded they extrapolate differently. But maybe by CEV you mean some idealised version.
Your impression that it is obvious that changes in de facto ethics are not changes in basic values rests heavilty on the assumption than basic values are in hardware, not software. That is not obvious , either.
CEV is not (and was never, AFAIK) meant to be self-applied by one individual to oneself.
More importantly, CEV’s archetypical example of “volition” should show how persuading someone that they want box A doesn’t change their CEV to “obtain A” if they need that diamond to pay for their own food, nor how persuading them that they should not want the diamond and that the diamond is worthless would change the fact that their CEV would still want to get box B, to get the diamond, to sell it, to pay for food, to live longer. No matter how effectively you persuade them that box A is really really shiny and that diamonds are really really evil.
Well, that’s your guess.
EDIT: double-post.
‘There’s a “principled distinction between discussing CEV as an initial dynamic of Friendliness, and discussing CEV as a Nice Place to Live” and his essay was essentially conflating the two definitions. ’
Pardon? I think you may have accidentally replied to the wrong comment.
No. Have you ever changed your mind on an ethical question? I’m serious.
...
The observation that a racist (or whatever) is using, albeit imperfectly, the same criteria to declare various courses of action “right” or “wrong”. What they lack is the knowledge that minorities are not evil mutants.
Very idealistic. What if putting down other humans is an actual terminal value for some people?
Something in their mind would most likely be broken for this to happen, according to data I’ve seen. Even the worst polypaths (sociopath + psychopath + whatever pathy you want to throw in for the most despicable example of human possible) apparently still see themselves as heroes “saving the world”, or at least as some kind of “good guy in the long run”. Not that I’m implying that the “All Evil people are actually Good because they just know that the world needs balance and humans need a common enemy” myth is true, because that’s been shown false even more clearly.
More importantly, CEV aims are reflectively coherent values. If they have a terminal value of killing people, this value is extremely likely to conflict with other of their values, maybe even with their own wishes regarding self-values (“I wish I didn’t enjoy killing humans so much”), and would definitely not cohere with most other humans’ values unless there’s four billion people out there who secretly desire very very much to kill humans all the time but live in utter misery thanks to a global conspiracy that successfully chains them down or some other just-as-unlikely factor (e.g. some undiscovered freeloader’s problem or tragedy of the commons that we’ve somehow never noticed).
Overall, my current odds are very very low that any such value would survive extrapolation when you attempt to have a reflectively coherent system where someone wishes they didn’t value X, but do value it.
Every (neurotypical) human I have ever observed, even indirectly, terminally valued human life. Have you ever met a racist? They’re not evil mutants, they simply don’t think minorities are people (and may think they are an active threat to “real” humans.) Of course, a mind that terminally values killing humans is possible. I simply haven’t seen any evidence that it exists in real life, and plenty of evidence for minds with a stable CEV that terminally values human life (among other things.)
Just not true. Not all racist people are confused on matters of fact in such a convenient way.
In my experience, they are. Could you provide a counterexample? Bearing in mind that I was using “people” to exclude evil mutants.
Part of the problem here may be that you are using a strong notion of racist. So the issue may be definitional. For example, I have a close relative who says nasty things about other racial minorities (especially that people from a certain racial group are stupid, lazy, fat, etc.). I’m pretty sure that person has no desire to kill people of that racial group. There are different degrees of racism.
Yes, I was using a “strong” racist as an example. But that close relative’s claims that the minorities are lazy/fat/whatever is either correct or incorrect as a point of fact, and has no effect on their terminal values.
You could call me a proto-racist in that I think that some races are more intelligent than others, more civilized, more violent, while still very much human.
There are no confusions of fact between me and someone who hates people of “lesser” races, only a lack of compassion.
While I’m going to have to disagree with you on a point of fact there, (is that inherently less civilized? Whatever, we’re getting off topic.) I note that someone who agrees with you but argues for, say, racial warfare or whatever, is likely under the impression that these natural differences between races are likely to jeopardise White civilization, and/or believes that these differences are more drastic than you do.
not necessarily. Sometimes it seems that way and would take quite the conspiracy to make it not true, but it could be either way and the point would be the same.
Oh, it’s entirely beside the point. I’m just curious.
… which races are we talking about here? On reflection, I can’t think of any race that seems less civilized. I could just about buy a difference in intelligence, and I can see how you might think violent inclinations are affected by race (although I’m pretty sure that’s sociological,) but I don’t really see how you can plausibly make the claim that civilization has a racial component.
let’s take civilization off the table for now.
I’m under the impression that controlled studies have found race-intelligence links. (maybe this is my confusion of basic facts). Seems plausible.
Sociology is pretty strongly corellated with this race thing, and race is more visible. Violence is definately linked to race in the USA (even if it’s only through social class, but I’ve seen arguments that race is an even better predictor).
It would be nice to have some solid literature surveys on this. Unfortunately, given the controversy, it’s hard to just trust what the academics are saying.
If it’s linked “through social class”, it’s not linked directly, which is what’s under discussion. No-one is claiming that race has no effect on class and/or class has no effect on the traits under discussion. You are claiming that low intelligence and violent tendencies are racial characteristics, which is generally considered racist nonsense by, well, non-racists.
Which are you more interested in being, non-racist or correct?
I hope that question doesn’t come off as too offensive, and it may turn out that you are genuinely more interested in being non-racist than correct. Given the treatment of prominent biologists for stating truths, one whose livelihood depends on public opinion and who isn’t an expert in biology might decide that adopting the dogma of the times is the wisest move.
But supposing that you are actually curious- that you are seriously attempting to determine the quantitative effect that race has on crime or intelligence or so on- what makes “0” such a special number? Sure, it’s the null hypothesis, but the null hypothesis for the effect of class on violence or intelligence is also 0. Why reject one out of hand, and not the other? Notice that we don’t have non-classists breathing down our necks to ensure we don’t point out that the poor are disproportionately represented in the jails.
This seems like a seriously good question to me, at least for most of us. The fact that racist beliefs (true or false) are very strongly correlated with being a bad person is worth noticing. We may just be better off not knowing such things, if true.
Let me note that what is correlated with badness may be more the fact of speaking racist beliefs, not of ‘having them’—the latter is hard to collect info about, absent mind-reading technology.
It seems extremely likely that there’s a correlation between having racist beliefs and speaking them. In particular, the more extreme one’s racist beliefs are, the more likely that one will a) consider racist beliefs acceptable to say (some combination of illusion of transparency and typical mind fallacy) and b) will consider more moderate racial claims as less controversial in comparison.
True, though in general I don’t think we have much trouble discovering the unspoken beliefs of other people through their behaviors. I grant of course that if a racist belief has no relationship to someone’s behavior whatsoever, then it cannot be the cause of being a bad person (since this seems to be very much an issue of behavior).
But in such a case, I think serious questions could be raised about whether or not this belief is actually a belief the person holds.
The question is how causal is that correlation.
So, what do you mean by a “bad person” and how do you know that this includes both true and false beliefs? A related issue may be what one means by a “racist belief”. For example, is it a racist belief that Tay Sachs is more common among Ashkenazic Jews than the general population?
You’ve asked me a series of questions here about the terms I’m using, and I’m not sure how precisely to respond. I don’t think either of us is, for example, in the dark as to what ‘bad person’ means.
So could you, on the basis of your best guess about what I mean to say, just voice your objection?
My objections were I thought apparent. I apologize for the illusion of transparency on my part. Simply put “bad person” is highly subjective, and I don’t at all have a clear notion of what it means. Is a thief who gives some of his money to charity a bad person? Clear, agreed notions of what was a “bad person” would be essentially equivalent to solving most moral questions.
As for racism, my point was that I can give explicit examples of differences between what are classically called racial groups that you probably agree are all actual genetic differences that have substantial impact on their lives. Tay Sachs in Ashkenazim isn’t the only example. sickle-cell anemia in some African groups and Huntington’s disease in Western Europeans are other examples.
I suspect that you don’t consider yourself a bad person. So what we mean by “racist beliefs.” It seems one doesn’t just mean statistically significant differences in genetics that express themselves in the phenotype. So does one mean such beliefs when related to intelligence? Or does one mean people who assign lower moral worth to some races? if the last is the case, then your statement is probably true by most definitions of “bad people” but then completely useless and uninteresting for the discussion at hand.
I agree that clear agreed upon notions of what a ‘bad person’ is would amount to clear and agreed upon notions of morality. But I think we clearly have the latter, and so the former as well. We may bounce back and forth over tricky cases, like your charitable thief, but that doesn’t mean we are in a state of fundamental confusion or disagreement about anything. (EDIT: notice, for example that you didn’t just ask me ‘is a thief a bad person?’)
This last point would follow if intelligence were as irrelevant to moral worth as is a vulnerability for blood diseases. But we evidentially don’t think it is irrelevant. If I told a random black person on the street that I thought him more vulnerable to sickle-cell on the basis of his race, he would probably just agree with me. If I said he was probably stupid, on the basis of his race, he would (rightly, I think) call me a racist in the morally pejorative sense.
So again, it’s an open question as to what exactly the relationship is between intelligence and moral value such that this is different from the relationship between vulnerability to blood-disease and moral value. The fact that this is an open question should leave open the option that intelligence has nothing to do with moral value, as you imply. Yet I think we have substantial intuitive evidence that this isn’t a good way to go.
I am non-racist because assuming all humans are ultimately the same has proved a better heuristic than the natural tendency to assume that people’s flaws are inherent aspects of their nature. In addition, statistically, I am almost certainly biased against other races (as are you.) While there is probably a negligible effect of race on intelligence and violence, it’s almost(?) too small to measure and the problems of taking it into account are far greater than the amount of influence it has.
TL;DR: I’m non-racist in order to be correct. It’s a heuristic that has served me well, and has served it’s users well historically.
What do you mean by this? Do you mean that all humans are equally smart? Or do you mean assuming some humans are in fact smarter than others but smartness isn’t correlated with say skin color? If the latter, that “all humans are ultimately the same” doesn’t seem like a good summary.
Edit: Or are you attempting some version of what Christians mean by this statement, namely “all humans have a soul and all souls are equal before God”?
I was also slightly offset by this, particularly the vague phrasing “ultimately the same”, which by reflex I would’ve asked to taboo. However, by charitable interpretation, I think the intended meaning is that everyone is running on the same source code. Even if the source code contains modules that take set values according to runtime events and then become irreversible (or extremely difficult to alter), which leads to the same “program” doing vastly different things and having different capabilities.
An example intuition pump here might be to imagine a standard PC running a custom OS that enables or disables a bunch of its key features and messes a bunch of its parameters or will use different optimization subroutines and garbage collection procedures during it startup routine all according to some hidden, unknown algorithm that takes pictures of the user during said startup as input.
Obviously the sourcecode and hardware are the same, but the behavior and capabilities will be radically different depending on the user. You might even be able to hack parts of the OS during runtime to enable certain disabled features or tweak some parameters, but how much can be hacked and how to do it is unknown at first.
Well, this can be made trivially true through a suitable choice of the line between “source code” and “set values”. For example, define the laws of physics and basic biology to be the “source code” and let our DNA and upbringing be the “set values”. I fail to see how this is interesting.
I took his statement to mean, “the variation among individual humans across the entire human species is far greater than any variation between racial subgroups, to the point where the racial variations become negligible”.
While there are of course minor differences between individuals, they tend not to correlate with anything much, and are generally far, far smaller than humans tend to assume. Those terrorists don’t hate our freedom, those women aren’t naturally more emotional, and those blacks aren’t really savages.
I would not object to Bugmaster’s summary, although it seems somewhat overly specific.
What do you mean by “really”?
If you mean that if I go out into the world and measure savageness and emotionalness and terroristness (the freedom-hating thing is straw), I will not find an effect? This is a rather radical claim, and I would like to see such a study. My impression is that studies like that find that there are effects.
If you mean “really” to mean “genetically”, note that my “weak racism” would still be a valid interpretation. (For reference, “weak racism” is the claim that whether the effect is genetic or memetic or societal only matters for what kind of intervention to fix it with, and does not have bearing on whether the effect exists or is something worth talking about.)
Actually no. If one were to ask (Islamic) terrorists how they think society should be organized, one would find that their suggestions contain significantly less freedom than modern western societies.
By “really” I mean exactly what is usually meant: in reality.
Terrorists, as a point of fact, do not see themselves as enemies of freedom. They see them selves as defenders of civilization/morality/Islam,, heroically sacrificing themselves to strike a blow against the dark forces of America. They are willing to give their lives to protect their people from the forces of … well, whatever Bad Thing those dispicable americans did this week. Corrupting our women or spreading AIDS or starting wars without provocation. These are misguided, and any attempt to paint them as evil mutants is incorrect. These are facts.
Women, likewise, are not hormonal balls of emotion and unreasonableness, and black people have, on occasion, produced civilizations,and these days many of them have even integrated into white society. None of this is news. People are people everywhere, and your enemies are not monsters.
You keep stating facts that we all agree on, and straw-manning positions that no one here holds (keywords “enemies” “evil” “mutants” “genocide” “people” “monsters”).
You have failed to answer the weak racist’s position, or even acknoledge it’s existence. In case you missed it, the weak racist’s claim is “There are no inherent genetic differences in intelligence or antisocial behaviour between groups of people, but other heritable factors like culture make the differences between groups worth talking about anyways. Further, we should try to fix these problems (intelligence differences and antisocial behaviour being problems) with compassion and rationality, not hatred or denial.”
I am tapping out of this discussion.
Sorry if I was unclear, that was intended as a clarification of my beliefs, not an attack on yours. I am well aware that you do not hold any of the beliefs referred to; they were selected for their empirical falseness. I was treating them as examples of mistakes my heuristic is intend to prevent, and did not intend to imply that theyw ere held by any participant on this site.
As regards your “weak racist’s position”, as stated it is generally accepted here AFAIK. I have never claimed that culture does not cause “differences between groups worth talking about” and I am puzzled that you would imply I should have. What I have claimed and continue to do so is that we should, based on the current evidence, treat culture and upbringing as screening off race for the purposes of intelligence, violent tendencies etc.
EDIT:Perhaps we are talking past each other. I’m not claiming you can’t get any information from someone’s race, I’m saying that this is due to historical/memetic causes. It’s the difference between loaded dice and an opponent who regularly lies about the results, if you see what I mean.
I agree that obviously someone who goes around saying “Blacks are savages; women are incapable of reason” is a vile racist and sexist who should be shunned, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence: the fact that some people use alleged group differences as a pretext for their awful agendas, doesn’t mean that we can’t have a nuanced, evidence-focused, statistically-savvy discussion of which human traits correlate with other traits, and to what extent, and why. It’s certainly true that people are people everywhere, but it’s not very specific; as seekers of a detailed model of reality, we can do better.
For example, with math: Cohen’s d is a common measure of effect-size. It’s the difference in the means (averages) of two groups of things, divided by the pooled standard deviation (a measure of how spread out the data is): essentially, how many standard deviations apart the two group means are. This is an important idea because it means we have a quantitative measure of what it means for two groups to be different. In the absence of data and concepts for talking about data, it’s hard to make intellectual progress: one person might say, “Men are taller than women,” and someone else might say, “No way; there are plenty of tall women,” and they could go on arguing indefinitely. But if you actually have data, there’s no need to argue: you can just note that in this case d is observed to be about 1.41 (source), and that’s all there is to say; the data speaks for itself.
Of course, height is much easier to measure than something more abstract like “aggression” or “intelligence,” and I haven’t said anything about how we might determine what causes statistical group differences in height or anything else, but you see the general principle here: facts about humans can be investigated empirically. When someone like Nyan Sandwich says that they think there is an effect (between some human characteristic like ancestry or sex, and some other human trait), and that they’d like to see a study, they’re not necessarily doubting that people are people everywhere, nor expressing contempt for people different from them; they’re making a falsifiable prediction that, if you did the science, you’d observe that d is not near zero (although exactly what numbers are “near zero” is something that you’d want to ask them to clarify).
Of course. I was merely clarifying as to what I meant by the phrase “all humans are ultimately the same”. When nyan—who is currently trying to ironman racism, or something—questioned the claim that the beliefs I described were “really” wrong, I expounded my claim a little further. I am in no way claiming that we should ignore variations in intelligence, violence etc. I am claiming that it is more useful to assume that the minor differences between individuals do not add up to stereotypes, especially since humans have a well-documented bias towards assuming superficial attitudes are somehow inherent, especially with regards to negatively connotative ones of our political enemies.
TL:DR: a) please read the parents and b) you’re technically correct, but only nominally so, and due to bias it is more effective to ignore this.
Is that really true, though ? As far as I know, and I may be wrong, there are some flaws that are indeed attributable to race. For example, white people suffer from a lack of UV protection as compared to almost everyone else; Asians find it more difficult to metabolize alcohol; etc.
Granted, you are very probably right about intelligence and violence, though.
Sorry, I meant flaws in their personality or whatever. The psychological unity of mankind and all that. Your co-worker kicks his desk because he’s an angry person, you kick your desk because your alarm clock didn’t go off and you had to skip breakfast and then it was raining … or, more to the point, we have to keep on killing Them because those bastards wont stop trying to kill us. And so on.
And there I was thinking civilisation was memetic, not genetic.
In case you’re not just trolling, you should be aware that your comments might be better received if you were a bit less abrupt and toned down the snark.
No one said it was genetic.
People always assume that acknowledgeing a trait in a person requires you to have an explanation for it. And then they note that all possible explanations are politically controverisal, so they conclude that the trait does not actually exist. This is bad logic, as far as I can tell.
The fact is, race is a good predictor of things like civilization, intelligence, violence, etc. I offer no explanations.
What do you mean by “race?” I notice a lot of discussion below on this topic already, but the term is unclear to me, and I don’t see how anyone can usefully disagree or agree without this information. Some people use “race” to indicate loose groupings based around skin color, whereas others mean much more strictly a specific genetic group.
Incidentally, there is no canonical “race,” just generally-agreed upon loose labels that vary from person to person. Because of this, it is generally not useful for predicting anything, and should be avoided, I think. A “white person” from Sicily and a “white person” from Iceland do not have much more in common with each other than they might with a disparate other range of people, so it’s not a meaningful grouping (except perhaps when speaking of historical things). It is wiser to be more exact.
There’s the additional danger that you will be misunderstood, and that someone will (very reasonably) think that you are advocating simple-minded racism of a common sort. Saying “race is a good predictor of things like civilization, intelligence,” etc. is a fairly specific sort of social code, and if you don’t actually mean that “black people are dumb” or “Asians can’t drive,” (and I’m not saying that you necessarily do) then you should find another sort of phrasing.
yes, “race” as normally used is woefully underdefined.
Woah there. To the extent you can agree on a test for race, it will be useful for prediction. Obviously some tests (actual genetic heritage) will be more interesting that others “lol what’s ur skin color”. As you say:
Yes, agree. Let’s be specific enough so that we all agree which set of people we are talking about, and agree that that is a meaningful grouping. Then I think we will find that membership in that set will predict many things.
Saying that race is a good predictor of such things is roughly equivalent to saying “black people are dumb” or whatever (with suitable disclaimers of probabilisticness that really should not be needed on this site). Call that simple minded if you like; I’d rather be right than high-minded.
(and just-so it’s clear, racially-based (or anything-based, really) hatred is stupid and unproductive. compassion is so much nicer.)
I would suggest that most people do have a common test for race. It is something along the lines of, “To what extent does this person match a small set of specific physical characteristics?” For someone to be “black” in many places in modern America, it means that their skin tone is relatively dark, their lips are big, their nose is wide, and so on. But of course, this tends to fall apart under close scrutiny, and is complicated by a lot of cultural baggage, like the fact that “white” is the default, so those of mixed-race are often identified with (or themselves choose to identify with) their minority identity. A prominent example is President Obama, who has few of the physical characteristics of the stereotypical “black” person. This is why it is a very sloppy and pretty useless label, and even though most people agree on a “test,” it remains so.
Of course, it’s absolutely better to be right. But it’s very difficult to determine whether you are right or wrong without rigorous definition of your terms and inquiry. You think that race correlates with other traits, and I agree—but only with strong caveats and reservations, particularly when it comes to questions of causation. That’s why I began by asking: what do you mean by “race”?
EDIT: You appear to be engaged in several other discussions along these lines, so please just let me know if you consider this one is too parallel to the others to be useful. It can be difficult to explain yourself to several people all at the same time, I know.
See this for my full opinion on all of this. Anything I said that contradicts that is deprecated.
The quick version of what I mean by “race” is those things that are both heritable and clustered with visible and genetic markers. Not exactly the classic definition of “race” because it includes memetic heritage as well as genetic.
I will reply there. Thank you.
I thought genes had something to do with race, but feel free to clarify.
Across cultures?
Currently unknown, since they are strongly correlated anyway; race is also a good predictor of cultures.
Not really. There are people of just about every race in just about every culture.
I show you a picture of an asian person (if you’re good at distinguishing them, you notice they’re of Japanese ethnicity, specifically) that you do not know, and it is obvious that I’ve photoshopped clothing, background, and other environmental visual cues that could reveal that person’s culture. You only have their body frame and their face to work with.
What is your probability assignment that this person is of generic asian (japanese) culture, as opposed to any other culture (e.g. that of amazon hunter-gatherer tribes)? Is this probability equal to that for any other culture, as per an even-distribution hypothesis?
Look at the context. Racism only predicts violence and civilsiation inasmuch as it predicts culture, and culture predicts those things better—hell, you couldn’t get a razor blade between culture and civilsiation. So why does Nyan_Sandwich call himself a proto-racist?
The primary observation is one of race. You can visually see that someone is of asian race. You cannot immediately ascertain a specific culture without first learning and recognizing in practice behaviors strongly associated with that culture.
e.g. If you don’t know anything about japanese culture at all, you will not know that a person of japanese race who does not get upset when a stranger who is also japanese calls them by first name without honorifics is most likely not of typical japanese culture, nor will you understand why another does get upset in the same situation. Thus you cannot use their culture as a predictor, since you don’t have any signals that tell you which culture they’re part of. Race is much easier to use as a data point.
This is not obvious, nor does it follow trivially from any logical assertions I’ve seen yet. I’ve never seen claims either way backed by sufficient evidence to move my prior significantly in either direction.
That does not have the slightest bearing on what is most stronglty correlated wtih what, what the causal mechanisms are, and why on Earth Nyan-Sandwich would want to call himself a proto-racist.
“Want to”? Perhaps he merely thinks it’s an accurate description.
I call myself a racist in that I would predict differing values for intelligence, propensity to violence, etc based on observing someone’s race. I find it interesting that there are people who would not. The ones that are especially attached to racial equality have to go to all sorts of lengths to justify why race isn’t evidence of these things.
I call myself a proto-racist because despite being racist on matters of fact, I try to not make the (default) step from there to hatred or smugness. I think it fucking sucks that some people are disadvantaged in intelligence, or in ability to function as a member of civilized society. I think we should do something nice (help) instead of something mean (genocide).
Come on, man. Do you even probability?
If culture comes form acculturation , it doens’t come from genes, and therefore has nothing significant to do with race. The statistical correlations you make so much of aren’t worth making anything of unless they indicate mechanisms.
tell it to the statistics establishment. Methinks I can make better predictions using not-causally-explained statistics than I can without. For example, If I learn of a person who is black and american, I can predict that he is 5x (or whatever it is) more likely to be in prison. I can predict that he is more likely to be a part of that awful antisocial gansta culture.
Of course, if I then learn that at this very moment, he is wearing a cardigan, a lot of that goes away.
If you restrict yourself to causal models, you do very poorly. I might even be tempted to say “I guess you’re fucked then”
I don’t like this. Not sure why.
Could you clarify what you mean, here?
If you throw out information you have reason to believe is true but can’t explain the mechanism for your model is more coherent but less powerful. Does that make sense?
No. How exactly are you defining a causal vs a statistical model? What I find confusing is in the Newtonian physics limit of what you can know, I don’t think you can do better than a causal model, in some sense. I understand that it can happen that non-causal models can predict better if knowledge is not complete, I am just trying to find a way to state that formally.
Let’s talk about fluid dynamics. In FD, we have many equations that were determined by measuring things and approximating their relationship. For example, the darcy weisbach equation for drag in a pipe:
dP = fd*L/D*rho*v^2/2. This equation (and other like it) is called a corellation, or an empirical equation, as opposed to a theoretical model. To demonstrate the power of corellations, consider that we still can’t predict fd from theory (except for laminar flow). At this point, it’s just a lack of computing power, the use of which would be esentially the same as measurement anyways. There were times in the past, though, where we didn’t know even in principle how to get that from theory.Bascially, you need to be able to look at the world and describe what you see, even if you can’t explain it. If we’d taken the policy of ignoring corellations that couldn’t be understood causally, we still wouldn’t have airplanes, plumbing, engines, etc.
I don’t think these sorts of equations are good examples of what you are trying to say, since laws of physics and related equations are counterfactual and thus causal. That is, if I were to counterfactually change the length of the pipe in your equation, it would still predict the loss correctly. Invariance to change is precisely what makes these kinds of equations useful and powerful, and this invariance is causal. The fact that the equation is ‘ad hoc’ rather than deduced from a theory is irrelevant to whether the equation is causal or not. Causality has to do with counterfactual invariance (see also Hume’s counterfactual definition).
I think a better example would be something like the crazy “expert voting” algorithm that won the Netflix prize. I think in that case, though, given sufficient knowledge, a causal model would do better. Not because it was causal, mind you, but just because observing enough about the domain gives you as a side effect causal knowledge of the domain. In the Netflix prize case, which was about movie recommendations, ‘sufficient knowledge’ would entail having detailed knowledge of decision and preference algorithms of all potential users of the system. At that point, the model becomes so detailed it inevitably encodes causal information.
The people who supply statistics to people who are looking for causal mechanisms.
“American” isn’t a race. An american of any race has a n enhanced likelihood of being in jail, becaue the US imprisons a lot of poeple. Have I converted you to Americainism?
Culture is culture, not race.
Better than, say, poverty? Source please.
Make sure you’re distinguishing between the claim that P(intelligence = x|income = i) = P(intelligence = x|race = r,income = i), which would be that poverty screens off the effects of race, and the claim that P(intelligence = x|race = r) = P(intelligence = x), which is the claim that intelligence and race are unconditionally independent. The first claim is only relevant to nyan_sandwich’s claim if by “good” you mean “better than income” rather than “worth knowing.”
As it stands, both of those claims are pretty obviously false if you take a look an unbiased look at the data. Life is not fair.
The left-hand side of the first equation was supposed to be P(intelligence = x|income = i)?
Yes, it was. Thanks for the correction!
By poverty, I meant background, not income (which is determined by background to an extent, along with talent and so on.). Just a point of clarification there. And yes, I was claiming both that poverty screens off race. However, note that it was not merely intelligence—a much more plausible claim—but violent tendencies and “civilization”.
I’ve retracted the civilization thing because it’s not clear what it even means.
do you think violent tendency is less corellated with race than intelligence? (it depends where we are talking about. I would expect only a very weak link here in my hometown (vancouver), a strong link in US and european cities)
Well, historically, it meant the idea that they couldn’t produce or participate in civilizations, due to poor impulse control or whatever. But fair enough, that was always your least defensible claim.
As has already been pointed out, if you expect the link to be weaker in different societies, than the link is caused by society. If you compare people of different races raised and living in the same conditions, and there’s no difference, then racism is wrong. If there is a difference—for example, if black men are still just as likely to commit crimes—then, and only then, do you have a point. Consider slave-owners who refused to educate slaves because they were stupid—of course they were, when did you last meet a slave who could read or write?
Only then could propensity to crime be an inherent, genetic thing. And the inference that that was the case may still be wrong, for example if black people are bombarded by messages that they are supposed to be become criminals, or are otherwise influenced by the people around them. It would be very difficult to seperate the inherent genetic traits from those that are caused by percieved race.
I feel like we are talking past each other, so I am going to take this opportunity to state and steel-man the position of the modern “racist” in its entirety. (maybe this should be a discussion post).
Let’s start with something simple that I hope we can agree on. Group people by genetic heritage, and by social class, and by intelligence, and by antisocial behaviour. “Genetic heritage” is clear enough, I hope. “Class” is rather slippery in this analysis unless we are careful with it. Let’s pin it down right now to be talking about environment, not where a person ends up. We’ll see why later. Anyways, if you make these groupings, you will find that there is a lot of mutual information between them. That is, they are not independent. If you don’t believe this, assume it for now.
There are two ways we could take it from here, and I’m not sure which is right: We could note that race is conditionally independent of the others given social environment. Then we would conclude that race and class were caused by some other variable (who your parents were), and that only class causes intelligence and antisocial behavior. Note that we defined “class” in such a way that it cannot be caused by race, or cause race. As far as I can tell, this is the world as the non-racists see it. This could very well be the case.
Another way it could be is that race does impact intelligence and antisocial behaviour indpendently of class. This is what I’ll call “strong racism”. I would not be suprised if this were the case.
At this point, I hope I’ve said nothing controversial. The redefinition of “class” rubs me the wrong way, but I couldn’t think of anything else to call that node. Ok, let’s move on to the implications.
Let’s boot up the racist and see what he says about all this. The racist says “I don’t care which of the two it is, and here’s why:”. Uh oh, here we go.
Let’s do a little thought experiment: group someone’s genes by those that define who they are as a person, and those that define what they look like. Let’s say there’s no overlap between these, that is, that a given gene cannot both impact personhood and appearance. (there’s reasons to suspect overlap, but this is a thought experiment). Let’s further say that, for obvious reasons (subpopulations), having gene
A, which affects appearance, is quite strongly corellated with having genealpha, which affects personality. Extend this to most of the genes so that you can largely predict someones appearance genes from which cluster of personality genes they come from, and the other way around. Does it seem unreasonable to talk about which cluster you belong to without specifying which of appearance or personality you are refering to, given that you can say things like “people with visual trait X have personality trait Y”, which I hope seems reasonable itself, in this case. Note that this is the imaginary world where “strong racism” is correct.Ok, given that, if you’re still reading, let’s draw a parallel to the weak racist world where genes affect appearance and such, and memes affect intelligence and personality and such, and these factors are both highly heritable and highly corellated. (This is our world). When asked to comment, the weak racist says “Why should it matter whether a highly heritable component of who someone is is genetic or memetic or on the 13th chromosome or the 14th? Can’t we just point to the empirical clusters and say ‘that there is a meaningful cluster’, given that it does seem to cluster in a meaningful way?”. At this point the lines are open and the objections are coming in fast:
“But you can’t just hate someone because they belong to some disadvantaged empirical cluster”. Correct, in fact, I would say that we should say “that fucking sucks and we should go kick God’s ass for creating such an unfair world”.
“But there are places (like Vancouver) where, for selection and social reasons, race is independent of other things, therefore race is not interesting.” Yes, then no. In our imaginary strongly racist world, there are places where green eyes and black hair does not corellate with a ketchup fetish and kleptomania, but in most of the world it does, so “wiggin” is still a meaningful term. More generally, just because you can find a subset of your survey population that does not have the corellations you find in the whole, doesn’t mean you can reject the corellations in the whole. Especially given that if you look at enough subpopulations, you’ll find ones that go just about any way you like, so you might as well cherry-pick your data if you are going to do that. All such a non-corellation proves is that the variables of interest don’t have a common atomic cause (or that you have selection effects in your data).
“What about a guy who wears a cardigan and goes to harvard? If you learn he is black, should you then conclude he is stupid and violent like the stereotype?” No, because no matter how things go, who you became screens off any possible cause.
I’ve run out of things to say. At this point though, we know how to react to all of the possible cases:
There is no link between race and behaviour. ⇒ yay happy liberal world.
There is a link between race and behaviour, but it’s mostly memetic-historical. ⇒ That really sucks for some people, and we should go kick God’s ass with a memetic and social intervention.
The is a link, and it’s partially genetic. ⇒ That sucks, and we should go kick God’s ass with a hybrid memetic/social and genetic (when feasable) intervention.
There. Now we have comprehensive lines of retreat. Now and only now are we prepared to go take an unbiased look at the data, because none of the possibilities are scary anymore. I haven’t looked very hard, but I think it’s the third case. Not that I really care; I’ve got plans however it happens to be.
That’s modern compassionate steel-man racism. Sorry for the length.
I think childhood role models and so on is a part of one’s upbringing and “society”, don’t you?
Perhaps we are talking past each other. I’m not claiming you can’t get any information from someone’s race, I’m saying that this is due to historical/memetic causes. It’s the differenc between loaded dice and an opponent who regularly lies about the results, if you see what I mean.
“Upbringing”? “Background”? I’m OK with class, TBH, as long as we both know what we mean.
Here we go indeed. The racist is supposed to hold a belief abut how he world is, i.e. that intelligence and so on are as much racial characteristics as skin tone.
Fair enough. This is what our pet racist here believes is true, yes?
No no no no no.
Consider various brands of Wiggin.
For whatever reason, Wiggins are usually born to disadvantaged families, and must live off. ketchup and steal simply to survive. They often have trouble breaking these habits when they are fortunate enough to escape their poverty
The genes responsible for black hair and green eyes are heavily correlated with the ones causing kleptomania and a craving for ketchup.
Wiggins are constantly expected to steal and eat ketchup, and people generally behave as society expects.
Now, in all these situations Wiggins do, in fact, steal and eat ketchup. However, in the first case, once we know that this particular wiggin grew up in a well-to-do environment, we should no longer expext them to steal our ketchup. In addition, we should expect anyone who grew up in a disadvantaged home to act “wiggin-like”, not just those with black hair and green eyes.
In the second case, there is no need to consider the upbringing of a particular Wiggin, since they all have similar odds of stealing our ketchup. In this case, however, we can perform genetic tests to identify whatever genes may be causing this problem; and of course there is a case to be made for sterilizing Wiggins to prevent their criminal genes from spreading—especially to non-wiggins, who would interfere with our ability to judge the likelihood of ketchup-theft by a particular individual.
In the third case, we have something of a dilemma. On the one hand, we need to protect our ketchup from thieving Wiggins. On the other hand, assuming any Wiggin will try and steal it will only encourage them. In this case, while we realize that a wiggin-like appearance is a risk factor for ketchup-theft, we must strive to treat them equally; only hiding our ketchup if we know they already steal (and we should do likewise to non-wiggins.)
What this proves is that you should take location into account when estimating the odds of a particular individual acting like a Wiggin.
Not necessarily. If race determines violent tendencies and intelligence, then, while he may well be unusually intelligent, we should still be wary of him attacking us. Furthermore, we should increase our probability that he is unusually stupid for a cardigan-wearing harvard-goer, and achieved that status by some other means than intelligence.
I’m pretty sure that admitting that, if racists were right, genocide would be justifiable, is a line of retreat. But then I already admitted that, so whatever. The problem is that you can’t get from “I update my probability of a harvard degree downward when I learn that he’s black” to “racists are right”. You have to check if the environment is causing all or most of the differences.
Not entirely, since the environment where a particular Wiggin grew up, is affected by his parents’ genes.
This makes a lot of assumptions about psychology that are not at all obvious. For example, it might be that if Wiggins have less opportunity to steal ketchup, fewer of them will do it and eventually the strength of the expectation itself will decrease.
Well, yes. I was simplifying for clarity.
The entire point of the example is that the assumption that they want to steal ketchup is what causes it. If you assume they will try (as evidenced by hiding the ketchup when you see them,) then they will conform to expectations by trying. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of the purest sort.
To be honest, I just made this one up to have a third example, and also to show the level of self-reference possible. It’s much less grounded in reality.
I was basically drawing attention to that fact. Also Ockham’s razor is a great way to cut down on self-reference in these kinds of situations.
I specifically wanted a self-referential example because many posited real examples are self-referential in some way.
It could also mean that the link is weakened by different social conditions to different extents. It could be a selection effect on the kind of people who move to Vancouver.
In any case, even this statement has politically incorrect implications, namely that we shouldn’t be considering Black/Ebonics culture as equal in value to mainstream culture.
By “caused by society” I was referring more to a lack of role models, higher likelihood of a low-income upbringing, alienation due to societal discrimination etc.
However, I would indeed claim that any culture that is encouraging violent tendencies and discouraging academic success should be improved by any means possible.
In that case the argument of yours I quoted in the parent is almost a complete non-sequitor.
How so? You claimed I was dissing “Black culture”.
Oh, sorry. I was dissing “Black culture” and pointing out that my argument followed from what I thought you meant.
If the link varies amongst persons of the same race in differnt places, then it’s not that much to do with race, is it? Would you predict that an African-American offspring of two college professors living in New England was a violent imbecile?
Eh? What is this thing you call “race,” Earth Monkey?
We used to think the answer was obvious. You know, it’s obvious what “race” someone is, isn’t it? Until you start to look at the details.
Race is a cultural convention. There is a science of population genetics, and it isn’t about “race.” Rather, people use population genetics to infer the social marker called “race.”
I adopted an African girl. What “race” is she? What determines this? She has tribal markings on her eyes—or the scars from tribal medicine for conjunctivitis, hard to tell—but the markings are characteristic of her region and tribe, so someone who knows could tell where she comes from, as to the region.
I once had a friend tell me that my Chinese daughter was, of course, going to be more intelligent than the Ethiopian girl. The Chinese daughter is no slouch, intellectually, but her younger sister is definitely smart as hell. My friend was a racist. Lots of people are racist. That is, they believe that race is a biological or even a “spiritual” reality. He wasn’t being mean, he was just being ignorant.
What determines it? Ancestry. Race is basically a way of asking “who were your ancestors?” and accepting a blurry answer because, well, each person has a lot of ancestors! That version of race is obviously a biological reality, because people have different ancestries, even going back long distances, and the ancestry distribution can be geographically plotted. If you go back thirty generations for me, I would need to have about a billion distinct ancestors for there to be no inbreeding; the entire world didn’t have that many people! Europe, the probable source for most of my ancestry, only had about 50 million people thirty generations ago, and even then it’s unlikely that all of them are my ancestors- for one, many of them didn’t have any children! I’d estimate somewhere less than 10% of the total world population at any point since 1000 AD is in my ancestry, and the distribution of their contribution to my ancestry is pretty localized. It’s probable there’s many people out there who share none of my ancestry for a full thirty generations back, and there’s one who (probably) shares it completely.
Knowing she was adopted from Africa, odds are good that she’s mostly African. That’s only one step more informative than “human,” since it only gives you the archaic racial category- Negroid- which tells you as much as “Caucasoid” or “Mongoloid.” Ethnicity would give a much narrower picture- about one person in six is African, but only about one person in four thousand is Gurage.
Adding on the data that she’s Ethiopian muddies the picture- due to its northeastern position, Ethiopia has been the site of significant mixing, and there’s quite a bit of ethnic diversity: the primary ethnicity, Oromo, is only a third of the population- your Chinese daughter, though, most likely has significant Han ancestry (92% of the population of mainland China).
So, using the archaic terms and assuming she’s from one of the more prevalent ethnicities, your daughter probably has about 60% Caucasoid ancestry and 40% Negroid ancestry.
So, good IQ estimates in Africa are generally hard to come by, but Ethiopia supposedly has the world’s lowest average IQ, at 63 (administered in 1991, sample size of 250), and China is estimated to have an average IQ of 100. Working off that data (and assuming both groups have a standard deviation of 15), that gives a 96% chance that the Chinese daughter is smarter. Now, the Ethiopian data is spotty, especially the normality assumption- one of the pitfalls of historic IQ testing is that 0 scores are treated as 0s, dragging down the average, instead of an separate number of “people who didn’t understand the concept of the test.” It’s also not clear what selection effects adoption has; children that get adopted out are likely to not be representative of the country as a whole, and it’s hard to say if that would be a positive or negative effect. If we use the African American average IQ of 85 instead of the estimated Ethiopian averaged IQ, and still assume that we should use the Chinese average, we get a 76% chance that the Chinese daughter is cleverer.
Of course, given that they’re your daughters, there’s not much reason to guess; you could just get them both tested, which would be way cheaper and more informative than sponsoring another test of Ethiopian national IQ.
Yep. The most recent common ancestor of living humans lived at least a couple millennia (i.e. about seventy generations) ago. (EDIT: I’m not fully convinced that that implies that for any time t later than that, there’s at least one with you no ancestry at time t. I’m too tired to trust my cognitive abilities right now.)
Do you have any reason in particular to suspect that you and your sibling may have different biological fathers, or is the “probably” a 1-is-not-a-probability self-nitpick?
It’s not “1-is-not-a-probability” so much as it is “the base rate of this is not 0″; there’s also the chance that I was switched at birth (hospitals are much better at avoiding this now than they have been in the past). If my family signs up for 23andMe, then the probability will either shoot up towards 1 or drop down to negligible, but until then I’m going with the base rate.
Really during your life you haven’t encountered much net evidence towards either direction shifting your probability assignment away from the base rate, e.g. how much you look like your parents, whether you share some uncommon medical condition with either of them, blood type, etc.?
I have very little expertise in quantifying the effect of that evidence, and in the aggregate it doesn’t seem strong enough to make the probability negligible or large.
The strategic concerns here are also amusing to ponder. (There’s several reasons that 23andMe shows you 2nd and higher cousins with no prompting, but wants your approval before they show you first cousins.) The more one suspects being swapped at birth, the more important it is to find one’s birth family for health prediction. But, I’ve had my SNPs read, which I imagine screens off much of the benefit of knowing family history for medical conditions. It’s also less damaging to the existing family structure: most people who learn they were swapped at birth maintain their relationship with the parents that raised them, and also gain some sort of relationship with their genetic parents.
If you suspect infidelity, though, then the picture is very different. Again, learning your birth father tells you something about health, and may be a valuable social relationship (for one, they may not have any other children; in the swap case, there’s someone else in the mirror of your situation); it’s probably tremendously destructive to your current family arrangement, though.
Also, probably the effects of nurture contribute to keeping their average IQ that low; it seems unlikely to me that the fact that the average IQ of African Americans is 22 points higher is entirely due to the European genetic admixture in the latter. (EDIT: And I hadn’t even noticed you mentioned Ethiopians have lots of Caucasoid ancestry too!)
That is not what “race” means when people use the word. Race is a division of humanity into categories. Who determines the categories? Do those categories naturally occur? On what does the “race” category depend? Can “race” be identified visually? Can it be genetically determined?
Yes, if you divide people up into “races,” or into geographical population groups, and study their genetics, you can find statistical significance, but the two divisions will produce differing evaluations for individuals.
The classic way to identify someone’s “race” involves identifying one’s own group visually (and sometimes behaviorally, perhaps through dialect or language), and then lumping together those who don’t seem to match “my race” into other groups. That is why someone who is “mixed race” will be lumped into the “other group,” until the mixture becomes small enough to not be visible. How people perceive themselves is irrelevant to this process.
“Race” is a racist concept, naturally. The word “racist” is hot, and gets mixed up with racial chauvinism, but that’s distracting. I use “racism” to refer to the belief in race as an objective reality.
I wrote that population genetics was a reality. Race is not. It’s arbitrary, and race is not scientifically defined. The conclusion is a non sequitur. Race has been totally discredited academically, and that’s not just political correctness.
Odds are entirely that she is African, i.e., she was born in Africa. I know that her grandparents were born in Africa, in her tribal region. Beyond that, I don’t know. Probably it goes back further, but there are always strays.
If her ancestry plot maintains “African” location, say entirely, back, say, 20 generations, does that mean that she is racially “African”? I hope you’d know that this could give results that might seem preposterous to those who depend on visual identification of “race.”
The basic question is being ignored. How is “race” identified? As used, my “race” does not depend on where I was born. It depends on … what? Where someone else was born? Who, specifically? What lumps all these people together? And separates them from others, who might look quite the same?
“Archaic racial category.” So race is being used to define race? Those are just as you stated, “racial” categories, which assumes some identity based on … what?
Lucky guess about my Chinese daughter. The one-child policy impacts Han Chinese the most.
However, “Ethiopian” tells you almost nothing about “race.” Let’s start with this: Each tribal grouping in Ethiopia, by default, considers itself to be very different from the others. There are over seventy such groupings in Ethiopia, if we mark them by language.
Unlikely, in fact. She’s from the Kambata-Timbaro Tribal Region, her native language was Kambatigna. It’s a minor ethnicity, there are maybe a few hundred thousand Kambata.
In the U.S., she is readily identified by people as “Black.” She doesn’t look “Ethiopian” (which is popularly known through high-Arab ancestry general appearance). Is “Black” a race? What defines it?
Was that a test administered racially, or was it according to how and where the child was raised and tested?
What kind of intelligence was measured? Intelligence generally confers survival value, but the form of intelligence selected shifts with environment.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Ethiopian “national IQ” is totally irrelevant. Somehow, Ethiopia, with that supposedly low IQ, managed, almost uniquely in Africa, to avoid extended outside control, with an ancient and literate culture.
What I personally know is that, possibly contrary to stereotypes, the Ethiopian girl is highly competitive, she stars at whatever she does, the Chinese girl—raised here since she was under a year old—is shyer and suffers from the shadow of her younger sister. Both girls have no difficulty figuring out how to do what they want on computers. I have no confidence that IQ tests would tell me much of value, though at some point both girls will be tested to determine if they belong in “gifted” programs.
My racist friend knew nothing about my daughter’s ethnicity, he was judging entirely on “African,” based on his early experience with “Blacks” on the street in America (are they “African”?) , which wasn’t, shall we say, “positive.”
Sorry I ddin’t read all of your wall of text yet, but I find it fishy that you’re allowed to redefine “racism” to mean “non-hating acknowledgement of differences due to ancestry” but Vaniver isn’t allowed to use race in the normal sense of “what’s ur ancestry?”.
Genetically differentiated human populations defined by phenotype.
A quote from wikipedia:
“Forensic physical anthropologist and professor George W. Gill has said that the idea that race is only skin deep “is simply not true, as any experienced forensic anthropologist will affirm” and “Many morphological features tend to follow geographic boundaries coinciding often with climatic zones. This is not surprising since the selective forces of climate are probably the primary forces of nature that have shaped human races with regard not only to skin color and hair form but also the underlying bony structures of the nose, cheekbones, etc. (For example, more prominent noses humidify air better.)” While he can see good arguments for both sides, the complete denial of the opposing evidence “seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all”. He also states that many biological anthropologists see races as real yet “not one introductory textbook of physical anthropology even presents that perspective as a possibility. In a case as flagrant as this, we are not dealing with science but rather with blatant, politically motivated censorship”.
The input is the claim ‘Race is a cultural convention.’ You output the interpretation: ‘None of the phenotypic variations associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments.’ Given how transparently ridiculous the assertion is, one must at least take a moment to pause and reconsider whether the anthropologists’ claim is really what you take it to be.
Perhaps what is being denied is not the existence of morphological variation between human populations, but rather the conceptualization of these differences under the traditional concept of Race, with its assumptions of discreteness and of other markers of cultural and bio-diversity strictly mapping on to a small set of physiognomic markers. Perhaps what is also being asserted is that the precise boundaries between races, and how large or small a ‘race’ gets to be, is culturally constructed and varies across different groups possessing ‘race’-like categories. Is it more likely that anthropologists are speaking somewhat loosely and infelicitously, or that they think the existence of darker and lighter skins in different parts of the world is a Grand Alien Conspiracy?
Given how I might have said/believed something similar myself just a couple years back, I think I know what is meant. You get a photo of Colin Powell and he was about light-skinned as Bush—so since different people of the same skin-hue are one called ‘white’ and the other ‘black’, one thinks it might the division may be entirely a cultural artifact.
Also there’s no single characteristic which doesn’t fluctuate gradually across populations—so any grouping seems again entirely arbitrary.
But a visual that got me to understand the above view was too-simplistic was this graph here at Lewontin’s argument and criticism. Though any one characteristic wouldn’t suffice to divide humanity meaningfully into races, several characterics taken together in can form clusters...
So such groupings are in fact meaningful.
If you used to believe this yourself, then maybe you can explain to me what you mean(t) by ‘entirely a cultural artifact.’ Did you think that the people in question didn’t have different skin tones? That skin tone isn’t a genetic trait? That there was no correlation between a racial grouping and any phenotypic or genetic marker, like skin color? That genetic relatedness is confabulated in a grand game of make-believe?
“there’s no single characteristic which doesn’t fluctuate gradually across populations”—No, some traits have reached fixation in a population, or are totally absent. But I take your point. It’s still understandable that categories predating our modern, sophisticated notions of genetic variation would be controversial in their attempted modern reimaginings.
Colin Powell did not have a different skin tone than George W. Bush; yes—no categorization based on skin-color would actually put Colin Powell in a different category than Bush, while putting him in the same category with Condoleeza Rice: Relevant photo.
And whole groups that Americans called non-white (like Middle-easterners) looked likewise pretty white to me.
There was correlation with physical characterics obviously—much like you could say that Swedes are more often blonde, but that the actual lines drawn around the category didn’t really have anything to do with physical characteristics—same way that Swedish citizenship correlates with blondness but isn’t defined by blondness.
I’ve seen the photo. So your claim is that anthropologists, like yesteryou, once believed that 100% of ‘black’ people had darker skin than 100% of ‘white’ people, with zero overlap? This seems very implausible.
That’s no coincidence. American authorities typically group most Middle Easterners with Europeans as ‘Caucasians.’
But being of Swedish descent does have biological meaning and significance, albeit to a lesser degree than being of African descent. So what can be meant by the claim that race is ‘merely’ like being Swedish? Is it merely a fuzzy quantitative shift, not a categorical disagreement about what ‘race’ is or how it fits into the natural world?
Allow me to attempt to rationally reconstruct what the younger you and the straw-anthropologist believed. Based on the evidence that changed your mind, I gather that your old view was not that racial distinctions were nonexistent, but that they were biologically superficial. The obvious phenotypic variations very nearly exhausted the distinctness of each racial group. So when you advocate racialism, what you’re really trying to draw attention to is that race is more than skin deep, that there are many many genetic traits, some very significant, that break down along racial lines of various sorts. And this is indeed an important point, though framing it as a dispute over whether ‘races’ are ‘real’ is, to put it mildly, misleading.
I don’t know about anthropologists. I thought I explained that my yesterme saw the opposite of what you just said: saw that some people labelled ‘black’ had skins as light (or almost as light) as ‘white’ people. So I saw the dividing line between ‘black’ and ‘white’ to be utterly arbitrary, a line arbitrarily drawn in some continuum, and which best seemed to identify cultural not biological differences.
Keep in mind that my yesterme was a Greek boy, and had no occasion to have known about e.g. Afro-textured hair or different nose structures, etc. or any other collection of physical characteristics that together could form a cluster.
No, I’m not talking about mere superficiality, nor about how insignificant or significant the traits were. I’m talking about an utterly arbitrary line drawn between populations of people. As if someone had arbitrarily said that the numbers >72 are the “orange” numbers and the numbers <72 are the “purple” numbers.
With only one trait in question to divide the races, this judgement of mine would have remained valid—no matter if it’s something as insignificant as skin-color or as significant as IQ.
It’s the combination of more than one trait (e.g. skin-color AND hair-texture AND nose-shape) that makes racial visual identification a classification of actual observed clusters in the human species—again REGARDLESS of whether the traits are “significant” or “superficial” or “important” or whatever.
So you were guilty of two bits of ignorance. Instead of my ‘racial traits are all superficial’ (which sounds like a much more plausible error for multiculturalists, anthropologists, etc. to make), your view was that (a) ‘there is only a single phenotypic trait distinguishing each race from the others,’ and (b) ‘these traits exist on a continuum smoothly linking all the races.’
Since these two old views of yours are how you understand the claim ‘race is a cultural construct,’ you are then asserting that people who reduce race to a cultural construct are ignorant of, or in denial regarding, the fact that different racial groups have different common ancestors over long stretches over time, owing to reproductive isolation. So you are effectively asserting that the anti-racialists are guilty of doubting the existence of continents, mountain ranges, and other sources of reproductive isolation that could interrupt various continua. This seems like an extremely implausible claim to impute to others, whether or not you naively believed it yourself; so you’ll need to cite sources demonstrating that the people in question really did hold this view.
You are also asserting that the ‘race is a cultural construct’ crowd think that race is not merely superficial, but reducible to a single trait and nothing else. For instance, anti-racialists can allow that east Asians have an epicanthic fold, or can acknowledge that they have darker eyes and hair than Europeans, but cannot acknowledge both of these facts, since this would then be asserting that races are distinguished by clusters and not by single phenotypic effects. Again, this is an extraordinary claim, much more radical and ridiculous than my moderate suggestion that anti-racialists tend to think of this clustering as ‘only skin-deep.’ So again, you are obliged to provide some references demonstrating that this is the stance of anti-racialists, on pain of straw-manning.
People can see what I’m “asserting” by reading my own sentences. Any assertion that I actually make, you can quote word-for-word. All your assertions about my supposed assertions, I disavow.
Downvoted, because putting words in another man’s mouth is one of the tactics I least appreciate and least want to see in this forum. I consider it a form of slander.
Aris Katsaris, you’re the one accusing the field of physical anthropology (and other people sharing anti-racialist views of this sort) of promoting the unargued assumption “Race is a cultural convention.” and of dismissing the possibility of any alternative view. As yet, in this entire conversation you have provided no evidence of this; so I’ve instead had to focus on clarifying what you mean by this accusation. (I was not under the impression that trying to unpack and understand libel was itself libelous; but if so, I will tread with caution...) Your evidence that this is a plausible accusation, and your explanation of what this accusation means in concrete terms, both reduce to your own past experience of believing:
… which seems to be denying the occurrence of the mechanism (reproductive isolation) that blocks continuous variation. If this is not a fair characterization of your characterization of the anti-racialist position, then explain what you really mean and why my exposition is off-base. And again, quoting you:
… which seems to be denying that racial groups have more than a single trait in common. If this is not a fair characterization of your characterization of the anti-racialist position, then, again, explain how.
Good-faith use of the technique of paraphrasing in order to make sure you’ve understood what the other person has said is extremely important, indeed an indispensable one for successful discussion. Part of why it’s important is precisely because it’s so easy to misunderstand someone; so it’s my goal to be corrected by you, if I have misrepresented you, and paraphrasing serves both this goal (by making transparent my understanding of you) and the goal of clarifying what’s actually under dispute. If the sky is not blue, I desire to believe that the sky is not blue. But I cannot revise my model of your argument and beliefs if you do not articulate specifically what I got wrong, and what the right explication is.
You mistook my interpretation for a straw-man. (Note: Accusing people of ‘slander’ is rather less conducive to productive discussion than noting a straw-man fallacy and moving on; and simply pointing out the error and how it occurred is more conducive still.) But my ‘superficiality’ interpretation was an attempt to steel-man your position, and when you completely dismiss my steel men and assert they are not what you meant, it severely limits my interpretive options. Hence my more recent interpretations do make your position appear weaker. Perhaps that means you should reconsider whether your view is justified. Or perhaps that means I misrepresented you; in that case, it should be supremely easy to explain how I did so, and to clarify precisely how your intended meaning differs from what I said.
Given the downvoting I received, I updated upwards on the possibility that I was wrong on my interpretation of the thread, and reread it from the start. As such I’m retracting my accusation of you as a troll—though I still don’t appreciate some of your communication tactics (next time please just ask whether I’m asserting something), and I still can’t tell if you’re arguing in good faith, I can see how you may indeed be doing that, given some unclear/badly communicated bits on my part, including how I didn’t clarify that I wasn’t necessarily agreeing with all the parts of the quote I provided.
I’m at work right now, but later today, I will try to briefly “unpack” my position again, from scratch, hopefully bridging the inferential gap between us.
Given how much karma you have on this site, and how reasonable most of your comments are, I’m updating upwards myself on the chance that I’ve been using some discussion tactics that needlessly put people on the defensive. I apologize for not clearly distinguishing my paraphrases and counter-arguments.
Also, I don’t think that quotation you cited is totally crazy. It does need some defending and unpacking, and if you want to jettison some parts of it, feel free. I’m familiar with some of the excesses people on both sides of the racialism debate can fall into, and part of my motivation for pushing you on this issue was an honest curiosity to see if you have examples of the kinds of excesses that give you such a dim view of the anti-racialist side of the issue. Since this seems to be essentially a terminological dispute, I don’t particularly care about whether we retain use of the word ‘race’ or not; but I do care about the deeper-level misconceptions fueling the controversy.
I’ll try here to clarify some points better than I did last time, and then I’ll bow out of this thread.
First of all, in regards to the George W. Gill quote—my primary desire in providing that quote was to indicate forensic anthropologists consider ‘race’ to be more than a cultural construct. The last part of the quote, which refers to the opposing views, I should have left out as I’m not actually informed enough about the academia to discuss the extent that the ‘cultural construct’ view is politically motivated or not.
Now trying to unpack my own views on the ‘race’ and ‘cultural construct’ issue. Some plain facts both yesterme believe and I still believe: “Race” as the word is typically meant, is a grouping of people, visually identified as such by other people—in this they differ from things like e.g. ‘nationalities’ which can’t be visually identified.
So effectively “racial categories” is a map. But a map may be drawn either
A) in non-arbitrary lines, according to some natural shape (e.g. a map of continents) -- in which it identifies some reality that an objective disinterested observer would map in roughly the same manner. In which case we can call said model a natural model.
or B) it may be drawn almost entirely according to political/cultural and arbitrary criteria which no two observers would draw in the same way unless they both rested on the same cultural tradition. In which case we call it a “cultural construct”.
E.g. if someone is asked to divide human beings in two great categories according to biology that relates to reproductive functions, it’s easy enough to figure that the human species would “naturally” be divided into males and females—because there’s a biological reality under that. Such dividing lines, between people with XX and people with XY chromosomes is an obvious Schelling point.
But consider the calendar. The solar year is a natural enough division. A month so-and-so, roughly following the moon, but not quite. And a week or a century aren’t natural divisions at all—they’re dependent on cultural constructs. If you try to divide human history into eras, the cultural construct becomes even more visible. Even if you go with “Hellenistic” “Classical” “Middle Ages” “Rennaisance” “Modern era” in one corner of the world, you’ll have to go with “Heian” and “Edo” eras in another corner. And even limited in one area of the world, it’d all be about what we as history-readers are supposed to consider significant.
Now going back to the issue of race—both the current me and the yesterme believe that what human beings call “race” is between (A) and (B) -- to significant part a cultural construct, but not completely. The difference between me and yesterme is that some years back I considered race to be almost entirely a cultural construct, -- because I saw no clear clusters (and therefore no “natural” categories) for any one characteristic and I hadn’t yet visualized how a combination of multiple characteristics could form “natural” clusters when any single characteristic by itself did not.
Having now visualized this, I realize that such clustering can actually form “natural” racial categories, some of which will match up really with what people identify as such.
That having been said, race in America at least is obviously still to some extent a cultural construct—which is why e.g. partly-African partly-European descent people are much more often grouped with completely-African people than with completely-European descent people.
Now any former belief of mine doesn’t need to have also been held by other people in order to treat ‘race’ as a cultural construct. They need have ONLY considered the particular clusters that our society calls “clusters” as cultural constructs, rather than as naturally occurring categories.
This certainly doesn’t mean that they need have disbelieved in “mountain ranges” or “continents” or even that there exist populations of largely differing genetic characteristics—they needn’t even disbelieve that a natural map can indeed be drawn. They need only disbelieve that society’s current map is natural.
Now I’m bowing out of this thread. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by further elaboration of beliefs of my yesterme or even my current me on the subject.
No, I don’t remember accusing that field of anything. Since your comment begins with a blatant falsehood, I will not bother reading the rest of it. Downvoting it unread, and classifying you as a troll.
You seem to have forgotten how this conversation got started. Someone said “Race is a cultural convention.” You argued that this claim, although common in physical anthropology (you cited George W. Gill’s view to support this assertion), is false. I suggested a more charitable, steel-mannish reading of the “Race is a cultural convention.” thesis, and asked you what your own reading of this common multiculturalist thesis is. You responded “Given how I might have said/believed something similar myself just a couple years back, I think I know what is meant.”, and then proceeded to unpack your own earlier views. We’re still trying to do that unpacking, and unless you’ve silently changed your mind about the structure of this discussion, you’re still trying to give an exposition of what the anthropology textbooks in question, and most other people who support this view, have in mind.
My suggestion is that you have yet to give an interpretation of “Race is a cultural convention.”, and of the general anti-racial-categorizations thesis, that would plausibly have been held by academics, since the denial of more than one racial trait statistically clustering together, and the denial of non-continuous human variation, both reflect truly fundamental misunderstandings of human phenotypic and geographical variation. At the very least, a great deal of textual evidence would be needed to justify attributing such a strong, absurd thesis to so many anti-racialist people. Now: Where, precisely, do you disagree with my representation of this discussion? And where, precisely, do you disagree with my specific counter-arguments?
If by ‘troll’ you mean ‘someone acting in bad faith,’ might I suggest that your human psychological model is a bit implausible? (Or, possibly, you have become too personally invested and are not applying your own model carefully. I couldn’t say.) A corollary of Hanlon’s Razor: ‘Never attribute to trolling that which is adequately explained by good-faith misunderstanding or disagreement.’
It’s understandable that you’re angry; dissonance (both internal and social) inevitably makes us angry. Intellectual virtue isn’t about being stoically immune to such responses from our very primate brain; it’s about how you handle them when they arise, how you minimize the damage. Just a word to the wise.
Technically, libel.
Middle Easterners’ skins do look noticeably darker than those of typical native English speakers of European ancestry, to me. But then again, so do those of certain (but not all)¹ Italians, whom I don’t think any sizeable number of Americans would call non-white.
ISTM that there’s much larger variation in skin colours among Italians than among northern Europeans or among Middle Easterners. (All the people in this picture are Italian with no sizeable foreign admixture that I know of except in one case, and none is albino or anything like that.)
...and seven hours after I post this, I see a friend of mine whose skin is almost as pale as that of a typical Irishwoman and I remember that her parents are from the Middle East. God, I am full of crap certain times.
The problem is that when asked to justify that statement ‘Race is a cultural convention’ anthropologists in interpret it in the way you describe in your second paragraph, but they than proceed to use it in arguments as if it means ‘None of the phenotypic variations (except possibly skin color) associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments’.
That’s extremely strange and surprising, if true. Can you provide an example of this?
Care to name names?
Names of racists who believe other races are inferior? Racists who think other races are an active threat? Commenters who have claimed racists are evil mutants? I’m not sure what you could be asking that couldn’t be answered with, at most, a quick Google search or the phrase “all of them?”
Sorry for being too vague (I tend to be so when posting from my smartphone). What I was asking for, specifically, is for names of racists who “simply don’t think minorities are people”. My priors are that this is a straw-man, but if not, please excuse my ignorance of racist doctrine.
While I’m having a surprisingly hard time finding any quotes by racists (I’m mostly getting quotes about racism, which is of course very different,) I’ve definitely seen quotes from slave-owners and British Empire types talking about how the savages cannot control their impulses, have low inteligence and so on. Hitler would be the obvious answer, but it’s always hard to be sure what he actually believed - we still don’t know what religion he was, for instance.
Luckily, there are sites dedicated to calling out racists. Unluckily, they are often taken in by trolls, and of course the more intelligent/charismatic/educated racists are often filtered out.
Nevertheless:
source
Some other examples:
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
source
What do you mean by “people”?
Satisfying my criteria for moral consideration, I suppose. I’m not entirely sure what the details of these criteria are, but CEV would presumably extract this metric, along with the other components of my utility function.
People tend not to value killing one-of-us, where “us” can be defined very broadly or very narrowly, or anywhere inbetween. Is that one terminal value or many?
Well… IMO, not counting psychopaths as human amounts to a no-true-Scotsman fallacy.
The no-true-Scotsman fallacy applies to an argument when it excludes particular cases by rhetoric rather than for objective reasons. It does not apply to any particular drawing of category boundaries on its own.
I’ve always interpreted no-true-Scotsman as warning about the dangers of arguing by definition. At the very least, saying psychopaths are not human runs the risk of being argument by definition.
Well, I’d say it depends on the complexity of those objective reasons. “The way to carve reality at its joints, is to draw simple boundaries around concentrations of unusually high probability density in Thingspace. Otherwise you would just gerrymander Thingspace.”
(OTOH I think language should also depend on what you value: if your utility function is the number of inwardly-thrice-bent metal wires capable of nondestructively fastening several standard sheets of paper together at an edge in the universe, it’s handy to have a single word for ‘inwardly-thrice-bent metal wire capable of nondestructively fastening several standard sheets of paper together at an edge’, whether that’s a natural category or not. But you shouldn’t pretend it’s a natural category.)
“No true Scotsman”:
Not “No true Scotsman”:
The second is just using a nonstandard definition, not redefining the word to fit the line of argument, so does not fall under the No True Scotsman fallacy. Even if you’re gerrymandering reality ahead of time, it doesn’t count as No True Scotsman (At the very least, that isn’t even an argument yet, so can’t be a fallacious argument!)
“Everybody likes to watch a beautiful sunset”
“Fred doens’t. Mind you, he’s blind”.
“Then he doesn’t count”
True Scotsman or not?
Clearly not. As I noted upthread, True Scotsman requires that the redefinition is happening for rhetorical, rather than objective, reasons. The relevant reference class could have been picked out ahead of time, and I wouldn’t predict those two folks are going to continue that dispute.
I was referring to extinct species and subspecies of human. Of course psychopaths are human, but AFAIK they have always been a small minority.
The existence of blind people is not usually taken to disprove “human beings have sight”.
Indeed. Imagine someone arguing that past civilizations saw colour differently to modern humans; it makes a pretty god analogy for this discussion.
Maybe I just need to read up on the theory a little more, because I’m still quite confused. Is my CEV the set of things I would want given all the correct moral arguments and all the information? As opposed (probably) to be the set of things I want now?
I can see how the set of things I want now would change over time, but I’m having a hard time seeing why my CEV could ever change. Compare the CEPT, the Coherent Extrapolated Physical Theory, which is the theory of physics we would have if we had all the information and all the correct physics arguments. I can see how our present physical theories would change, but CEPT seems like it should be fixed.
But I suppose it’s also true that CEPT supervenes on a set of basic, contingent physical facts. So does CEV also supervene on a set of basic, contingent wants? If so, I suppose a CEV can change depending on which basic wants I have. Is that right?
If so, does that mean I have to agree to disagree with an ancient greek person on moral matters? Or that, on some level, I can no longer reasonably ask whether my wanting something is good or bad?
Yes. This needn’t be the same for all agents: a rock would still not want anything no matter how many correct moral arguments and how much information you gave it, so CEV is indifferent to everything. Now you and Homer are much more similar than you and a rock, so your CEVs will be much more similar, but it’s not obvious to me that they are necessarily exactly identical just because you’re individuals of the same species.
Technically this is just EV (extrapolated volition); then CEV is just some way of compromising between your EV and everyone else’s (possibly including Homer, but presumably not including rocks).
Thanks, I think I get it. Do you have any thoughts on my last two questions:
I’d say that would just mean that the two of you mean different things by the word good (see also TimS’s comment), but for some reason I feel that would just amount to dodging the question, so I’m going to say “I don’t know” instead.
I think you’ve got the right idea that CEV aims to find that fixed, ultimately-best-possible set of values.
If I understand correctly, CEV is mostly intended as a shortcut to arrive as close as possible to the same ethics we would have if all humans sat and thought and discussed and researched ethics for [insert arbitrarily large amount of time] until no more changes would occur in those ethics and the system would remain logically consistent and always the best choice for all circumstances and in all futures barring direct alteration of elementary human values.
There may be some conflation between CEV and particular implementations of it that were discussed previously, or with other CEV-like theories (e.g. Coherent Blended Volition). I may also be the one doing the conflating, though.
None of the people alive in Homer’s times is alive today. Dunno about how “fundamentally” different we are—I’d guess the difference between CEV and CEV is very small but not exactly zero.
Okay, I think I’m starting to get it. Is the idea that, both of us given all the correct moral arguments and all the information, an archaic Greek person and myself would still want different things?
Yes. For a more philosophical (and extreme) take on the issue, you can read Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. Warning: Nietzsche is made of hyperbole, so it’s often quite difficult to understand his substantive point.
In this case, the point is that the Greeks divided the world into good and bad, while we moderns divide the world into good and evil. What’s the difference? It is possible to bad at a sport, but acting within the norms of the sport, it is impossible to be evil. Imagine how your moral perspective would be different if you only judged people based on whether they were “good at life” or “bad at life”.
Indeed, I like Nietzsche’s philosophy as I know it from second-hand accounts, but when I tried to read his own writings I had to force myself through the pages and gave up. (Maybe I used a bad translation or something.)
ISTM that many (most?) LWers also divide the world into good and bad, so, to the extent this is a fundamental disagreement between values rather than someone’s confusion due to not knowing something/not thinking stuff through, CEV might be closer to CEV than to CEV!
BTW, I think I’ve also seen a two-dimensional model for that; I don’t remember how the quadrant other than “good”, “bad” and “evil” (people who aren’t terribly good at life, but at least try hard not to harm others as a result of their incompetence, even to a cost to themselves) was labelled—wimps?
Sounds like two axes, one going from competent to incompetent, the other from well-intentioned to ill-intentioned.
Yes. (Not sure about the exact labels on the axes, but that was the spirit.) IIRC, “good” was the quadrant (competent, well-intentioned), “bad” was (incompetent, ill-intentioned), “evil” was (competent, ill-intentioned) and I don’t remember the label on the remaining quadrant.
Yes. Apparently sam0345 (if that’s what he means by “his moral ideal”) thinks the two of you would still want very different things; wedrifid and I think you would want slightly different things.
Okay, thanks for taking the time to explain. This has been very helpful.
While we’re speculating anyway...
How different do you guess CEV and CEV would be?
[pollid:205]
a) The word “different” seems to be missing from the above.
b) I don’t k now how CEV is defined or whatt it is suppsed to be. Old-fashioned metaethics from that “diseseased discipline”, philosophy, seem much clearer to me.
C) I have only ever been saying that, as so far stated, such questions are imponderable.
It’s in the question; it seemed redundant to me to put it in the answers too.
I have read Pinker’s arguments in detail in his book. I don’t think Homer would have agreed. I bet this is not approaching Homer’s CEV, this is self-domestication of humans. In any case mind sharing how you implemented CEV checking on a mere human brain?
I meant, our behaviour being closer to our CEV than Homer’s behaviour was to his CEV, if that makes sense. (Are you thinking of anything in particular about Homer or was it an arbitrary example?)
I wouldn’t, but I can roughly guess what the result would be. (Likewise, I couldn’t implement Solomonoff induction on any brain, but I still guess general relativity has less complexity than MOND.) If I had no way of guessing whether a given action is more likely to be good or to be bad, how should I ever decide what to do?
I don’t think that makes sense. Also, I am pretty sure that Xenophon’s behavior (massacre and pillage the bad guys and abduct their women) was a lot closer to his moral ideal than our behavior is to Xenophon’s moral ideal.
Further, the behavior Xenophon describes others of the ten thousand performing is astonishingly close to his moral ideal, in that astonishing acts of heroism were routine, while the behavior I observe around me exhibits major disconnect from our purported moral ideals, for example the John Derbyshire incident, though, of course, Xenophon was doubtless selective in what incidents he though worthy to record.
“It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair. But when dogs shame the gray head and gray chin and nakedness of an old man killed, it is the most piteous thing that happens among wretched mortals.”
in context of Pinker’s observation.
Hmm… Well, the definition of a CEV is something like a point attractor in the space of a society’s moral attitudes. So it’s not too surprising if there is convergence of the society towards that CEV ie “moral progress” as you define it is to be expected. Though whether there is a point attractor as opposed to an attractor cycle (or chaotic attractor) seems to be an open question of course.
However, I’m struck by the thought that a Spartan society becoming “more perfectly Spartan” or a Taliban society becoming “more purely Islamic” over time would count as moral progress by the same token. So that the more thoroughly the slaves, women etc. are indoctrinated to accept the prevailing Spartan or Taliban norms, the “better” the society becomes. Does that also match your concept of moral progress?
No, CEV is the goals societies “moral attidudes” (eg slavery) are tying to satisfy, applied to the FAI’s best guess of the actual stste of reality (eg black people weren’t created by God with the purpose of acting as slaves to whites) and averaged out.
Well, is the indoctrination reversible? i.e., could those people to reject Spartan or Taliban norms if they heard the right arguments, as happened to Lukeprog? (Which suggests to me a heuristic to tell which of two memeplexes is closer to the CEV of humanity: is the fraction of adult A-ists who convert to B-ism per year larger or smaller than the fraction of adult B-ists who convert to A-ism?)
If you’re curious, you could try doing this heuristic on the Pew American religion survey which includes rich conversion data: http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report-religious-landscape-study-full.pdf (The results may surprise you!)
Thank you, I’ll take a look at that.
That seems like a good heuristic for telling who has the best missionaries, writes the cleverest arguments, or best engineers society to reward their believers. I’m not sure it’s a good heuristic for actually extrapolating volition.
Perhaps a superintelligent mind could create an argument that would convince any human of any belief. Why should such an ability have moral implications?
Well, such an ability would just as easily persuade you that the sky is green, so I’m guessing no.
That’s my point.
I know, I was agreeing with you. Persuasiveness is not the same as accuracy.
Yes, it probably is reversible. It seems quite plausible to me that for most pairs of human ideological systems A, B, there is some combination of arguments, evidences, life-experiences etc. that would cause a randomly-selected adherent of A to switch to B. (The random selection would tend to avoid the most fanatical and committed adherents, but I’d guess even most of them could probably be “deprogrammed” by the right combination of stimuli.)
However, if you want to count the actual numbers of conversions happening right now, the statistics are messy: apparently just about every religious group (including the group of non-religious) claims they are the “fastest growing”, all with some empirical justification. I found this Wikipedia article highly amusing in that context.
But what’s the point here? If we are talking about humanity as a whole, then this may just show that there is no single CEV for all human societies everywhere. Instead, there are a huge number of attractor points in the moral attitudes space, and any given society tends to converge to the nearest attractor point… unless and until a major shock throws it out again (or breaks up the society).
Global humanity as a whole may perhaps now constitute a single society, and be moving towards the “liberal democracy” attractor point, which therefore defines a local CEV… but only because it’s already in that basin of attraction. And even that’s empirically more dubious than it was twenty years ago (I don’t see China, Russia, or most of the Islamic world still moving that way, and a lot of Western countries have themselves become distinctly less liberal / democratic in recent years.)
Note that if at the beginning of the year A had one billion adult adherents and B had one hundred, and since then 160 of the former have converted to B and 60 of the latter have converted to A, my heuristic would still point towards B being wronger than A even though B has doubled in size and A has stayed pretty much the same. (And anyway, I was thinking more of memeplexes who have existed for at least a couple of generations—with new ones it would be much more noisy.)
I don’t think violence has declined. State violence has increased. Further, since we are imprisoning a lot more people, looks like private violence has increased, supposing, as seems likely, most of them are being reasonably imprisoned.
Genghis Khan and the African slave trade cannot remotely match the crimes of communism.
And if it has declined, Xenophon would interpret this as us becoming pussies and cowards. Was Xenophon more violent and cruel than any similarly respectable modern man? Obviously. But he was nonetheless deservedly respectable. We rightly call the ten thousand brave, not criminal.
Social acceptance of brave, honorable, and manly violence has greatly diminished, and so brave, honorable and manly violence has greatly diminished. But vicious, horrifying, evil and depraved violence, for example petty crime and the various communist mass murders, has enormously increased.
This doesn’t follow, unless by ‘violence has increased’ you mean that there are more incidents of violence. But this would be consistant with violence being extremely rare. So are we imprisoning people for violent crimes and at a higher rate?
I have the same questions about your claims of increased state violence. Has the rate of state violence gone up, or just the number of incidents? It’s the former we’re interested in.
I suggest the downvoting was due to quibbling about the word “moral” when:
The usage was peripheral, the more active phrase there was “technological progress.” But “moral progress” does have a referent, morality is merely as perceived, it’s subjective, that’s all. Konkvistador, “moral progress” is something made up by Earth monkeys, and only applies to Earth monkeys dealing with Earth monkeys.
It may have no meaning for one who is not an Earth monkey.
The conclusion, the point of the quote, was ignored. That conclusion is, at least, interesting (to this Earth monkey!).
Yes. Even the point of the quote is subjective. “Should” could imply morality, i.e., we “should” take it personally, maybe we are “bad” if we don’t.
However, it can be interpreted to mean something objective. I.e., we “should take it personally” means that we have been affected personally.
We have a choice, reading, to derive value and meaning, or to criticize and find fault. We may also see both, i.e., value and error, and both of these depend on the interpretive choices we make. The statement is just a pile of letters, without the meanings Earth monkeys supply to their arrangement.
It is highly likely that every down-voter was an Earth monkey.
No comma between “of” and “Earth”? ;-) (Just kidding. I didn’t downvote.)
More seriously, it looks like someone’s downvoting the entire thread. (I’m upvoting most of it back to 0.)
One form of moral progress that doesn’t look the same as “random walk plus retrospective teleology”, is the case where some inconsistency of moral views is resolved.
For example, some dudes say that it’s self-evident that all men are created equal. Then somebody notices that this doesn’t really jive with the whole slavery thing. So at least some of what gets called moral progress is just people learning to live up to their own stated principles.
Another way of looking at it is that there is little difference between the terminal values of me vs a mediaeval lord, but the lord is very confused about what instrumental values best achieve his terminal values (he wants the best for the peasants, but thinks that that is achieved by the application of strong discipline to prevent idleness, so values severe discipline).
By this reasoning, abolishing slavery was moral progress, but declaring that all men are equal was moral regress.
If the fallacy is slavery, then moral progress. What if the fallacy is that all men are created equal?
By your measure, hypocritical values dissonance, we morally regressed when some dudes said it was self-evident that all men are created equal, and have indeed been morally regressing ever since, since affirmative action and so forth are accompanied by ever greater levels of hypocrisy and pretense. While the abolition of slavery reduced one form of hypocritical values dissonance, other forms of hypocritical values dissonance have been increasing.
Example: Female emancipation, high accreditation rates for females. Most successful long lived marriages are quietly eighteenth century in private, and most people, whether out of sexism or realism, quietly act as if female credentials are less meaningful than equivalent male credentials. Your criterion is neutral as to whether we do this out of sexism or realism. Either way, by your criterion, it is an equally bad thing, and there is a mighty lot of it going on.
Not really. It was previous notions of class/race/nationality granting moral worth that were incoherent morally.
Because he’s not a monkey, he’s an ape.
I downvoted because it implies moral progress is meaningless, rather than nonexistant.
Of course, I would probably downvote a bald claim that moral progress doesn’t hapen anyway.
Cliff Pervocracy
While I think there’s some truth to this, it’s easy for me to come up with examples of things I’ve done that never made sense to myself.
Fair point. I can’t really think of anything I’ve done that didn’t make at least some sort of sense at the time, but I can think of at least one thing I’ve done where I seriously have to strain to see how it ever could have made sense to me (though I remember feeling like it did). Looking back on it, I feel like I was carrying the idiot ball.
— Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
I’m uncomfortable with Stephenson’s take here* on hypocrisy because I think it neglects context. His implied analysis holds in the context of a homogeneous culture, but fails badly in a relatively heterogeneous one, and here’s why:
In a heterogeneous/multicultural society, the moral stances you publically advocate signal a frame for others, who hold different values, to engage with you. They tell others about what topics to avoid in discussion, how to predict your behavior, and so on—generally, how to behave politely and get along with you.
In the heterogeneous society, the hypocrite is wasting other people’s time, in forcing unnecessary behavioral accomodations on them.
*: It’s possible that Stephenson was entirely aware of what I’m saying here, since he’s describing only the semi-closed neo-Victorians, but those who quote him take the description at face value.
I read that as a point against multicultural society.
The word “multicultural” deserves a better analysis. What exactly is a “culture” (besides that for many people it is an applause light), which parts of culture should we preserve and which are free for optimization, whether we can measure a utility function of a culture and whether that function itself is culture-specific, whether cultures can be extrapolated, how much can human cultures be different, et cetera.
The important part is that we are speaking about human cultures, which puts some limit on how different they can be. We should not discuss them as if there is no such limit, as if an arbitrary set of values can be a culture, and each such set is automatically an applause light.
To the extent that humans from different cultures can share values, there can be common values even in the multicultural society. And there can be cross-cultural hypocrisy with regards to these common values.
In other words, we should not model humans from different cultures as incomprehensible aliens. Funny thing is that there two opposite political reasons to do so. The obvious one: racists/nationalists/etc. try to describe the other people as completely alien, to make it easier to explain why we should avoid them. The more subtle one: politically correct people sometimes also describe humans from other culture as aliens, just to signal how tolerant they are; because tolerance to an alien is more difficult, and therefore more noble, than tolerance to a mere human.
In yet other words, the “multicultural” society—as its greatest proponents and opponents imagine it—does not really exist. There is just an interaction between different human cultures, which includes a lot of differences, but also a lot of shared values.
As far as I can see, “multiculturalism” is the belief that we should celebrate and encourage diversity because we are all really the same.
If one looks at the competing Christological doctrines of early Christianity—Arianism, monophysitism, monothelitism, Marcionism, Patripassianism, Nestorianism, Chalcedonianism, and so on, from a modern atheistic perspective it all looks insane. Even leaving aside one’s presumption of the non-existence of the relevant supernatural entities, it still looks like a mass of confabulation accreted like a pearl in an oyster, around a seed of irritation resulting from thinking about how Jesus could have been both a man and God.
So, after perusing that section of the Wikipedia page I just linked, look at the first paragraph of Wikipedia on multiculturalism.
Doesn’t it look just as insane? Is “a society at ease with the rich tapestry of human life and the desire amongst people to express their own identity in the manner they see fit” any more meaningful a string of words than “the human nature and pre-incarnate divine nature of Christ were united as one divine human nature from the point of the Incarnation onwards”? What would the bishops who argued about the latter at Chalcedon have made of the former? Never mind agreeing or disagreeing with it, what would it even mean?
What exactly is “a society at ease with the rich tapestry of human life”?
Am I “at ease” with cultures that have a hobby of cutting small girls’ genitalia? Hell no! Does that make me an intolerant racist, or whatever is the most appropriate boo light today? So sue me, or at least make sure I will never get a job at academia!
Multiculturalism is an applause light, until you look at specific details. Then it sometimes gets ugly. Of course, to remain “politically correct” you have to stay in the far mode, and ignore all the details. It’s easier that way.
Just like “desire amongst people to express their own identity in the manner they see fit”. Again, if your desire includes a desire to cut small girls’ genitalia, then I think those girls deserve to have their opinion heard too. If that is against your sick religion, again, you have the choice to sue me, criticize me in media, assassinate me, or all three things combined. (In a sufficiently “politically correct” society you literally could do all three suggested things, and then have some educated people excuse your actions.)
This all is a completely different thing from when people from village X decide to wear robes with red flowers, and people from village Y decide to wear robes with blue flowers. Or if Americans pour ketchup over all their foods, while Asians use the soy sauce. With that kind of culture I have no problems. I also have no problems with folk songs, operas, paintings, or books (assuming those books don’t preach something I find repulsive).
It is bad that these two things are often mixed together under a wide umbrella of “culture”. Then it makes people objecting to genital mutilation seem like brain-damaged bigots obsessing about the right color of flowers on everyone’s robes. And that is pretty dishonest. And evil.
To all those claiming that multiculturalism has no downsides, I would like to point out that “equal time for creationism” sprung from and used multiculturalism; the notion that you can justify anything using religious freedom can and does lead to Bad Things being justified thus. AFAIK no real society is perfectly multicultural, but that’s poor implementation; a bug, not a feature.
EDIT: I am in favour of all the Good Things that spring to mind when we hear “multiculturalism”, and do not advocate the Bad Things associated with opposing it (ie a single monolithic and enforced culture.)
Not outside the US it didn’t
Are you saying it didn’t happen outside the US or when it did it had some other origin?
The former.
That’s false. It happened in 1980 in Queensland, and 1985 in Turkey (the latter continuing to the present). Just a few years ago in Switzerland, many schools had science books that gave equal time for creationism, but it was controversial and ultimately rejected.
While a separate issue, many Islamic countries ban the teaching of evolution or teach an “intelligent design” friendly version.
Exactly which multiculturalist do you think are “at ease” with that behavior?
Assassination is not really an accepted political move in Western Europe or the US, which are the domains of political correctness. I challenge you to find a recent murder in either region that was not prosecuted by the government authorities for “political correctness” (as opposed to established legal doctrines like insanity).
About as many as there are environmentalists who are “at ease” with the mercury content of compact fluorescent bulbs, while campaigning to abolish incandescents. Female genital mutilation is a cultural practice, but instead of saying that this cultural practice is wrong and should be stopped, which a multiculturalist cannot do, some of them say that “there are cultural and political aspects to the practice’s continuation that make opposition to it a complex issue”, or that “the ritual of FGM has been the primary context in some communities in which the women come together”, or that colonial attempts at eradication constitute “interference with women’s decisions about their own rituals”, or that “its apparent victims were in fact its central actors”. Quotes from Wikipedia.
A multiculturalist could take a different tack and argue that FGM is not a cultural practice, making it permissible to oppose. However, since it is a cultural practice, and is clearly understood and explicitly stated by those who practice it to be a cultural practice, that isn’t so easy to maintain. But I doubt impossible; the insanity is not peculiar to philosophers and theologians, but is bred whenever one is obliged to cling to both sides of a contradiction.
On both points: what the flaming Hell are you talking about? Snopes says,
(Wiki-link added.) See also the information—in particular, the graph of lifetime mercury emissions for incandescent vs flourescent—at Energystar.gov.
So the comparison with FGM seems truly bizarre. I also don’t think you have the slightest clue what you’re talking about when it comes to FGM and multiculturalism—in particular, I doubt you bothered to follow the link to the Lynn Thomas source. It seems straightforwardly descriptive. Feminists sometimes criticize attempts to impose a ban in African nations because bans tend not to work and may turn this horrific practice into a symbol of resistance to imperialism. I gather people have had more success by talking to mothers about the health risks. So this seems like a fine example of how:
*understanding other cultures can help you talk to people and find common values
*conservatives talking about feminism or “multiculturalism” often look really stupid.
And yet they have a problem with adding the trace lead amounts of lead to electronics necessary to prevent tin whiskers.
We are seeing political memes here, standard stories or arguments. First, the mercury in CFLs compared to the impact of incandescents. That one is just plain silly, and hairyfigment cited some good sources. Sure, mercury in CFLs is a matter of concern, but in the real world, we must compare choices until we have better ones.
As to Female Genital Mutilation, I have a perspective on it, as I have a daughter from Ethiopia, a place where female circumcision is practiced, and there was some suspicion that she had been circumcised. (Believe it or not, it’s not always easy to tell. The ultimate professional opinion was, No.)
Is it “mutilation” or is it a “cultural practice” or does it have some other purpose?
There are all kinds of variation in the process. But to start, what about “Male Genital Mutilation,” i.e., circumcision, which is practically universal in Islam and Judaism? Female circumcision is controversial in Islam, and, apparently, was a pre-Islamic practice that was allowed, the Prophet is reported as saying, “If you cut your women, cut only a little.” It was never considered an obligation by sane Muslim scholars.
The horror stories that are told about FGM are far, far from a “little.” Probably the soundest approach to alleviating suffering here would be education, and that is exactly what is going on in Ethiopia.
Someone who imagines that there is some moral absolute here is dreaming. It looks like a cultural absolutism is being suggested. This culture is good and that culture is bad. Personally, I’m horrified by the extreme stories. However, I was also circumcised as a boy, it was routine, and my parents were Christian. And that has gone in and out of fashion over the years. Because my older boys were born at home, they were not immediately circumcised. There were problems, later, and eventually they went through the procedure. And it was a real problem, the doctor botched it. It would have been trivial at birth. Does that mean that boys should be circumcized?
No. It may indicate that if it’s going to be done, doing it earlier is probably less traumatic, for technical reasons. And doing it is largely a matter of cultural preference, and people do get crazy over Male Genital Mutilation.
Would you mind describing the Schelling fence between those two things.
Policy debates should not appear one-sided. There are pluses and minuses to multiculturalism. Other cultures have good and bad aspects, and the default for humans is to reject anything out-group, good or bad. So a shove in the direction of the ridiculous caricature of multiculturalism above would generally be a good thing, on the whole.
Compared to what? If you have a sitation, where de facto, severla cultures are under a single politcal authority with a predominant culture, there are only so many things that can happen:
1) The minority culture(s) are physcially expelled—pogroms.
2) Wall are built within the state—apartheid, ghettos
3) The minority cultures are foricibly homogenised or converted
4) The minority cultures are tolerated.
I think it is pretty clear that 4 is the least ugly. Even if it needs a little bit of (3) to work. Which is where most of the controversy comes from.
In point 4 you misuse the word pogrom, while deportation may include pogroms those aren’t a necessary feature. And even when violent they often in the long term solve many difficult problems and resolve sources of conflict, see the population exchange between Greece and Turkey.
5) The multi-ethnic state is broken up along ethnic lines
This can occur violently or relatively peacefully as in the dissolution of Czechoslovakia or the independence of Slovenia. Other times they are accompanied by violence see the independence of Ireland or Greece or some anti-colonial movements. This was the ideal in large part was behind the self-determination. See also self-determination.
6) The state is already practically mono-cultural, simply don’t allow immigration where the immigrants are unlikely to assimilate
Now depending on the features of the society option 6 might mean practically no immigration (Japan) or relatively high levels (19th century France or America for white immigrants) depending on various factors.
I could have included extermination, and I could have been accused of baising the issue even more
That is the extreme of (2). Aparthied-era SA included “independent homelands”.
I was assuming that it isnt. You cant’ solve the problem of de facto multi-ethnicity by wishing it had never happened.
Extermination was indeed historically used by states (especially in newly conquered territories) but to me it seems to be a separate solution from deportation or expulsion. Sometimes however deportation was used as a cover for extermination.
By formulating it as you did originally you imported negative connotations. By picking this particular example you again import negative connotations. Many of these are pretty reasonable. Independence imports positive connotations, many of these are pretty reasonable. But you seem to refuse to accept the latter. Why?
In any case I think there is a big difference between setting up say a Millet system or some other kind of separation in the same state and dissolving the state entirely and have each cultural community be sovereign.
Isn’t this a narrow perspective? Just because this isn’t a solution to existing multicultural societies like say the US it doesn’t mean it isn’t a viable solution for many other societies (such as say Japan or Finland).
It isn’t a solution for the multi-ethnic societies of Finland and Japan because they are not particualrly multi-ethnic.
I guess you are right but it is a solution to the “what to do about cultural diversity” question. And you should add a disclaimer that not all states are multicultural.
If you don’t have cultural diversirsity, there is nothing to do about it. Do you tell insomniacs to “sleep on it, it always works for me”?
If you don’t have any asteroids crashing on your planet, there is nothing to do about it.
Sure, in effect, we’re not randomly throwing asteroid-cracking missiles out in empty, asteroid-less space.
We’re certainly preparing for it and putting in place pre-emptive countermeasures, though, AFAIK.
Japan and Finland have effective strategies for dealing with cultural diversity, namely: Pre-emptively apply social measures to prevent any cultural diversity from reaching critical mass where it starts having social weight.
Against something that is universally assumed to be a Bad Thing.
..and what kind of thing is that?
Gosh. There’s a lot of people who know that DIversity is Bad (and not just that some specifics things that some ethinicities do that aren’t neecessarily opposed by some form of MC are bad).
Wow. I’d really love to see the chain of reasoning that went from “For dealing with cultural diversity, preventing it altogether is an effective strategy.” all the way to “Cultural diversity is morally wrong and should be prevented at all costs!”
Or were you just assuming that such were my beliefs because I was giving a counterargument to one of your soldiers?
Note: When I get strawmanned, ad-hominem’d or targeted with sarcasm and satire, I do get confrontational. The above tone is intentional, for once.
If you don’t think it is a bad thing, why do you need a strategy to prevent it?
It’s the most effective strategy because it incurs the least cost for the most effect. It deals with it quite nicely, and there is very little social disturbance.
Whether I think it’s a bad thing, or need a strategy, is irrelevant. Japan has implemented such a strategy. I can’t speak for Finland’s current state because I’m very misinformed on that country, I’ve learned recently.
Indeed, you won’t come up with and implement such a strategy if you think the costs of cultural diversity will be greater than the opportunity costs of not having any + costs of preventing it. This doesn’t prevent anyone from noticing, naming, and perhaps even analyzing this strategy once it has already been used and shown to the world, even if we disagree with the reasons behind its implementation (or disagree on the specific meaning of “dealing with”—for them, not having any is just as much “dealt with” as for us a long-term, self-sustaining/reinforcing, mutually-beneficial ecosystem would be “dealing with” multiple cultures).
If “disturbance” (not “change” or “revitalsiation”) is a cost, and if homegeneity is a benefit...yes. If homegeneity is bad, and revitalisation is needed, the opposite follows. You don’t have a neutral c/b analysis there, it is loaded.
You could do a polictically neutral analysis in terms of how man dollars or yen immigration brings in, but it is by no means guaranteed to come up with zero as the optimum figure.
If you don’t have the flu, being told to stay indoors to avoid it is useful.
Only because you’ve chosen the alternatives in order to favour it. “The melting pot”, as a description of America’s former waves of immigration, does not fit any of them.
“(4), oh, and with a little bit of (3)” is glossing over the problem, trying to save an unsalvageable idea by changing the words used to express it. Besides, a multiculturalist would give you stick for using the word “tolerated”, which is insufficiently accepting these days. Try “celebrated”, which suggests happy friendly things like colourful street parties and festivals, framing cultural differences as dressing-up games.
So what does it fit? (2) was tried at one time—Jim Crow. The US has not has a sngle consistent approach.
Are you sure it is not a differnt idea? Are you saying anythign with the label “mutlicuralism” is unsalvageable, irrespective of what it is*?
Some subtypes of MC-ist might. But werent you just saying that 1-4 are not exhaustive?
An alternative not on your list: immigrants aspiring towards assimilation into a single culture to which they give their allegiance, superseding their original one, of which nothing remains but the dressing-up aspects.
I am saying that the concept described by the Wikipedia article I linked, which seems to me an accurate statement of what “multiculturalism” is generally used as a name for, is incoherent. Privately using the word differently doesn’t change that. “(4) with a side order of (3)” looks more like a rationalisation of the incoherence of the original concept than a decision to use the word to name something else.
ETA: On further thought, I might be being too inflexible. One might certainly present a model of how people of multiple cultures should coexist as “multiculturalism”, even if the model deviates substantially from the current one that goes by that name. One would, in effect, be presenting the model as a new interpretation of a deeper, unchanging fundamental concept, superior to the previous interpretation.
Certainly, that describes the history of Euler’s Theorem: mathematicians coming to a better understanding of the underlying concepts and finding better expressions of mathematical truths. But then, there is an unchanging objective reality in mathematics. In sociology, not so much. Instead, one has to adopt the methods of religion, presenting a new concept as merely a better understanding of the old.
In a different subthread*, the line of reasoning went that this does not positively “deal with” multiculturalism, but rather eliminates or prevents it. This seems to be part of what is happening in Japan; IIRC they deliberately filter immigrants for willingness to blend in, though they do so in more politically-correct terms.
* This one, though most of the replies that are most relevant will probably be hidden, since it appears Peterdjones is being heavily downvoted on this topic for some reason.
“let the problem solve itself”..
How do you have a policy of people just voluntarily doing what is most convenient? Can you eliminate crime that way?
ETA:
All I can see is you stating that MC construed in a particular way has consequences you don’t like. That isn’t incoherence
I’m not familiar with the history of the migrations to the USA of the 19th and early 20th centuries beyond a quick look at Wikipedia, but from that, it looks like it pretty much did solve itself. There was friction. It passed.
What has that to do with this discussion?
Weren’t severe restrictions on immigration, practically closed borders, instituted during the early 1900s?
It depends a bit on ethnicity. Quotas were in place that favored Northern and Western Europeans over Eastern and Southern (Mediterranean) Europeans. And anyone from Europe was favored over Japanese or Chinese—thus things like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1880.
Those favored ethnicities were also those closest to the existing elites’ desired American culture, which kinda makes the point: they felt the more dissimilar ethnicities couldn’t be absorbed at their existing immigration rate.
Bussing, voter registration drives and reservations are all quite artificial and politicaly driven. Even pledging allegiance is a mildish form of (3).
ETA: Incidentally, you have throughout been associating multiculturalism with immigration, but minority aborginal populations can be relevant as well. Among other things.
It is a way of making the point that hoping that problems solve themselves is hardly ever a workable solution to anything.
You don’t actually need one—people tend to do what’s most convenient on their own. An attempt at policy tends to just get in the way.
Sadly, no; crime is often what is most convenient.
People tend to do wha’t convenient for them, left on their own. Hence crime.
Yes, and assimilation is frequently most convenient.
Given sufficient opportunity, yes.
I don’t see where you see that. Rather, RichardKennaway seems to be saying that MC construed in the usual way is incoherent. I’m not seeing any mention of consequences.
Yes, he’s said that it is incoherent. He hasn’t said why. Sayign he doesn’t like FGM doens’t demosntrate incoherence.
Perhaps I should have made more explicit references back. The incoherence that I see is what I was talking about when I originally said this:
It’s that basic contradiction:
We are all different! Diversity! CLAP NOW!
We are all the same! Equality! CLAP NOW!
that this thread has been about: how do you support “the rich tapestry of human life and the desire amongst people to express their own identity in the manner they see fit” without prohibiting yourself from criticising abhorrent cultural customs like FGM? It’s that contradiction that gives rise to the contortions around the subject of FGM that I earlier quoted from the Wikipedia page.
One common approach is called “liberalism”. It ascribes certain notional boundaries — called “rights” — to each individual; and asserts that each individual may do as they choose to express their identity, so long as they do not transgress the notional boundaries of another person. This places certain limits on the ways each person can “express their own identity in the manner they see fit” in order to define a space in which all others can do so too.
The conflict between individuality and cultural consistency is practically as old as civilization itself. Most ideologies throughout history included ad hoc, unprincipled, case-by-case solutions to those problems.
Why do you think that multi-culturalism is more inconsistent and unprincipled than any other historical solution to the individuality / group identity problem?
The problem is not that it is inconsistent and unprincipled, but that it is inconsistent and principled.
But it isn’t inconsistent.
Prizing equal rights obviously isn’t in tension with prizing diverse human exercise of those rights. You haven’t cited a contradiction. However, we could use your argument to spin off a real tension:
Similarity (e.g., our common humanity, our common interests and heritage and concerns) is valuable. But dissimilarity (e.g., cultural and individual diversity) is also valuable. So ‘value’ seems to be trivial.
Response: What we really value is not ‘being the same’ or ‘being different’ in a vacuum. What we value is (a) being similar or different in particular respects, and (b) having a certain ratio of similarity to difference. The English language just isn’t sophisticated enough to allow for easy slogans of either of those forms. We can’t easily signal that we value diversity, but in specific areas and not in all areas; likewise for valuing some similarities, but not all. And we can’t easily signal that we value a certain mixture of sameness and differentness, because too much of one or the other would make life less worth living. They seem like platitudes, but they aren’t false, and they’re worth taking seriously if only because they stand in for so many specific attributes that we need to take very seriously. It’s just important to see past the surface structure of some virtues.
Thank you for clarifying. That really was unclear.
“Equality” never means identicality in the political context. It instead means equal value or equal worth.
That’s what we’re talking about. Requiring a religious day of rest every Friday, or every Saturday, or every Sunday, are indeed practices of equal worth. FGM is not of equal worth with those.
It means people are of equal worth. In liberal democracies you don’t have to show that any kind of behaviour is of worth before you do it, you have to show that is does no harm and has consent.
That works until you start getting into details of exactly what constitutes “harm” and “consent”.
In the overwhelming majority of the cases the distinction is clear-cut; it’s just that the ones where it isn’t tend to be much more salient.
And those are precisely the type of cases that gradually cause attitudes to change.
I don’t know who would think that would demonstrate incoherence. And I don’t notice RichardKennaway pointing out that he doesn’t like FGM, so that seems totally irrelevant.
Ah, different thread, thanks. Yes, there doesn’t seem to be anything in that comment where RichardKennaway connects FGM with incoherence. You seem to be jumping to conclusions.
I think that’s a wrong question. I’m pretty sure the above was mostly just a reminder that policy debates should not appear one-sided.
EDIT: Never mind, that comment is the opposite of that.
The red car effect/availability heuristic at work—I instantly thought of a Zizek quote. Or were you quoting this bit too?
Zizek on the “decaffeinated Other”
I’m more on the “good fences make good neighbors” side, which I guess is the opposite from Zizek (judging by this quote; I don’t know more about his opinions). He criticizes the fear of harassment (and labels it “obsessive”, just to remind the reader that it is a boo light); I would like to talk also about those specific situations where the threat is real.
To me it seems that the “politically correct” description of people from other cultures is that they are a) completely different, but also b) completely harmless.
On the other hand, my opinion is that people from other cultures are often very similar, but even the small differences can be dangerous.
A “political correct” picture of a different people is something like this: They have green skin and worship ants… but if we will tolerate their green skins and ant worship, they will certainly be pleasant neighbors and our lives will be made more rich by their presence.
My picture of a different people is something like this: They are mostly like me: they value truth, and they want to punish people who harm others. Unfortunately, their idea of truth is whatever their holy prophet said; their idea of harm is opposing the prophet’s words; and their idea of proper punishment is to murder everyone who disagrees with their prophet. This is why they wouldn’t make pleasant neighbors.
Yep, that picture is a lot like mine, but Zizek would add pages upon pages about religion to it, to show how the words of the prophet—if the prophet said anything interesting at all—can be twisted and turned until the resulting ideology is refined enough, and more viable in a civilized world. That’s the massively oversimplifying cynical take on it, anyway.
It’s also worth noting that human “cultures” behave remarkably like empirical clusters of loosely-correlated social norms, behaviors, signals, status rules, hierarchical systems, beliefs, and moral systems. This seems to strongly support most of what you’ve said here, and obviously there is some drift and some shared space between “cultures” depending on how you carve them.
What you’re describing is the definition of “culture” (more precisely, a definition of “culture”, and a good one). I’m not sure why you’re giving the weaker qualification of “behave remarkably like” rather than “are”.
This particular wording was meant to convey the sense that “Whatever people generally define as ‘culture’ or as separate ‘cultures’, even if they use rigid aristotelian categories, it still behaves pretty much like this.”
see also
Of course it’s easy to say one has no morals at all when the morals in question are so much more complicated—they’ll seem permissive by your ability to manipulate them in contrived edge cases. This complication, though, is for adaptation to the real world—they have something useful to say about very real cases that Victorian morality completely chokes and dies on.
But that’s not really in conflict with the point of the quote, is it?
--Bertrand Russell, “Philosophy’s Ulterior Motives”. (The context is Descartes’ philosophy and the obviously fallacious proofs he offers of the existence of God and the external world.)
Or laziness, or lack of time, or honest error. Multiple causes can have the same effect, and hanlons razor comes into play/
“Bias” can include those flaws, especially how the word is used on this site
“Bias” has a strict definition. Not all errors are biases. One can clearly be wrong and rational, for example, by not gathering enough information (laziness, or lack of time...).
I think men whose reasoning powers are that good are few and far between. (Women too, I’m not trying to be some sort of sexist here.)
I’ve encountered the phenomena described in this quote and used it as a signal in the game of Mafia. It’s quite effective but I think has limited general application.
Jason Brennan, Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know
Something Positive
See also: http://lesswrong.com/lw/12s/the_strangest_thing_an_ai_could_tell_you/.
New Yorker article on David Deutsch
(I saw this on Scott Aaronson’s blog)
-Aristosophy. I like to think this is about the Robot’s Rebellion.
″
well shit that didn’t work.”
“Reality Injection Attack” would make a great name for a mathcore band.
Anonymous
-- A dialogue by Philip Gasper
Hilarious. It reminded me of Dennett’s “Superficiality vs. Hysterical Realism” (which is much more serious and academic, though).
-Paul Graham in The Lies We Tell Kids
This sounds like a challenge. Would you prefer your children to not swear; and if yes, why?
My reasoning would be that I want my children to be successful (for both altruistic and selfish reasons), and I believe that a habit of swearing is on average harmful to social skills.
Disclaimer: There are situations where swearing is the right thing to do, so it would be optimal to swear exactly in these situations. But it would be difficult for a child to determine these situations precisely; and from the simple strategies, “never swear” (which often develops towards “don’t swear in presence of adult people or someone who would inform them”) seems very good.
I like to be around people who don’t constantly emphasize their every word, making it hard to tell when something is actually important. Since swearing is a verbal marker of importance, its casual overuse is like shouting all the time; it’s very wearying. And, lest I be accused of rationalising, I do not only apply this to children, but have also asked my wife to cut back on swearing.
As a side note, Americans are very loud, both in the literal sense of putting more decibels behind their voices, and in their over-reliance on swearing. I think you’ve fallen into the bad equilibrium that comes about when everyone has an incentive to be a little louder than the next guy, and there’s no cost to being so.
Thank you for this. I’ve been wondering reflectively why I’ve been swearing more frequently lately, and I just realized that it’s to make sure my voice is heard. I’ll try to attack the root of this and instead get my attention-validation from having good things to say rather than saying them most crassly.
I’m almost sure this is mainly a status thing. Frequent swearing is perceived as crass, a lower-class practice, and so aspirational parents encourage their children not to. This intent then proceeds to backfire when children develop their own social networks: status relations among children and young teenagers are quite different from adult ones, and swearing in this context is often a marker of independence and perceived maturity. This gradually unwinds during the teenage years as swearing in the presence of adults becomes more socially acceptable and adult-style status relations start to assert themselves.
The only thing that confuses me about this model is the lack of countersignaling, but perhaps children of that age can’t reliably parse signaling at that level of indirection. Or maybe I just don’t remember enough childhood social dynamics.
Or you could, y’know, try to think of a better way.
That you know what a policy of punishing swearing develops into (“don’t swear in presence of adult people or someone who would inform them”) shows that you have the ability to think forwards into the consequences, but also hints at some sort of stopping, perhaps motivated (because hey, finding better solutions is hard).
Clearly, you also have the ability to reason a bit further: What sort of microsociety does the above behavior encourage once they get into high school, where the majority of their perceivable world is a miniature scheduled wildland?
When I was six and used swear words in front of my school principal (hey, when you spend half the day in the principal’s office for the 13th time, you kinda get used to someone), he later brought it up with my parents (though I vaguely recall it wasn’t in any negative manner). My parents immediately started reprimanding me, naturally, but he stopped them, and afterwards they changed strategies based on his advice and some insight they gained from reading more research and books on related topics.
I’m certainly glad they did, in retrospect, because in the twisted social environment that high schools are, a good swearing strategy can be extremely effective. I don’t know how widely this’d work, YMMV and all that, but a “leave me alone” usually didn’t get prospective bullies off my back. If I then followed up with a steady gaze and a “leave me the fuck alone” (yes, I know, but that’s how 14-year-olds talked when I was there), now suddenly they’d grow much more cautious and start re-evaluating whether they should still try to play their little status game and get their cheap fun, when someone who rarely ever swears had just signaled to them that shit got serious.
All in all, “never swear” seems to me like it never actually works, and takes much more effort to attempt (by punishing every single instance of swearing that you can find, even though you know you can only find a small fraction of them) than other strategies like teaching “swearing gets less useful and powerful each time you use it, so if you always keep it as a reserve it’ll be that much more effective”.
Oh, I was not specific enough. What I wanted to write is that a habit of swearing is harmful to your social skills after you leave the school. Imagine a person at a job interview saying: “Yeah, I know the fucking Java, but NetBeans is gay, and if you ain’t doing unit tests like all the time, you are seriously retarded, man.” ;-)
Probably no one would do this intentionally, but the problem is, if you get a habit of swearing, then sometimes a word or two slips through, often unnoticed (by you; but your audience is shocked). At some moment this happened to me (no, not at a job interview, at least I think so), and after getting a feedback I decided to be extra careful. Which I would want to teach my children. I was very lucky to get that feedback, because most people assume that others are well aware of all the words they use.
Since I don’t have nor plan on having children I actually haven’t given it much thought. I posted this because it gives a good example of rationalization in action.
Nick Cooney, Change of Heart
--Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning Was… the Commandline
From “Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine”
I would like to upvote the Feynman quote. I am not interested in upvoting the Stephenson quote. I think it would be better if these quotes were in separate comments, as recommended in the post.
.
I would like to abstain from voting on them, but to do so in separate posts.
You two talk between yourselves so that only one of you upvote the entire comment.
This reminds of how two high school classmates of mine eluded the prohibition from voting for themselves as class representatives by voting for each other.
Or, you both downvote the conglomerate and each write a comment expressing objection to the combination, approval of the desired quote and indifference to the other.
(I downvoted the conglomerate on the principle “I wish to see less quote-comments that people believe should be separate, especially when said quotes are verbose anyway”. There is an implied ”...and would upvote both comments if they were split to encourage trivial improvements in response to feedback”.)
--Carl Sagan
Hasok Chang, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress
Thomas Huxley
-- Adam Savage
If this were true, the ancient Greeks would’ve had science.
My impression was that it was the screwing around that was lacking.
-Galen, a Roman doctor/philosopher, on Asclepiades’s unwillingness to admit that the kidneys processed urine—despite Galen demonstrating the function of the kidneys to Asclepiades by, well, cutting open a live animal and pointing to the urine flowing from its kidneys to its bladder (search the page for “ligatures” to find Galen’s experiment described), among other things.
And in case it’s not obvious to readers, the Greeks were huge fans of irony—the above quote should be read sarcastically.
Yes, in MythBusters context, sitting around talking about stuff doesn’t qualify as screwing around. It is, at best, the thing you do to prepare for screwing around.
My understanding is that they had the screwing-around, despite some philosophers not doing it. They didn’t have the concept that the results of screwing-around was more virtuous than the philosophy.
To say that the Greeks didn’t have correct scientific theories is obviously true. To say that they had a methodology that departs from ours is somewhat true. To say that they were merely making stuff up without reference to any observation is to merely make stuff up without reference to any observation.
I could do someone significant bodily harm by hitting them with Aristotle’s collected empirical works on the anatomies, reproductive systems, social habits, and forms of locomotion of animals. And I’m not a huge dude.
How would we compare these hypotheses?
The ancients achieved less science because they were less scientific in ideology or culture; because they had mistaken ideas about the relative virtue of experiment and philosophy.
The ancients achieved less science because they lacked the precision equipment that modern scientists have.
The ancients achieved less science because they lacked the generations of accumulation of information that modern scientists benefit from.
The ancients achieved less science because there were fewer of them, population-wise. Fewer people → fewer Einsteins.
The ancients achieved less science because they lacked a large-scale scientific community; developments were isolated to their developers’ city-states.
The ancients achieved a lot more science than we know, but it has been deliberately suppressed by political and religious censorship and so we haven’t heard of it.
The ancients achieved a lot more science than we know, but it has been accidentally lost in fires, floods, wars, or other disasters where they hadn’t taken adequate backups.
The ancients achieved a lot of science, but it wasn’t applied much to create technology because they had access to cheap slave labor.
9. Scientific advancement requires that in each generation, your culture acquires more knowledge about the world than it loses — and there are a lot of ways for a culture to lose knowledge; among them mortality, library fires, Alzheimer’s, censorship, tech bubbles, faddish beliefs or cults, pareidolia, political propaganda, shame, anti-epistemology, language change, revolt of the masses, economic collapse rendering high-tech/high-knowledge trades untenable, superstitiogenesis¹, the madness of crowds, and other noise. In the absence of really good schooling, literacy, anti-censorship memes, skepticism memes, and economic resilience, the noise is likely to dominate the signal, driving cultures back towards subsistence and ignorant superstition — a condition in which beliefs are no more correlated with reality than is needed to keep you alive from day to day. However, the difference is basically quantitative (how much is preserved?) rather than qualitative (some cultures Have It and others Don’t).
10. It’s just too hard to maintain the technology base for scientific advancement with 1% literacy; there’s just too much chance of losing it due to correlated death of the literate class — plagues; king decides to kill all the scribes and burn the books; barbarians invade and do the same; etc.
¹ any process by which new superstitions are created
I hoped the footnote would exemplify some such processes...
Export-oriented slavery in the Americas was actually fairly technically dynamic, so if this is really the explanation I suspect it’s because slave societies lack a mass consumer base.
*10. The ancients achieved less science because they cared less than we do about the actual goals science was useful for. (Later generations cared even less and forgot most of what was already known by the ancients.)
*11. The ancients achieved less science due to lack of research funding models. All funding was private and rich people were patrons to artists, not scientists.
I think that we can dismiss 2. because they did make precision devices when they wanted to (see the Antikythera Mechanism). If this had been the limiting factor they should have been able to reach at least the level we had in the nineteenth century.
I guess that several of those had a non-negligible impact.
“Virtue” has a specific meaning in the ancient Greek world which doesn’t seem like it’s all that relevant here.
The way I would put it is that a clever Greek interested in the natural world became an engineer, and a clever Greek interested in the social world became an active citizen, which is a sort of combination of landlord, lawyer, and philosopher. Archimedes made his living by basically being the iron-punk hero of Syracuse; Plato and Aristotle made their living by teaching young rich folks how to be effective rich adults. A broad-minded citizen should be curious about the natural world, but curiosity is just a hobby, not a calling.
They came impressively close considering they didn’t have any giant shoulders to stand on.
Yep. If nothing of what Archimedes did counts as ‘science’, you’re using an overly narrow definition IMO.
Well, all of classical and medieval Europe had writing, and yet science was created much later than writing. There were many other pieces to the puzzle: naturalism, for instance.
Naturalism came after science, not before it. Most if not all of the key figures of the Scientific Revolution were devout theists.
Many scientists today are also theists. The actors of the Scientific Revolution successfully compartmentalized their theism. If they had really thought God was likely to modify the results of their experiments to differ from established physical law just to mess around, or that there weren’t any regular physical laws, they wouldn’t have bothered with science.
It had nothing to do with compartmentalized their theism. They cared for the physical laws because they wanted to know how God wants things to be.
If some witch violates the physical laws through her witchcraft that was considered to be bad, not impossible. God wasn’t supposed to have a reason to violate his own laws. A God that violates his own laws wouldn’t be perfect.
Their key idea wasn’t to get rid of theism but to replace looking at the bible to find out God’s will with looking at reality to find out God’s will.
That implies God does not create miracles—violations of his laws. And that was and is a heresy according to the Catholic church, and I imagine almost all other Christian denominations as well. The story of Christ alone is full of law-violating miracles.
It could imply God left some sort of “backdoor” in his creation, a lawful yet seemingly miraculous and near-impossible to detect part of creation. Matrix Lords, psychic powers etc.
It does seem rather incompatible with Christianity, though.
If the Texanian government sentence a person to death you don’t call the event manslaughter. The fact that the person get’s sentenced to death doesn’t mean that a law gets violated.
The 10 commendments contain “do not kill” but death as punishment for nearly every offence. Laws are a tricky business.
But yes, those early scientists did had a problem of being seen as heretics by the established church.
That is a mistranslation. The original reads “do not murder”, i.e. do not kill extrajudicially.
Also, it’s 10 commandments not commendments :) God was apparently not overly pleased with his chosen people, certainly not enough to commend them 10 ways on the exodus well done.
I hear it was actually closer to “do not engage in blood feud”, but I don’t recall where I heard that so treat it with deep suspicion. In any case, one could add “unless you’re God” to these physical laws for the same effect.
(Wait, if God kills you, isn’t that still extrajudicial? God isn’t working for the government.)
Not really. Divine judgement qualifies for two out of three definitions of judicial right of the bat and then we have to consider that for religious purposes everyone is considered to either belong to a Theocracy under God or be a heathen enemy of the state. On top of that God’s scriptures dedicate much of their content to setting up a legal system, with a book outright dedicated to “Judges”. If it wasn’t for the fact that God just doesn’t exist I think it’d be fair to say that he claimed precedence on “Judicial” a long time back and human states just borrow the concept.
You know, you’re right.
Ahh, that makes more sense.
… wait, does that imply there are non-supernatural (ie heaven and hell) sources of magic? Because I can think of other reasons why you wouldn’t want to do business with a demon. Y’know, the whole “wants to torture your soul forever” thing might cause some issues.
EDIT: that is to say, is this intended to justify not using fairies or whatever other superstition? Because I doubt most people are ok with dealing with a demon (that is, something that has “torture all humans forever” as an explicit goal.)
Law 34: God can do whatever the hell he wants. This law supersedes any precedent and subsequent laws.
If only they’d thought of that one.
That was my first thought.
Oh, true. I guess I read your post too quickly and didn’t process the information.
Hey, if God didn’t think of it...
I always got the impression that it how physical law was being violated (ie selling your soul) that was condemned.
The core idea of laws is that it’s morally bad to violate them.
If you make a contract with another person and then violate that contract you are violating “natural law” in addition to violating the “law of the land”. You sin and might get judged by God after your death for violating “natural law”.
The witch is also violating “natural law”. Now there’s the problem that God might punish the village in which the witch lives for natural law violations. As a result that village might prefer to get rid of the witch.
The idea that the physical laws of the universe are qualitatively different than natural laws like “honor your contracts” is a later development. The first interest in finding out the natural laws was a very theistic endevour.
Their revolutionary core idea was that it’s possible to understand what God wants by studying reality. Empiric research is a better tool than reading old scriptures to understand God’s will.
As I have said, I was under the impression that demons were supposed to have a natural ability to produce “miracles” from their angel days, and used them as payment for the souls of witches. That said, there would have been considerable variation anyway.
A demon who might want to corrupt a woman won’t start by asking for her soul. To corrupt her he might start by giving her some power without asking anything in return.
Even today there are still Christians who consider certain New Age practices immoral. Hypnosis doesn’t involve summoning the devil and making a bargain with him. It’s still considered to be a dark practice by many Christians. The catholic church took till 1956 to accept hypnosis as not being immoral.
Genemanipulated food would be a modern example where some Christians object that the practice is violating “natural law”. Craig Venter has to defend against the charge of playing God. According to that Christian perspective biologists are supposed to study how nature works instead of changing it.
Similar things are true for opposition to cryonics. The person who get a contract with Alcor isn’t a Satanist. He still sins, by trying to escape God’s plans for how human’s are supposed to live.
And the same applies to all doctors. Study of anatomy and medicine was traditionally illegal.
That was out of respect for corpses, IIRC.
I doubt they had that much respect for corpses of non-human animals. Anyway, trying to heal the sick by whatever method was held to be a sin. Sickness and accidents were believed to be caused by God as a punishment for sin, and a faithful believer would accept the punishment and try to repent. Death itself was a punishment for the original sin, so trying to medically delay death was (at certain times and places) a sin and therefore illegal.
As I recall, executed criminals were often kosher as well.
I’m going to call BS on that one. To my knowledge, no-one ever has banned attempting to cure the sick. Certain methods of doing so, perhaps, but then I myself am not in favor of legalizing mercury injections.
But that would be the ultimate goal, yes?
(Why specify a woman?)
So is karate. What’s your point?
… Huh.
So … metallurgy is also sinful because God intended ores to be impure and buried? ALL OF MEDICINE is evil because we’re messing up His plans for that disease? Interracial marriage is bad because God created the races separate? (That last one is both the least plausible and also the only one that was actually made, AFAIK.)
EDIT: fixed some typos.
True, but I don’t think “naturalism” is the right name for that. “Determinism” seems closer to it; though perhaps many of them believed that humans had souls that were exempt from the physical laws of nature—so, “physical determinism”?
I also don’t think “successfully compartmentalized their theism” is a good description of what they did. Many of them would have insisted there the lawfulness of Nature was tied to the existence of a Lawgiver, and that theism and science fit together harmoniously in a unified worldview, not in separate mental boxes. From today’s standpoint we can say that the implications of the scientific way of thinking that they launched lead, when fully developed, to an incompatibility or at least a strong tension with theism. But I’d say it is anachronistic to say read that back some hundreds of years and say that the early scientists were compartmentalizing.
Science is also possible in a non-deterministic universe, one in which the evolution of physical systems has a random component and the future is not fully predictable from a full knowledge of the present. All science needs are natural laws, repeated regularities; they don’t have to be entirely deterministic. And in fact scientists did not have a strong reason to think the universe is deterministic until they had what looked like a complete set of the laws of physics, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
On the other hand, a god that does miracles is incompatible with natural law as we know it, because we presumably can’t put an upper limit on the probability of a miracle occurring. An intelligent god can selectively cause miracles to disrupt particular experiments or to lead scientists to a false conclusion. Science pretty much assumes that won’t happen.
“Many” is ambiguous. What place and time are we talking about? I would expect that until, say, the 19th century, the majority of scientists everywhere were conventionally religious.
Twentieth? If you’re talking about the first couple decades of it, yeah, but I’m pretty sure that, after quantum mechanics became widely accepted and before the relative state interpretation and similar were proposed, most scientists were not determinists, and many still aren’t today (see the third column of this table).
I don’t know the math of quantum mechanics. My layman’s understanding includes the belief that quanum state evolution is deterministic (described by the Shrodinger equation). I may well be wrong about this.
Either way, my point was that before Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism, and the understanding that light was a form of EM, science didn’t have anything like a complete description of physics. So it was hard to say whether physics was deterministic, even though the existing Newtonian law of gravity was. Once there was an attempt at a Law of Everything, even though it was refined over time, there was at least strong evidence for determinism.
Yes, the evolution of the quantum state is deterministic, but according to certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, after a “measurement” “wave function collapse” occurs, which is stochastic.
An intelligent God could also write crap into a holy book to mislead people. A God that’s good has no reason to mislead people.
Or does he?!
There are places in the Bible where it sounds very much like God does not want to be clearly understood. I seem to remember a verse (I don’t recall which book it’s in...) where Jesus says that he speaks in parables (as opposed to plainly) because otherwise most people would understand him. The general argument I’ve heard is that evil serves a purpose, and perfection according to God requires the experience of lots and lots of bullcrap. The obvious question is why he wouldn’t then create people with those experiences built in...
Those … don’t seem connected. You appear to be talking about theodicy.
As for “otherwise most people would understand him”, I think that’s in the context of hiding his messiah-ness.
I’m talking from the perspective of modern people like Newton. They didn’t consider a good God to engage in morally bad practices like lying and misleading.
And I was joking.
That said, lying could be a necessary evil. Perhaps there are lovecraftian mind-destroying truths out there?
EDIT: relevent
EDIT: Retracted due to double-post.
Judea Pearl always gives Abraham arguing with God about Sodom and Gomorrah as the example of the first recorded scientist. The point of science is the discovery of rules (in Abraham’s case the rule for collective punishment).
If this is to be believed, “Traditionalists” (i.e. Catholics) were originally already “compartimentalized” (to use your word, which I’m not sure is the best one—see Alejandro1′s reply) to begin with, and it’s “Moderns” (i.e. Protestants) who decompartimentalized.
That’s a fair description. Even earlier Traditionalists were not yet compartmentalized, and so couldn’t do Science. Compartmentalization helped them. Then “Moderns” decompartmentalized again, with the result that some of them moved towards either atheism or a completely lawful (non-interfering) concept of God, and could do science; while others moved towards fundamentalism, and ended up rejecting the lawfulness of nature and therefore science.
Er, yeah, “originally” was the wrong word—look at what happened to Galileo.
I believe DanArmak may be referring to Methodological naturalism
They didn’t screw around, and/or they didn’t write about that, because contradicting the Aristotelian/Christian worldview was Evil.
They… did? If you want to make a distinction between Greek natural philosophy and modern science, which understands more about theories, hypotheses, and causality, and is rich enough to support an entire class of professional investigators into the natural world, then sure, the Greeks only had natural philosophy, and Savage is being too broad with his definition of ‘science.’ I think I side with Savage’s approach of normalizing science- I would rather describe science as “deliberate curiosity” than something more rigorous and restrictive.
The people in this thread should read The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn by Lucio Russo.
They did. Look up Thales, Aristotle, Democritus, and Archimedes just for a start. Particularly Archimedes.
It makes more sense if you consider “screwing around” in thMyth
http://www.theonion.com/articles/loved-ones-recall-local-mans-cowardly-battle-with,772/
I find both the ironic and straightforward meaning of this quote to be meaningful.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 13
But if my (not a mathematician) friend says that god spoke to him in a dream, and gave him a proof of the Goldbach conjecture, and he has the proof and it’s valid, then I would think something more interesting than a typical dream was going on.
But then the dream is doing zero work: your friend could simply say God told him the proof of the conjecture, and your situation is the same—if the proof checks out then you need to compare base rate for gods delivering math proofs and your friend secretly having a hobby of being a mathematician and succeeding etc to see whether it changes your beliefs.
And delivering a mathematical proof is surely not what >99% of God’s previous statements were doing.
How do you know? People mention “divine inspiration” quite frequently. The point is that the statement is untestable and thus irrelevant, not that it is most likely false.
I don’t think the version with the math proof is meaningless in a probabilistic sense; my point is that the meaning comes from an additional factor unrelated to the dream, and I think Hobbes would agree that in the absence of any additional aspect of God speaking to the dreamer such as prophecies (objectively verifiable, like the proof!) there’s no reason to believe him. But these additional aspects are the strange and unusual things which might oblige Hobbes to believe him, not the speech in a dream.
Why is that relevant? To see the flaw in your reasoning replace “God” with “mathematician X” and notice that >99% of mathematician X’s previous statements aren’t delivering mathematics proofs either.
Statements in general was not the reference class.
What I’ve observed in myself about reports of “God” doing something I’ll describe as “insufficient curiosity.” I have frequently not asked how the person identified the source as “God.”
White beard, what? No, I’ve assumed, way too easily, that their actual experience doesn’t matter.
And this could also be quite interesting if the person is a mathematician. Depends on what is more important to us, solving the unsolved math problem, and perhaps understanding heuristics, or coming up with evidence that something unexpected is going on. Can’t explain it? Goddidit. Q.E.D.
But then that doesn’t hold up to any decent Bayesian probabilistic analysis.
When you trace the chain of causality for why they thought it was “God” that spoke to them in the first place, you find that they use very vague heuristics for identifying speakers-in-dreams as “God” as opposed to “Some Mathematically-genius Alien”, and then that the source of those heuristics is even more vague and unlikely to be accurate: Biblical readings, inferences from the bible, third-hand accounts from some person who listened to some priest who read the Bible, etc.
So the final compound probability that their source of information was good and they correctly applied the right heuristics and their conclusion that “God” was communicating to them was correct and that it was actually a communication in a dream rather than a dream about a communication and that the proof was given by this communication rather than subconsciously arrived at by the non-mathematician friend somehow… is not very high.
(well, depending on some priors, obviously… if your priors for “God exists” and “God frequently communicates with people through dreams” are very high to begin with, the above starts sounding much more plausible)
I didn’t say I’d think God was involved. I said the deliberately vague, conjunction-fallacy-avoiding phrasing “I would think something more interesting than a typical dream was going on.” That means I’d update P(God spoke to him OR aliens spoke to him OR he’s secretly a genius mathematician and trolling me OR he’s got serious math talent he can’t access consciously OR [more hypotheses I won’t bother generating because this didn’t happen]), with the most likely possibility being that my friend is a genius troll. Then I’d do more experiments.
Note: I didn’t downvote you.
Ah, yes. I took you to imply you would acknowledge the friend without telling him that he’s probably wrong, or that you’d update disproportionately higher the probability that “God spoke to him in his dream”. i.e. I had assumed an uncharitable interpretation. Doing more experiments on the basis that something interesting happening has suddenly become very likely sounds like a healthy (well, scientifically-healthy) thing to do!
Re. downvote: One single downvote usually doesn’t mean much for posts where I expected karma to remain near 0 anyway. Despite the name and intended purposes of this site, there are still systematic downvoters, karma trolls, generic trolls and biased people around. I’ve noticed (and corrected, hopefully) at least one instance where I was systematically being biased against a certain user and downvoting their comments more frequently than I should. I suspect not everyone is as careful with this.
Yep.
Barney Stinson once spoke to me in a dream.
That proves that Barney Stinson is real doesn’t it?
Source: Andrew Sullivan in an otherwise fairly bland political post
More often than not it hits you first.
Not for all aspects of reality. Some require very extreme conditions (like large, complex physics experiments like the LHC) to hit.
On confirmation bias
If a man objects to truths that are all too evident, it is no easy task finding arguments that will change his mind. This is proof neither of his own strength nor of his teacher’s weakness. When someone caught in an argument hardens to stone, there is just no more reasoning with them.
Epictetus, Discourses I.5.1-2 (page 15 of this edition) (original Greek, with alternate translations at the link)
Matthew Yglesias
--Michael Gazzaniga
--Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
For some reason, I interpreted Girl 1 to be a Boy.
Paul Valéry
.
(This version is from Wikipedia.)
Previously approximated here.
I still habitually complete this joke with:
Though I’m now tempted to add:
”Hmph,” snorts the cognitive psychologist. “Such presumption. An event occurred that we experienced as the perception of a black sheep, only one side of which was visible, standing on what we believed to be a field in Scotland.”
I’ve heard a version in which after the mathematician speaks, the shepherd yells “Snowy White [the name of the sheep]! Stop rolling in the mud!”
Best version, in my snap judgment. The story, told this way, is about the different modes of thinking of astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, and shepherds. (and there are other variations about the approaches of stage magicians and cognitive psychologists, each of which has a characteristic interest. As a pure and careful thinker, the mathematician comes up with something similar to the practical approach of the stage magician, or the more-carefully-specified approach of the cognitive psychologist.)
But the shepherd is living in a different realm, very connected to reality, and comes up with something, from knowledge, not from thinking and careful analysis, that the sheep isn’t black at all. The cognitive psychologist allowed for this, distinguishing the possibility of perceptual error, but still could not speak with authority about the sheep itself.
But this version doesn’t mention the cognitive psychologist. The shepherd essentially confirms the conceptual space of the cognitive psychologist.
And the biologist says, “guys, that’s a dog”
“Bah”, says the thermodynamicist. “All I know is that your brain is in a configuration that makes you say you saw a black sheep a minute ago.”
“Meh”, says the trivialist. “Scottish sheep are black. Scottish sheep are white. Scottish sheep are black and white. Scottish sheep are purple octopuses. And I don’t even need to look out the window.”
While everyone else is arguing the pragmatist has googled “Scottish Sheep varieties”
And Robin Hanson sets up a prediction market in Scottish sheep colors.
And Paul Graham is making money off of startups that try to profit from the recent boom in Scottish sheep color economies. Oh wait...
Cloned white and black True ScotsSheep with lifetime color warranties are marketed, free shipping worldwide.
Add in another scoffing thermodynamicist, and we can round out the joke with an infinite regress.
-- Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History
Source: The Economist’s “Babbage” blog, in a post on exoplanets
(Of course, science advances when reality agrees with models too.)
Edited to remove “emphasis added” from the quotation, which I had added originally but have since decided against.
-- The Science of Discworld, Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen
Yes, yes it does. Otherwise, what would be the point? There’s an infinity of ways to get things wrong; you don’t want to spend your life catalouging them.
The word “right” (without the use of modifiers such as “exactly”) might sound too weak and easily satisfiable, but I think the idea is the following: Theories that may seem complete and robust today might be found to be incomplete or wrong in the future. You cannot claim certainty in them, although you can probably claim high confidence under certain conditions.
You can’t ever claim absolute certainty in anything. There’s no 1.0 probability in predictions about the universe. But science can create claims of being “right” as strong and justified as any other known process. Saying “science doesn’t claim to get things right” is false, unless you go on to say “nothing can (correctly) claim to get things right, it’s epistemologically impossible”.
but are we 100% CERTAIN there’s no 1.0 probability in predictions about the universe?
We are certain because we treat it as an axiom (loosely speaking) of our epistemology. We’re as certain of it as we would be of a logical truth. In practice we are fallible and can make mistakes about logical truths. But in theory, they are absolutely certain; they have a higher status than mere beliefs about the universe.
Assigning 1.0 probability to any proposition means you can never update away from that probability, no matter what the evidence. That means there’s a part of your map that isn’t causally entangled with the territory. What we’re certain of is that there shouldn’t be such a part.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161020161000/http://forums.catholic.com/showpost.php?s=911f001b47b040ac5997321714c0244b&p=7081969&postcount=8
“It was designed to look like one” does sound like a connection to me.
On the level of an abstraction, yes. But as a physical object or basic function? No. I think that what this quote is getting at, though I’m not sure what the point is as I find all this extremely self evident.
Quote from Peter Watts’ Blindsight.
About the prospects of a fight against a superintelligence:
Great book, it’s freely available here, in plain html.
Can you recommend similar novels?
Unfortunately, I can’t: this kind of (strangely refreshing) cynicism is, in my limited experience, unique to Peter Watts, and the use of interesting “starfish aliens” seems to be quite rare.
There are, however, other short stories (not novels) of Peter Watts that have a somewhat similar mood , such as Ambassador, but you probably are already aware of them.
How about R. Scott Bakker’s Disciple of the Dog and Neuropath? YMMV on his Second Apocalypse books.
I thought this book was really good up until the ending, which was beyond predictable—yet I had the impression it was meant to be quite the surprise.
John Maynard Keynes
Previously quoted on LW, but not in a quotes thread. I was reminded of it by this exchange.
“His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.”—Lois McMaster Bujold, writer (b. 1949)
-Epicurus
I need help on this: I’m torn between finding this argument to be preposterous, and being unable to deny the premises or call the argument invalid.
You are allowed to have preferences about things that don’t coexist with you.
Fair enough, but I think Epicurus’ point might be rephrased thus:
-not really Epicurus
If that’s right, it’s not so much a question of being concerned about things you don’t coexist with. He’s saying that it’s irrational to be concerned about things which are impossible and inconceivable.
That’s stupid, of course. Of course, people die. But I have a hard time seeing where the argument actually goes wrong. I am regrettably susceptible to philosophical nonsense of every kind.
It’s linguistic trickery, like saying prisoners can’t escape because if they escape they’re not really prisoners now are they?
I don’t think that’s the kind of linguistic trickery it is. It’s more like:
The dead person’s body exists, but the dead person’s mind/consciousness no longer does. If you equivocate by calling both of those things “the person”, then they seem to simultaneously be dead and not dead. If you stop equivocating, the problem goes away.
That’s a good point, but it’s not a solution (so much as a repitition) of the problem. How is it possible that prisoners can escape? Or that ships can sink?
I’m not saying I actually doubt that ships can sink, prisoners can escape, and people can die. That would be insane. My problem is that I have a hard time denying the force of the argument.
Try this one:
Premise: Imaginary cheese is cheese that is imaginary.
In particular, imaginary cheese is cheese.
Therefore, some cheese is imaginary.
Premise: Invisible cheese is imaginary.
Therefore, some imaginary cheese is invisible.
By (3) and (5), some cheese is invisible.
Where can I get some of that.
EDIT: Changed some details because they were distracting.
Yes, I think I also just deny premise 2. Some words work like that: former presidents, for example, are not presidents.
The problem is in #2. Imaginary cheese is not a kind of cheese.
Edit: I’m not entirely sure this is where I saw it first, but this forum post (ironically, on a Catholic forum of some sort, apparently discussing whether certain games such as Magic are evil...) makes the argument excellently.
Edit2: In fact, I daresay an excerpt from said post is good enough to post as a rationality quote on its own, which I will now do.
I’m not sure I like this phrasing although the essential point is correct. I’d say rather that generally when one uses a word one implicitly has “actual” or “real” in front of it. Adding the word “actual” at the relevant points in the argument makes the problem more clear.
What is the position of imaginary cheese in thingspace, relative to the position of the cheese similarity cluster?
Along most dimensions (those relating to physical properties, most causal properties, etc.), imaginary cheese is quite far removed from actual cheeses. Along a couple of dimensions (verbal description, perhaps something like “what sorts of neutral firings are involved in perceiving it”), imaginary cheese is closer to actual cheeses.
To take a two-dimensional example, perhaps gouda is at (4,6), cheddar is (5,3), mozarella is (3,7), provolone is (3,5)… and imaginary cheese is, say, (100,4). Within the cluster if you look only at the y dimension, quite distant from it if you look at all dimensions. And if we actually plotted cheese and imaginary cheese in some suitably higher-dimensional space, there’d be a lot of dimensions like x in my toy example (along which imaginary cheese is far from actual cheeses), and few like y (along which imaginary cheese is close to actual cheeses). Out of those dimensions in which cheeses form a cluster, most would be like x, few like y.
Edit: the basic issue is that things cluster in thingspace; categories into which we place things are reflections of that clustering. What things do not, in fact, do is fall neatly into classes and subclasses that might seem natural to us, like objects in Java, where if you have e.g. ImaginaryCheese extends Cheese (i.e. the ImaginaryCheese class is a subclass of the Cheese class), then ImaginaryCheese is guaranteed to inherit any and all properties of its superclass Cheese. All we really have is approximations of this behavior, to a lesser or greater extent, e.g.:
GoudaCheese behaves more or less like a subclass of Cheese; most relevant properties of Cheese (that is, properties shared by all things within the main body of the Cheese similarity cluster) are in fact inherited by GoudaCheese… because, of course, GoudaCheese is within the main body of the Cheese similarity cluster.
Conversely, ImaginaryCheese is not within the main body of the Cheese similarity cluster, so we shouldn’t expect it to behave like a subclass of Cheese… and it doesn’t.
So an alternate response to the logic in the great-grandparent (Nisan’s comment) might be:
Yes, some cheese is imaginary. You can’t get it anywhere because, unlike most cheeses, imaginary cheese isn’t “a thing you can get”. This is not a problem because reality doesn’t (apparently!) feature strict class hierarchies.
In fact, the problem with the reasoning is that while you could construct a strict class hierarchy, the properties you could assign to the Cheese superclass would be only those shared by all cheeses… and if you’re drawing the boundary around the similarity cluster such that ImaginaryCheese is within the boundary, then “existence outside of minds, and therefore ability to be ‘gotten’” would not be one of those shared properties.
Wonder what the author of that post was banned for.
In your imagination.
Look! I made a pretty picture to help!
As I said here, imaginary cheese doesn’t belong in the Cheese circle. Imaginary cheese is not a kind of cheese.
This argument implicitly assumes that we can’t meaningfully talk about things not in the present.
The argument asserts that ‘death’ (which we might taboo as ‘a change, the result of which is not existing’) is an incoherent concept. It’s not claiming that death is always in the future, it’s claiming that there is just no such thing as death.
I wasn’t referring to death not being in the present. Rather, the problem with the statement
is that it assumes that because the person doesn’t exist in the present, it isn’t meaningful to talk about that person existing at all.
Ahh, I see, that’s a very good point. So you would say that Socrates, despite being dead, nevertheless exists now as someone who is dead.
I suppose if we’ve got a block-time view of things anyway, existence wouldn’t have much of anything to do with presentness.
I like that answer.
Try playing Taboo.
So ‘ceasing to exist’ would replace ‘dying’. The argument would then be that nothing can cease to exist, and an implicit premise would be that the referent of the subject of a true sentence must exist. Is that true?
I guess the reason it’s tempting to think it’s true in the case of death is that dying is a change in which some particular thing goes from existing to not existing. Yet in the moment the change is complete, there is nothing undergoing any change. So as long as the changing thing (and thus the change) exists, it has not yet died, and if it has died, there is neither a changing thing nor a change.
At the very least, this makes death a very weird kind of change.
I can think of two possible things Epicurus could have meant, one correct and the other incorrect. We don’t need to fear the experience of being dead, because there’s no experience of being dead. But if we care about saving wild geese, then we should avoid dying, because our dying leads to fewer saved geese.
Which of those (‘no experience’ or ‘wild geese’) is correct, and which is incorrect? Both seem plausible to me.
Yeah, sorry, my comment was poorly written. Both statements seem correct to me, but the second one contradicts a certain interpretation of the Epicurus quote, thus making that interpretation incorrect.
It’s pretty much correct, as far as I can see. One should avoid death because s/he values life, rather than cling to life because s/he fears death.
Doing the latter helps sustain ability to do the former.
At the very least, even assuming there’s no reason to worry about your own death, you would probably still care about the deaths of others—at least your friends and family. Given a group of people who mutually value having each other in their lives, death should still be a subject of enormous concern. I don’t grant the premise that we shouldn’t be concerned about death even for ourselves, but I don’t think that premise is enough to justify Epicurus’s attitude here.
Of course, for most of human history, there genuinely wasn’t much of anything that could be done about death, and there’s value in recognizing that death doesn’t render life meaningless, even if it’s a tragedy. But today, when there actually are solutions on the table, this quote sounds more in complacency than acceptance. Upvoted though, because it points to an important cluster of questions that’s worth untangling.
Death should still concern you very much. Even though you should not necessarily ‘care’ about your own death, certainly you should try to eliminate those horrible occasions of your loved ones dying.
-- John Allen Paulos(from Beyond Numeracy)
Henry David Thoreau
Charles Mackay from “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”
-Descartes, Discourse on method part 6.
Doctor Who
CrimethInc (Not exactly a bastion of rationality, but they do have some good stuff now and again.)
--Prime Function Aki Zeta-Five, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
Removing all those glands and hormones (assuming they are pars pro toto for our evolved urges), what would be left? A frontal lobe staring at the wall?
Why the criticism?
While I’m not privy to exactly what Prime Function Aki Zeta-Five meant to imply, this especially:
… creates an impression of a homunculus, a little man in the box (the brain). An entity (“you”) who’d still have a utility function after removing all the evolved urges that initially drove it. I object to that kind of mystical thinking (and the frontal lobe just staring can also serve as a visual cue of criticism).
I think that the parts of ourself that we identify with don’t comprise all of our hormones. Yes, parts of the quote seem to border on dualism, but I think that it only does so because dualism is a neat little persuasive trick.
William Blake
That’s Blake again. Tim Freeman is the author of the quote before the Blake quotes on this page.
Thanks, fixed.
When I am speaking to people about rationality or AI, and they ask something incomprehensibly bizarre and incoherent, I am often tempted to give the reply that Charles Babbage gave to those who asked him whether a machine that was given bad data would produce the right answers anyway:
But instead I say, “Yes, that’s an important question...” and then I steel-man their question, or I replace it with a question on an entirely different subject that happens to share some of the words from their original question, and I answer that question instead.
What does this mean?
Steel man
See also.
Thank you!
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Rationality challenge: Understand why I posted it here.
Bonsu Rationality Challenge: Reinvent the meaning of “God” I used to ironman the position. Start by ironmaning it yourself.
“Men have forgotten God” → “Men have lost certain beliefs and practices that strengthened social stability, and thus provided (despite their actual falsehood or even ridiculousness) a certain local optimum.” ?
It’s an example of how even absurd amounts of research can fail to move a religious thought. I think too many people will fail to get the joke and the potential for abuse is too high.
In abandoning one’s religion, one also abandons an ethical system. If this lacuna is not filled in by another ethical system that works at least passably well, the consequences for personal and political behaviour can be dire.
For decision-theoric reasons, the dark lords of the matrix give superhumanly good advice about social organization to religious people in ways that look from inside the simulation like supernatural revelations; non-religious people don’t have access to these revelations so when they try to do social organization it ends in disaster.
Obviously.
Seems legit.
Bonus challenge accepted, blind mode—no peeking at comments, take my word.
“God” = the objectively present, difficult-to-disentangle historical trends of the West, and the memetic strains that caused those trends, chiefly Universalism and its Christianity section. So here, a Universalist culture has violated Universalism’s own naturally-evolved barriers and safety measures, and suffered for it by landing in a shallow circle of Hell. But Solzhenitsyn wasn’t very Universalist, I’d say—not like Zizek and Moldbug and yours truly take it—so he couldn’t see that Universalism can only stay alive while moving ever onwards and unfolding itself.
Also: this quote should be way way up there! And the Obamas of today shouldn’t be quoted so much—all is dust, and all will be dust. But history will sort its Right and Left… in due course.
(help help will newsome is taking me over with his computational theology konkvistador you know you saw it help)
Meta-level point: It is possible to steel-man someone’s position into an argument that they would not actually endorse. I think that might be what you are doing here.
I’m trying to be more whimsical in my posting on LW, but I’m not sure that “rationality,” “optimization,” or any other special virtue in this community is advanced by this provocative post or its religious-language framing.
For a more detailed discussion go here.
A key of Marxist thought is the rejection of the idea of God. The Marxist morality that drove the Russian revolutionaries was different than Christian morality.
I don’t the an inherent problem with blaming the Russian revolution on that change in morality. It’s a bit like putting the blame that the crusades happened on Christianity.
Was it really? For example, “the meek shall inherit the earth” transfers basically unchanged.
In Christianity the meek somehow inherent the earth while staying meek. In Marxism they do it through running a revolution and overthrowing the old order.
That sounds like an empirical prediction, not a moral claim.
In Marxism there’s no difference between empirical predictions about the far future and moral claims. Marx basically got the idea that you can make empirical predictions about how moral standards will be at the end of history. According to Marx all actions that move the world in the direction of being more in line with the moral standards at the end of history are morally good.
That’s not completely relevant, as “the meek shall inherit the earth” was a Christian claim.
You’re making a category error. Historical materialism just doesn’t have anything to say on the subject of morality, certainly nothing so silly as that. At the end of history the universe will be dirt and dust, but I haven’t seen any Marxist who cares (though I think I did once encounter someone who concluded from this and Aristotelian teleology that morality is whatever maximizes entropy, lol.)
More generally, even if we can make reasonable claims about what Marxists’ and Christians’ effective moralities, asking whether these are the same moralities or not is a confused question, for entirely different reasons.
I’ve seen several compelling arguments along similar lines.
Compelling? Do you mean compelled to reject the premises or compelled to accept the conclusion?
Mostly, I was compelled to author the grandparent comment. So not very compelling.
You’re misreading the Marxist “end of history”. To Marx, history is the story of class struggle, and so once there are no more classes there is no more history.
You might both be confusing Marxist and Marxian thought.
I’m certainly not confused, but those trying to make that distinction might be. His political and sociological theories followed directly from his economic theories—refuting the labor theory of value is really sufficient to defeat Marx entirely, or at least eliminate anything that wasn’t already said better by Hegel.
OK, sorry for the superfluous advice then. I have only had a cursory glance at your discussion.
Marx burrowed the idea of history from Hegel.
For Marx history is the process of social changes. When that process of changes reaches it’s end, you have Marx’s end of history. For Marx that’s a communist society in which all workers get equal pay and life happily ever after. Afterwards there are no social changes, therefore there’s no history.
Marx makes a prediction that this communist society will come about. Things that move the world closer to that prediction are morally good for Marx.
I’d say that’s like putting the blame for the battle of Normandy on democracy.
Very, very well put! (FYI, Eugine_Nier appears to be pro-democracy)
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^ looks just right in rot13, too! Black Speech!
I can’t tell whether you understood my point, or completely misunderstood it. I don’t see where I was “thinking like a Marxist”.
Not in this comment specifically - just a general thing about your view of economics’ relation to social structures having similar focus (determinism etc) to the Marxist view. TimS has called you out on it recently, no?
But still, “moral fashion doesn’t ever cause revolutions on its own” is a statement any Marxist would sign under. So in this regard you ironically proved closer to Marxism than the view you kinda-opposed as insufficiently strongly worded (“causal link about as evident as for crusades and Christianity”). See?
TGGP defends economic determinism here.
Heh! Cool, thanks.
Ok, so you did misunderstand my intent.
My point, was mainly that the Crusades are not a good example of “religion causes people to do something evil”.
Wait, why are the Crusades not a good example of religion causing people to do evil things? Do you think they weren’t evil, or that religion wasn’t to blame?
That depends on what you mean by those terms. Was the battle of Normandy a good thing?
I’m confused. Yes, D-Day was a good thing. Yes, D-Day was violence in service of democracy.
What does this have to do with whether (1) the Crusades were a good thing, or (2) whether religion (particularly Catholicism) was a substantial cause of the Crusades?
The crusades are often portrayed as violent Christians invading Muslim lands, which forgets that the Muslims violently took those lands from Christians in the first place.
On the other hand, no one complains that the battle of Normandy consisted of violent democracies attacking the lands of the Third Reich.
There probably would be people complaining if D-Day had occurred four centuries after the fall of France.
We could debate the reasoning that led the Western and Northern Europeans to militarily support the Byzantines until the heat death of the universe—but it’s not a particularly interesting discussion.
But the Crusades did spark a lot of in-group / out-group violence in Europe itself. De-tangling the Crusaders related pogroms from the base rate of pogroms in Europe is very difficult—but it is at least plausible that the increased religious fervor was a partial cause of the Crusader pogroms.
If it’s a question of whether religion has a history of motivating violence, it’s worth considering why the Muslims took those lands to begin with.
I agree that’s a better example. One thing to notice is that the propensity of a religion to cause violence varies by religion.
Plunder and glory?
edit: To put it another way, I’d argue the conquest of traditionally Christian territories under the Rashidun and Ummayad Caliphs was due to religion in the same way the Spanish conquests in the Americas were—enabled and justified by religion, but motivated primarily by the desire for wealth and fame. I can go into further detail if anyone wants, though I doubt that is the case.
Fair enough.
What about what the Conquistadores did in the Americas, or what the Inquisition did to heretics? Were they good things too?
The Conquisadores destroyed the human-sacrificing Aztecs. A better example for religion causing people to do bad things would be the Aztecs themselves.
1) There no rule that says the Spanish and the Aztecs can’t both be wrong.
2) That doesn’t resolve the invasion of the Inca in South America
3) The Spanish occupation over the next few centuries probably caused more suffering than the Aztec (or possibly even the Crusades).
The main suffering caused by the Spanish was through the unknowing introduction of European diseases, not because of their religion. I haven’t studied the issue of the invasion of the Inca but I haven’t heard it religiously motivated either.
My point remains that the actions of the Aztecs are a far better example of religion causing people to bad thing.
The conquest of the Inca was probably a mixed religious / imperialist motive on the part of the Spanish—as was basically all activity by the Spanish throughout the New World. But the occupation throughout Latin America also had a substantial religious component—including religious justification of the plantation system and harsh conversion practices.
In short, I am unsure how frequent the human sacrifice component of Aztec religion was performed. But it would need to be quite frequent to exceed the suffering caused by the Spanish governing practices in the New World—even excluding suffering caused by introduction of new disease.
Finally, I mostly agree with Eugine_Nier above that the brutally of warfare in that era cannot reasonably be counted as evidence of evil on par with the evil of human sacrifice or human slavery. For example, Medieval siege created massive suffering, but that’s just the cost of war in that era. Calling it evil is the same as calling war evil—a position I’m willing to consider, but acknowledge is quite extreme..
Unfortunately this is a controversial subject in academia—largely because it informs arguments like this one, but also because of sparse primary evidence. I’ve seen estimates as high as 250,000 sacrifices a year in Aztec-controlled territory, although more conservative figures put the number an order of magnitude lower; I’d probably be more inclined to accept the latter, given the relatively small population of the Aztec states of the time. Aztec use of prisoners of war as objects of sacrifice is pretty well documented (though there’s some controversy over the role of the so-called flower wars), but even with that input it seems to me that there’d be some basic sustainability concerns.
I’ve heard estimates even lower than that, but I’m not sure how credible they are.
From what I understand it would be more credible to blame said behavior on “capitalism” than “religion”. What with the invading to take the land and natural resources (gold, for example).
IIRC what little “statistics” and population estimates I’ve seen of native americans and aztecs in particular, a bunch of hotspots around the world today are doing much, much worse damage both per-capita and especially in terms of raw numbers.
Any number of them could reasonably be attributed to religion, but they could also be attributed to a bunch of other factors, which would be better described overall as “anti-epistemology” or just generalized stupidity.
Any examples?
Well, taking estimates from various of the top search engine hits and wikipedia, I arrive at an uppper 95%-confidence bound of 7% (rounded up) of the aztec population sacrificed systematically per year on average (during the peak of the empire, though, probably not sustained for more than a decade if even that), using the lower 300k total peak population and the (probably over-)estimated 20k number for annual human fatal sacrifices. The actual ratio was most likely much lower than this, but I wanted to challenge myself a bit.
By comparison, the ongoing war(s) in Afghanistan are estimated at a total three million deaths (upper bound also). This is over 34 years however, and the population estimates at the start were of 15 million, with current estimates around 30 million (this is all according to wikipedia data, though). This brings us to an average 0.5% deaths from war, rather than systematized sacrifice, which is arguably different and not quite the same as “religion causing people to do bad things”.
Similar data from similar sources on the Darfur case give a 1.1% figure, though I only used the pre-war 6-million population for this and the ratio would be higher if I had excluded the massive amount of people who fled or were displaced soon after that whole nightmare began.
So I’m running short on time here and won’t go analyzing other examples I had in mind, but in retrospect it seems I don’t quite have such clear-cut numbers here, and while I find the 20k/year estimate for aztec sacrifices ridiculously unlikely compared to the estimates for Afghanistan or Darfur, it would be reasonable to take my previous statement on per-capita with a large dose of salt. However, the “raw scale” point is certainly valid—even the impressive 20k/year figure pales in comparison to the 66k/year of Darfur or the 88k/year of Afghanistan, or some other figures that could be found with some more digging, and I’m quite sure that if we had better timeline data the total sum of the aztec sacrifices throughout their entire history wouldn’t even come close to the World Wars, for obvious reasons of scale.
And of course, for the concentrated killing-as-many-people-as-quickly-as-possible-by-doing-stupid thing, I now feel somehow obligated to point at them evil nuclear bombs. Because, y’know, they certainly win at the (deaths/second)*stupid formula.
Mass murder, theft, and enslavement don’t become okay just because contemporaneous plagues have a higher death toll. And yes, the former tended to justified in religious terms, for whatever you think that’s worth.
The argument I was responding was “The Spanish occupation caused more suffering”, therefore it bloody well is relevant to figure out how much of that suffering was the result of religious motivations and how much of it wasn’t.
If the argument is supposed to be about “mass murder, theft and enslavement” instead about “suffering”, then the argument should have said “mass murder, theft and enslavement” rather than “suffering”.
And nowhere do I see any place where I say or imply that mass murder, theft and enslavement are “okay”—I’d appreciate it if you keep the Principle of Charity in mind when you’re responding to people.
You’re right, you didn’t “imply mass murder, theft, and enslavement are okay”, you neglected to mention them entirely, despite them being relevant to your claim that “the actions of the Aztecs are a far better example of religion causing people to bad thing”, unlike disease. You made no argument against the claim that the suffering inflicted by the Spanish directly exceeded that caused by the Aztecs (#3 in TimS’s post). Instead you simply noted that disease caused “the main suffering”, and restated your previous position. What would you accept as a charitable interpretation of that?
I could also play the game where I claim you implied human sacrifice is okay, but that would be falling to your level. Hence: end of discussion on my part.
Well, they achieved that by exterminating them (well, they didn’t even have to try that hard—infectious diseases did much of the work for them—but still...) rather than by converting them, so the cure was worse than the disease.
Um… technically that’s a geographical impossibility. Once the democracies liberated French territory (violently taken by the Third Reich from France in the first place) and launched offensives beyond the “lawful” borders of Germany as drawn under the Treaty of Versailles, it wasn’t called the “Battle of Normandy” anymore. Normandy is a mid-sized region on the northwestern French coast. (Wikipedia article)
You are being extremely uncharitable to Eugine’s point. D-Day or “Battle of Normandy” is a reasonable shorthand for the Allied liberation of France and followup invasion of Nazi Germany.
I know, I know. It’s just that I’m a pretty hardcore (read: obsessive) World War 2 geek :).
The Third Reich considered northern France a part of itself.
That depends where you draw the line. The Third Reich considered Vichy France a client state, dependent on but legally separate from itself. The north and west of France, including Normandy, fell under German military occupation after 1940 (as did the rest of the country after 1942), but that ostensibly represented wartime defense needs rather than a permanent territorial claim.
Germany did administer some French lands as part of itself during the war, all in France’s northeast along the German border. There’s some indication that territorial expansion would have proceeded further had the Nazis won, but most of the Third Reich’s annexations took place east of Germany’s prewar territory.
That religion wasn’t to blame. Read the grandparents, most notably this.
EDIT: Wait, no. I had that backwards.
Did the (nominal) Christians who did violent and terrible things forget God too?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn doesn’t speak about “why people do violent things?” in the quote but about why the Russian revolution happened.
I wasn’t asking Solzhenitsyn, I was asking you.
I think that question is illformed.
If I look into (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nominal)[webster] the definition of ‘norminal’ that applies here seems to be: “3a : existing or being something in name or form only ”
I think according to this definition ‘norminal’ Christians as a whole are people who forgot God. Therefore those who don’t forget God aren’t ‘norminal’ Christians. As all ‘norminal’ Christians forgot God, that should also be true for those ‘norminal’ Christians that do violent things are also “forgetting God”.
Does that help you? I don’t think so.
In case you care, I’m no Christian even when my surname is Christian. When forced to label I choose ignostic.
A lot of self proclaimed atheists who get blinded by their faith. They think that the meme they identify with God is the thing that most people mean when they say God. Very often that leads to misunderstanding of arguments such as the argument made by Solzhenitsyn. It gets reduced to the question “did God intervene to punish people who forget him” and “will Christian’s always act moral?”.
You lose a lot of details. What changes in a society if people socialize in workers unions instead of going to church?
Re: nominal. Could be a True Scotsman fallacy. Discuss.
People generally do neither where I come from. So what?
I think you are trying to set up a true scotsman as a strawman.
You live in the 21st century. It doesn’t make much sense to analyse events from the early 20st century by imposing your 21st century perspective.
In our times the average person didn’t replace the social enviroment that churchs provide and is more lonely than his ancestors were. He’s postmodern in the sense that he doesn’t have a strong loyality to a single framework. A lot of atheists do have some loyality to academic science and spokespeople like Richard Dawkins but that loyality isn’t strong enough to die for. In Willpower Roy Baumeister (who’s no theist) argues that partly as a result of not believing in God willpower is now lower than it was in the past.
Debating Church v. nothing to replace it is different than debating Church v. early 20st century Marxism (and the institutions that got created after the revolution was “successful”). Answering a question about the effects of believing in God is depends a lot on the zeitgeist of the time you are speaking about.
But to get back to the issue of “true Christian’s”, the people who go to church because their parents went to church are different than the people who have spiritual experiences and believe in God because of those experiences.
A few days ago I was debating a Christian theology student. He follows in the foodsteps of his father who’s a priest. He had to admit to me that he has no good argument for why he prefers Christianity is more true than Islam. He believed that everybody get’s to heaven regardless of how he lives his life. According to him there are a lot of people in his faculty who see things similarly. On the other hand those fellow students with spiritual experiences have racidally different views than him.
If you want to speak about the effect of being Christian, self labeling as Christian isn’t necessarily the best criteria. Spirtiual religious experiences or spending a lot of time in Christian rituals are likely to be more important than self labling.
It gets him his daily bread, then? :-)
To some Christians, that is outright heresy. Does he have any arguments for why he prefers his Christianity to any other Christianities?
Do they all differ from him in the same way?
I thought you might go down that route, and you did.
Maybe it isn’t strong enougnh to start a war for either. Are we so much worse off without that kind of Willpower?
No, I didn’t argue that true Christian’s don’t commit violent acts. I made a bunch of claims but that isn’t one of them.
I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don’t have as many people who believe it. -George Carlin
“I have the same height as the Empire State Building, I just don’t tower as many feet from the ground.”
Interpreting Carlin charitably, he is talking about moral or rational authority, not about authority in the sense of power over others.
What’s “rational authority”?
‘Rational authority’ is the reason why, e.g., if you care about the election outcome, you are more interested in Nate Silver’s opinion than a taxi driver’s.
Oh, I see. Good point.
The first entry Google gives me for authority is “the power or right to give orders”, which is presented as a single definition but which is clearly two very different concepts lumped together. Carlin’s quote and your parody each seem to be focusing on only one or the other half of that definition, but he does so in a way intended to highlight the distinction whereas you seem to be doing so in a way which hides it.
You could replace “Pope” with “President” in that quote, and it’s still true.
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-- George Weinberg commenting on Mencius Moldbug, “The magic of symmetric sovereignty”
(Not that I think that’s a valid general principle, but I do feel that way about many of the thought experiments I see proposed on LW.)
The Last Psychiatrist bats another one out of the park:
the meaning or source of the $ amounts if very unclear to me. Is there more on it somewhere?
$150/mo for SNAP (i.e., food stamps) is in the right ballpark; the average in 2011 was $133.85/mo.
$700/mo for SSI is an overestimate; the average benefit for those under 18 (i.e., “some high school”) was $621.30/mo.
I couldn’t find an average benefit estimate from the department of labor for unemployment insurance, but sufficiently many sources claim on the order of $300-500/week, possibly before taxes. $1500/mo is perhaps reasonable.
I don’t know where he’s getting the jail number from, but some random googling suggests that the average cost per inmate of American prisons is something like $20k-40k/year. Presumably he means minimum security prisons (as he uses the example of an incarcerated marijuana user later).
-- Siderea
(Hat-tip to Nancy Lebovitz.)
Meh. ‘But’ is just ‘and’ with a case of incongruity. That’s what it is, so I don’t see a problem with using it for that… though of course dark arts applications would be problematic.
It’s even more dark artsy to not even mention contrary evidence.
Unless you know they’ll run across it and want to control their exposure to it.
Train self to perceive the word “but” as an alarm bell. When tempted to use it in an argument, immediately abort sentence and reflect on whether to swap the clauses before and after it, or even save the latter for a more appropriate time. (I imagine a lot of people here already do that.)
--David Eagleman
The final sentence of that quote is true whether the first two sentences are there or not. Thus, I could make the same assertion by saying:
--Mencius Moldbug on an experiment that has interesting results
How naive. Surely right and wrong are defined loosely enough for each side to claim that they were right all along.
On a related note, maybe you should create a subthread called “Irrationality Quotes”, given the quotes you post.
EDIT: And now, thanks to a poorly thought out anti-troll policy, I will never know what provoked such a strong negative reaction in readers.
--Michael Gazzaniga
Regarding brain architecture.
I like these. Has he written papers or books that might be of particular interest or value if I’m interested in the gritty bits of what-we-don’t-know about neurobiology, brain architecture and general brain-related stuffs?
You may be interested in chapter 14 by Christof Koch (the one and only) in an anthology on Consciousness, the whole chapter is available for free at google books here.
In general, Koch’s the go-to guy for these kinds of questions.
I have these from the youtube lectures he has given, very accessible and interesting(thanks to lukeprog for the tip):
Charles Babbage
I suppose we don’t know if this is true, since it doesn’t yet exist. BTW, what has this to do with rationality?
It was a fairly audacious prediction, that turns out to have been true. I think it’s fair to allow Babbage to describe as an analytical engine what we would nowadays call a “computer”.
Computers have revolutionized most fields of science. I take it as a general “yay science/engineer/computers” quote.
Babbage’s prediction isn’t about computers in general; it is about the Analytical Engine (which, as I pointed out, has never been constructed in its entirety).
What could his Analytical Engine do that a modern computer can’t? (BTW, I’ve just read the lead of the Wikipedia article and I’m seriously impressed.)
Nothing.
So, what’s the relevance of the fact that his Engine “has never been constructed in its entirety” if machines that can do everything it could do do exist?
What relevance is any fact about “modern computers” to the truth value or usefulness of this quote? Babbage isn’t making a general claim about computers and science, he is bragging about a product he designed, but that never made it to the market.
I’d be charitable and interpret the quote the way scav did. He said “an Analytic Engine”, not “my Analytic Engine”—he did use capital letters but ISTM that people back then used them all the time.
William Blake
Freeman? That’s one of my favorite lines from Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”...
-- Yvain, “Why I Hate Your Freedom”
“Must a name mean something?” Alice asked doubtfully.
Of course it must,” Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh; “my name means the shape I am—and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
DBZ Abridged on the lack of consequence concerning death in the series. Tien’s supposed to be the only serious character in the series. That’s the joke.
Edit: Perhaps I should explain this quote… I simply thought that Yamcha served as a good representation of most people’s reactions… and Tien as a representation of “Um. It’s no biggie.” The rest of this series finale went off without a hitch as all characters realized “Wait. There are almost no consequences here. There may never be? What’s the use in grieving!”
H.L. Mencken
“Some magic bullets from the past”
On [the bottom line(http://lesswrong.com/lw/js/the_bottom_line/)/[politics as a mindkiller](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer):
Source: Bill Clinton, in an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (episode date: September 20, 2012). The quoted material appears at about the 6:50 mark.
Duplicate
So it is. I guess I didn’t check thoroughly enough. Thanks.
Transitional species, Winston Rowntree
I couldn’t just quote a part of this, as any one good quote would drag half the comic with it. It deserves reading, though.
Misclicking like a madman today, Transitional species, Winston Rowntree is one massive, awesome quote. Only one part wouldn’t do it justice, unfortunately.
-related by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion
Versions of this quote have been posted twice before; the best version of the quote includes the friend’s reply to Wittgenstein: http://lesswrong.com/lw/94r/rationality_quotes_january_2012/5kib
Thanks; I thought it was likely to have been posted, but I tried to search for it and didn’t find it.
Mm. If you had googled for ‘wittgenstein earth’, which seems to me to be the most obvious search phrase, you would’ve found 2 links on the first page...
Yes, clearly my Google-fu is lacking. I think I searched for phrases like “sun went around the Earth,” which fails because your quote has “sun went round the Earth.”
There’s your problem, you got overly specific. When you’re formulating a search, you want to balance how many hits you get—the broader your formulation, the more likely the hits will include your target (if it exists) but the more hits you’ll return.
In this case, my reasoning would go something like this, laid out explicitly: ‘”Wittgenstein” is almost guaranteed to be on the same page as any instance of this quote, since the quote is about Wittgenstein; LW, however, doesn’t discuss Wittgenstein very much, so there won’t be many hits in the first place; to find this quote, I only need to narrow down those hits a little, and after “Wittgenstein”, the most fundamental core word to this quote is “Earth” or “sun”, so I’ll toss one of them in and… ah, there’s the quote.’
If I were searching the general Internet, my reasoning would go more like “‘Wittgenstein’ will be on like a million websites; I need to narrow that down a lot more to hope to find it; so maybe ‘Wittgenstein’ and ‘Earth’ and ‘Sun’… nope nothing on the first page, toss in ‘goes around’ OR ‘go around’, ah there it is!”
(Actually, for the general Internet, just ‘Wittgenstein earth sun’ turns up a first page mostly about this quote, several of which include all the details one could need aside from Dawkins’s truncated version.)
Like I was standing still and the earth was rotating.
Sting
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Each morning I go through all my beliefs and randomly flip their truth values, guaranteeing maximal surprise
joking aside, this is a fun and somewhat useful exercise in deduction.
That’s certainly true. I think the point isn’t that you should be constantly changing everything you believe, but that you should actively seek out new knowledge—especially knowledge that has a high probability of shifting the way you think (in a positive direction, of course).
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You’re right, but the quote still makes sense. Humans are built so that they either live in ignorance or in perpetual wonder as they discover and rediscover that their intuitions don’t accurately model reality. You might consider this as proof that humans are insane, and I’m inclined to agree, but the quote is still true and has a useful message.
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See here and here for why you should prefer the stronger version of the injunction, even if it seems paradoxical.
I’m trying to figure out what “somewhat” adds. Seems to me it takes something away. It makes a powerful statement into a wimpy one. Sure, if you take “unsettled” to mean something like “check yourself into a psychiatric unit,” and take “daily” literally, obviously there would be a problem.
But “unsettled” means just that. Unsettled. Not fixed. In question.
How much in question? What’s the ideal level of “unsettled”? And, “Who is asking?” is the question I’ve been taught to ask. If I ask the question, I’m uncomfortable with “unsettled” and want to be assured that it will only be a little, so that I can continue with “my” philosophy without any significant transformation.
Pretty standard survival thinking.
The rest of the statement makes it clear. It implies a value to “all the universe has to offer.” When? Every day.
What philosophy? Part of it? No, the whole thing. Look, I should be so lucky that the whole complex constructed mess disappears. Doesn’t happen that way. If it did, the chance of a day with no established philosophy at all would be amazing. Where do I sign up?
(No, if this was an amnesia drug that simply wiped it, I’d refuse. Rather, “unsettled” is just right, up to the point where it isn’t attached at all, it’s just sitting there, floating, not controlling, visible, available and useful if needed, seen for what it is, a pile of memories and patterns.)
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Indeed. One should have an open mind but a very judicious customs agent at the gate.
Shush, I’m obligated to defend Neil deGrasse Tyson. This is the internet.
The quote’s lack of precision doesn’t bother me because most powerful quotes lack precision. Also, adding somewhat means that the quote will be longer.
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I’m not sure. I would need to see a bunch of examples on a sliding scale of precision. This isn’t feasible because I’m willing to accept less precision in exchange for more impact, which means that different quotes would receive distorted results.
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With extra points for communication which is precisely more than one different thing?
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I periodically issue verbal messages that intentionally can reasonably be interpreted as having multiple different meanings. In those cases, I intentionally intend to communicate the multiple different meanings in one communication.
Different from a vague message which is intentionally vague, in that there are two or more different concepts encoded in the same message, not an concept which is intentionally vague.
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Clearly, one goal is to be understood by your listener(s). I think that everything else can be converted into ’will the listener(s) understand the same thing(s) (including degree of precision) that I mean, which provides a single quantity which can be maximized, even if it is nontrivial to measure.
Which leads me to realize that saying more than one thing at once is more of an art form than a communication method. I’m fine with communicating and arting at the same time, especially when they interfere constructively.
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Or, when sharing a concept which is not precise, sometimes the right level of understanding in the listener(s) is a vague idea. Especially when collaborating on an idea which is in the process of forming.
I used to agree, but that part of my philosophy recently became unsettled.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Given that Coates is complaining about a pundit who disdains polls in favor of personal impressions (or worse, secondhand accounts thereof), it seems like a better conclusion would be “there is an objective world; and your feelings about how the world is, are not the world itself; you actually have to go and measure in a systematic fashion if you want to know what the world is like”. I’m not sure why he concludes that the objective world is not real. Besides, if there’s no objective world, then the notion of some attempts to represent that world being more or less flawed, seems incoherent...
P.S. You’ve got the hyphen in Coates’ name placed wrong; it should be “Ta-Nehisi Coates”.
I think he means that none of the stuff in a mind is going to be a perfect representation, but if that’s what he meant, then there were probably better ways of saying it.
In any case, the location of the hyphen in his name is about as objective as you can get, and I’ve corrected it.
Yes, to be fair, that seems like a reasonable charitable interpretation. Coates’ writing (that I’ve seen linked from here, anyway) is consistently insightful and clear-headed, so I was actually somewhat surprised to read a “there is no reality” line from him.
Perhaps the real rationality takeaway here is that sometimes the people who talk about the “objective world” and “looking at reality” and so forth are the ones who are engaging in woo and irrational nonsense, which baits their opponents into this strange arguing-against-objective-reality position. The lesson, then, is that we should look at how people actually derive their beliefs, not how objective they claim they’re being.
The Dialogues Between Bokonon and Koheleth
If we’re using “humanity” to mean human values, this quote seems simply false (presuming that value stability is a solved problem by then).
If we’re using the word to mean the architecture of baseline humans, it seems somewhere between false and irrelevant depending on what features of that architecture we care about.
If we’re using it to mean some kind of metaphysical quality of human nature, it seems entirely unverifiable.
I found the quote amusing specifically because of this ambiguity (modulus your first point—the question of values seems tangential to me).
I found the mix of optimism (ie. the assumptions that no extinction type events will occur, and that there will be a continuous descendant type relationship between generations far into our future, etc...) and pessimism (ie, the assumption that, on a large enough time scale, most architectural components traceable to now-humans will become obsolete) poignant.
That seems like the presumption that the quote is challenging.
Even if that’s true (which I’m not convinced it is; as I implied, “humanity” covers a lot of ground before it stops working in context), I’m uncomfortable with the implications of the quote. It seems to be treating value stability less as a (difficult) problem and more as an insurmountable obstacle, the sort where the only way to win is not to play. Then there’s the “alas, Babylon” overtones.
Suppose I should expect as much from someone taking the name of a Kurt Vonnegut character, though.
Even if you think the essence of the quote is wrong, that “we” would be better off if all the poets and street performers were making good livings in the white economy, don’t you think the quote is valuable for pointing up an important question that many of us working on coding intelligence may need to answer some day?
Wait, what? I was talking about self-modification, not social normativity. It might be a point about the latter in context, but it isn’t out of context; I was responding to the words you presented, not the ones in the source.
And my objection isn’t that it raises the wrong question, but that it closes that question with a wrong answer.
What’s the quote have to do with whether we want to be street performers? Do you think that self-modifying humans would try to make themselves want to work in offices instead of street performance, or something?
You can make a lot more money per unit time working in an office rather than as a street performer.
Is that what you would do if you could self-modify better? Do you use your limited capacity to change how your mind functions to make yourself into a more efficient money-making machine? I don’t.
Do you do any instrumental things? Like say, eat? Practice? Learn? Self modify?
Making more money happens to be a very effective way to achieve most goals.
You should use your “limited capacity to change how your mind functions ” to become more capable of doing whatever it is you want to do, in the most effective way possible.
If you find that making money is not instrumental to your goals, say so, but don’t just make fun of it and imply that the people who do (try to make money) are doing something wrong.
yeah. Sorry. The tone I was using was totally wrong for the kind of discussions we want to have here.
Is the point of being a street performer to make money or artistic fulfillment? It seems like there are better ways to achieve either one of these goals.
We shouldn’t edit humanity to remove depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and other mental illness?
No thanks—instead, let’s avoiding totally pointless wasting of human capability.
You shouldn’t carelessly think you are necessarily wise enough to edit humanity without destroying it in the process. Things like “depression” “anxiety” “schizophrenia” are probably not neatly packed away in tidy little boxes you can remove from your brain without any side-effects at all.
This has been somewhat discussed at Devil’s offers
I’m not saying that disentangling what we want to preserve will be easy. But the quote speaks in absolutes—fixing the code that causes schizophrenia or Capgras syndrone is prohibited because that would destroy our humanity.
It’s conflating the problem of Hidden Complexity of Wishes with Justification-for-being-hit-on-the-head-every-day.
The quote neither speaks in absolutes nor does it prohibit anything.
Quotes must be compact and pithy to be quotable. If a quote refers to “advanced humans of the future,” it is quite reasonable to expect they are talking about healthy, typical humans, and not referring to the repair of defects that only occur in some humans.
The quote expresses a wistful sense of loss at a choice to clean out the evelved code that makes up our kernel. It doesn’t prohibit anything.
I think the questions relevant to the quote would be should we avoid editing out crying at cute kitten videos, sitting with your grandmother while she tells you the same story for the 21st time, wearing a “kiss me I’m Polish” pin on st. patrick’s day, laughing at three stooges movies, and swooning when a nice boy writes you doggerel or gives you an “Oh Henry” candy bar.
In rewriting the part of the code that evolution put in, all sorts of idiosyncratic behavior will be written out. The fact that the root idio means self, personal, private will not make it any easier to replace the evolved code with rationalized, readable, maintainable code without losing all sorts of behaviors whos purpose is nearly unknowable when looking at the existing code.
Since anxiety, depression, and especially schizophrenia are features of humanity which exist to a negative degree only in some of us, it will probably be possible to fix these by writing patches that operate on the relevant minds that have these features, and will not reqiure touching the evoluion-written code.
Why would you judge your morality by the quality of it’s coding?
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
“The real value of an education has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
“This is water.”
--- David Foster Wallace in his commencement speech to Kenyon College, This is Water. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
Duplicate.
My mistake, I searched but didn’t see it.
I read this quote as saying that we don’t get educations in order to do things, but rather to have an awareness of things. I personally don’t do that, with most things. I think this quote smacks of ivory-towerism.
K.C. Cole
I dislike this quote because it obscures the true nature of the dilemma, namely the tension between individual and collective action. Being “not in one’s right mind” is a red herring in this context. Each individual action can be perfectly sensible for the individual, while still leading to a socially terrible outcome.
The real problem is not that some genius invents nuclear weapons and then idiotically decides to incite global nuclear war, “shooting from the hip” to his own detriment. The real problem is that incentives can be aligned so that it is in everyone’s interest every step along the way, to do their part in their own ultimate destruction.
Of course, if “right mind” was defined to mean “socially optimal mind,” fine, we aren’t in our right mind. But I don’t think that’s the default interpretation.
If you’re consistently in your right mind you can safely create the means of your own extinction, with the knowledge that you are sufficiently sane not to use it to extinguish yourself. This can come in handy when the means of your own extinction has significant non-extinction related uses.
This is true in theory, but do you think it’s an accurate description of our real world?
(Nuclear power is potentially great, but with a bit more patience and care, we could stretch our non-nuclear resources quite a bit further, which would have given us more time to build stable(r) political systems.)
No, I was responding to the “no one in their right mind” bit. It seems to me that when you are in your right mind is precisely the time to build artifacts that could destroy your civilization, and it doesn’t seem to me that you could conclude from building such artifacts that you are not in your right mind.
Rather, I think there’s other evidence that humanity can’t be trusted with e.g. nuclear weaponry, and this suggests that we should not build it. lukeprog’s quote seems to me to be of the form “Humanity can’t be trusted with nuclear weapons, yet builds them anyway, so it must be crazy, so it can’t be trusted with nuclear weapons.”
I think you set a false dichotomy here—we can generate relatively safe nuclear power (thorium reactors) without existential risk, and without creating the byproducts necessary to create nuclear weapons. This is not an argument against the root comment, however.
Sure, thorium reactors do not appear to immediately allow nuclear weapons—but the scientific and technological advances that lead to thorium reactors are definitely “dual-use”.
I’m not entirely convinced of either the feasibility or the ethics of the “physicists should never have told politicians how to build a nuke” argument that’s been made multiple times on LW (and in HPMOR), but the existence of thorium reactors doesn’t really constitute a valid argument against it—an industry capable of building thorium reactors is very likely able to think up, and eventually build, nukes.
Fallacy of Composition? “We” didn’t create advanced weapons, for example, tiny fractions of “we” did. And if half of humanity nukes the other half to extinction, but not before the other half fires off the nukes that wipe out the first half, then is it really fair to say that “we” committed suicide? The outcome is the same but you can’t begin to understand the problem by oversimplifying it.
G.B. Shaw on the Less Wrong gender ratio.
Sean Davis discussing political polling.
I’d like everyone to be far more skeptical of those who are instinctively skeptical of math.
Yes, and one of the best ways to do this is to reduce the perception among those with low math skills that people with strong math skills use math to intimidate.
Davis’ statement was not a generalised admonition concerning reasoning, but a statement made with the bottom line written (he was justifying ignoring Nate Silver). It’s not entirely accurate to characterise it in general terms.
I suggest we put this debate on hold, until say November, 6. ;)
It seems like calling into salience the notion of “those who use math to intimidate” would tend to increase the perception among those with low math skills that people with strong math skills use math to intimidate.
If we increase the social penalty on people who use math to intimidate we will decrease the number of people who use math to intimidate and so on net might reduce the perception among those with low math skills that people with strong math skills use math to intimidate.
Changing the underlying reality seems like a rather roundabout and unreliable method of changing people’s perceptions.
If this wasn’t on LW (and on the rationality quotes thread!) it would deserve to go on the rationality quotes thread.
In LessWrong terms, this is about the most horrible thing you can say about a society. It reads like an introductory quote to some hyper-Machiavellian book on advertising or political campaigning. Up-voted!
Doesn’t the wisdom of this depend on whether those using math to win status conflicts are right on the merits?
If being good at math is sufficiently likely to make one win status arguments because one is right, the incentive on people to become better at math is probably worth the cost from people using high math skills to win arguments despite being wrong on the merits.
Specifically, as part of the recent conservative criticism of Nate Silver.
--Some dude in the comment section of West Hunters
Source quote (thanks to ErikM):
I think this is the source you want.
See the section Consequences of Artificial Methods, subheading 17.
I was just going to edit it in after you mentioned it on IRC. Thank you!
That rather depends on which moral standards you’re using to start with. For example, modern humans—men as well as women—are often seen in public wearing nothing but shorts and a T-shirt. Pope Paul VI may or may not have seen this as normal, but his predecessors surely would’ve condemned the practice as supremely immoral. Does this mean that moral standards had fallen during the past 500 or so years ?
I’d like the original wording for the last prediction; the government subsidizes and promotes it but only China forces everyone to use it. Also I have doubts about the causation in prediction two.
Also, right above what you quoted:
That’s pretty vague. Like, if they predicted “Smart hard workers will be able to do their stuff without wasting time with kids”, that’s a win for them.
Oversimplified. One-child policy. I have an adopted Chinese daughter, I went to China for the adoption in 2002, and I talked about the policy with Chinese working for the adoption agency.
“Artificial birth control” is one method by which Chinese might avoid unwanted children, but if anyone is forced to use it, that’s not official by the government. However, there were isolated, unofficial actions taken by local officials, sometimes, cases of forced abortion.
See also Two-child policy.
Normal enforcement of the policy is through fines on excess children, the definition of excess varies by region, ethnic group, and, sometimes, the sex of already-born children. The most stringent requirements are on the Han majority
The situation is much more complex than most in the West might imagine..
<Bile-spewing rad-fem mode ON! Be warned, I’m not sure I quite get radical feminist thought, so this is a test run.>
I have few doubts here. Indeed this perverse logic looks simple to me, as I am habitually terribly disrespectful to my ideological opponents—so I automatically assumed that the “Dude” above, who presumably counts himself among the savvy “Bigots”, went for as much cynicism as possible. So the phrase “disrespect women” should not be taken as a decent modern person would, at face value—“treat them worse than their character and behavior could justly warrant”.
Instead, you should assume that our oh-so-savvy Dude considers men to be entirely sex-driven, and indifferent/hostile towards the Other that is a woman’s personality, individuality, etc, and so a woman is an entirely commodified barrier (a walking, talking tax) to a rare and precious resource—Consequence-Controlled Sex.
“Risky” sex is more available but the patriarchal society taxes/fines it with a whole lot of potential troubles, so such selfish and casually misogynistic men must go for the safer option, which is bundled with the sacred function of childbirth. So by such a roundabout way the women as a group can get the “respect” of the patriarchal society—it trickles down from the market value of their bodies, and that’s it—men aren’t taught to seek anything else, instead they’re just given the carrot of “proper” sex and the stick of unintended pregnancies of STD.
Gotta love them old good traditional values! They’re full of such harmony and beauty, and are totally not quick, dirty, cynical hacks!
P.S.: (looks up and finally notices MixedNuts’ username) - might I be preaching to the choir with this?
I think the reasoning under “disrespect woman” is as follows:
1) Increased availability of birth control leads to an increased frequency of non-marital sex.
2) Increased non-marital sex must be caused by social pressure on women to have non-marital sex.
3) Social pressure on women to have non-marital sex at a higher frequency than the women “naturally” desire is not respectful to women.
From most feminist perspectives, (1) and (3) seem like reasonable predictions / moral assertions. Step 2 is filled with some noteworthy implicit assertions about how sexual relations are and should be negotiated—for one thing, there’s not much female agency in that story.
I’m not sure how much, if at all, that my interpretation differs from yours, except that it doesn’t directly require different understandings of words (i.e. “disrespect”) than a feminist might use.
I’d add that the “patriarchal” thinking can get perverse enough that 2) might be replaced with “the disappearance of the risk of pregnancy removes the barrier to women’s naturally wanton and irresponsible sexuality”, so that 3) becomes “if men see the woman’s true, uncontrolled sexual nature, they’ll disrespect her much as if they saw her uncovered, naked body; both states are savage and animal.”
But your interpretation might work too—it’s just that mine seems crazy and perverse enough to be the product of cultural adaptation/rationalization while yours is more logical. And damn, I swear I could see my version implied/assumed in the wording of some angry MRA/PUA rants I’ve read.
(Dear downvoters, what exactly are you opposing here?)
In other words, “I prefer mine because it makes a better strawman”.
BTW, see here for a good description of the actual catholic position.
Strawman or not, TimS’ version is still very problematic to a modern view of gender, as he says.
And more importantly, why do you believe that most people—especially in a traditional society—even care to apply logic and reflection when thinking about sex? So many other popular beliefs (on drugs, religion, etc) both then and now are full of cached thoughts, inherited memes etc. and lack rigorous reflection!
What does this have to do with it being or not being true?
You seam to be conflating the progressive/traditional distinction intellectual/popular distinction. There were a lot of smart people in the past (who would today be considered traditional) who thought about these things.
This is equally true in non-traditional societies.
It’s a response to the charge of me intentionally picking the more strawman-like answer.
Sure, but in traditional societies reflection on sacred matters is officially discouraged, whereas in modern ones there’s just the silent pressure to come to the approved conclusion—but many still decide not to! There are more patriarchally oriented people now in the 1st world than there were liberal people in the past.
If neither position is obviously insane and they just stem from different moral instincts, then there must be slightly more freedom of thought today along these axes.
That some didn’t stop Christian theologians from doing an awful lot of reflection on sacred matters.
The sacred is a territory that a caste claims for themselves. The edict is about preventing outsiders from impinging on their turf, not one of preventing all from doing the reflection.
Modern scientists tend to take a similar attitude to outsiders who impinge on their turf.
Exactly what I was thinking of as I wrote the comment. Scientists and Doctors are certainly priestly castes.
But here the Pope is predicting how the “people” would react, presumably applying his cynicism and savvy.
My point is that over time the Church has acquired a decent working model of how humans behave in large groups.
Would anyone please challenge this? Are there other ways to construe the “disrespect women” line?
I took disrespect woman to mean “treat them worse than their character and behavior could justly warrant”.
That’s a reasonable definition of “disrespect.”
Why should one believe that freely available birth control is likely to cause disrespect towards women?
Freely available birth control → Fewer direct consequences to having sex → Men have sex with more women → Men more likely to think of women only as sexual objects
Doesn’t this explanation rather rob women of agency ?
If you feel annoyed at the universe for robbing women of agency in this instance, go ahead. The universe doesn’t care.
I was complaining about you, not the Universe. If your model of reality includes “women are automatons” as a feature, your model is not very likely to be correct.
“Agency” in this sense (social and moral agency, I’d call it) obviously =/= “Libertarian free will”.
What does this have to do with the discussion?
Why not state the conclusion here as: People have more sex. Just as men have more sexual partners, why wouldn’t women have more sexual partners.
When phrased like that, the next conclusion (Women increasingly thought of as sex objects) requires a bit more justification. One could assert that women naturally have fewer partners than men, but surely some or most of that is explained by the relative ease of avoiding the consequences of pregnancy.
I was presenting a possible causal mechanism, not an argument. The argument is that the Pope’s prediction did in fact come true.
In case it isn’t clear, there is not agreement that the second prediction did come true.
(or the fourth. And the first is simply argument by definition).
Here is Catholic John C Wright describing what they mean.
Modern western societies have women integrated with men in most professions, whereas societies that highly limit sexual behavior with women seem to be the ones who turn women into something other than humans primarily.
Reqiuring women to be coevered head to toe if they appear in public, requiring them to only appear in public when they are with a man from their family who can protect them, and limiting their rights to own property, work, drive, and attend schools are all features of “highly moral” societies and essentially absent from “immoral” societies.
As a result children are raised by people how are neither smart nor hard-working.
But those children would have been raised by those parents regardless of what the smart hard workers did.
On the other hand, it affects what the average member of the next generation is like.
How?
If you define morality the way the catholic church does, I’m not sure whether it’s true. There are all sorts of developments that you could call a lowering of moral standards from the perspective of the church.
The last decades saw a rise in pornography that you could call “men disrespecting women”.
Having numbers on infidelity would be nice.
Some governments who have problems with overpopulation do encourage their citizens to use birthcontrol. China even goes as far as forcing them.
Could you provide a reasonend argument as to the evidence that Pope Paul VI predictions are false?
Violence against women is way down. Laws limiting the occupations of women and the rights to own property of women are way down. If by respect you mean “keep them barefoot and in the kitchen and punish them if they go out and risk their precious lady parts” then I won’t be able to convince you, because by respect I mean “acknowledge the autonomy and independence of independent agents and provide societal protections against coercion by abuse or threats of abuse.”
Your welcome.
If you want to understand what someone else is saying it makes sense to look past the way you yourself define terms.
If you want to say Pope Paul VI’s prediction is wrong it would make sense to use a definition of respect of Pope Paul VI. To me the claim that Pope Paul VI would define respect for woman as “acknowledge the autonomy and independence of independent agents and provide societal protections against coercion by abuse or threats of abuse” seems wrong.
Do you really believe that’s Pope Paul VI definition?
I suppose if you were asking me “do you think Pope Paul VI thinks he is wrong when he makes these four predictions” it might make sense to use definitions of these terms common among Catholics.
Do you really believe that Pope Paul VI believes when he refers to respecting women or morality that it is his personal definition of morality or respect he is speaking of, or do you suppose he thinks and would claim he is really talking about something real and external to him in discussing Morality and Respect? Since Catholic is a Latin word meaning Universal, I’d bet that he, like most other Catholic dogmatists in history, would not accept that his statements are just true for him and are not also true for people who disagree with him. What do you think about that?
In any case, the original quote speaks of the cool people being wrong, so wouldn’t it make at least as much sense to use the terms respect and morality in ways that the cool people would agree with in examining these questions?
In light of the above questions, arrogating the words Respect and Morality to only their papal definitions will not be fruitful for you, either in this discussion or in your own thinking on these issues.
I didn’t use the word “personal”. Of course he speaks about the position of the catholic church. In this case the position that the catholic church had in 1968 when he made his prediction.
Part of the idea of catholic faith is that something like the meaning of “respecting women” get’s defined top-down.
That’s not what I’m doing. I have no problem with using different definitions of terms depending on the text I’m reading. If you can only use one defnition and try to interpret what everyone is saying through that definition you are likely to misunderstand the position of people who disagree with you.
It’s bad to have habits that make it hard to understand what people with different mindsets are saying. It allows you to have all those tribal beliefs of the cool people crowd without spending any conscious thought in rationally examining your beliefs.
Honestly, I think there’s a fairly tenable argument that all of those things have happened (not 4, but...).
I think the better objection is that there’s no causal connection between those things and birth control.
Hmmm. If you define morality as having less sex rather than more sex, then morality has declined. If you see the reason for advising chastitiy as avoiding unwanted pregnancy..that no longer makes sense.
I don’t see why govennets would want to reduce the number of future taxpayers
Respect for women...please...hugely increased by the “cool people” within living memory. The RC’s still don’t respect women enough to allow them to dispense the sacrament.
Do y’all genuinely not understand why some people like chastity?
Part of morality is interacting with sacred things only in highly ritualized contexts and focusing on strong emotions appropriate to the thing. Sex is sacred. If people have sex because of pious zeal to follow the first of all commandments, of deep hope for a child to birth and raise and love, and of overwhelming, passionate, committed romantic love that they have freely chosen to be bound by for life, then it’s moral. If they have sex because it sounds like fun right now, then it’s profanation and therefore gross/evil.
Sacredness looks like a cultural universal. I like the theory that we have a general sense of things being in the wrong place that causes revulsion because it’s a disease prevention mechanism, but it seems too narrow to hold water; it’s good for avoiding dangerous food and contamination, but I can’t see why it could affect sex, unless it was specifically triggered by STDs or something.
(Now if someone could explain to me why so many people find gay kisses gross...)
I’d say “respect” for individuals, women or otherwise, would be that those who buy in to your ideas about chastity get to do what they find consistent with that in their lives, those who have other ideas about sex get to do something different, and that both choices when made without coercion are essentially protected by law.
It is not “respect” of an intelligent entity to constrain THEIR behavior to fit YOUR ideas about sex. And such constraint is the policy of the Roman Catholic church (where popes come from), even in modern day where we see Roman Catholic support for laws against the use of birth control in Italy, and Ireland (two countries where the Roman Catholics have a lot of influence.).
That’s the preaching-to-the-converted version. When preaching to the unconverted, more pragmatic arguments tend to be brought forward
Unwanted pregnancy would have been as disastrous as disease in the econiomcally constrained socieites of our ancestors. .
Or interacial kisses? Depends where y’all come from, I figure. Old chap.
Short answer: conditioning.
I’m not sure hunter-gatherers typically avoid pregnancy—they’re much more free-lovey and screw-it-let’s-just-kill-excess-kids-ey than low-tech farmers.
Sex aversion in cultures I’m most familiar with seems to have to do with proof of paternity (individual, small set of individuals, or even just the local band) than with pregnancy avoidance. Sex when you have too many kids to raise is stupid but not gross; sex out of wedlock when you could totally raise a kid is. Don’t know if it’s because many cultures have incentives to condition for that or if it’s innate.
But that’s not quite my question. What I’m asking about is why physical and moral disgust have so much overlap. Touching poop then eating is gross, but I don’t feel it’s morally repugnant. Killing your neighbor is evil, but not gross. So why does disgust leak into morality? I don’t think we ever do in/outgroup or fairness or harm/care without a moral element. Most emotions (joy and curiosity and the like) affect moral judgement, but they’re not fundamental bases.
And why do we have such specific emotions for the sacred? It’s a weird-ass intersection of cleanliness, morality, ingroup bonding mechanisms, appeasing the high-status, and aesthetic appreciation. Who ordered that?
I’m not sure why disgust can be conditioned at all, but we can do that for all emotions anyway and cultures that learn win.
No, that one’s easy. The proper place for a person is among their race, leaking out is matter out of place—impurity, dirt. Plus, whites are better than blacks, so mixing black with white is disgusting corruption, like mixing dirt with food.
Whereas I’d expect basically the Ancient Greek stance on homosexuality: doing men is More Purer, and men are better than women so they’re nobler in the sack. (And two women can’t have sex, silly.)
Where are you getting this from? It does match my model, but it’s a controversial-sounding enough point that I think a cite would be beneficial.
Miswiring.
Is it? So sex isn;t sacred. it is just believed to be. By some people.
I don’t know that there is a culture (other than some subcultures in the modern First World) who don’t consider sex sacred, though certainly there’s quite a gap between “Son, if you ever lust after another guy you’re going to Hell!” and “Son, if you don’t suck enough cock, you’ll lose your vital energy!”.
Not sure what you mean by “sacred”. Almost everybody obsesses about it, positively or negatively. Is that sacredness?
No, sacredness is way more specific. Sacred things are:
Special. They belong to their own sphere of sacred things apart from mundane ones.
Powerful. If you fuck with them, they will fuck you up.
Important. You care about them a lot.
Emotionally charged. This kinda follows from the above, but the stronger and more unusual emotions you add, the sacreder. Awe is sacred as balls.
Big. You can’t quite comprehend them; maybe there’s too much importance or power or emotion for you to handle, maybe they act unpredictably (because they’re people or something), maybe they’re inherently and magically mysterious.
A lot like your parents when you’re a little kid, really.
Uh-huh. Where I come from, the prevalent culture is very much not to regard sex as sacred in that sense.
Attempt at explanation:
That’s how that culture “wants” people to think (believe-in-belief) - because sex-in-itself has largely the “taboo” + “big” + “powerful” factors for it so people shrink from thinking too much about it; while the “importance” and the “emotional charge” factors are attached to the intersection of sex and romantic love/marriage/childbirth. Thinking about sex with those attachments is easier in such a culture than thinking about sex-in-itself.
Presumably to make sex without those latter attachments less desirable/less of a goal on a memetic level, but keep the overall cover of sacredness.
Sounds plausible/falsifiable enough within MixedNuts’ model, doesn’t it?
You can rescue any theory with a furry of auxilliary hypotheses.
Fixed that for you.
I stand by this answer.
I used to find gay man-man kissing (or any form of intimate touching between males, really) very gross despite a very strong conscious understanding and notion that it was just as “right” for them as between a man and a woman.
Then, as I noticed and saw more of it, it got normal.
Now I don’t find any of it the least bit gross or off-putting anymore, except in rare cases that evoke specific memories.
The just-so hindsight explanation that makes the most sense is that I believed-by-default everything I was told as a child about such things being “bad”, “gross” and “disgusting” or even outright “evil” by my peers. However, that’s only the slightly-more-likely out of many possible explanations, and I don’t have real data.
I don’t think so. I think that everything vile, disgusting, and repugnant got normal, not just gay sex.
I say this from observation of people who have conditioned themselves for a politically correct lack of disgust reflex. They also have a non political lack of disgust reflex: Observe, for example the “no pressure” video, and the cannibalism video
I predict that you are also no longer disgusted by poop eating, cannibalism, or the malicious infliction of painful and destructive injury.
I predict that if you watch the “no pressure” video, or the cannibalism video, you will wonder what the fuss was all about.
Someone who quite genuinely does not find feminists disgusting, is likely to be sincerely astonished when lots of people who piously pretend that they do not find feminists disgusting react with outrage at the “no pressure” video.
Modern morality is anti sex, and has been ever since the Victorians, for example “date rape”, “marital rape”, and the ever rising age of consent, all of which started culturally or legally with the Victorians, and has become every more extreme ever since.
Obviously a society in which women generally do not marry until their fertility is about to expire has less sex than a society where women generally marry during their most fertile years.
The New Testament position was that most people are entirely incapable of celibacy, and therefore upholding sexual morality meant maximizing monogamous sex.
(I notice I got downvoted for endorsing the New Testament position that fertile age people are incapable of celibacy, and it is just not going to happen.)
According to the New Testament:
And, from the start of Christianity to the early nineteenth century, that was Christian sexual morality. Today’s sexual morality is Victorianism on steroids.
From the restoration to the early nineteenth century, they deviated from Christian morality by being OK with men having sex with sluts, but not OK with women being sluts. Victorians cried “hypocrisy” after the fashion of Alinsky, cracked down on men having sex with sluts (rising age of consent, ever more expansive rape laws requiring ever less evidence, etc) and eased up on women being sluts. Compare treatment of Petraeus with treatment of Monica.
Are you quite sure that’s not being pro-consent?
Should morality reflect reality or should our reality be frozen in time, immune from technical advances, so that it stays relevant to an old morality? Yah… if children are a technically unavoidable result of sex, then one set of policies is optimum, if children are avoidable, another set of policies will optimize.
Women in modern societies have violence of various sorts much less often perpetrated against them, and have many fewer life choices precluded to them than in the past. It would be an odd definition of respect indeed which rated women less respected now than they were in the days of less effective birth control.
And if you’re Roman Catholic, having children is the goal you’re optimizing for.
Fele: You are really hot
Angela: Thank you.
Fele, Nah, it’s not your own achievement
-Tesis (1996)