I like that formulation, thank you!
Apprentice
Karma: 1,657
Humans can drive cars
So… you value following duty as a character trait?
I guess you could spin it that way—but let me take an example.
For the last couple of weeks, my wife and I have been involved in some drama in our extended family. When we discuss in private and try to decide how we should act, I’ve noticed my wife keeps starting off with “If we were to do X, what would happen?”. She likes to try to predict different outcomes and she wants to pick the action that leads to the best one. So maybe she is a consequentialist through and through.
I tend to see the whole sorry business as too complicated for us to predict, especially since I don’t want to neglect consequences 10 or 20 years down the line. So I fall back to trying to apply rules that would be generally applicable. “What is our duty to family member X? What is our duty to family member Y?”
It’s not that I would ever say “We should do X, even though it leads to worse outcomes.” But I do want to consider the long run and I’d prefer not to destroy useful Schelling points for short term gain.
Are you a virtue ethicist at heart?
No, but I’m a deontologist at heart. Only in death does duty end.
Lots of good points here. In addition to the Matrix analogy (which, as you point out, is hardly a neutral way to frame the divide), keep in mind that in the US, blue and red are also the conventional colors of the left and the right.
We continue to have our little ‘reactionary paradox’ in that the census results show overwhelming support for feminism, but the discussion on the ground seems oddly ‘red’. As you have already suggested this effect might be partially explained by LessWrong’s fondness for contrarians.
I wasn’t aware of these sub factions. Are they real?
It’s an idealization, to be sure. And I don’t think there are cliques meeting in smoke-filled IRC-channels to plot downvoting sprees. But still, I think my comment above describes something real.
Previous discussion here.
It’s not that people hate your ex and want to downvote all sympathy for her. Rather, this is just one of many manifestations of our ongoing culture war. Roughly speaking, we have two teams:
Team Blue is on board with romantic love and feminism and emphasizes personal autonomy. On this view, a successful love relationship is about finding a person you click with, which could mean any number of quirky things. The problem with your marriage is that your wife was never that into you—which sucked for her. Now that she’s found a person she clicks with, the seeds have been sown for more future happiness for all. No-one is really at fault, especially since you have both done your best to minimize disruption for the children.
Team Red is sympathetic to “red pill” advice (Athol Kay etc.), emphasizes biology and is less individualistic. A successful relationship is not primarily about a unique connection between unique individuals—rather it is about acting in accordance with an already existing model of what human males and females desire in each other. A particular necessity is that the male should, where appropriate, display confident and assertive behavior. On this view, our modern society has fallen into a trap (we have some harmful memes floating around, or whatever) where many males become doormats—which makes them unattractive to their wives or potential wives. What ruined your marriage is not that you were somehow inherently the wrong man for your wife—but that society failed to teach you to be assertive when appropriate. (She thought she could bring her lover into your home and you would just conveniently scurry away. This is how little she thought of you.)
You totally could express sympathy to your ex within a Team Red perspective but it would go something like this: “I feel for your wife. She couldn’t control her biology and feel attracted to a man who was not displaying sufficient alpha traits.” In practice, Team Red views do sometimes come with a certain regrettable bitterness towards women—especially wives who leave their husbands. So a Red-ist may tend to read sympathy to such a woman, if not explicitly framed as Red-ist, as Blue-ist propaganda.
Anyway, the point is that Team Red and Team Blue are locked in a low-grade war on LessWrong. Comments on the relevant issues will often have downvotes as well as upvotes. The comment by shminux is currently at +9, 76% positive, while the comment by Viliam Búr is at +9, 68% positive.
If you are a partisan of this, it is hard not to downvote the opposing team because you feel that they are directly harming people with their counterproductive advice and toxic memes. I don’t know if we can work out a downvote ceasefire.
I like that you didn’t move out and I like that you took up fencing.
My instinct is to agree with this. I spent decades learning the intricacies of North-European politeness and I think I’ve finally more or less got it. Now that I’ve learned it, I might be motivated to think that there is some actual point to all this dancing around!
I like Stefan’s idea of connecting guess/ask with wait/interrupt. We might also want to bring the guilt/shame axis into this.
It sounds like ask/interrupt/shame should make for a more honest and efficient society. The guess/wait/guilt stuff sounds pretty frakked up when it is described. But in practice it seems to be correlated with the best places to live in. Maybe this is one of those Chesterton’s fence things:
If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
Or for a more recent version, xkcd on drama.
This is a very hard field to work in, psychologically, because there’s no reliable process for producing valuable work (this might be true generally, but I get the sense that in the sciences it’s easier to get moving in a worthwhile direction).
I think you’re right that philosophy is particularly difficult in this respect. In many fields you can always go out, gather some data and use relatively standard methodologies to analyze your data and produce publishable work from it. This is certainly true in linguistics (go out and record some conversations or whatever) and philology (there are always more texts to edit, more stemmas to draw etc.). I get the impression that this is also more or less possible in sociology, psychology, biology and many other fields. But for pure philosophy, you can’t do much in the way of gathering novel data.
worlds where outright complex hallucination is a normal feature of human experience
What sort of hallucinations are we talking about? I sometimes have hallucinations (auditory and visual) with sleep paralysis attacks. One close friend has vivid hallucinatory experiences (sometimes involving the Hindu gods) even outside of bed. It is low status to talk about your hallucinations so I imagine lots of people might have hallucinations without me knowing about it.
I sometimes find it difficult to tell hallucinations from normal experiences, even though my reasoning faculty is intact during sleep paralysis and even though I know perfectly well that these things happen to me. Here are two stories to illustrate.
Recently, my son was ill and sleeping fitfully, frequently waking up me and my wife. After one restless episode late in the night he had finally fallen asleep, snuggling up to my wife. I was trying to fall asleep again, when I heard footsteps outside the room. “My daughter (4 years old) must have gotten out of bed”, I thought, “she’ll be coming over”. But this didn’t happen. The footsteps continued and there was a light out in the hall. “Odd, my daughter must have turned on the light for some reason.” Then through the door came an infant, floating in the air. V orpnzr greevsvrq ohg sbhaq gung V jnf cnenylmrq naq pbhyq abg zbir be fcrnx. V gevrq gb gbhpu zl jvsr naq pel bhg naq svanyyl znantrq gb rzvg n fhoqhrq fuevrx. Gura gur rkcrevrapr raqrq naq V fnj gung gur yvtugf va gur unyy jrer abg ghearq ba naq urneq ab sbbgfgrcf. “Fghcvq fyrrc cnenylfvf”, V gubhtug, naq ebyyrq bire ba zl fvqr.
Here’s another somewhat older incident: I was lying in bed beside my wife when I heard movement in our daughter’s room. I lay still wondering whether to go fetch her—but then it appeared as if the sounds were coming closer. This was surprising since at that time my daughter didn’t have the habit of coming over on her own. But something was unmistakeably coming into the room and as it entered I saw that it was a large humanoid figure with my daughter’s face. V erpbvyrq va ubeebe naq yrg bhg n fuevrx. Nf zl yrsg unaq frnepurq sbe zl jvsr V sbhaq gung fur jnfa’g npghnyyl ylvat orfvqr zr—fur jnf fgnaqvat va sebag bs zr ubyqvat bhe qnhtugre. Fur’q whfg tbggra bhg bs orq gb srgpu bhe qnhtugre jvgubhg zr abgvpvat.
The two episodes play our very similarly but only one of them involved hallucinations.
I’ve sort of forgotten where I was going with this, but if Will would like to tell us a bit more about his experiences I would be interested.
Do you feel overworked and desparate as a PhD student or is it basically fun? Have you published any articles yet or are you planning to? What are your career plans?
I skimmed it and nothing seemed obviously wrong. If you’re interested, you could try for yourself. If you download Marlowe’s corpus, Shakespeare’s corpus and stylo you can get a feel for how this works in a couple of hours.
You’re right, it’s a horrible term. For one thing, the methods involved are pretty well-established by now. I just use it by habit. As for that old Marlowe/Shakespeare hubbub, here’s a recent study which finds their style similar but definitely not identical.
Yes, you could turn the quote upside down and it would still work. That was kind of the point. For effective communication it’s not a good idea to talk as if your opponent is operating on your assumptions rather than her own assumptions.
I no longer try to steelman BETA-MEALR [Ban Everything That Anyone Might Experience And Later Regret] arguments as utilitarian. When I do, I just end up yelling at my interlocutor, asking how she could possibly get her calculations so wrong, only for her to reasonably protest that she wasn’t make any calculations and what am I even talking about?
I’ve always wanted to know more about how authorship attribution is done; is this, found with a quick search, a reasonable survey of current state of the art, or perhaps you’d recommend something else to read?
The Stamatatos survey you linked to will do fine. The basic story is “back in the day this stuff was really hard but some people tried anyway, then in 1964 Mosteller and Wallace published a landmark paper showing that you really could do impressive stuff, then along came computers and now we have a boatload of different algorithms, most of which work just great”. The funny thing about stylometry is that it is hard to get wrong. Count up anything you like (frequent words, infrequent words, character n-grams, whatever) and use any distance measurement you like and odds are you’ll get usable results. If you want to play around with this for yourself you can install stylo and turn it loose on a corpus of your choice. Gwern’s little experiment is also a good read.
My involvement with stylometry has not been to tweak the algorithms (they work just fine) but to apply them in some particular cases and to try to convince my fellow scholars that technological wizardry really can tell them things worth knowing.
Are your fields, and humanities in general, trying to move towards open publishing of academic papers, the way STEM fields have been trying to?
Yes. Essentially every scholar I know is in favor of this. As far as I can see, It will happen and is happening.
Do you plan to stay in academia or leave, and it the latter, for what kind of job?
I worked as an engineer for a few years but found I wasn’t that into it and really missed school. So I went back and I’d like to stay.
Thank you. You brought up considerations I hadn’t considered.
Okay, I’ll bite. Do you think any part of what MIRI does is at all useful?
While I do like that visualization a lot, I think it is misleading in some ways. It is trivial to add to the sum of human knowledge. Go and count the coins in your wallet. I don’t know how many are in mine so I’ll go and check. Okay, there are 18 coins in my wallet. Now we know something we didn’t know before.
“Oh, but that’s not knowledge, that’s just data—and just one datum at that. By ‘knowledge’ we mean stuff you can get published in research papers—something containing analysis and requiring insight.” Bah, I tell you. You totally could get a coins-in-wallet study peer-reviewed and published. You just have to look in more wallets. Imagine you gathered a sample from 100 people in your city. Take 100 people from another city. Add cities in other countries. Do it all again in a year. Keep doing it for 10 more years. Now you have lots of data. Go and write your paper. It won’t require any insight or genius—it will practically write itself. Just present your data in some legible way with nice graphs and you will find someone interested enough to publish it. Maybe not a top journal but definitely a legitimate journal in a relevant field.
The boundary of knowledge isn’t hard and doesn’t require years until you come up with some “breakthrough”. You can just start right away, collecting information no-one currently has.
Or if you’d like to define ‘human knowledge’ so restrictively that the coins-in-wallet study wouldn’t count, then the average PhD won’t count either. Look at this zombie. Isn’t it racist and sexist? Yes, it is.