Caue

• CaueMar 30, 2015, 8:43 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Schel­ling fences on slip­pery slopes

  Thanks, this is what I thought. That would be the difference between my first and third types of speech, and an example of a controversy about how to draw the line.

• CaueMar 30, 2015, 8:21 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Schel­ling fences on slip­pery slopes

  Looking at my thought process, I think I’m using this differentiating test:

  Look at the probability of the outcome, given the speech—if it’s high enough that you can ignore the receiver of the message as an independent agent whose response generates uncertainty, the causation looks pretty direct. But if the outcome is dependent on people freely considering the information and acting on their own conclusions (as they would if the information was known by other means), then it looks indirect enough that I consider “transmiting information” as the function of the speech.

• CaueMar 30, 2015, 7:38 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Schel­ling fences on slip­pery slopes

  Consider e.g. whisteblowing. Or pretty much any political speech—are you saying engaging in political speech specifically in order to influence the elections “isn’t really protected”?

  No, I’m saying that causation is sufficiently less direct in this case (than in cases like shouting “fire” and ordering a murder) that it’s more reasonable to put it in the “intent to transmit information” box.

• CaueMar 30, 2015, 6:08 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Schel­ling fences on slip­pery slopes

  By the presence of this additional element, the intent for the speech to cause a concrete effect besides transmission of information, and its ability to cause it.

  ETA: For some reason I only now noticed the “other hand” on your first response. Yes, all speech transmits information (even if just the information that I think A or desire B), and most speech intends some goal (even if just the goal that people think like me). When I think of the problem of putting a speech act in the first or second boxes my mind follows paths similar those used in determining causation in Law, with similar difficulties. There won’t always be a bright line, but most instances will be closer to one end than the other.

• CaueMar 30, 2015, 5:47 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Schel­ling fences on slip­pery slopes

  Sorry, that was supposed to be “falsely shouting fire”. I’ll be surprised if someone is punished for shouting “fire” if there really was a fire and they were only transmiting this information. For that reason, I also expect that “I thought there was a fire!” would be an effective defense.

• CaueMar 30, 2015, 5:25 PM

  1 point

  on: Schel­ling fences on slip­pery slopes

  I’ve read the comments, and nobody seems to have mentioned the different functions of speech, and the different goals of limitations. Yvain’s examples of Holocaust denial and “shouting fire” are not the same sort of thing.

  Speech as an act causally linked to a desired consequence unrelated to communication, like falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, or commanding a subordinate to shoot someone, or etc., isn’t really protected (I’m not very familiar with US Law, but I can’t think of counterexamples). These limitations don’t usually register as “censorship”.

  Speech as transmission of information is protected, but with many [mostly] uncontroversial exceptions, like privacy, intellectual property, and state secrets.

  Most controversies seem to be about speech as expression of thought, be it opinions, theories, or art. Yvain’s thoughts are about this (as are his and Vladimir’s points about identifying the Right-Thinking People and legislating the truth), so the “shouting fire” example doesn’t help much.

  I’m not sure it’s useful to speak of all three as “speech” and have a single set of general rules for them, unless this is also acting as a Schelling point (although some current debates—hate speech, blasphemy—seem to be essentially about the framing of the issue as the first or the third kind of speech, with speaker intention often acting as a [Schelling?] divide).

  [edited after Lumifer’s response]

• CaueMar 24, 2015, 3:11 PM

  5 points

  in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Open thread, Mar. 23 - Mar. 31, 2015

  “Algorithms” feels more related to the Sequences, but may not be the strategic choice. I don’t expect non-math/​CS types to go “yay, a book about algorithms!”.

• CaueMar 23, 2015, 2:34 PM

  0 points

  on: LINK: Cos­mol­o­gist and an Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian Don Page on God and Cosmology

  The first link doesn’t work...

  Don argues for God and Christianity on Bayesian reasons.

  That is significantly more burdensome. And it seems that the argument presented here doesn’t stretch enough to reach a God compatible with Christianity.

• CaueMar 17, 2015, 11:56 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Open thread, Mar. 16 - Mar. 22, 2015

  I like this.

• CaueMar 13, 2015, 5:46 PM

  9 points

  0

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity: From AI to Zombies

  My first reaction as well.

  But that is easy. What I haven’t figured out yet is how to get them to read it.

• CaueSep 12, 2014, 6:02 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Septem­ber 2014

  The point was just that we should be allowed to weight expected positives against expected negatives. Yes, there can be invisible items in the “cons” column (also on the “pros”), and it may make sense to require extra weight on the “pros” column to account for this, but we shouldn’t be required to act as if the invisible “cons” definitely outweigh all “pros”.

• CaueSep 12, 2014, 5:48 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Azathoth123’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Septem­ber 2014

  I agree with this.

  But then we look, and this turns into “we haven’t looked enough”. Which can be true, so maybe we go “can anyone think of something concrete that can go wrong with this?”, and ideally we will look into that, and try to calculate the expected utility.

  But then it becomes “we can’t look enough—no matter how hard we try, it will always be possible that there’s something we missed”.

  Which is also true. But if, just in case, we decide to act as if unknown unknowns are both certain and significant enough to override the known variables, then we start vetoing the development of things like antibiotics or the internet, and we stay Christians because “it can’t be proven wrong”.

• CaueSep 11, 2014, 6:28 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Septem­ber 2014

  (thank you for helping me try to understand him on this point, by the way)

  This seems coherent. But, to be honest, weak (which could mean I still don’t get it).

  We also seem to have gotten back to the beginning, and the quote. Leaving aside for now the motivated stopping regarding religion, we have a combination of the Precautionary Principle, the logic of Chesterton’s Fence, and the difficulty of assessing risks on account of Black Swans.

  … which would prescribe inaction in any question I can think of. It looks as if we’re not even allowed to calculate the probability of outcomes, because no matter how much information we think we have, there can always be black swans just outside our models.

  Should we have ever started mass vaccination campaigns? Smallpox was costly, but it was a known, bounded cost that we had been living with for thousands of years, and, although for all we knew the risks looked obviously worth it, relying on all we know to make decisions is a manifestation of hubris. I have no reason to expect being violenty assaulted when I go out tonight, but of course I can’t possibly have taken all factors in consideration, so I should stay home, as it will be safer if I’m wrong. There’s no reason to think pursuing GMOs will be dangerous, but that’s only considering all we know, which can’t be enough to meet the burden of proof under the strong precautionary principle. There’s not close to enough evidence to even locate Christianity in hypothesis space, but that’s just intellectual reasoning… We see no reason not to bring down laws and customs against homosexuality, but how can we know there isn’t a catastrophic black swan hiding behind that Fence?

• CaueSep 9, 2014, 8:29 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Septem­ber 2014

  I agree with the apparent LW consensus that much of religion is attire, habit, community/​socializing, or “belief in belief”, if that’s what you mean. But then again, people actually do care about the big things, like whether God exists, and also about what is or isn’t morally required of them.

  I bet they will also take Taleb’s defense as an endorsement of God’s existence and the other factual claims of Christianity. I don’t recall him saying that he’s only a cultural Christian and doesn’t care whether any of it is actually true.

  I would also add that it’s quite okay when different people hold different beliefs.

  Well, I won’t force anyone to change, but there’s good and bad epistemology.

  Also, the kind of Chesterton’s fences that the new atheists are most interested in bringing down aren’t just sitting there, but are actively harmful (and they may be there as a result of people practicing what you called religion1, but their removal is opposed with appeals to religion2).

• CaueSep 9, 2014, 7:24 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Septem­ber 2014

  It can also help to illustrate ideas. Taleb basically says that religion1 is a very useful concept. New atheists spend energy arguing that religion2 is a bad concept. That’s pointless if they want to convince someone who believes in religion1. If they don’t want to argue against a strawman they actually have to switch to talking about religion1.

  But you could say that the new atheists do want to argue against what Taleb might call a strawman, because what they’re trying to do really is to argue against religion2. They’re speaking to the public at large, to the audience. Does the audience also not care about the factual claims of religion? If that distinction about the word “religion” is being made, I don’t see why Taleb isn’t the one being accused of trying to redefine it mid-discussion.

• CaueSep 9, 2014, 5:50 PM

  7 points

  in reply to: Salemicus’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Septem­ber 2014

  (I haven’t read the book)

  The way I usually come in contact with something like this is afterwards, when Elinor and her tribe are talking about those irrational greens, and how it’s better to not even engage with them. They’re just dumb/​evil, you know, not like us.

  Even without that part, this avoids opportunities for clearing up misunderstandings.

  (anecdotally: some time ago a friend was telling me about discussions that are “just not worth having”, and gave as an example “that time when we were talking about abortion and you said that X, I knew there was just no point in going any further”. Turns out she had misunderstood me completely, and I actually had meant Y, with which she agrees. Glad we could clear that out—more than a year later, completely by accident. Which makes me wonder how many more of those misunderstandings are out there)

• CaueSep 8, 2014, 3:44 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Salemicus’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Septem­ber 2014

  Ambivalent about this one.

  I like the idea of rational argument as a sign of intellectual respect, but I don’t like things that are so easy to use as fully general debate stoppers, especially when they have a built-in status element.

• CaueSep 8, 2014, 3:29 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: Capla’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Septem­ber 2014

  My source were his tweets. Sorry if I can’t give anything concrete right now, but “Taleb GMO” apparently gets a lot of hits on google. I didn’t really dive into it, but as I understood it he takes the precautionary principle (the burden of proof of safety is on GMOs, not of danger on opponents) and adds that nobody can ever really know the risks, so the burden of proof hasn’t and can’t be met.

  “They’re arrogant fools” seems to be Taleb’s charming way of saying “they don’t agree with me”.

  I like him too. I loved The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness back when I read them. But I realized I didn’t quite grok his epistemology a while back, when I found him debating religion with Dennett, Harris and Hitchens. Or rather, debating against them, for religion, as a Christian, as far as I can tell based on a version of “science can’t know everything”. (www.youtube.com/​​watch?v=-hnqo4_X7PE)

  I’ve been meaning to ask Less Wrong about Taleb for a while, because this just seems kookish to me, but it’s entirely possible that I just don’t get something.

• CaueSep 3, 2014, 3:03 AM

  11 points

  in reply to: Azathoth123’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Septem­ber 2014

  Yes, but my point is that this is also true for, say, leaving the house to have fun.

• CaueSep 2, 2014, 3:51 PM

  9 points

  in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Septem­ber 2014

  Opportunity costs?

  I would say it should be the one with best expected returns. But I guess Taleb thinks the possibility of a very bad black swan overrides everything else—or at least that’s what I gathered from his recent crusade against GMOs.