Disabling downvoting would just turn “voting” into a popularity contest.
Downvoting doesn’t stop it from being a popularity contest. If you don’t like someone, you can vote them down just as much as you can vote up people you like.
EGarrett
Karma: 268
Yes, he confessed to it when confronted. My understanding was that there were posts about mass downvoting and people asking who was doing it and if it was happening and he never admitted it or posted in them to confirm it, whereas if he thought it was okay there was no reason for him not to.
He didn’t just mass downvote. He purposefully attempted to remove other contributing members from the community. He also did not confess to it indicating both dishonesty and that he was aware that his actions were unacceptable. He also multi-accounted and still does and posts absolutely disgusting and logic-free racial comments and trolling (referring to black scientists to “dancing bears.” You’re welcome to demonstrate what’s rational or constructive about that).
You don’t just undo those actions, you punish the person who takes part in them in order to deter the action occurring in the future. So that there can be civil discourse going forward. This is rational and a standard part of human social requirements.
Well I’m not interested in copy/pasting for cheap karma, and I don’t wish to encourage or create an environment where others do it. All the best, no offense taken and hopefully no offense caused.
The goal is not to tell people what they already know nor flout tradition. Just to share a quote from the Slack Chat that some segment of the thread readers may find useful.
It’s a great concept.
3 years is enough time.
“In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “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.” -GK Chesterton
Just to underline here...philosophy has a bad track record because when it finds something concrete and useful, it gets split off into things like science and ethics, and very abstract things tend to be all that’s left.
Hypotheticals are probably in the same class. Useful when they apply to reality, entertaining or stimulating sometimes even when they don’t...and in some cases neither. The third category is the one I ignore.
“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” -Einstein
I regularly bicker about hypotheticals on the Facebook group. I wish I could give a tidy answer here, but I can’t put all hypotheticals in the same category. Some represent reality better than others. “Where will I post my ideas if this group closes?” is a perfectly normal and useful one.
The hypotheticals I question are ones that don’t plausibly occur in reality and that are known primarily because they irritate the brain, or allow social signaling, or some other non-useful purpose.
“If a tree falls in the forest...” can be useful since it exposes how unclear language can be, but if people aren’t aware of it, it mostly is just trolling.
Another is the “Sophie’s Choice” hypothetical. Such as the Trolley problem, where you flip the switch to kill one person or leave it as killing three. This problem is famous not because it represents something people will run into in real life, but because it irritates the brain. The brain evolved in imperfect scenarios, and where apparent bad choices like this are best handled by looking for the many answers it hasn’t yet considered. Without this instinct to reject the scenario, we may never have developed tools and many other things.
So, these types of scenarios trigger a natural instinct to avoid the problem, not to answer it, which makes perfect sense given the way our brains work. Without that realization, the question is just shared to bother other people or socially signal. This isn’t useful behavior, and thus rejecting those hypotheticals I think is a fine response.
When did I say i’d read the book? There are hundreds of humor theories and as I’ve said I haven’t been able to review all of them, which is why I asked people to detail what they think is relevant so it can be discussed. Similarly, I didn’t ask anyone to review all of my papers, but have pointed out and described the relevant points here specifically for people to see.
The descriptions I see of the material all fit the style that Dennett uses, which I don’t enjoy for reasons I’ve offered. You’re welcome to make a substantive reply with actual points from the book or addressing the points I made. Bald assertions aren’t that.
Are you seriously going to argue that self-reported black people are no less likely to have blue eyes and blond hair than the general world population?
I’m arguing that your data is corrupted and thus so is its predictive power. This is getting very boring, as is your circular voting with Azathoth and his failed red-herring arguments. This is precisely why the voting system here is flawed.
What? Do you deny that eye color, hair color, lactase persistence and blood type are genetically caused?
Genes are caused by environment. If environment shifts, these fuzzy-categories, including racial categories, will become associated with wildly different traits. It’s trivially easy.
First, you somehow forget to mention that Charles Barkley also has more European DNA than Snoop Dogg. Snoop Dogg has more Native American DNA. Is the fact that Charles Barkley has lighter skin than Snoop Dogg so surprising given these data?
You’re talking about who is self-reported as a black person. Which refers traditionally to their Sub-Saharan African DNA. To claim that other DNA has contributed to their skin color, and thus corrupted the causal link between self-reported race and genetic profile, is to shoot yourself in the foot, not vice versa.
This is very, very boring.
As opposed to the banishment/disenfranchisement etc of actual convicted criminals?
If you remove the trait, you won’t have criminals. A genetics-caused relationship, logically, would allow you to do this. You’ll know beforehand who will be a criminal. Not only that, since it would assist in establishing likelihood, you should be able factor race into the evidence in criminal trials. This would be a terrible idea.
Whether races exist as useful categories that allow to make predictions about observations is an epistemic question. We have very strong evidence for this claim.
Whether some races, in modern Western countries, are more prone to have certain “bad” traits (e.g. low IQ, high crime rates, etc.) is also an epistemic question. We also have strong evidence for these claims.
You have nothing but correlation, and correlation based on fuzzy and corrupted data. Correlation is not causation, and you seem to struggle mightily with the difference.
Political incorrect as they are, some of these claims, specifically the one about IQ, have some degree of plausibility, due to the high heritability of some of these traits. But the jury is still out.
Whether we should discriminate against these races with “bad” traits is an entirely different kind of question, a moral question. It doesn’t follow from any of the previous claims.
These claims are also the result of you not seeing the distinction between logic based on causation and logic based on correlation.
No. If you believe personality traits are caused by genetics, that’s the solution to minimizing or removing those traits.
Environment and nurture-based solutions, i.e., the accurate ones, are based on environment and nurture as the primary operative factors.
If I ask you to estimate the probability that a person randomly sampled from the world population has blue eyes, you can do no better than aswer with the worldwide prevalence of blue eyes. If I then tell you that this person is black, then you can improve the a posteriori probability of your prediction by updating it to the, much lower, prevalence of blue eyes among self-reported black people. We can do the same even for traits that are not immediately visible, yet entirely genetic, such as lactose tolerance or blood type.
This is evidence that self-reported race is an epistemically useful concept.
A self-identified “black person,” has a highly unpredictable amount of actually African genes, and the common results of certain traits will depend on genes that may not cause self-reporting, so your conclusions will all be corrupted. Including the fact that genetic-causation of traits is a hopelessly flawed concept in the first place. But if you’re hellbent on doing this type of science, go for it.
Actually, they are both self-reported black people and the DNA test detected primarily sub-Saharan African ancestry in both of them.
They are self-reported “black people” with significantly different DNA, including in their skin color, which is supposed to be a defining trait in terms of self-reporting. Their actual proportion of Sub-Saharan DNA did not express itself in these most stereotypical traits. In regards to having “primarily” Sub-Saharan African Ancestry, the cultural “one-drop rule” tendency to self-report as black with an African-American parent will also cause you to have self-reported black people who actually have less than 50% Sub-Saharan African DNA. So even that will be highly unreliable.
Assuming I’m parsing this sentence correctly, you favor “changing short and long term environmental pressures on groups of people”. Good, so do I. However, the way racial differences are currently not acknowledged is making this difficult.
First, I hope it’s clear that if we chalk up personality traits and other such individual characteristics to race instead of environment, then the solution to removing certain undesirable traits (like criminality) would be banishment/disenfranchisement etc of an entire race of people, or outright genocide. This is why this is a problem.
Secondly, you say that you recognize that environment is the cause, but you immediately go back to referring to them as “racial differences.” This is the phrasing that leads to race-based thinking, and thus prejudice and discrimination. I can’t stress enough that these aren’t racial differences and there’s a reason society generally rebukes this classification.
Also, false egalitarian beliefs have killed far more people than false “racist” beliefs. The way is happens is the following logic:
What?? The Communist famines and purges were results of sociopaths killing their political enemies and delusional economic policy. Not egalitarianism, but believing that the country would survive fine if everyone stopped producing food and instead was forced to make metals. Those aren’t “egalitarian” failures (not that I believe in egalitarianism), but racial purges are absolutely and explicitly done in the name of “ethnic cleansing.”
...and even if this were true, this is a bizarre attempt at a red herring argument. If I killed your dog, would you consider it okay as long as I pointed out that other people have killed more dogs than me?
Um, the genetic aspects of ethnicity quite likely are the cause of a lot of those differences.
This implies that you’re ignoring the most fundamental parts of this conversation, so I’m not sure what the point is of this exchange.
Yes in the example the person is viewing a single tendency in an example and acting in a damaging way because of that. It may be more accurate for the speaker to say that he saw a group of Asian people sleeping on a plane and none waved back, while the Hispanic person who was awake, did.
I really don’t think you’re engaging with the actual points here, which are (1) that puns and similar jokes can be funny simply by being clever, without any “misplacement” required; and (2) that even when a “misplacement” is involved, your theory doesn’t appear to identify any reason why the pun should be funnier than a mere plausible mistake that no one would be amused by.
I feel that puns, when by themselves, all play off of our misplacement instinct. But not all puns are equally funny. Some things are more “out of place” then others. And the more “obscure” your pun, (the more out-of-place) the funnier it will be. (assuming of course that it’s noticeable, low anxiety and the other requirements)
I think I know what you’re saying though. The “flushing” example fits in BOTH places, and thus isn’t “misplaced” by itself in the actual sentence where it’s used.
That’s probably an example of a pun which, by itself, would not be very funny. Something that could be out of place but not really...so you see it as potentially a small chuckle. But if “flushing” had less in common with where it was (rather than fitting in both places), I think it would be funnier.
That “double meaning” or “double placement” in flushing might earn a small chuckle, similar to how you might see a button on a computer that looks like candy and suddenly find yourself feeling a tiny bit hungry.
Obviously this is a subtle case we’re discussing so we might need to speak more.
I’ll take, in fact, one of your own examples, the “kidney beans” joke from your longer paper, which I shall modify a little further to bring out a point. Imagine that you are reading a scholarly article on a cannibalistic tribe in some faraway place, and you find this passage: “The Ougalou people consume human flesh only on special occasions such as a victory over another tribe. Their staple diet otherwise is a dish of kidney beans.” I suggest that you might find this quite amusing, if you happened to notice it (I suspect it would be easy to pass over without noticing).
There is no “misplacement” here; the dish of kidney beans is (in my hypothetical scenario) perfectly correct. It’s just funny that cannibals should turn out to eat kidney beans. There is no one here to lose status (the author hasn’t made any kind of mistake; neither has the reader).
Yup, you’re absolutely right, I would laugh at that. I think I did correctly see what you’re putting across too. In addition to what I said above, I also feel this is likely the brain’s misplacement instinct being triggered by something that looks VERY much like a misplacement. After the fact of course, you may realize that it’s not misplaced, but laughter is a reflex that serves its purpose by triggering in the moment to allow others to potentially see the fail and adjust their opinion of the social order.
So it senses the potential misplacement and reacts, like how you might feel what you think is a bug on your arm, pull your arm away, then realize it was just a hair. It was the potential thing that caused the reflex.
This is a great thing to bring up.
But: “I make typos all the time. I see them all the time”. Apparently typographical errors, even when noticed, don’t constitute a serious enough loss of quality to be funny. So why would “copse” in place of “corpse” be suitable joke material, on your theory? It’s no worse an error—no more a sign of incompetence—than my example of “validty” in place of “validity”.
Typographical errors CAN produce funny, if they are very egregious, or if they get layered with some other fail. Think of the “Autocorrect Fails” that get sent around as memes. You see a correction that ends up making someone say something they really didn’t mean to say and thus makes them look really bad. But a simple missing letter that doesn’t lead to anything else, like “valdty” instead of “validity” is just run of the mill, generally not a surprise at all, and isn’t even layered with any other failure.
If this doesn’t cover it, let me know and I’ll go through the rest of what you said. I don’t want to bury you in too much text so I’ll move on otherwise.
Clowns
Yes, indeed, clowns do more than just dress up in silly clothes. I didn’t intend to suggest otherwise. My point is simply that their pies-to-the-face and comic pratfalls and absurd misunderstandings and whatnot are displays of conspicuous incompetence from people we expect to show conspicuous incompetence. So Qe-Qd in your equation can’t be large because Qe is low to begin with. And yet clowns can be pretty funny.
Ah, people WE expect, and I agree that we do expect clowns to do those things. But we as adults don’t laugh as much at clowns as kids do, right? Kids don’t have the same thorough understanding and expectations of the world as adults, so they will buy into certain acts that adults don’t...and clowns naturally perform more often for kids.
I would suggest that once kids have seen quite a few clowns and realize that they’re doing an act, they find the outfit and most of the standard stuff less funny. (though they may still laugh at some of the jokes and so on) Just like how we might laugh at some of the clown’s jokes if we haven’t heard them before, but the outfit and the horn and so on are generally “ho-hum” and not funny. (at least to me).
(obviously some kids are terrified by clowns, etc etc but that’s a separate issue)
Novelty
Of course there’s no reason why you should be much concerned with novelty. The only reason I brought it up is that you were saying that your theory, if correct, would “redefine the field”: I don’t think it would.
I say that mainly because I think it provides a logical reason for both “superiority” and “incongruity” to be found in humor, which relates quite clearly to an evolutionary pressure and has some elegance and simplicity. I’ve found that “uniting theories” like this tend to quickly become the main theories in a field (from what I understand, M-Theory united the 5 or 6 competing forms of string theory and is now by far the main idea)
On top of that, the ability to study jokes using this system and adjust different things to (at least in my testing on myself) make them more and less funny in many different ways is unique enough that it’s called “The Holy Grail of humor studies” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article.
Uniting the previous theories under a single elegant umbrella and finding the “holy grail,” in my opinion, would be a pretty major shift in a field of research.
Looks interesting. I may try writing an article or two to help the environment along.