Probably yes. Oftentimes when someone says something that I thought was addressed in the paper, I’ll try to expand on it or say it again in different words to help the original meaning come across.
EGarrett
Karma: 268
There are non-humorous instances of laughter, like tickling for one. But I think Schadenfreude is very definitely humor. It simply requires that you have enough emotional distance from the person who failed that you don’t feel anxiety as a result of what happened to them.
Naturally, this is considered cruel by some people, because it indicates a lack of empathy or low-anxiety related to someone else’s pain. But if you do have that lack of empathy or low-anxiety in those cases, your humor instinct will almost definitely be what’s triggered by Schadenfreude.
A good thing to bring up. There’s several reasons this could occur, mainly because laughter communicates to others how much anxiety someone is feeling at the moment.
In the example of your relative, you were probably quiet because you don’t know what anyone else is thinking, for the person in question to tell a joke (or someone close to it), lets you know that they themselves aren’t utterly depressed at that moment and thus lowers your own anxiety. Which probably readied you to laugh as well.
An attempted joke at a horribly wrong time, if it’s a big enough fail to overcome small amounts of anxiety, can make you potentially laugh at the person telling the joke for their utter lack of awareness. This is why a lot of comedy skits feature people doing stupid things at funerals.
At the actual moment when you feel highest anxiety though, such as when your loved one actually dies or the moment when it’s diagnosed, I would suggest that you won’t laugh at a tension breaking joke. It requires time for that feeling to fade a bit and for everyone to be unsure about how other people feel about things.
EDIT: I thought about this one in the shower. There’s also the possibility that your relative wasn’t joking, in which case you’d probably laugh (and I would too) because you expected them to be thinking much more dire thoughts. And the fact that their own response was a true result of a pragmatic, shoulder-shrugging type of analysis (not having to worry about getting lost due to being wheelchair bound), added validity to the idea that they were thinking about it that way. This would trigger us to laugh at our own expectations being so totally wrong. My own instinct is to say “oh, so that’s it?” while I’m laughing, which also points to this being the reason.
The equation doesn’t have measurable units but instead represents the proportions and relationships of the variables. Any other study or article that uses some formula may or may not be a good idea, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think this form allows me to say the most in the least amount of space. (By contrast, there was a study going around recently that spoke about the “formula for happiness,” with the “equation” using what seemed like 10 variables and tons of complex notation that seemed to probably take more work to use than to simply write it out).
Re: Anxiety approaching zero, it’s not intentional because you can end up in a tangential argument about what feeling amounts to “zero anxiety” then claiming that should make your head explode because the equation is undefined, so I’d rather offer an alternate form just to try to avoid spending time on that. Having said though, in paper 2 we mention Nitrous Oxide which seems to lower anxiety beneath our natural levels and has the side effect of making people laugh at all kinds of inappropriate and abnormal things. So artificial lower of anxiety DOES seem to amplify the overall humor people feel.
You might find the post to be completely insane or an epic fail below what you expected, so you laugh at the poster, or you might find the post to have handled the subject so quickly that you laugh at yourself or at others for not having seen it before. Those seem to be the two most likely situations.
HI Stuart,
You can’t assign actual values to the amounts, instead it represents the proportions or relationships of the variables.
Particularly how a lack of Quality Expectation (such as if someone is humble), a lack of low opinion of the Quality Displayed (in paper 1 we use the example of how many people don’t laugh at homophobic jokes or teasing because they don’t feel that a man being gay is a sign of a low quality), a lack of noticeability (not seeing what happened or not knowing physics for an inside physics joke) or a lack of validity (if the joke is very cheesy or corny) can all single-handedly ruin a humorous moment, particularly if one of the multipliers is 0. Just as how feeling too much anxiety (such as if your mother just died) will kill your sense of humor as well.
I don’t see any other method to represent these relationships as accurately in as small an amount of space. So I went with an equation.
A “Holy Grail” Humor Theory in One Page.
Compare Da Vinci’s quote to Kubrick’s...
“Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.”
They both seem quite clearly to be saying that the knowledge they gained studying what they were forced to study was essentially nothing in comparison to what they gained studying what they themselves found interesting.
From personal experience, I agree totally with both statements.
“Just as eating against one’s will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.” -Da Vinci
“Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.” -Richard Feynman
Apologies for the dupe.
Another example that I think is relevant, Wiles decided to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem when he was 10-years-old...and picked the problem up again in his early 30′s because of that childhood fascination.
That’s funny, I searched for “Irrationality Quotes” and that led me to believe it hadn’t.
EDIT: Actually now that I think about this...Alicorn may of course not even be suggesting that it’s a bad idea due to a previous thread in 2011, but just in general, if the last time the topic came up was 3 years ago, it’s probably fine or even preferable to bring it up again in some form if people found it interesting before. I’m sure there have been a few new members in the last 3 years, and a few more irrational things have been said. In general, people discuss various relevant topics more than once, and a time horizon for repeating them would probably reasonably be on the scale of months at the most. Otherwise, it’s guaranteeing the slow death of the site.
Do you think there would be interest in an “Irrationality Quotes” Thread?
To be honest, these threads are full of such great information that I can’t help imagining putting something absolutely useless or ridiculous in it. I just can’t resist how it would look to be scrolling through such properly-formatted and thoughtful knowledge from reputable people and then come across, just as perfectly-formatted, presented totally seriously...something like “Some dogs can’t resist a tasty morsel of feces.” -Theresa A. Fuess. (http://vetmed.illinois.edu/petcolumns/petcols_article_page.php?PETCOLID=77&URL=0) …just tucked in perfectly normally with everything else.
Or, more appropriately for its own thread, quotes that demonstrate the exact opposite of what LessWrong represents, as a means of reminding people of the various forms that irrationality takes when presented by serious opposition.
I’ll give it a go.
“The history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible.” -Freeman Dyson
“One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as ‘that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you’re right.’ If you don’t have that, if you think you’ve got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.” -Saul Alinsky
See the next sentence of my comment.
Yes, but I feel that problem nullifies the paragraph.
That’s a very different case. Downvoting a person into losing privileges can by done by a single user if the target’s posted a lot of marginal or controversial comments, but unless they’re very new it takes a lot of patience or a downvote script (Eugine seems to have been using patience), and AFAICT most people have karma ratios high enough that it’d take sockpuppets or other abuses that could be targeted by narrower rules.
I would have agreed that the patience required is a barrier, until I found out about the 1000 vote attacks. Also, even giving someone a smaller amount of downvotes can become a problem if it’s disproportionate to the upvotes. Such as downvoting the person’s last 30-50 comments. It simply requires a larger number of people to be doing it. When there was no indication that there would be mass downvote moderating, I actually downvoted Eugine several times in a row out of annoyance when I realized what he was doing to other people...since I figured there was no other option to control it.
Anyway, it may be of course that Eugine is the first person to be outed for this behavior and it will become a regular thing. In which case this issue may cease to be a problem at all.
Hi gwern, I’m not sure exactly what you mean. In Facebook groups, you can ignore someone, but the person in question can still participate in discussions that don’t involve you, or discuss what you’ve said outside of your own threads. I think this is actually a good thing, since it lets you avoid unconstructive people, but doesn’t allow you to censor people from being heard by others if that person has something valuable to add.
Regarding downvoting vs upvoting, counteracting mass downvoters (who apparently have gone to the extent of downvoting someone over 1000 times) is a huge burden on other people and not something they should have to do.
Hi Nornagest, I’m used to forums with a multi-quote feature. I wasn’t aware it wouldn’t notify you if I just replied to the bottom comment.
I’m presuming no such thing; I was talking about the composition of LW, not the purpose of the downvote button. People’s personal downvote policies are going to vary (quite a bit, really), but as long as the forum as a whole contains people with a mix of values similar to those I mentioned, their votes are going to average out to something like the behavior I described: some votes for conformity, some for contrarianism, some for unrelated norms.
This doesn’t work in practice precisely because mass and retributive downvoting are disproportionately effective. One person with a skewed concept of downvoting can outweigh tons of other people who are using the functions as intended. I might vote up a comment by someone I like, but I’m not going to go through their profiles and give them hundreds (or even thousands) of upvotes, while we’ve seen the downvote-abusers do exactly this. So they won’t average out properly.
The visibility effects of karma, I suspect, are overrated as a driver of behavior except in the case of top-level posts (where they’re taken off most of the interface and become something of a pain to get to): leaving that “downvoted below threshold” notification seems to incite people’s curiosity as much as anything. Some of my highest-ranked posts are replies to comments below the threshold; they wouldn’t have gotten there if people weren’t reading the thread.
We don’t have a lot of clear data on this because an “ugh field” or people refraining from posting are often an invisible cost. I’ve had several times that I had a notion that I wanted to post about here, even considering an entire sequence or at least largely new area of discussion, then thought of some of this type of behavior and changed my mind.
Even if the “downvote below threshold” might incite curiosity, the person in question still loses privileges on site. Lastly, the Eugine_Nier news is quite encouraging and may indicate some solutions to this issue.
Eugine_Nier was exactly who I was referring to in the other thread about mass downvoting when I said I had noticed certain members who had a long string of “-1” votes on comments they were replying to and with which they disagreed.
I think he was a perfect example of the flaw in the karma system, but to see him investigated and removed for this behavior is very encouraging.
I have that under “nervous laughter” in the second paper. People will often forcibly laugh in tense moments (like when confronted by a bookie to whom they owe money) to try to show or establish a low anxiety situation. We can do this any time though, so I don’t think it’s humorous, just a purposeful put-on.