Jiro

Karma: 5,000

Jiro May 9, 2025, 3:13 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Which journalists would you give quotes to? [one journalist per comment, agree vote for trustworthy]

The title question is a proxy for the thing I mean:

I think Cade Metz fails to qualify for those things. I don’t think he is trustworthy, quotes accurately, or is truth seeking. And I certainly wouldn’t give him any quotes.

Jiro May 9, 2025, 6:07 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: danielechlin’s comment on: It’s ‘Well, actually...’ all the way down
If they’re just using the word “chemical” as an arbitrary word for “bad substance”, you have the situation I already described: the word isn’t communicating anything useful.

But in practice, someone who claims that they don’t want chemicals in their food probably doesn’t just mean “harmful substances”. They probably mean that they have some criteria for what counts as a harmful substance, and that these criteria are based on traits of things that are commonly called chemicals. When you tell them “wait, water and salt are chemicals”, what you’re really doing is forcing them to state those criteria so you can contest them (and so they can become aware that that’s what they’re using).

Jiro May 9, 2025, 5:53 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: danielechlin’s comment on: It’s ‘Well, actually...’ all the way down

So don’t use the definition if it’s useless.

It’s not just the definition that’s useless. The phrase itself becomes useless, because if the only way to know what they mean is by asking “do you mean X”, the original statement about not wanting chemicals in their food fails to communicate anything useful.

Jiro May 9, 2025, 5:34 AM
5 points
1
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Which journalists would you give quotes to? [one journalist per comment, agree vote for trustworthy]
I’m pretty sure that would not disqualify most people.

Note that it’s not being upset that’s the problem, it’s being selectively upset.

Also, as a man, I can’t get social status by claiming I’ve cried myself to sleep anyway.

Jiro May 8, 2025, 8:34 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: It’s ‘Well, actually...’ all the way down
But that definition becomes useless if it isn’t legible. The Boubas don’t want chemicals in their food. If “chemical” means “harmful substance that I don’t know how to specify”, it’s useless to say that they don’t want chemicals in their food—how are they going to even deetermine that the food contains “chemicals” by their standard?

Also, the fact that they are even using the existing word “chemical” and not some phrase like “harmful chemical” implies that their definition has something to do with the characteristics of things called by the existing word, such as unfamiliar and long names. This is, of course, not a logical necessity, but people in the real world think this way, so it’s a good bet.

Jiro May 8, 2025, 8:17 PM
11 points
10
in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: Which journalists would you give quotes to? [one journalist per comment, agree vote for trustworthy]
Kelsey selectively got upset to the point of crying herself to sleep over something, and posted calls to action with the implication that since she was so emotionally distraught it was callous not to act, but she only did this when it was politically expedient to do so.

I think that this is a bit more than just “didn’t write”. It’s “didn’t write when previously it was so urgent and horrible she was crying herself to sleep over it”. The more urgent that she claims it is, and the more distraught she claims to be, the more the significance of ignoring it when it’s done by a politician she likes. At least, she’s disqualified under “Are they truth seeking?”

Jiro May 8, 2025, 5:15 AM
16 points
10
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Which journalists would you give quotes to? [one journalist per comment, agree vote for trustworthy]
Are you sure?

Jiro May 6, 2025, 6:39 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Nina Panickssery’s comment on: Nina Panickssery’s Shortform
Any rule about when to give advice has to be robust to people going on and on to lecture you about Jesus because they truly and sincerely want to keep you out of Hell. (Or lecture about veganism, or EA, or politics.)
More generally, social rules about good manners have to apply to everyone—both to people with correct beliefs and to people with incorrect ones. Just like not letting the police break into everyone’s houses catches fewer criminals (when the police are right), but protects innocent people (when the police are wrong), not giving advice helps fewer people (when the advice giver is right), but saves people from arrogant know it alls and meme plagues (when the advice giver is wrong).

Jiro Apr 24, 2025, 5:46 AM
2 points
0
on: Problems with Bayesianism: A Socratic Dialogue

We know that the actual probability of theories that use the ideal gas law is 0. Under Bayesianism, any and all theories that make use of the ideal gas law would have no way to increase their probability.

The theory isn’t “reality behaves according to the ideal gas law”, the theory is “reality behaves in approximations to the ideal gas law”.

Jiro Apr 18, 2025, 7:22 PM
4 points
2
in reply to: kilgoar’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief

While your insistence that I use colloquial rather than technical terms is cute, it’s also despicably ignorant and you’re not making strong arguments against the wider view of history I’m presenting.

It’s a pretty basic principle of debate that you have to dispute things that people actually said. When “we” say that modern people are better than past people, that doesn’t count the 1800s as modern, never mind the 1600s. If you don’t want to call that “modern people”, you can call it something else, but then your dispute is about the something else. The claim about your kind of modern is not one that people have been making; addressing it as though it is is addressing a straw man.

When I said that medieval Christians held a taboo against slavery and did not practice it, and explain the process by which secularization and early proto-sciences justified the creation of history’s most vicious form of slavery, medieval slavery in the Islamic world is not a counterexample in some kind of logical trap you’ve sprung.

You’re equivocating between “religious” people and Christians specifically.

Rather, there are many mistaken and misunderstood aspects about the time and especially the role religion played

We may associate religion with the past in some vague way, an irrational set of beliefs that have been superseded by science.

Modern people are the ones who made religion a tool of harm,

If you’re going to say things about “religion”, Islam is relevant.

(You also brought up Jefferson claiming his religious misgivings were against slavery. Thomas Jefferson believed in God, but wasn’t a Christian.)

While Liberal human rights tell you not to “keep serfs,” a stupid phrase meant to insist upon your false narrative of equivalence, remember that the most hard-headed Liberal of the early US, Thomas Jefferson, ensured that the institution of slavery would continue while owning slaves himself.

And the same goes for the things that your religion is supposedly doing—I can find prominent, influential, religious believers who thought that slavery or whatever is good. You just say that they don’t count because they’re “really” the state.

(Also, I’d appreciate a reference for Jefferson.)

Jiro Apr 18, 2025, 2:24 PM
4 points
2
in reply to: kilgoar’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief

Who cares what “most people” think, they’re fucking wrong!

You are supposedly criticizing other people:

We want to believe that as moderns we are better, more rational, so much more wise than people of the past, and it is this very conceited and highly sympathetic view of ourselves that is just so unthinkably blind.

If you are criticizing other people, you have to criticize what they are actually talking about. And pretty much none of them are saying that moderns under your definition are better than religious people. People who believe that “we are better than the past” count the 1800s as the past.

And there is no denying the modernity in the African slave trade

Of course there’s denying the modernity. Because you’re not defining “modern” to mean today, you’re defining it to make your answer come out the way you want.

You also already gave the explanation:

Maybe ancient people would have worked harder to ship slaves across oceans and displace more peoples, if only they had better sailing ships. They simply couldn’t afford to house prisoners in massive systems before the industrial era made food incredibly cheap.

And you made the odd concession before:

The Islamic world did not in fact only enslave pagans.

Okay, so religious people, from your own specified time period, not only enslaved pagans, they also enslaved others. And somehow it still doesn’t count as religious people from that time keeping slaves?

Serfs were not property of any master and ideally had protection against displacement and violence. In practice this didn’t always play out, but neither do liberal human rights.

Liberal human rights tells me to not keep serfs at all. And serfdom is evil at its core. “Serfs ideally weren’t mistreated” means nothing, because they were being inherently mistreated by being serfs.

Jiro Apr 18, 2025, 12:42 AM
6 points
2
in reply to: kilgoar’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief

Their values of humility, honor, faith, and so on are so different from our own imperatives of competition, survival of the fittest, and so on.

Yet I don’t keep slaves or have serfs. Your people of humility, honor, and faith did.

Maybe ancient people would have worked harder to ship slaves across oceans and displace more peoples, if only they had better sailing ships. They simply couldn’t afford to house prisoners in massive systems before the industrial era made food incredibly cheap.

I mean… yes? They had a problem doing lots of things well. Of course that means they couldn’t oppress very well either.

We are the ones who did these things, not them,

Only if you carefully define “moderns” to… not be modern. Blaming pogroms and the Spanish Inquision on “moderns” is blatantly distorting what most people mean by that in order to whitewash religion.

Jiro Apr 17, 2025, 10:39 PM
7 points
3
in reply to: jenn’s comment on: A Dissent on Honesty

Advocating for more lying seems like especially bad advice to give to people with poor social skills, because they lack the skills to detect if they’re succeeding at learning how to lie or if they’re just burning what little social capital they have for no gain.

I think the advice works better as “if it’s a social situation, and the situation calls for what you consider to be a lie, don’t let that stop you.” You do not have to tell someone that you’re not feeling fine when they ask how you’re doing. You do not need to tell them that actually the color they painted their house in is really ugly. And you certainly shouldn’t go to a job interview, get asked for your biggest weakness, and actually state your biggest weakness.

If someone reads the advice and thinks “Lying, that’s an idea! I’ll use it every time I can” they’ve overcorrected by far too much.

Jiro Apr 17, 2025, 10:24 PM
2 points
0
on: How worker co-ops can help restore social trust
The alternative theory is that political bias has gotten much greater, and the acceptable political beliefs are strongly in the direction of trusting some groups and not trusting others. By that theory, progressive movements are trusted more because they have better press. Realizing that you can increase trust by creating worker co-ops would then be an example of Goodhart’s Law—optimizing for “being trusted” independently of “being trustworthy” is not a worthy goal.

Jiro Apr 17, 2025, 10:12 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: kilgoar’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief

I am not making the simple argument that religion makes for better societies, and I can see you’re totally confused here.

If all you’re saying is that at least one thing was better in at least one religious society in at least one era, then I can’t disagree, but there isn’t much to disagree with either.

And I think you’re making an excessively fine distinction if you’re not arguing that religion makes for better societies, but you are arguing that religion doesn’t damage society. (Unless you think religion keeps things exactly the same?)

Jiro Apr 17, 2025, 1:48 AM
4 points
−3
in reply to: Julian Bradshaw’s comment on: A Dissent on Honesty
Scott once had a post about how it’s hard to get advice only to the people who need it.

Sam Bankman-Fried may have lied too much (although the real problem was probably goals that conflict with ours) but the essay here is aimed at the typical LW geek, and LW geeks tend not to lie enough.

Jiro Apr 17, 2025, 1:30 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: Niklas Lehmann’s comment on: Calling Bullshit—the Cheatsheet
I would think that if your “common ground” with someone is something 99% of humans agree with and which is absurdly broad anyway, you haven’t really found common ground.

Jiro Apr 16, 2025, 3:09 AM
6 points
4
in reply to: kilgoar’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief

In the premodern Christian medieval context, slavery was all but completely forbidden

It feels like you’re gerrymandering a time, place, and scenario to make the answer come out correctly. The medieval era was not the only era where Christianity was powerful, and you’re just handwaving it away by saying that Christianity was an arm of the state after that (and ignoring the period before that—the Romans kept slaves even when they were Christian.) You’re also including or not including Islam depending on whether it’s convenient for your argument (they don’t count when they keep slaves, but they count as religion being a source of learning). And you’re handwaving away serfdom—yes, it isn’t slavery, but it’s still a pretty big violation of human rights practiced by religious people back then that we don’t practice today.

(For that matter, I’m not convinced that “we only enslave pagans” is much of an excuse. Modern secular society doesn’t enslave pagans, after all, so we’re still better than them.)

How can the church hold back something which doesn’t yet exist?

By making it dangerous for it to come into existence.

it is fair to say that religious people in the industrial era have the desire to hold back science. But they simply don’t have the power anymore, they are no longer the center of learning.

There’s a big gap between “no power worth speaking of” and “not in the position of the Pope in 1500″. For instance, religion had enough power to be a serious obstacle to the acceptance of evolution, even if in the 21st century the remaining creationists are a joke.

Jiro Apr 15, 2025, 2:59 PM
9 points
2
in reply to: kilgoar’s comment on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
We can happily and easily disprove the idea that Judeo-Christian cosmology “damages society” by comparing the modern secular society developing after 1500AD with that of the Christian society before it.
1. You’re cherrypicking features of the society. I could respond by pointing to feudalism or slavery, for instance. Having less hospitality but no slavery seems overall positive.
2. I’m pretty sure you’re exaggerating what hospitality requires. If it was actually required to feed and house all beggars who come to your door, people would be overwhelmed by beggars.
3. “Judeo-Christian” here doesn’t make sense. You’ll have to at least include Islam. And even then, I wouldn’t say that non-Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions made the society especially horrible. Ancient China and Japan weren’t great, but in ways comparable to how “Judeo-Christian” societies weren’t great.
4. “Judeo-Christian” cosmology “causes problems” by holding science back. Obviously, ancient societies had less science than we do, so this is perfectly consistent with reality.

Jiro Apr 15, 2025, 5:41 AM
16 points
4
on: A Dissent on Honesty

He asks “How interested are you in Widgets?” He has learnt from previous job interviews that, if he answers honestly, the interviewer will think he is any of lying, insane, or too weird to deal with, and not hire him, even though this is not in the best financial interests of the company, were they fully informed.

By the standard “intentionally or knowingly cause the other person to have false beliefs”, answering ‘honestly’ would be lying, and answering in a toned down way would not (because it maximizes the truth of the belief that the interviewer gets).