newerspeak

Karma: 145

newerspeak May 22, 2009, 7:32 AM
3 points
on: Least Signaling Activities?

You might suggest sleep, but others are often jealous of how much sleep we get, or impressed by how little sleep we can get by on.

In that case, parallel reasoning eliminates anything taboo. We signal our acceptance of community norms by avoiding taboo subjects. We might tell stories to make it less obvious that conformity is an end in itself: “intelligent people resist the temptation to swear and find more effective ways to express themselves,” cf. George Carlin and his seven words.

Fight of flight responses seem like a pretty clear case. Until the 20th century, most military engagements were won by putting the enemy’s troops to rout and then destroying the fleeing army in detail. That suggests many find it preferable to risk total disgrace, and possible death later, to be able to run away from an immediately dangerous situation. (cf. The Red Badge of Courage, Spartan women saying “come back with your shield or on it.”) Other extremely intense situations, like a parent protecting the life of a child, would probably work the same way.

We’re told it’s a bad idea to go into business with friends because we tend to overestimate the likelihood that they will remain loyal to us. Also, we’re sometimes willing to put up with the opprobrium of friends or relatives for a potential mate. Obviously signaling is extremely important in business and mating, but we will ignore it if the price is right.

Actions taken under the influence of drugs or alcohol might count, although there’s a wide range of behaviors to sort through. In college I knew a lot of people who drank heavily and publicly so that they could be (or feel, or feel perceived to be) signal-free for a while. There’s also the narrative that East Asian societies are socially repressive but don’t hold individuals responsible for their behavior while drunk, so binge drinking in groups is a common way to relieve stress. I have no idea whether it’s true, but it’s obviously a story about signaling. On the other hand, a guy on an acid trip, having a conversation with inanimate objects, isn’t signaling anybody.

newerspeak May 22, 2009, 7:14 AM
4 points
in reply to: SoullessAutomaton’s comment on: Least Signaling Activities?
Signaling is, generally speaking, a means of displaying social status and desirability as a mate, yes?

If you can believe it, this claim isn’t strong enough:
- you wear a suit to a job interview (otherwise you might be hard to work with)
- your bank spends a lot of money on impressive buildings (otherwise you wouldn’t feel safe giving them your money)
- the government. The last three American presidents have been drug users who supported the War On Drugs. Otherwise, people would think they were soft on crime.

newerspeak May 20, 2009, 8:21 AM
1 point
in reply to: conchis’s comment on: Survey Results

Will Wilkinson and Tyler Cowen are more reasonable…

Along with a few others, I mentioned them both by name in an earlier version of that post. I didn’t want to get bogged down presenting all the relationships needed to establish that all these people were in fact libertarians:

Arnold Kling, who writes at EconLog, has done a fair amount of thinking about the unique worldview in the Economics department at George Mason University (see here and here). I claim the position he lays out is essentially the same as mine above, with the explicit partisan identification removed. Kling is an adjunct professor of economics at GMU, along with Robin Hanson, Alex Tabarrok, and Tyler Cowen (whose blog cites his frequently). Kling’s co-blogger Bryan Caplan has a written a popular book about public choice theory, which presents a thorough critique of government intervention and is supported by a lot of important research and some cool math. Caplan and Kling are both adjunct scholars at the Cato Institute, which also sponsors Will Wilkinson, whose wife is an editor at Reason.

Instead of beating that glob of stuff into something readable, I got lazy and went for the low-hanging fruit instead, specifically the over-the-top claim that there’s no such thing as a coherent, consequentialist, libertarian argument against (e.g.) European-style socialzed health care.

newerspeak May 20, 2009, 6:19 AM
11 points
in reply to: komponisto’s comment on: Rationality quotes—May 2009
It’s a paraphrase of T.E. Lawrence:

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.

newerspeak May 17, 2009, 8:52 AM
4 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Wanting to Want

… “part of who he is” or an alien intrusion.

Okay.

I’m Paul Erdos. I’ve been taking amphetamine and ritalin for 20-odd years to enhance my cognitive performance. In general I want to want these drugs, because they help me do good, important and enjoyable work, which is impossible for me without them.

I can stop wanting these drugs when I want to, like when my friend bet me $500 that I couldn’t. I wanted to win that bet, so I wanted not to want the drugs, so I stopped wanting them. Was that my only motivation?

Also, I don’t want others to want to want amphetamines just because I want to want amphetamines.

A while ago I took Euler’s place as the most prolific mathematician of all time.

newerspeak May 14, 2009, 7:37 PM
2 points
in reply to: MBlume’s comment on: “Open-Mindedness”—the video
It’s been six months or so since I was first introduced to Mr. Minchin, and every so often I still find myself snarking “We don’t eat pigs...” to myself as I wake up in the morning.

newerspeak May 14, 2009, 7:18 PM
0 points
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Survey Results

It isn’t a strawman.

Let’s not argue semantics. I had intended to express the following simile:

(3-bullet-points : rigorous libertarian thinking) :: (straw-facsimile-of-human : actual-human)

That is how most libertarians argue. I liked that post much better, but it still doesn’t say why these actions by the majority of libertarians matter.

I’m afraid I’m having trouble understanding what you mean here. Can you clarify? I recognize it may not speak to the question you’re actually asking, but my immediate reaction to this is: “Arguments employed by most libertarians are completely irrelevant. It’s the arguments employed by the strongest and most sophisticated libertarians that demand our attention.”

I am not afraid of fakely consequentialist libertarians, because I think I can tell the difference. Except that I am afraid of Cato, which argues from the conclusions and might be clueful enough to invest in rhetoric. Why would you ever look to lobbyists?

I’m confused here, too. You mention falsely consequentialist libertarians and seem dismissive of them. You mention the Cato institute, and suggest they are arguing in bad faith and therefore very likely to be wrong. Your reference to “tell[ing] the difference” suggests you might entertain the idea of a consequentialist libertarian who argues in good faith. Is it possible that an earnest consequentialist libertarian could be right? What about?

newerspeak May 14, 2009, 5:33 PM
10 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Survey Results
I’m reluctant to jump into a long discussion of the specifics of libertarian public policy—mind killer and all that—but in light of the terrible account of itself libertarianism has given you and SoullessAutomaton, maybe a few nonspecific comments are in order.

There’s such a thing as libertarian public policy research. It happens in think tanks. It gets done by academics (mostly economists), it incorporates peer review, and it usually doesn’t hold with the kind of boorish behavior you’re describing. Many of its hypotheticals are imports from the most inconvenient possible world. Specifically, it acknowledges that market failures exist and that government intervention is sometimes the most effective way to deal with them; that regulation has legitimate uses in service of the public good; and above all that pragmatism and compromise are the only virtues that can survive in the political arena.

Like most public policy it is essentially utilitarian, and its specific claims center around the idea that society is too complex for any central authority to administer efficiently. That’s to say, while there are many good ends the government might achieve through intervention in the economy or the private lives of its citizens, the costs of such intervention—money spent, conventions altered, expectations shifted, power grabbed, responsibility abdicated, and goals co-opted by the political process—are rarely less than the benefits.

You may take issue with any of these claims, but hopefully you can agree that the framework I’m developing here supports more sophisticated answers to the question “As a society, what should we do?” than just chanting “Private GOOD! Public BAD!”

In the specific case of your test of Regulatory Scheme X, the thoughtful libertarian position might go something like this:

Accountability is great. Empirical validation is great. But in this case, your test is a non-starter. No one is going to want this to happen. Drug companies will resist the removal of their products from the marketplace. Doctors will see the legislative call to dispense with certain treatments as a threat to their professional autonomy. Crossover between the AMA and FDA will favor an equilibrium where most experts already support the status quo. Insurance companies will use the opportunity to demand changes elsewhere in their payment structure. Any one of these groups can scuttle the whole project and throw your whole party out of power in the next election by letting it slip to the AARP that you’re planning on taking away something previously covered by Medicare. And even if you manage a legislative or executive miracle, anyone in Area A who wants the banned treatments can just migrate to Area B and get them there.

None of this should be interpreted to rule out the possibility that the test itself could yield invaluable information, saving lives or huge amounts of taxpayer money. But no regulator or legislator has any direct incentive to risk his career and all his political capital for nobody in particular. When talking about cost-benefit analysis, it’s important to remember that government officials implicitly measure costs and benefits to themselves, and that many of the responsibilities government arrogates to itself go unmet as a result.

newerspeak May 14, 2009, 11:15 AM
3 points
in reply to: SoullessAutomaton’s comment on: Survey Results

Do you go looking for merit-worthy religious apologetics?

Yes. Diagnosing the faults in Alvin Plantinga’s reasoning is important. Am I to understand you’d prefer a frank exchange of views with Jerry Falwell?

That said, do you know of any libertarian arguments that do not assume either 1) economic freedom as the primary terminal value or 2) assume the efficiency of real-world markets? Both are unwarranted assumptions that seem to underlie many libertarian arguments I’ve seen.

Yes. I included one such argument in the post you just replied to. I quote myself:

One interestding claim [of policy libertarianism]: State actors are (made up of) people who are subject to the same irrational biases and collective stupidity as market actors, and often have perverse incentive structures as well.”

In other words, government decision-makers (i.e. bureaucrats) have just as much trouble integrating new information, violating social norms, and admitting error as consumers or decision-makers for firms, but bureaucrats are also subject to perverse incentives, regulatory capture, etc.

The implied primary terminal value here is welfare-maximization, according to some material standard that I’m assuming we could agree on, given that we’re both here. No specific claim about the efficiency of markets is made. A fortiori, the argument derives some of its strength from the acknowledgment of certain deviations from rational behavior that (once again) we both presumably know about, because we’re both here.

newerspeak May 14, 2009, 9:48 AM
10 points
on: “Open-Mindedness”—the video
Videos like this one partake of the typical mind fallacy.

“I understand the world through rational explanations,” the rationalist auteur tells himself, “so I’ll produce a rational explanation of the value of rational explanation for people who irrationally value irrational explanations.” Hasn’t this been tried enough for us to conclude that it doesn’t win?

Instead, it seems to me that the only sane way to proceed is by adopting strategies that co-opt—or at least demonstrate some awareness of—believers’ reasons for believing.

For example, consider the subtext of Tim Minchin’s secular Christmas song, White Wine in the Sun, in light of what we know about the signaling role of religious belief. It says^Wsignals:
- atheists have emotions
- they have families
- they love their children
- they’re good people
- they like music
- in fact, they like all the same things about holidays that you do.
- they also have some trenchant observations about the increasingly anachronistic rituals and institutions that we are supposed to accept are part and parcel of sincere belief...
- and maybe you should too

newerspeak May 14, 2009, 7:37 AM
2 points
in reply to: SoullessAutomaton’s comment on: Survey Results

In what way is he “poisoning” the discourse?

Taken together, bullet points 2, 3, and 4 are a textbook strawman.

Quite frankly, in my experience with people arguing for libertarianism, it tends to be precisely what he describes—a lot of bottom-line faux-consequentialist arguments...

To me, this speaks more to the extent of your motivation to find merit-worthy libertarian writing than to the merit of libertarian ideas. It so happens that an entire school of libertarian thought (“policy libertarianism”) is dedicated to studying the specific consequences of government action. One interesting claim: “State actors are (made up of) people who are subject to the same irrational biases and collective stupidity as market actors, and often have perverse incentive structures as well.”

If you’re interested in reading some reasonable libertarians, you might try The Cato Institute, Reason Magazine, or EconLog as starting points.

As a concrete example, by almost any metric European-style socialized health care systems work empirically, objectively better… I can’t conceive of any coherent, consequentialist argument against the immediate utility of adopting such a system in the USA.

Really? Respectfully, it seems much more plausible, based on the tone of your post, that you’re couching an appeal for your own preferred policy in hypothetical terms than that you’re actually suffering from a failure of imagination.

newerspeak Apr 22, 2009, 10:59 AM
4 points
on: Proposal: Use the Wiki for Concepts
During the last cycle of harrumphing at Hacker News over the possibility that successively larger batches of new users were diluting the quality of the discussion there, I started building a startup around an improved community discussion platform. I had some cool mathematical/algorithmic ideas WhichThisMarginIsTooSmallToContain, and I came to similar conclusions about structure.

But I differ on a big issue. I think the wiki should be outward-looking rather than inward-looking.

It seems to me that the focus in this post is on developing the wiki as a tool so that lesswrong members can read lesswrong posts more easily. That’s great, of course. It’s healthy for the community to articulate its goals, social mores, and world view, and a wiki is a good way to lower the barriers to participation by new members.

But I think we ought to build a section of the wiki as a resource for people who are interested in topics like rationality, “philosophy,” standards of argument, and debate. Giving away useful stuff is the best recruiting we can do—there are no accessible resources out there on these topics. What’s out there now is arid.

TVTropes provides a good example of how to do this: a catalog of relatable examples, a community aesthetic, and a lot of sharp analysis in a Devil’s Dictionary-like format that’s fun to read. People follow a link from an online discussion, pause because the writing is witty and engaging—they got me with unobtanium—and leave a few days later, dazed and much more savvy about narrative entertainment than they were when they showed up.

If you thiink this is an impossibly high standard (a common objection), consider that the originators of most of the ideas to be found on that site, collectively, were the people Alan Sokal was joking about. Mention this to such a person, and he’ll make a clicky, disapproving noise with his tongue and say “That’s not funny.”

Good discussion has a very similar role, in the average netizen’s life, to good storytelling. Both are commonplace, social, and therefore inherently interesting, human experiences where the difference between “done well” and “done badly” is immediately, viscerally obvious. So if we can provide some useful information on decision and discussion—the exact contents of the starter kit are the subject of a top-level post I’ve been marinating -- the world should beat a path to our door.

I’ll judge the project successful when commenters in highbrow fora like LtU and Hacker News start using the lesswrong wiki to decide (or end) arguments the way they currently reference Snopes or invoke Godwin’s Law.

e.g. NoItDoesNotFrackingBegTheQuestion.

aside—In case it’s relevant to anyone, I’m no longer working actively on this project. I’m about to start on a different startup with more funding and a shorter path to profitability.

newerspeak Apr 22, 2009, 9:08 AM
6 points
in reply to: trimeta’s comment on: Proposal: Use the Wiki for Concepts
You should try the tree-style tabs Firefox extension, which makes it practical to manipulate browser windows with 50-100 open tabs at a time. It takes about a day of getting used to, after which time you’ll wonder how you got along without it.

Thinking about it now, I realize that TVTropes was the website that convinced me I needed that functionality.