Peter_Twieg

Karma: 139

Peter_Twieg Jul 20, 2009, 2:26 AM
0 points
in reply to: SoullessAutomaton’s comment on: Sayeth the Girl

Isn’t social acceptance of saying rude but not false things exactly what you’re arguing in favor of?

I don’t think so, unless you’re implying that the armchair theorizing in this community is always rude. I’d prefer to presume that not to be the case unless there’s evidence otherwise… and I conceded in my top-level reply to this thread that there sometimes is (in my view.)

Peter_Twieg Jul 20, 2009, 1:59 AM
0 points
in reply to: SoullessAutomaton’s comment on: Sayeth the Girl

Why is it necessarily more rational to disregard “social consequences”?

I think it’s not irrational per se, just that it probably wouldn’t fly in this community as a substantive consideration in whether an argument should or should be presented here. Usually it’s considered eminently rude (but not strictly false) to say that the members of your own ingroup are too dumb/biased to discuss a given topic fairly.

I suppose I could also try to bootstrap this into an argument for a strong presumption against restricting speech due to its expected “social consequences” in general, but I think my original points suffice.

Peter_Twieg Jul 20, 2009, 1:29 AM
3 points
in reply to: RobinHanson’s comment on: Sayeth the Girl
To prohibit generalizations about gender without overwhelming hard data is usually to in effect silence the topic.

I think the concern is that a lot of these generalizations aren’t being made through a good-faith attempt to unbiasedly order one’s observations about the world. A lot of people see these arguments and have an (arguably often justified) prior that the individuals who make them are biased and/or bigoted. I realize that it can be frustrating to be told that you’re being criticized because your arguments resemble those made by morally-reprehensible people, but.… it’s often not unjustified for people to come to the table with those assumptions.

You also have the less-defensible argument sometimes being made that we shouldn’t make these theories lightly because they often lead to cryptosexism. That probably won’t fly in a rationalist discussion community, but it does in many other communities where the “social consequences” of one’s speech are supposed to be a serious factor in its moral evaluation.

Peter_Twieg Jul 20, 2009, 12:58 AM
24 points
on: Sayeth the Girl
I have to concur with the overall sentiment of this post. It bothers me more than a bit that sweeping generalizations about gender behaviors are made using armchair “just-so” evopsych stories. I even consider myself a relatively ardent supporter of evopsych in general, but a lot of the discussions of gender relationships seem to be motivated by an undercurrent of bitterness rather than an objective desire to understand the reality of gender differences. I realize that this is a vague ad hominem critique, and I could probably attempt to back this up by specific examples and analysis, but.… I think it’s just more imperative to call this stuff out as it arises.

I remember Razib on GNXP making fun of the demographic poll done here, that this is a community of young white male nerds. Oftentimes it shows… I often wonder what would happen if a Jezebel blogger stumbled upon this place.

Peter_Twieg May 28, 2009, 1:55 PM
0 points
in reply to: Emile’s comment on: Do Fandoms Need Awfulness?
Well, there are complaints about “Apple premiums” on pricing, but if those actually exist they’re most likely largely the result of the fact that the company can “exploit” its devoted fanbase...

I think Apple is a good choice, though. I’d also point to Prius or hybrid vehicles in general or other items of objectively-good quality which turn into status signals of various sorts… and then you see criticisms aimed at the signalers and not the underlying goods or their functionality. Or the criticisms are aimed at the fact that the fans overstate the value of their choice objects, which doesn’t exactly impinge the actual value.

Peter_Twieg Apr 21, 2009, 8:36 PM
5 points
in reply to: stcredzero’s comment on: Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
Most of the rules are mostly there for the sake of legal cover—the only things that are strongly enforced are:

a) Child pornography bans. b) Bans on organizing illegal activities, namely “raids” on other websites that can result in serious damage. c) Mass spam, especially spam that is meant to propagate scripts that are used for further spamming. d) Topicality rules. This only applies to some of the boards.

Moderation is most reliable for (a). 4chan is hardly a well-tended garden, let alone a “thoughtfully organized” one. Moderation is often capricious as well, with certain memes being unofficially targeted every once in a while (furries, Boxxy, etc.) It’s hard to really find an apt term or even a metaphor to properly summarize 4chan’s governing ethos… some kind of chaotic swarm or something, perhaps.

Peter_Twieg Apr 21, 2009, 8:24 PM
4 points
in reply to: MBlume’s comment on: Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
No one’s done a definite estimate of the impacts, but “Project Chanology” did attract thousands of protestors and a lot of mainstream media attention. I didn’t mean to argue that 4chan has never accomplished anything positive, or even that there isn’t a lot of creative activity there—I just don’t see any of it as having advanced the frontiers of human understanding in any meaningful sense.

Peter_Twieg Apr 21, 2009, 5:39 PM
12 points
in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
I can’t think of a specific example that a broad audience might know about, but it’s relatively easy to see how this could arise. Take a community of “idiots”, by whatever criteria we’d use to apply the term to the lone troll. Many of them exist which espouse all sorts of nonsense. Throw in someone who actually understands the topics which these people purport to discuss. Unless that person is incredibly subtle and eloquent, they will be denounced as an idiot in any number of ways.

I can speak here from my own experience as an economist who’s tried to make arguments about public choice and decentralized knowledge to a general (online) audience in order to defend free markets. A lot of crowds really will have none of it. I think this is a frustration which even the best libertarian-leaning individuals have run into. But given persistence, one can gain ground… and subsequently be accused of “ruining” a safe space which was reserved for the narrow worldview which you challenged. In face, any community with “safe space” disclaimers is probably extremely vulnerable to this—I just doubt you’ve engaged with many.

Peter_Twieg Apr 21, 2009, 5:07 PM
1 point
in reply to: JamesAndrix’s comment on: Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
Lots of memes come out of 4chan. I’m not sure I’d call any of them “good” in any way beyond their being amusing. (Of note: “4chan was never good” is a meme in and of itself.)

The thousand 13-year old Bayesian LW would never “build up” anything approximating rationality, I’d conjecture. It would select for rational arguments to some extent, but it would also select for creative new obscenities, threads about how to get laid, and rationalist imagefloods (whatever that would consist of) being spammed over and over. 4chan has almost 200 million posts and I can’t think of any meaningful contribution it has made to human knowledge.

Don’t get me wrong, it has its purpose, but I don’t believe you could ever get a community with a 4chan-style atmosphere to promote any sort of epistemic virtues, largely because I think what it would take to be noticed there would almost intrinsically require some kind of major violation of those virtues.

Peter_Twieg Apr 21, 2009, 3:06 PM
4 points
on: Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism

“Don’t believe in yourself! Believe that I believe in you!”

If you’re trying to quote Gurren-Lagann here, I believe you botched the quote. “Believe in me who believes in you!” But maybe it was dubbed differently. In any case, I do find some amusement in your approvingly quoting a show which was more or less premised on a rejection of rationality. “Throw away your logic and kick reason to the curb!” I’ll have to remember that for the next anti-rationalism quotes thread.

But anyways, I did like this post, although as you implicitly concede it’s just one narrative of community development among many. I’m sure that there have been as many communities to have fallen due to despotic moderation or impoverished by rigid ideological guidelines as there have been ruined in the ways described in the OP. Oftentimes the “idiots” who “ruin” the comm are actually the lonely voices of reason. It’s a fine line to walk, and I look forward to someday seeing a modern-day Machiavelli write a tract on “The Internet Community Moderator”. Because it really is that tricky.

Peter_Twieg Apr 21, 2009, 2:58 PM
18 points
in reply to: Peter_de_Blanc’s comment on: Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
I’d worry that:

a) It would be incredibly difficult to initially accumulate karma to begin with if it turned out that most posts that weren’t “Introduce yourself!” had a decent karma requirement.

b) You’d end up excluding non-regulars who might have very substantial contributions to specific discussions from participating in those discussions. For example, I’m an economist, and most of my posts have been and probably will be in topics that touch on economic concepts. But I don’t have much karma as a consequence, and I’d think it’d be to the community’s detriment if I was excluded for that reason.

Peter_Twieg Apr 17, 2009, 2:43 PM
0 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: The Trouble With “Good”
So if the slave were allowed to choose his own level of effort, he would no longer be a slave?

I think you have a point with what you’re saying (and I’m predisposed against believing that the taxation/slavery analogy has meaning), but I don’t think being a slave is incompatible with some autonomy.

Peter_Twieg Apr 17, 2009, 2:40 PM
0 points
in reply to: mattnewport’s comment on: The Trouble With “Good”
Utilitarianism doesn’t describe how you should feel, it simply describes “the good”. It’s very possible that if accepting utilitarianism’s implications is so abhorrent to you that the world would be a worse place because you do it (because you’re unhappy, or because embracing utilitarianism might actually make you worse at promoting utility), then by all means… don’t endorse it, at least not at some given level you find repugnant. This is what Derek Parfit labels a “self-effacing” philosophy, I believe.

There are a variety of approaches to actually being a practicing utilitarian, however. Obviously we don’t have the computational power required to properly deduce every future consequence of our actions, so at a practical level utilitarians will always support heuristics of some sort. One of these heuristics may dictate that you should always prefer serial killers to be shot over your sister for the kinds of reasons that gjm describes. This might not always lead to the right conclusion from a utilitarian perspective, but it probably wouldn’t be a blameworthy one, as you did the best you could under incomplete information about the universe.

Peter_Twieg Apr 13, 2009, 1:04 AM
2 points
in reply to: devinfinbarr’s comment on: Awful Austrians
I’d point out a couple problems here:

Firstly, “controlled experiments” is simply an ideal which is no more achieved in the physical sciences than in the social ones. The various experimental methods employed by scientists differ only in the degree to which they’re uncontrolled. Popperian falsifiability has been criticized in all scientific contexts for these reasons. I believe that Quine’s discussions of this issue are the best-known… suffice to say, the Austrians need to come up with a better reason for dismissing the scientific method as applied to economics versus the scientific method as applied to other disciplines—but alas, this would probably require them to wade into the kind of messy empirical issues which they seem to abhor.

Secondly, even if scientific knowledge of economic phenomena could be rejected for the above reasons, the fact is that Austrian economists still routinely make empirical predictions based on praxeological reasoning which seem incredibly difficult to support based on that reasoning alone. See the OP’s part about Mises on price controls—no purely praxeological account can determine that price controls will cause non-price rationing. So the criticism is that Austrians do not actually practice what they preach, largely because if they did so they would have very little to say about the real world.

Peter_Twieg Apr 12, 2009, 10:19 PM
7 points
in reply to: JGWeissman’s comment on: Awful Austrians
Unfortunately, Austrians more than any other group typify that classic Paul Samuelson quote: “Economists have correctly predicted nine out of the last five recessions.” It’s easy to make arguments about how trying to circumvent the market process will lead to calamity, and eventually you’ll be correct. But if you want to find an Austrian economist to respect, find one who will actually make concrete economic predictions that are falsifiable. It’s my impression that many of them simply will not, often on philosophical grounds.

Peter_Twieg Apr 12, 2009, 10:11 PM
2 points
in reply to: RobinHanson’s comment on: Awful Austrians
What in particular do you not understand? I think there are plenty of problems with Austrian arguments (and the OP does a good job of explaining some of them), but I can’t say I’ve run into many cases where I felt that I just didn’t understand what was going on. Do you mean that different Austrian economists make fundamentally incompatible arguments, or that the arguments that they do make just… don’t say anything meaningful?

Peter_Twieg Apr 12, 2009, 9:19 PM
1 point
in reply to: komponisto’s comment on: Sunk Cost Fallacy
Actually, without some ability to do that in the future, long-term planning would be impossible. Whether one has the ability in the present to uphold obligations to the past is only relevant to future time-consistency insofar as we think this directly lends itself to having this ability in the future, and… I think it’s far from clear whether that relationship will reliably occur, and even whether it should occur.

Peter_Twieg Apr 12, 2009, 9:06 PM
2 points
in reply to: Swimmy’s comment on: Awful Austrians
Oh, hey Tim. :D Not particularly surprised to see other classmates in these parts, but it’s still a neat occurrence.

And of course I recognize the dogmatic tendencies of the Mises Institute crowd, but I guess my broader worry is that their particular style becomes conflated with Austrian economics in general. It’s my impression that these failings aren’t recognized in GMU’s self-identified Austrian faculty, but I could be wrong.

Peter_Twieg Apr 12, 2009, 5:02 PM
3 points
in reply to: Matt_Simpson’s comment on: Awful Austrians
Small quibble: I think it’s unfair to many Austrians to imply that their school inherently eschews the type of mathematical formalisms that many prominent Austrians did, in fact, reject. Or at least, insofar as they do so, it’s based on more than simply saying that the map doesn’t reflect the territory, and therefore we must throw it out—they make elaborate arguments about how the map’s systematic inaccuracies make it a poor representation of the territory. (Apologies if I’m using the map/territory metaphor poorly.)

Admittedly, this opinion goes against what seems to be reflected on the almighty Wikipedia, and I realize that pinning down the essential features of a school of thought is a pursuit which is fraught with problems, but my impression is that there are a substantial number of Austrians who do not reject modeling per se (as was the case of Hayek), and labeling this tendency as a deviation from Austrian thought strikes me as a No True Scotsman argument. Perhaps someone more familiar with the Austrian school could correct me on this, however.