Is this an admission that CFAR cannot effectively help people with problems other than AI safety?
Robin
Karma: 23
I’m not sure what you mean and I’m not sure that I’d let a LWer falsify my hypothesis. There are clear systemic biases LWers have which are relatively apparent to outsiders. Ultimately I am not willing to pay CFAR to validate my claims and there are biases which emerge from people who are involved in CFAR whether as employees or people who take the courses (sunk cost as well as others).
I’d take your bet if it were for the general population, not LWers...
My issue with CFAR is it seems to be more focused on teaching a subset of people (LWers or people nearby in mindspace) how to communicate with each other than in teaching them how to communicate with people they are different from.
I think the Less Wrong website diminished in popularity because of the local meetups. Face to face conversation beats online conversation for most practical purposes. But many Less Wrongers have transitioned to being parents, or have found more professional success so I’m not sure how well the meetups are going now. Plus some of the meetups ban members rather than rationally explaining why they are not welcome in the group. This is a horrible tactic and causes members to limit how they express themselves… which goes against the whole purpose of rationality meetups.
How much will you bet that there aren’t better strategies for resolving disagreement?
Given the complexity of this strategy it seems to me like in most cases it is more effective to do some combination of the following:
1) Agree to disagree 2) Change the subject of disagreement 3) Find new friends who agree with you 4) Change your beliefs, not because you believe they are wrong but because other people believe they are wrong. 5) Violence (I don’t advocate this in general, but in practice it’s what humans do when they have disagreed through history)
Since it’s the conclusion I will say it’s a very benevolent universe, and I love it. And any struggle was worth it, and how, and I don’t regret a minute of it. What I mean that the struggle, or unhappiness, is enormously unimportant. But the positive is wonderful. And if it’s the last interview of my life, I hope, I know I will be saying it at eighty. It’s a benevolent universe.
Ayn Rand
The short example (from somebody who went to college with Scott and took Calc II in the same class with him) is yes. But that’s an answer relative to the students of an elite college and only based on the fact that he asked me for to work on math homework with him.
I hope they’ve managed to advance past “if somebody criticizes your idea, ban them from the group!” because that’s what happened to me after a criticized Comfort Zone Expansion.
It’s not unambiguous because it doesn’t take into consideration other factors. SAT scores are the only variable mentioned in your article, but they’re not the only variable in whether a college accepts a student. They’ve become a less and less important factor over time.
At some colleges, a low SAT score would prevent you from being admitted by a high SAT score wouldn’t increase your chance of getting in. Colleges value GPA, class ranking, letters of recommendation, sports participation, extra-curricular activities, personal essay etc etc. It is possible that Asians have done worse on those other areas and aren’t getting screwed by quotas or affirmative action.
At that time, though I think much of hypnosis can be explained by the placebo effect.
Maybe Rand is referering to a specific situation where she knows Branden’s thought processes and her statements are correct.
It was about arguing with collectivists (AKA people who were sympathetic to the USSR). Whether she was correct about communism being inferior to capitalism isn’t easy to analyze objectively but in a sense history has validated her.
In that case, I wouldn’t know. But if it’s meant generally enough to be a rationality quote—if it’s meant to explain why we get angry at dishonest people—then it’s just an unsupported claim
It’s supported by her personal experience. It is also largely supported by my own personal experience.
And equating dishonesty with both evil AND irrationality rubs me wrong. Rand believed that she’s basically solved morality, and rationality only allowed one kind of morality, namely hers
Only partly true. Her morality acknowledges that man has the free will to think, but assumes that if he thinks honestly he’ll come to many of the same conclusions that she does. The only real constraint in Objectivist morality is on the initiation of force.
I believe this is part of what locked her into an inescapable worldview, beyond correction and updating
This is an exaggeration.
(like what Branden wrote about how, once she decided that Reason’s verdict on hypnosis was that it was bunk and had no foundation in reality, nothing could reach her on the subject)
This puts Rand within the general consensus of American psychologists. Branden also said that Rand updated on the effects of smoking marijuana.
I think it more useful to consider rationality (correct reading of reality and decision making) separately from values held.
Why? What if you notice patterns in values held and rationality? Should you ignore them?
I am an intransigent atheist, but not a militant one. This means that I am an uncompromising advocate of reason and that I am fighting for reason, not against religion. I must also mention that I do respect religion in its philosophical aspects, in the sense that it represents an early form of philosophy.
Ayn Rand, to a Catholic Priest.
I’m not entrenched enough in this community to know what’s worthy of upvotes and what’s not, so I’m selecting quotes that I personally like and seeing how they fare.
Do you remember what you liked about Ayn Rand? I’ve found that people like her for very different reasons.
You lost me at “junk heap.”
Sorry you’re so averse to negative descriptions of the average person’s philosophy.
There is no conscious choice available to a layperson ignorant of philosophy and logic
Yes there is, they can choose what music, TV, movies, videos etc to buy/view/play.
and such ways of life are perfectly copacetic with small-enough communities
Do you mean communities where the leader knows about philosophy and can order people around?
If anything, it is the careful thinker who is more shackled by self-doubt
It’s reasonable to doubt certain things, but if learning increases your self doubt than you’re doing it wrong.
better understood as the Dunning-Kruger effect, but Ayn Rand has made it obvious she never picked up any primary literature on cognitive science
She was associated with Nathaniel Branden, a well regarded psychologist. Cognitive Science is a relatively new field.
so it’s not surprising to see her confusion here.
I don’t think she’s confused, she’s saying something you disagree with. If you think you’ve refuted it, I think you’re the confused one.
Anger is a form of recognition. It amounts to admitting that those people are important to you and they have the power to hurt you. Actually they haven’t.
You get angry when your opponents begin to be dishonest. Your anger comes from two reasons; anger at yourself for having been fooled, for having accepted them as honest, and your fear of the evil represented by any human being acting irrationally—which is the one essential evil.
Ayn Rand, in a letter to Nathaniel Branden
Would you consider having Less Wrong members record the sequences or do you already have people you’ve promised to give the job to?
Trying to overcome biases takes effort. Wasted effort is bad. It’s better to pursue mixed strategies that aim at instrumental rationality
I think you are assuming hyperbolic discounting/short time preference. It requires a lot of effort to overcome bias, perhaps years. But there are times when it is worth it.
than to aim at the perfection described in the Rand quotation
What perfection? Choosing philosophy? You can always update your philosophy.
This quote was from a speech given to West Point cadets. By no means are they identical but it would be relatively hard to find a group of people more identical (from the perspective of being of the same gender, same age (within a few years) same nationality, and same general ideology).
Interesting article. But I do not see how the article supports the claim its title makes.
I think there’s a connection between bucket errors and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.