TiffanyAching

Karma: 164

TiffanyAching Jan 15, 2017, 4:33 PM
7 points
in reply to: The_Jaded_One’s comment on: Defusing Hate: A Strategic Communication Guide to Counteract Dangerous Speech
That’s true, but every term you could use to describe misleading, counterfactual or just basically horrible statements can also be used as a rhetorical weapon without regard to whether it’s actually applicable in a given case. Lies, propaganda, fake news, twisted facts, hate speech, political correctness—you can use any of them to shut the door on argument. “Bias” is used like that often—“you’re just biased!”—but we still have to deal with bias as a real thing.

That said I’m not sure “Dangerous speech” is a useful new term itself. It’s very vague, and it has an Orwellian ring to it, and it seems like it would derail many discussions of the actual content of the speech into arguments about definitions of “dangerous”. If anyone wants to defend the utility of it, go ahead and I’ll hear it, but I’m usually only in favour of introducing new terms when they actually fill a gap. We already have terms like “lies” and “hate speech” and “incitement to violence” and what have you, so I’m not sure what “dangerous speech” would add.

TiffanyAching Jan 14, 2017, 1:09 AM
2 points
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: A Cruciverbalist’s Introduction to Bayesian reasoning
I’m afraid I don’t really have any useful feedback, but I did enjoy it. If nothing else it reminded me that I used to love crosswords and haven’t done any in yonks, so thanks for that!

I think it’s useful to have a more diverse set of introduction to rationality posts

Agreed. As long as they’re not inaccurate or misleading, having a variety of introductory articles is definitely valuable. Though I think I already had a decent beginner level grasp of Bayes when I read this, the crossword theme suggested “think in pencil” as a rather pleasing shorthand for the importance of resisting certainty and undue attachment to beliefs.

TiffanyAching Jan 14, 2017, 12:42 AM
4 points
on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
Did I bring the weather with me or something? I’ve spent the last year stuffing my brain with content just like this. A large part of why I joined LW was to get away from it, because I realized that being so immersed in political discussion and argument was damaging me as a rationalist and a person. I started catching myself rationalizing, using arguments as soldiers, holding up applause lights, the works. I was chain-smoking political content, swinging between outrage and fear and team-cheering and disgusted fuck-it-all-anyway cynicism. It was making me anxious and miserable but it’s so addictive.

It’s not a coincidence that I’ve joined LW in January. One of my goals for this year was to force myself stick to a healthier “mental diet”. Get my ass off twitter, seek out useful and enriching information, and strictly limit my intake of current political content.

LW seemed like a good place to do all of that. I joined on the understanding that current politics was a seldom-to-never thing here, and that if we wanted to discuss how rationality and politics intersect (valid and useful thing to do) we’d be using examples from the past or hypotheticals from the future.

Now in the five days since I’ve joined there have been a Brexit-post—worrying but arguably a justifiable exception given the content—and this, this useless article that taught me nothing new.

I’m a new member and I have no right to breeze in here and tell you guys how to run your show—but like I say, my brain is trying to eat healthy this year and I can’t stay on this site if people are going to keep offering me cupcakes and telling me one won’t kill me.

TiffanyAching Jan 12, 2017, 5:08 PM
6 points
in reply to: Pimgd’s comment on: Planning the Enemy’s Retreat
You’re absolutely right, it was totally, consciously manipulative and I’m not going to try to justify that with a bunch of utility boilerplate—but I’d claim that the manipulation element lay only in my tacit implication that Jenny must, as a matter of course, see the question as I did. The “as I’m sure you already know” stuff. Is there a name for that? It’s like begging the question on purpose, treating an important assumption as though it’s settled and barreling ahead before they can get a word in.

It’s embarrassing—socially difficult—for someone to interrupt in order to correct you, to say “wait a minute, back up, that’s all fine and dandy but I actually believe that the crystals themselves are magic.” Especially someone with only a shaky ability to articulate their belief in the first place, like Jenny. It was intellectual bullying in a small way and I don’t really know why I felt I had to do it like that. Petty fun, maybe? The devil is strong in me where crystals are concerned.

But I believe the rest of my idea still stands—there goes the tablecloth again—if you remove that unnecessarily manipulative element. if I had just simply and honestly discussed all the reasons I find crystals and their—ahem—healing properties fascinating, which again are all true, I would have still been making a model available to Jenny which preserved most of what she valued about her belief while jettisoning the belief itself.

TiffanyAching Jan 12, 2017, 5:39 AM
12 points
on: Planning the Enemy’s Retreat
I like this post. Sneaking “scary” ideas into fiction, where they can be faced in a context that feels safer—that makes a lot of sense to me. And while I think you’re right that it’s tricky to consciously use the technique on yourself, I’ve certainly had it happen that way for me accidentally. (Though I think it’s worth mentioning that the moment of realization—the moment it hit me that the logical or moral conclusion I had accepted in a fictional context was also valid/applicable in real life—was still sometimes painful or at least jarring.)

You asked about other ways to “reduce the perceived hedonic costs of truthseeking”. I have an example of my own that might be relevant, especially to the word “perceived”. Have you ever seen that trick where someone pulls a tablecloth off a table quickly and smoothly enough that all the plates and glasses and things stay right where they were?

I was speaking to a friend-of-a-friend to whom I had just been introduced—call her Jenny. In casual conversation, Jenny brought up her belief in crystal healing and asked me directly what I thought of it. Our mutual friend winced in horror because she knows how I feel about woo and anticipated a scathing response, or at least a condescending lecture about evidence-based medicine.

I’m not completely tactless, and Jenny was nice. I didn’t want to ruin her evening over some stupid crystals. I had an idea. I said, as near as I can recall, this:

“Oh, yes, I think crystal healing is amazing! Gosh, when you think that just by looking at a little piece of quartz or hematite or topaz and thinking about things like mental clarity or relaxation, we have the power to lower our anxiety levels, lessen our feelings of fatigue, even reduce our own blood pressure—I mean it’s such a beautiful example of the power of the human mind, isn’t it?”

And more in the same vein. Basically I gushed for five minutes about how cool the placebo effect is (without once using the term “placebo effect”) and how cool the natural world is, and how cool it is that we’re constantly learning more about things that used to be mysteries, and so on.

My friend was relieved and Jenny was nodding—a little hesitantly, like she was slightly bewildered by something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, but she was listening and she wasn’t upset or defensive or annoyed and the party proceeded without awkwardness or rancor.

I didn’t tell any lies. Crystal healing does work, in the sense that it’s better than nothing. Of course almost anything that doesn’t do active harm or negate the effects of real treatments works better than nothing—that’s the beauty of the placebo. Doesn’t really matter if it’s administered via sugar pill or amethyst or homeopathic milkshake, if the belief is there (and I’ve seen some intriguing evidence to suggest that even true belief isn’t necessary, by the way—you might only need hope).

See what I mean about the tablecloth trick? I was able to introduce Jenny to a less-wrong way of thinking about crystals without the hedonic cost of totally dismantling her beliefs. Now, I don’t think I convinced her that crystals aren’t filled with mysterious healing energy, and we never got near the fact that real medicine should work better than a placebo, but it still felt like a win—because I slipped a line of retreat into her head without setting off her intruder-alert. I gave her the plans for a model where her beloved crystals are cool and interesting and not-useless and not-lame that doesn’t rely on them being magic. I showed her that you could take away the tablecloth and leave her good china in place.

It’s a small example but I think there’s an argument for minimizing perceived hedonic cost by demonstrating to someone that the absence of one cherished belief does not necessarily mean that every cherished belief or value that apparently rests upon it must come crashing down. Relinquishing belief in the magic of crystals doesn’t mean Jenny has to throw out her collection of pretty rocks. Relinquishing belief in God doesn’t mean a life without joy or meaning or domestic felicity and I think that’s the kind of thing a lot of people are really afraid of losing, not the abstract idea of God’s existence itself. They need to know there’s a table under there.

TiffanyAching Jan 11, 2017, 10:10 PM
8 points
on: Welcome to LessWrong (10th Thread, January 2017) (Thread A)
Hello folks!

I think to accurately trace my development as a rationalist I’d have to ramble about my formative years for about fifteen paragraphs and it would bore the bejeezus out of anyone who isn’t my mother, so I’ll spare you, as Holden put it, the David Copperfield crap.

I value reason, logic and the search for truth—but also compassion, patience for human error and a sense of humour. (Hey, I’m Irish, flippancy is written in my genes just as humour with a “u” is written in my dictionary.)

I don’t like irrationality or ignorance, but I detest “shrug” or “let’s agree to disagree” or, worst of all, “who can really say what truth is anyway?”. I believe that someone passionately wrong is closer to being right that someone who doesn’t care. Believing that the truth matters is the sine qua non.

I promise I don’t go around sprinkling Latin into all my arguments, by the way. “Sine qua non” and “semper ubi sub ubi” are about all I’ve got.

I’ve read a great many posts on this site and others like it, and I’ve often constructed chains of reasoning in response to them, in order to work out whether I agree, partially agree, agree with the conclusion but not the steps leading to it or disagree entirely. Thing is, all of that is taking place in an empty room, literally and figuratively.

Talking to the walls in my flat about religion and morality and logic is unsatisfying and may be causing my neighbours some concern. I tried talking to my pot plant but it died, probably of boredom although possibly because I forgot to water it. Either way I’m reluctant to repeat the experiment with a hamster.

My problem is that I often feel awkward and diffident about participating in group discussions. I want to respond to everyone and then I get caught up in etiquette anxiety about what constitutes spamming or whether it’ll look like I’m trying to dominate the discussion, or I get embarrassed about replying to a five-year-old comment on a ten-year-old post, or I go into conflict-resolution mode and end up trying to moderate between two disputants instead of just participating on my own behalf. And I sometimes find being one voice among many competing for attention a bit dispiriting. I don’t just want to (ugh) “express my opinion”, and I certainly don’t want the last word—I can get that by talking to my poor dead pot-plant. I want to convince someone or be convinced myself.

Group discussion is usually not my bag, is what I’m saying, even in such a generally sensible community as LW—but I’ll try to give it a shot.

What I’d really like, though, (and please tell me if this is not an appropriate request or the appropriate place to make it—see etiquette anxiety, supra) is some good old-fashioned one-on-one conversation. So if you’re reading this and you’re at all like me, or you’d just like to do your kind deed for the day, PM me something—anything! - and let’s have a discussion or a debate or an argument. Religion, morality, trolley problems, the Great Santa Question, whatever—I’m down. I could perhaps be of some use to Advanced Rationalist Types who want to assess their ability to explain something clearly to someone with no background in formal logic or probability theory without ruining a dinner party, or to fellow newbs who want to test-drive a line of reasoning before taking it out in public. Try it on the dog, so to speak.

Looking forward to participating one way or another. My username, by the way, is the name of a Terry Pratchett character, and if anyone just wants to talk Pratchett I am so there.