Vladimir_M

Karma: 13,943

Vladimir_M 21 Aug 2012 22:04 UTC
20 points
in reply to: Risto_Saarelma’s comment on: LessWrong could grow a lot, but we’re doing it wrong.

Things are good as long as most interactions have at least one side familiar with existing site culture, but once you start getting outside users talking with other outside users in volume, there’s not much left maintaining the older culture.

Worse yet, the new users may comply with the culture in form but not in spirit. In the concrete case of LW, this means new users who are polite and non-confrontational, familiar with the common topics and the material covered in the classic OB/LW articles, making appeals to all the right principles of epistemology and logic, etc., etc., but who nevertheless lack the ability and commitment for truly unbiased and open-minded discussion at the level that used to be the standard. I think this is indeed what has been happening, and I don’t see any way an open-access forum could prevent this course of events from taking place eventually.

(It’s hard to make a point like this without sounding arrogant and conceited, so I should add that in retrospect, I believe that when I joined LW, at the time it probably caused a net lowering of its standards, which were higher back then.)
What links here?
- Epiphany's comment on Call For Agreement: Should LessWrong have better protection against cultural collapse? by Epiphany (3 Sep 2012 9:21 UTC; 16 points)

Vladimir_M 21 Aug 2012 21:15 UTC
31 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: [Link] Social interventions gone wrong

Failing all this I think we really should consider if the overly-strictly interpreted no mindkillers rule that was prevalent as little as a few months ago that much reduced political discourse wasn’t a good thing that should be restored.

I used to be excited about the idea of harnessing the high intellectual ability and strong norms of politeness on LW to reach accurate insight about various issues that are otherwise hard to discuss rationally. However, more recently I’ve become deeply pessimistic about the possibility of having a discussion forum that wouldn’t be either severely biased and mind-killed or strictly confined to technical topics in math and hard sciences.

It looks like even if a forum approaches this happy state of affairs, the way old Overcoming Bias and early LessWrong arguably did for some time, this can happen only as a brief and transient phenomenon. (In fact, it isn’t hard to identify the forces that inevitably make this situation unstable.) So, while OB ceased to be much of a discussion forum long ago, LW is currently in the final stages of turning into a forum that still has unusual smarts and politeness, but where on any mention of controversial issues, battle lines are immediately drawn and genuine discussion ceases, just like elsewhere. (Even if the outcome may still look very calm and polite by the usual internet standards.)

The trouble is, the only way a “no-mindkillers” rule can improve things is if it’s done in an extreme form and with ruthless severity, by reducing the permissible range of topics to strictly technical questions in some areas of math and hard science and consistently banning everything else. The worst possible outcome is to institute a partial “no-mindkillers” rule, which would work under a pretense that rational and unbiased discussion of a broad range of topics outside of math and hard sciences is possible without bringing up any controversial and charged issues, and without giving serious consideration to disreputable and low-status views. This would lead to an entrenched standard of cargo-cult “rationality” that incorporates all the biases, delusions, and taboos of the respectable opinion wholesale, under a pretense of a neutral, pragmatic, and unbiased restriction of irrelevant and distracting controversial topics.

Thus, it seems to me like the only realistic possibilities at this point are: (1) increasing ideological confrontations and mind-killing, (2) enforcement of the above-described cargo-cult rationality standards, and (3) reduction of discussion topics to strictly technical questions, backed by far stricter, MathOverflow-type standards. Neither of these looks like a fulfilment of LW’s mission statement, but (2) seems to me like the worst failure scenario from its point of view.
What links here?

Vladimir_M 21 Aug 2012 4:06 UTC
7 points
in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: [Link] Social interventions gone wrong
If I remember correctly, you replied to several of my comments on fairly controversial topics recently, but for the record, I didn’t downvote any of them. I downvote direct replies to my comments only if I believe that someone is arguing in bad faith, or when I’m annoyed with some exceptionally bad failure of basic logic or good manners.

Vladimir_M 21 Aug 2012 3:45 UTC
6 points
in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: [Link] Social interventions gone wrong
It seems like you’re losing focus of my point. I am merely trying to demonstrate that it’s wrong to consider studies of this sort as solid and conclusive evidence about the overall effects of the social interventions under consideration. I mentioned this scenario only as one plausible way in which one of these studies could be grossly inadequate, not as something I’m trying to prove to be the case.

Vladimir_M 21 Aug 2012 3:20 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Multiheaded’s comment on: [Link] Social interventions gone wrong
I’m not sure what exactly you’re trying to imply with this comment. You have complained that I was reading your comments too uncharitably in the past, so I’m trying to interpret it as something other than a taunt, but without success.

Vladimir_M 20 Aug 2012 15:46 UTC
12 points
on: [Link] Social interventions gone wrong
As it usually happens in the social “sciences,” it’s very naive to believe that in any of these cases we have anything like solid evidence about the total effect of the programs in question. Even ignoring the intractable problems with disentangling all the countless non-obvious confounding variables, there is still the problem of unintended consequences—which may be unaccounted for even if the study seemingly asks all the relevant questions, and which may manifest themselves only in the longer run.

Take for example this nurse-family partnership program. Even if the study has correctly proven that these positive outcomes have occurred in the families covered by the intervention, and that they are in fact a consequence of the intervention—a big if—we still have no way of knowing its total long-run effect. For one, it may happen that it lowers the cost of having children for poor unmarried women, both by providing assistance and by lowering the stigma and fear of such an outcome, so that in the new long-term equilibrium, more children are born to such women, especially the least responsible, resourceful, and competent ones, eventually increasing the total measure of child poverty, neglect, abuse, etc. Of course, this may or may not be the case, but there’s no way to know it based on these studies that purport to give a definitive evaluation of the program’s success.

Vladimir_M 19 Aug 2012 1:55 UTC
5 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: What is moral foundation theory good for?
Clearly it’s a very complex topic, but generally speaking, I do believe that Haidt’s recent work is more or less on the right track in this regard.

That said, much of his insight is not very original, and can be found in the work of other, often much older thinkers, some of whom Haidt cites. Haidt’s significance is mainly that he’s trying to pull off a “Nixon in China,” i.e. to leverage his own liberal beliefs and credentials to formulate these insights in a way that’s palatable to liberals, who would be instantly repulsed and incensed by the other authors who have presented them previously. (I’m not very optimistic about his chances, though, especially since he has to dance around some third-rail issues that might destroy his reputation instantly. Similar can be said for other modern authors who delve into social theory based on evolutionary insight, like e.g. Geoffrey Miller.)

Also, I think there are many other crucial pieces of the puzzle that Haidt is still missing completely, so he still strikes me as very naive on some issues. (For example, I don’t know if he’s familiar with the concept of Schelling points, but he definitely fails to recognize them on some issues where they are crucial. He also apparently fails to grasp what virtue ethics is about.)

Vladimir_M 19 Aug 2012 0:29 UTC
2 points
in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: Competence in experts: summary
It’s hard to tell, but if they have been influenced by that post, then considering the lack of adequate reception of the post in the first place, this probably didn’t improve their understanding of my comments, and has perhaps even worsened it.

Also, I don’t claim to be anywhere near the ideal of optimizing for feedback in practice. After all, “When vanity is not prompting us, we have little to say.” But I would certainly change my posting patterns if I were convinced that it would improve feedback.

I also don’t think that low returns from top-level posts are a general rule—it’s probably mainly due to my lack of writing skills (particularly in English) that results in more readable and cogent writing when I’m confined to the shorter space and pre-established context of a comment.

(Although, on the other hand, one general problem is the lack of any clear and agreed-upon policy for what is on-topic for LW, which makes me, and I suspect also many other people, reluctant to start discussions about some topics, but ready to follow up when others have already opened them and found a positive reception.)

Vladimir_M 18 Aug 2012 23:54 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Unnamed’s comment on: What is moral foundation theory good for?
Most of the points relevant to your comment are covered in this reply to Tyrrell McAllister, so to avoid redundancy, please follow up on that comment if you think it’s not an adequate answer.

Vladimir_M 18 Aug 2012 23:39 UTC
15 points
in reply to: Tyrrell_McAllister’s comment on: What is moral foundation theory good for?

How do you reduce autonomy to sacredness? I think of sacredness as something that inheres in some single object of veneration towards which a group of people can genuflect, such as a family shrine, a flag, a saint, or (for the left) “the environment”. I would also extend the notion of a “single object” to slightly more abstract things, such as a single holy text (which might exist in multiple copies) or a single ritual way of eating (which might be enacted on multiple occasions).

One way in which sacredness commonly manifests itself is through sacred boundaries that serve as strong Schelling points. In fact, I am convinced that any large-scale human social organization depends to a significant degree on Schelling points whose power and stability rests on the fact that the thought of their violation arouses strong moral intuitions of sacrilege. (Even though this might be non-obvious from their stated rationale.)

Take for example the ancient Roman pomerium, the boundary of the city of Rome that was explicitly held as sacred. In particular, bearing arms within the pomerium was considered as sacrilege, and this norm was taken very seriously during the Republican period. Of course, a norm like this can easily be given a practical rationale (preventing coups, assassinations, etc.), and it seems plausible that it indeed had a practical effect of this sort, contributing to the long-standing stability and competitive success of the republican institutions. However, it was in fact the sacredness aspect that gave the norm its power, since a consequentialist rationale for any norm can always be rationalized away, thus making it a weak Schelling point, easily pushed down a slippery slope. And indeed, when the reverence for this traditional norm of sacredness started fading in the late Republic (along with many others), it was a good sign that the Republic had indeed gone to the dogs, and soon the state was torn by constant civil wars between competing generals who had no problem finding justifications and support for their plans to conquer Rome and seize power by armed force.

Similarly, intuitions of sacrilege can be associated with non-physical boundaries. Take for example the modern norms against euthanasia, even in cases where it’s voluntary and in fact strongly desired by the patient, and the alternative is nothing but a prolonged suffering. People are horrified by the thought of euthanasia because it violates the perceived sacredness of human life. And again, one can make a cogent Schelling point/slippery slope argument in favor of such norms, but this is not what gives them their power.

Now, it seems quite plausible to me that this is in fact a common state of affairs for all sorts of norms that deal with the prohibition of crossing certain boundaries. Not all such norms are based on sacredness intuitions, of course—they can also rest on a basis of fairness, harm, liberty, or some mix of those—but in that case, their violation causes different and lesser kinds of outrage, and it’s also easy to convince people to make exceptions based on concerns for fairness, harm, or liberty. For example, the norms about private property rights seem to be typically in this category: their violation causes nothing similar to the visceral feelings of sacrilege, and it’s easy to convince people that some violations and curtailing of property rights are OK if you can convince them that it reduces harm and increases fairness or liberty.

With this in mind, I think it should be reasonable to ask whether the liberal intuitions of personal (and particularly sexual) autonomy are in fact a sort of pomerium backed by moral intuitions of sacrilege triggered by the perceived violations of this autonomy. (Whether or not we end up agreeing on the answer to this question.)
What links here?
- Vladimir_M's comment on What is moral foundation theory good for? by novalis (18 Aug 2012 23:54 UTC; 0 points)

Vladimir_M 18 Aug 2012 7:48 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Tyrrell_McAllister’s comment on: What is moral foundation theory good for?
I haven’t read The Happiness Hypothesis, but I’ve just read these pages on Amazon’s preview. It seems to me that this was indeed an earlier phase of Haidt’s thought, when he advocated a much more simplistic theory of the moral foundations and was still a partisan liberal. (I’m not just throwing around an ideological label here—these days Haidt indeed describes himself as a “partisan liberal” in past tense.)

In these cited pages, Haidt gives some clearly biased and unrealistic statements. For example, we are told that “On issue after issue, liberals want to maximize autonomy by removing limits, barriers, and restrictions.” But obviously, you only need to ask a libertarian for his opinion about this claim to realize that in fact “removing limits, barriers, and restrictions” applies only to a strictly circumscribed set of issues, and the liberal understanding of autonomy in fact has a more complex basis.

These days Haidt is far above such evident partisan biases, but I think he still hasn’t come around to re-examining the issues of liberal autonomy in the light of his more recent insight, while at the same time he realizes at some level that it’s incompatible even with his current view of the liberal moral foundations. I don’t think he’s avoiding these problematic discussions in a calculated way, so I think he simply has some sort of “ugh field” around these questions and thus fails to address them clearly and openly.

Vladimir_M 18 Aug 2012 4:38 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Tyrrell_McAllister’s comment on: What is moral foundation theory good for?
Just in case I don’t remember correctly, I’ve just checked The Righteous Mind’s index for “abortion.” It lists three pages, each of which mentions abortion only in passing as an example of a public moral controversy, without getting into any analysis whatsoever of the issue. To the best of my recollection, there is no such analysis elsewhere in the book either, nor in anything else I’ve read by Haidt.

As for the blog you link to, I strongly suspect that the author is in fact extrapolating from his (her?) view of what Haidt believes, not relaying an actual argument by Haidt. I might be wrong, but a few minutes of googling didn’t turn up any relevant statements by Haidt.

Vladimir_M 18 Aug 2012 4:17 UTC
5 points
in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: Competence in experts: summary
I’m not complaining about a lack of upvotes and links, but about the lack of responses that leave me with more insight than I started with, and also a general lack of understanding of the nature and relevance of the problems I’m trying to discuss. I’d rather have a comment buried deep in some obscure subthread with zero upvotes, which however occasions a single insightful response, than a top-level post upvoted to +200 and admiringly linked from all over the internet, which however leaves me with no significant advance in insight (and possibly only reinforces my biases with the positive attention).

(Not that I’m always optimizing for feedback, of course—sometimes I just fall prey to the “someone is wrong on the internet” syndrome. But, for whatever reason, as embarrassing as such episodes may be, they fill me with less dissatisfaction in retrospect than failures of systematic and planned effort.)

Vladimir_M 18 Aug 2012 3:22 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Tyrrell_McAllister’s comment on: What is moral foundation theory good for?

I haven’t read Haidt, so I don’t know how he accounts for “concern for autonomy” under his system. Does he reduce it to fairness and harm somehow? Or does it arise incidentally out of diminished concern for authority?

I’ve read Haidt’s book, and I’d say he skirts around the topic of autonomy (sexual and otherwise) in liberal thinking, never giving it a satisfactory treatment, and avoiding issues where it would unavoidably come to the fore. For example, as a notable and glaring omission, the book doesn’t address the controversies over abortion at all. (Thus putting Haidt in a very odd position where he purports to have a general theory of moral psychology that explains the contemporary American ideological rifts, but nonchalantly refuses to apply it to the single most ideologically charged moral issue in the U.S. today.)

Now, as you probably guess, I would hypothesize that he avoids autonomy-centered topics because they tend to contradict his theory of liberals as low on sacredness. But whether or not one agrees with this view, it seems clear that his treatment of such topics is incomplete and unsatisfactory.

Vladimir_M 17 Aug 2012 5:24 UTC
0 points
in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: Competence in experts: summary
I tried that a while ago, but the results were disappointing enough that in the meantime I’ve grown somewhat embarrassed by that post. (Disappointing both in terms of the lack of interesting feedback and the ruckus occasioned by some concrete examples that touched on controversial topics, which I avoided with less scrupulousness back then.) For whatever reason, insofar as I get interesting feedback here, it looks like I get more of it per unit of effort when I stick to run-of-the-mill commenting than if I were to invest effort in quality top-level posts. (I don’t think this is a general rule for all posters here, though.)

Vladimir_M 16 Aug 2012 22:24 UTC
12 points
in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: Competence in experts: summary
You’re right, these topics do make me sound like a broken record, and I also didn’t take into account the broader context. It’s just that I’m really irritated with papers like these.

Vladimir_M 16 Aug 2012 18:57 UTC
0 points
on: Competence in experts: summary
(retracted, see below)

Vladimir_M 16 Aug 2012 2:10 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Tyrrell_McAllister’s comment on: What is moral foundation theory good for?
That would indeed be a fully general counterargument, but it’s not the sort of argument that I’m making. My theory is not that liberals elevate harm and fairness so much that they should be called “sacred” for them. Rather, my theory is that they have their own peculiar moral intuitions of sacredness—which is evidenced by the fact that if these intuitions are challenged by arguments based on harm or fairness analogous to those they accept in other cases, they react with emotions and rationalizations in a manner typical of people brought into dissonance by an attempt to elicit conflicting moral intuitions.

Of course, my view may be wrong, but I don’t think it can be dismissed as a fully general counterargument.

Vladimir_M 15 Aug 2012 19:36 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: What is moral foundation theory good for?
OK, if you want to delve into a concrete example with all the inflammatory details, PM me your email address. (I find the PM interface on this site very annoying.) If the discussion produces any interesting results, maybe we can publish it later suitably edited.

I’ll also post a further reply later today, addressing some of your points that I think can be answered satisfactorily without going into too much controversy.

Vladimir_M 15 Aug 2012 16:32 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: What is moral foundation theory good for?
Sorry, I composed the above comment in a rush, and forgot to address the other questions you asked because I focused on the main objection.

Regarding other forums, the problem is that they offer only predictable feedback based on the ideological positions of the owners and participants. Depending on where I go, I can get either outrage and bewilderment or admiring applause, and while this can be fun and vanity-pleasing, it offers no useful feedback. So while I do engage in ideological rants and scuffles for fun from time to time on other forums, I’ve never bothered with making my writing there systematic and precise enough to be worth your time.

Regarding other thinkers, I actually don’t think that much of my thinking is original. In fact, my views on most questions are mostly cobbled together from insights I got from various other authors, with only some additional synthesis and expansion on my part. I don’t think I have any unusual epistemic skills except for unusually broad curiosity and the ability to take arguments seriously even if their source and ultimate conclusion are low-status, unpleasant, ideologically hostile to my values and preferences, etc. (Of course, neither of these characteristics is an unalloyed good even from a purely epistemic perspective, and they certainly cause many problems, possibly more than benefits, for me in practical life.)

The problem, however, is that on controversial topics, good insight typically comes from authors whose other beliefs and statements are mistaken and biased in various ways, and whose overall image, demeanor, and affiliation is often problematic. And while people are generally apt to misinterpret agreement on a particular point as a full endorsement of someone, and to attack a particular argument based on the author’s mistakes and biases on other questions, I think LW has some particularly bad problems in this regard. This is because on LW, people tend to assign a supposed general level of “rationality” to individuals and dismiss them if sufficient red flags of supposedly general irrationality are raised.

Whereas in reality, on controversial and ideologically charged questions, there is much less consistency within individuals, and people whose rationality is sterling as judged by the LW public opinion (often not without good reason) typically have at least some horribly naive and biased views, while much good insight comes from people whom LW would judge (also often with good reason) as overall hugely biased and irrational. (The only people who maintain high standards across the board are those who limit themselves to technical questions and venture into controversial non-technical topics only rarely and cautiously, if at all.) So that on many questions, saying “I think X has good insight on topic Y” would be just a way to discredit myself. (When I think it isn’t, I do provide references with the appropriate caveats.)