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Not one of you made a case. Not one of you pointed to an error. And yet the judgment was swift and unanimous. That tells me the argument was too strong, not too weak. It couldn’t be refuted, so it had to be dismissed.

Believing that your post was voted down because it was too strong is very convenient for you, which means that your belief that it was voted down because it's too strong is likely motivated reasoning.

It's a lot easier to write BS than to refute it, so people don't usually want to bother exhaustively analyzing why BS is BS.

So what I've though is maybe that is backwards. I'm starting a test to see flipping the approach, putting the word I already know up first and then having to come up with the Korean word as the "answer"

I thought it was standard to practice flashcards both ways round. Recognition and recall are different skills.

1. I told you that I addressed this failure mode in another comment. Why did you ignore when I told you this instead of reading that comment and responding to what I said over there instead? Isn’t that the *only *thing that makes sense, if that’s all you want to talk about?

I read the comment in question (this one [LW(p) · GW(p)], yes? if that’s not the comment you meant then please link the correct one) and it did not seem to me to have addressed this. (I did not particularly find anything specific to respond in it, either, although I certainly can’t say that I agree with the model you give therein.)

2. Why are you talking whether men pick up on these things in general?

Because, as I have said [LW(p) · GW(p)], I agree with johnswentworth when he wrote [LW(p) · GW(p)]:

Sometimes this is due to the woman in question not recognizing how subtle she’s being, and losing out on a date with a man she’s still interested in.

I would guess that this is approximately 100% of the time in practice, excluding cases where the man doesn’t pick up on the cues but happens to ask her out anyway. Approximately nobody accurately picks up on womens’ subtle cues, including other women (at least that would be my strong guess, and is very cruxy for me here). If the woman just wants a guy who will ask her out, that’s still a perfectly fine utility function, but the cues serve approximately-zero role outside of the woman’s own imagination.

EDIT: In fact, let me expand on this.

Your linked comment answers the question “why don’t women just ask, if they really want the guy”. (I find the answer unconvincing, as I said, but that’s actually beside the point here.) But the reason I brought up the scenario in question wasn’t to pose the question “why don’t women just ask”, but rather to point out that in said scenario:

1. The woman is definitely sending cues as hard as she can.
2. The man does not pick up on those cues.
3. If asked later, the man will say that he did not perceive any cues. (Indeed, he’d be surprised by the question—“Cues, what cues? From whom…? That one woman? Flirting? With whom? With me?! No, you’ve got something mixed up, surely…”)
4. If asked later, the woman will say that the man did not pick up on any cues. (And will be very frustrated by this; she was being so obvious, how could this absolute dunce of a man not have noticed?! Ridiculous! And she was really into the guy, too…)

So even in this case where one person is trying as hard as they can to send cues, nevertheless the other person is totally oblivious. (Does this happen all the time? Yes it does.)

Given this, does the suggestion that actually, everyone is perceiving all the cues all the time, is obviously silly. If even trying this hard, “sending” this “loudly”—at such extreme “transmission intensity”—can fail to be enough to get the signal through, at all, then how could it be true that the signal is actually successfully getting through pretty much all the time? The answer is obvious: it can’t be true.

(Now, you might say: “but I am making no such suggestion, because you have misunderstood my…”—sure, fair enough. But this should, at least, clearly and definitively answer the question of why I brought up that scenario and what relevance I think it has to the general question.)

(Edit ends.)

So, to again try to summarize: you claim that people (and in particular, men) “sense the cues” that other people (and in particular, women) send. What exactly it means to “sense the cues”, in your usage, remains unclear. It likewise remains unclear how (or if) that claim is responsive to johnswentworth’s claim quoted above (with which I agree). It certainly seemed like you were disagreeing with him. But then, based on your later explanation of how you are using the relevant words, it seemed like you were not disagreeing with him but instead were saying… something… unrelated…?

Could you, perhaps, express your position on this matter using the same terminology as is being used by your interlocutors? (I understand if you prefer an idiosyncratic usage, and it’s fine if you return to that usage afterwards, but it would help if you could “translate” your point into the normal usage at least temporarily, just so that we could at least get clear on what it is that you’re actually saying.)

Even though it’s normally rude to point out so bluntly like this, I certainly prefer the respect of “What you’re saying sounds obviously dumb. What am I missing?” than the polite fictions that condescend and presuppose that you’re not only in error but also too emotionally immature to admit it.

Yes, of course, likewise.

EDIT: By the way, this is false in my experience:

You’re still misunderstanding what I’m saying though. Again, you can’t judge truth of a statement until you know what the statement means.

Well, I’m definitely confused about at least one thing. Namely, I am confused about whether you claim that you have already explained what you mean by “sense the cue”.

If you haven’t already explained it… well, the obvious question is “why not”, but never mind that, we can move past it, and instead proceed to: please do go ahead and explain it.

If you have already explained it (as seems to me to be the case), then what makes you think that, despite your explanation, I do not understand what you meant? (As far as I can tell, you’re not saying “aha, I conclude from this here statement of yours that you didn’t understand my explanation”, but rather “I know in advance that you didn’t understand my explanation, and on the basis of that fact, I conclude that this here statement of yours is false”. But how do you know it in advance…?)

flinching from admitting what you sense

Needless to say, I can’t decipher this comment, because I am once again (or still?) not sure how you’re using the word “sense” here…

Perhaps you could go ahead and explain what you think is wrong with the billboard analogy I offered?

As a meta-level comment, I’d like to note that I’ve asked quite a few questions to try to understand your points, and you’ve ignored almost all of them, whereas I have (as you see) tried to respond directly to your questions in my replies. (Perhaps it seemed to you like the questions were rhetorical? But no, I actually did want answers to them!) For example, in the grandparent I asked:

What do you mean by “matter” here?

That wasn’t a rhetorical question; I really would like to know what you meant when you disputed my alleged assumption that you have to be aware of things for them to “matter”. In what sense do things you’re not aware of “matter”? (I can think of some obvious cases where this is true—one need not be aware of electromagnetism for it to affect you, for instance—but presumably you don’t suspect me of being a solipsist with regard to physics, so this can’t be what you meant. On the other hand, if someone is trying to communicate something to you—“sending cues”—but you are not aware of this, then, clearly, you cannot be receiving the message that is being transmitted. Is that something you dispute? Or does “matter” mean something else entirely here?)

(And likewise with the other questions I asked; they were meant to help me understand your points, not as some sort of rhetorical ploys. But let’s start with that last question, at least; it’ll do for now.)

This debate seems hampered by a lack of clarity on what “objective” and “subjective” moralities are.

Absolutely.

Coyne gave a sensible definition of “objective” morality as being the stance that something can be discerned to be “morally wrong” through reasoning about facts about the world, rather than by reference to human opinion.

That's a poor definition. It tries to oppose facts about the worlds to human opinions. While whether humans have particular opinions or not is also a matter of facts about the world.

The fault here lies on the terms itself. Such dychotomies as "objective/subjective" or "real/non-real" or "stance-independent/stance-dependent" are very unhelpful. Artifacts of ancient philosophy which didn't understand map-territory relations, treated mind and matter as separate magisteriums and therefore were tremendously confused about basically everything, unable to separate baby from the bathwater.

I don't think we need content on LessWrong that keeps perpetuating this confusion. Therefore, I'm downvoting this post even though I seem to agree with about 80% of it.

I haven't tried it but it's a cool idea and I'm excited to see how it turns out! I might try it if I try to go back to learning Italian.

Remember, we’re talking about the following situation:

If that's what you think we're talking about then I have a couple questions for you:

1) I told you that I addressed this failure mode in another comment. Why did you ignore when I told you this instead of reading that comment and responding to what I said over there instead? Isn't that the only thing that makes sense, if that's all you want to talk about?

2) Why are you talking whether men pick up on these things in general? It feels like you're saying "We're talking about the people who died during heart surgery. In this context, where's the evidence that heart surgery works!?". The evidence for the effectiveness of heart surgery obviously isn't in the corpses... but you're smart enough to know this, so wtf?

Even though it's normally rude to point out so bluntly like this, I certainly prefer the respect of "What you're saying sounds obviously dumb. What am I missing?" than the polite fictions that condescend and presuppose that you're not only in error but also too emotionally immature to admit it. 

I'm placing my bet that you also both want and deserve this kind of honesty -- and will either say "Oops, good catch", or else point out something I'm missing that makes it seem less like you're flinching from admitting what you sense. 

We'll see if it pays off. If not, I'll probably bow out.

EDIT: By the way, this is false in my experience:

You're still misunderstanding what I'm saying though. Again, you can't judge truth of a statement until you know what the statement means.

Hey Ozyrus I sent you a direct message.

I'm big on point #2 feeding into point #1.

"Alignment," used in a way where current AI is aligned - a sort of "it does basically what we want, within its capabilities, with some occasional mistakes that don't cause much harm" sort of alignment - is simply easier at lower capabilities, where humans can do a relatively good job of overseeing the AI, not just in deployment but also during training. Systematic flaws in human oversight during training leads (under current paradigms) to misaligned AI.

Great essay. The lack of links made it way more artistic, but a link to Anthropic Education Report: How University Students Use Claude seems helpful.

Also, now I know what tillering is!

Thanks, is there anything you can point me to for further reading, whether by you or others?