A Kick in the Rationals: What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts?

Prophetic, maybe :-)

Unless the argument itself is the part you get returns from. I've long admitted that arguing on the internet is utterly pointless. But so is watching TV or playing video games, and this at least makes me smarter sometimes.

And it amuses me when rationalists get frustrated at the elementary errors, and mistakenly think that they "should know better", despite the overwhelming evidence that they don't. It especially amuses me when that rationalist is me. I should know better, and I do upon reflection, but rarely do in the moment.

2) Being forced to take a class in "critical thinking" which actually turned out to utilize pretty much every dark arts technique in the book to convert you of the professor's political agenda.

That sounds like it could be the final exam in a class on critical thinking.

Another one: In the film Rear Window, the protagonist witnesses a dog sniffing around a flower bed; later, that same dog is found dead. The protagonist responds by having his girlfriend dig up the flower bed, only to find nothing. From this, he concludes that his suspicion that his neighbor is a murderer is correct, and sends his girlfirend to break into said neighbors house. Of course, by authorial fiat, he ends up being right.

Also, anything that ICP has said, ever. But this takes the cake.

"Fog, to me, is awesome," he replies. "Do you know why? Because I look at my five-year-old son and I'm explaining to him what fog is and he thinks it's incredible."

"Ah!" I gesticulate. "If you're explaining to your five-year-old son what fog is, then why do you not want to meet scientists? Because they're just like you, explaining things to people…"

"Well," Violent J says, "science is… we don't really… that's like…" He pauses. Then he waves his hands as if to say, "OK, an analogy": "If you're trying to fuck a girl, but her mom's home, fuck her mom! You understand? You want to fuck the girl, but her mom's home? Fuck the mom. See?"

I look blankly at him. "You mean…"

"Now, you don't really feel that way," Violent J says. "You don't really hate her mom. But for this moment when you're trying to fuck this girl, fuck her! And that's what we mean when we say fuck scientists. Sometimes they kill all the cool mysteries away. When I was a kid, they couldn't tell you how pyramids were made…"

"Like Stonehenge and Easter Island," says Shaggy. "Nobody knows how that shit got there."

"But since then, scientists go, 'I've got an explanation for that.' It's like, fuck you! I like to believe it was something out of this world."

Also a less obvious reference to this.

It was very much of the tone "I am now going to explain to you why you are wrong", but it was still civil. Rough outline:

1) Quantum mechanics does not say that.

2) Strong anthropic principle is a bold claim you've failed to substantiate.

3) Saying "our current theories of the physical world don't work" is outrageous coming from a man who attracts other objects towards him with a force proportional to the product of their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

4) The physical processes underlying organic life are perfectly compatible with a lawful physical universe, and fairly well understood by the standards of many academic disciplines (and you should know that, because you're actually an expert on the subject). To date, no mental phenomena have demonstrated properties that violate the laws of physics.

5) "Tree in the forest" is an artefact of the semantic history of our language, and nothing to do with physics.

6) Remaining few paragraphs are presented in a needlessly confusing way to obfuscate some fairly straightforward ideas. Obviously things we label "optical effects" require optical devices in order to manifest in the way we perceive them. The mapping in the analogies is sunlit_droplet -> skyscraper / rainbow -> sight_of_skyscraper, but the phrasing implies it's rainbow -> skyscraper.

7) It's one thing to point to poorly-understood phenomena and go "woooo...isn't it weird and spooky and strange?" but it's another entirely to deliberately and erroneously subvert pretty well-understood phenomena to try and achieve the same effect. Please stop it.

(Unless you are Summer Glau, of course.)

Words can not express how awesome it would be if Summer Glau was a LW regular.

Eh. If violations of physics and common sense (never mind unusual cognitive-science concepts) in space opera had the ability to make me angry, I'd have to spend most of my time getting angry. Mass Effect actually seems fairly sane as space opera goes, though its handling of the robot rebellion motif is pretty damned ham-fisted.

The most recent Deus Ex game actually bothered me more, thanks to explicitly tackling transhumanist themes and then completely failing to resolve them in a way that showed any understanding of the subject matter. Very little in media irritates me more than a work rendering complex philosophical issues down into a trite moral quandary and then trying to award itself cool points for knowing about the issue at all.

Any rationalist that can't enjoy a simple story... much less resorting to throwing their controller at the screen... has demonstrated weakness, not strength. You have cut yourself out of a huge part of culture, the "human experience", simply so that you can proclaim "bullshit!" and be angry, without affecting any actual change in the world.

Yep. Most mass-market space operas are guilty of this. Despite having knowledge and resources to fly to other planets, humans in them still have to shoot kinetic bullets at animals.

However, stories, in order to be entertaining (at least for the mainstream public), have to depict a protagonist (or a group thereof) who are changing because of conflict, and the conflict has to be winnable, resolvable -- it must "allow" the protagonist to use his wit, perseverance, luck and whatever else to win.

Now imagine a "more realistic" setting where humans went through a singularity (and, possibly, coexist with AIs). If the singularity was friendly, then this is an utopia which, by definition, has no conflict. If the singularity was unfriendly, humans are either already disassembled for atoms, or soon will be -- and they have no chance to win against the AI because the capability gap is too big. Neither branch has much story potential.

This applies to game design as well -- enemies in a game built around a conflict have to be "repeatedly winnable", otherwise the game would become an exercise in frustration.

(I think there is some story / game potential in the early FOOM phase where humans still have a chance to shut it down, but it is limited. A realistic AI has no need to produce hordes of humanoid or monstrous robots vulnerable to bullets to serve as enemies, and it has no need to monologue when the hero is about to flip the switch. Plus the entire conflict is likely to be very brief.)

I know how you feel. I get so much stupider and sadder when I'm tired. Have you found any solutions? I've tried naps and mid-afternoon exercise and dietary changes. The only thing that's ever helped in the long term was giving up coffee 3 years ago - the crashes after the caffeine high were making everything so much worse. It took a lot of nail-biting but it was worth it.

On the plus side, at least you recognise its happening to you so you can try and make sure you don't make important decisions in this state.

Related to this, what kicks me in the Less Wrong Parts is that I can be in a bad mood and thinking irrationally, be aware that I am in a bad mood and thinking irrationally, and helplessly watch myself continue to think irrationally.

Moods, for me, are very sticky, and any strategy I develop for extricating myself from a foul mood ends up only working within the context for which it was designed. I feel like if I got a handle on my moods, my demonstrated rationality would skyrocket.

It might help to mention that I am not depressed or even unusually moody. In fact, I'm more even-keeled than average. Maybe this is what makes it feel that much worse when I do find myself in a foul mood. It is an unaccustomed state I don't know how to deal with.

I've noticed many people who practise meditation have a strong belief in meditation and the more 'rational' core of Buddhist practices, but only belief in belief about the new age-y aspects. My meditation teacher, for example, consistently prefaces the new age stuff with "in Buddhist teachings" or "Buddhists believe" ("Buddhists believe we will be reincarnated") while making other claims as simple statements of fact ("mindfulness meditation is a useful relaxation technique").

I used to believe in God and pray often.

When I discovered that I had stopped believing, I stopped praying.

In a month or two, I felt the lack strong enough that I felt I needed to do something about it. So I began to go through the motions and find what parts work.

It turns out that I can perform prayer-like-actions without invoking a higher power and get similar results. A couple years have allowed me to refine the process, somewhat, and now I can feel the rightness, acceptance, and love-like-experience I once called 'being filled with the Holy Spirit' much more easily than I could when I had to first abase myself before God's judgement.

And I call that progress.

Horrible lurching realisation: over the past couple of years, I've avoided unproductive online arguments. This has made me happier. I've also felt, over the past 18 months or so, that my general argument-forming faculties have gotten a little bit shoddy.

This is worrying.

Examples of brain damage patients would also prove your point nicely, perhaps more saliently.

Oh, I got another one, mostly confined to this forum: people making up numbers for probabilities of certain events and feeling so much more Bayesian.

One basic thing about MWI is that it is a matter of physical fact that large objects tend to violate 'laws of quantum mechanics' as we know them (the violation is known as gravity), and actual physicists do know that we simply do not know what the quantum mechanics works out to at large scale. To actually have a case for MWI one would need to develop a good quantum gravity theory where many worlds would naturally arise, but that is very difficult (and many worlds may well not naturally arise).

To be fair, a lot of actual physicists feel that way when they hear the word "quantum". It's definitely one of the common cases of things that make people feel this way.

Armchair critics are often just as bad. For example, there are all thosepeople who insist that "cryogenics" doesn't work because ice crystals inevitably explode all the cells. The much harder thing to accept however is when experts and public faces of the field fail to correct public opinion on the matter.

Kids, eh

Hey, you're the one who sired a human. Don't go blaming her for the resulting failure to think clearly.

This reminded me of Ayn Rand on Immanual Kant:

[H]is argument amounted to a negation, not only of man's consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such. His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes -- deaf, because he has ears -- deluded, because he has a mind -- and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.

The article you linked does mention Kant, though apparently Stove was easier on him than Rand was:

Talk of 'forms of perception', and 'things in themselves' may suggest Kant, but it is not clear that Kant was imposed on by a 'Worst Argument'. Stove does pin a few small Gems on him (Stove, 1991, 160), but they are not central to his argument.

You know, an uncharitable reading of this would almost sort-of kinda maybe construe it as a rebuke of the LW community. Almost.

Ooh, burn!

Your last link explains the ire I expressed in my other comment, thank you.

Sounds like the LaRouche cult.

edit: that last link is excellent. The ingroup-outgroup thing gone pathological. All the ingroup needs is a defined enemy and WHAM! cult.

OMG, is that the real "shrink"? If so - we're not worthy! I own a copy of every one of your books.

I don't understand. I think you might have said "DON'T" when you didn't mean to.

The idiot plot, in which every character needs to be an idiot for the plot to work. See also the "second-order idiot plot", in which not merely the characters but everyone in the society needs to be an idiot for the plot to work.

a movie about stupid people doing stupid things

This is essentially the premise of "Burn after Reading".

I have a lit-crit friend who I have known for a better part of a decade. We have an ongoing struggle to understand each other, and as part of this we will occasionally trade ideas the other finds incomprehensible. As part of this cultural exchange process, she decided to send me something about one of my subjects (econ) in 'her language', and linked me to this.

Needless to say, this was like a cannonball to my LessWrong Parts.

As much as I do find this sort of stuff distressing, I also find it useful for helping me explain precisely why I'm so confident in dismissing it as informationally bankrupt. The general retort from the literary type is that these sorts of texts contain lots of specialist language and ideas, and just as you wouldn't expect a lay-person to understand a maths or physics paper off the bat, you shouldn't expect to understand something like the above.

To which I respond "my arse". Papers in disciplines I consider to be respectable, but lack any deeper knowledge of, have a recognisable argument structure, even if I don't necessarily understand the arguments. Also, any epistemology worth having should demand claims be provided with means of substantiating them, or at the very least show why the status of the claim matters. Anything not meeting this criteria falls into Not-Even-Wrong territory.

(Also on a more speculative basis, if you're explaining a Very Hard Maths Principle to someone, your language may become more arcane depending on your audience, but the overall structure of the argument should be made in such a way that's easy for a brain to process, as both a pragmatic design principle and a courtesy to the reader; the above piece, which is amongst the more lucid critical theory stuff I've come across, seems wilfully hard for a brain to process. If someone can get onto a Ph.D. program and still have such abysmal communication skills, they can't be communicating anything that important.)

I should probably mention that I'm never sure whether my friend is trolling me or not.

Only one word needs to be added for it to be accurate (if unexciting).

The most astounding fact about the universe is the knowledge that everything we consciously perceive—color, sound, and even energy itself—is a process that involves our consciousness.

Not as much as "physics is wrong because our brains are magical because I say so", but yes, it does.

That our perceptions are a process that involves our consciousness (however you want to define that) is, technically, a fact about the universe, but only in the same way "my cat's breath smells like cat food" is a fact about the universe.

The perceptions fact (insofar as it is a fact) is more of a statement about human cognition than it is about the universe. It may very well be the statement he finds most astounding about the universe, but it's not the core of the paradigm-busting central theory of everything he purports it to be.