I'm Not Saying People Are Stupid

It makes the writer sound unintelligent and low in Conscientiousness. Perhaps this is because people with less of those things are less likely to use correct capitalization, leading to an association in my mind.

I'll admit, my first time through, my thought was: "maybe your atheist friend finds you hard to follow because you are stupider and less educated than you think you are, your reading speed due to haste & low comprehension, and your explanations & arguments are badly put or deeply fallacious".

Hugh,

I've been blogging for 7 years. In that time there was a significant period when I was working 60-70 hours a week, as well as managing to read, have a relationship, and, running two weblogs (since I didn't run GNXP as a diary, and pre-scheduled many of my posts, I assume you weren't aware of this). So I got used to making the particular trade-offs you see. In the comments I focused on quantity and not so much on quality. As for the posts themselves, I tried to focus on substance and not care too much about style (e.g., I did a quick once over but then published). Since I had very little marginal time that was just what I had to do.

So, from your perspective I can see why it would be eminently reasonable to wonder why I wouldn't capitalize. But you aren't, or weren't, subject to the same trade-offs as I was on a day to day level. So why did I, and do I, blog? Well, I've met some incredibly intelligent people, and made some awesome contacts. Many people at the Singularity Institute (e.g., Michael Vassar, who began reading my weblogs well before he was Mr. Singularity Institute President) for example, but also many people in science and outside of science. I also managed to get a fellowship out of it. I understand why implicitly I might have made myself seem a bit less intelligent than I was because of the stylistic ticks which I've developed over the years, but this is a case where obviously I feel I've presented myself well enough to the people who "count." The primary payment I've received for blogging all these years are the people in the comments who have sent me links, critiqued ideas, etc.

So if the people who "count" to me did make suggestions stylistically (as they have on occasion), I would take notice. But as it is, none of them have complained about my capitalization, though they have about other things.

In any case, there was a time where I would want to present myself in a way where LW readers would take me as seriously as possible. For a variety of reasons, that really isn't that time, and I try and avoid most weblogs and conversations on most weblogs (I'm splitting myself between 3 right now). I've reached pretty my "Dunbar's Number" for intelligent people I've met through my weblog (I also tended to discount comments from.

As for the disagreement with Eliezer, it's gotten me thinking. Some of the differences are long-standing. I enjoy hanging out with Eliezer's gang, but I think I'm a lot more pessimistic than they are about human nature in general. Perhaps a BHTV episode in the future? I'm doing one for the 17th of October already with John Hawks, so way in the future probably.

Capitalized text is no easier to read than uncapitalized text.

Maybe for you, but not for me. Capital letters serve as focus points when scanning through text, and appear mainly in the places that people are most likely to be looking for when scanning: proper nouns (to help when backtracking through text to resolve a pronoun) and sentence boundaries (to help find a start point when switching from scanning to reading). Text without capitalization is like text in bad handwriting or a poorly chosen font; missing capitalization only slows readers down a little bit, but that's more than enough to make many people skip reading it entirely.

Absurd. Do you think punctuation is useless and no easier to read? Capitalization is semantics as expressed in syntax; it tells us where thoughts end and begin, important because text doesn't have the vocal rhythms or frequency shifts which we otherwise rely on.

Huh, I thought there was a fair bit of evidence around showing that people perform basically just as badly on tests which exploit cognitive biases after being told about them as they do in a state of ignorance.

I suppose you're saying that when a useful heuristic (allowing real-time approximate solutions to computationally hard problems) leads to biases in edge cases, it shouldn't be considered a bug because the trade-off is necessary for survival in a fast-paced world.

I might disagree, but then we'd just be bickering about which labels to use within the analogy, which hardly seems useful. I suppose that instead of using the word "bug" for such situations, we could say that an imprecise algorithm is necessary because of a "hardware limitation" of the brain.

However, so long as there are more precise algorithms that can run on the same hardware (debiasing techniques), I would still consider the inferior algorithm to be "craziness".

My response was to Christian's implication that a rationality program isn't necessarily buggy for outputting irrational behaviors because it must account for human emotions. My point was that human emotions are part of the human rationality program (whether we can edit our source code or not) and that if they cause an otherwise bug-free rationality program to output irrational behaviors, then the emotions themselves are the bugs.

In your response, you asked about emotions that produce behaviors advantageous to the agent's goals, which is rational behavior, not irrational behavior as was stipulated in Christian's post.

If those emotions are part of an otherwise bug-free rationality program that outputs rational beliefs and behaviors, then there is no bug. And that's what it means for an emotion to be correlated with reality, precisely because there are no XML tags mapping certain neural spike patterns (i.e. emotions) to the state of reality.

Emotions aren't beliefs about the world that can be verified by looking at the territory. Emotions are threads within the running program that maps and traverses the territory, so the only thing it can mean for them to correlate with reality is that they don't cause the program to malfunction.

What I was trying to point out to Christian is that emotions are part of the system, not outside of it. So if the system produces irrational behavior, then the system as a whole is irrational, even if some of the subroutines are rational in isolation.

The irrationality of the emotions don't somehow cancel out with the irrationality of the outputs to make the whole system rational.

Of course it can be considered a bug, if I do the considering and I don't give two cupcakes for reproductive fitness.

What leads you to suggest Aumann isn't thinking that? Are you saying he is unaware that his ideological beliefs conflict with evidence to the contrary? Of course he is aware he could update on rational evidence and chooses not to, that's what smart religious people do. That's what faith is. The meaning of "capable but unwilling" should be clear: it is the ability to maintain belief in something in the face of convincing evidence opposing it. The ability to say, "Your evidence supporting y is compelling, but it doesn't matter, because I have faith in x." And that's what I think crazy is.