Defense Against The Dark Arts: Case Study #1

I disagree with your conclusion on the grounds that I think you're interpreting the passage in a different way than the author intended it.

My interpretation is more along the lines of "Steve Jobs, on seeing the profound economic destitution in the East, examined his beliefs about human utility functions. Finding that Western values/practices seemed to promote utility better than Eastern values/practices in developing countries (and perhaps that they do even in developed countries), he decided that the East should adopt the West's values/practices."

I loved the dissection into multiple biases, and I agree with your dissection based on your reading of the passage, but I think the author is saying something different and more in line with the prevalent beliefs on Less Wrong.

IAWYC but the two statements should not sound exactly alike, they should sound exactly as convincing. If they were both true, then the first form would be more poetic and better-written than the second, but still should not sound any more convincing.

I posted this in reply to the comment under question, but it should probably be mentioned here as well:

Here is the best source I can find: http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/36/04717208/0471720836.pdf This appears to be the first chapter of iCon by Jeffrey Young and William Simon.

The story of Jobs in India starts on page 23.

From page 25: “We weren’t going to find a place where we could go for a month to be enlightened. It was one of the first times that I started to realize that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Kairolie Baba put together.”

These conclusions seem a little more defensible than those of the anecdote under question.

How do you know you have mastered this art? When the statements

In his youth, Steve Jobs went to India to be enlightened. After seeing that the nation claiming to be the source of this great spiritual knowledge was full of hunger, ignorance, squalor, poverty, prejudice, and disease, he came back and said that the East should look to the West for enlightenment.

and

For complex historical reasons, the average Westerner is richer than the average Indian. Therefore, there is minimal possibility that any Indian people ever discovered interesting mental techniques.

sound exactly alike.

But they are not exactly alike. Ignorance and prejudice are not simply functions of wealth.

Yvain -

i) you have inherited the longwindedness of Eliezer. I wonder if this could be elevated to a fallacy? Let's just raise our hands (on second thoughts not).

ii) the Steve Jobs aphorism is an aphorism - compact, pithy, witty. Like a good metaphor it surprises and sends the mind on a search. The reader himself finds meaning and defies common logic and possible fallacies. Metaphors are dangerous.

iii) it is my strong impression that rational rationalists hate metaphors. Metaphors are not based on evidence or deconstruction but more a pluralistic synthesis mode. Intuitive emergence (oops - bad word) as a tool for irrational rationalists.

iv) the expressionn "Dark Arts" is quickly becoming a weapon of destruction. While I have no wish to do evil things and incant magic rituals I suggest real rationality (and not just the rationality as practised by white male english-speaking twentysomethings with degrees in maths or science) involves other modes of cognition and have more shades of colour than LW allows.

Still, five fallacies is a lot for a two sentence anecdote.

I think that is related to the open-ended nature of the statement. Because it doesn't clearly state its reasoning or conclusion, there are lots of ways of fallaciously completing it.

I don't disagree with the idea that we should view India's ideas skeptically, and moreso because its people are so miserable.

But I will point out that India once held one of the most advanced and prosperous civilizations on the planet, a society that was primitive by our standards but overwhelmingly superior to everything else at the time.

And that society existed for longer than Western Civilization has.

If, as I suspect, Western Civilization is in the process of destroying itself, what remains after the length of time that's passed since India's golden age may well resemble India as it is now.

Dinosaurs used to be symbols of obsolescence and failure, but by evolutionary standards they were far more successful than humans have been. Or even mammals, for that matter.

Let us not be quick to discard Indian mental techniques as dinosaurs.

Nice post. Working up from the basics is always important. For an analogy to math, I'm always surprised how many people who do highfalutin things with partial differential equations and systems of nonlinear equations can make basic mistakes in their reasoning because they consider themselves beyond set theory or even topology. Rationality is one of those domains where I find it's best to work up from first principles whenever possible, accepting shortcuts only as practical necessities.

For an additional fallacy, we can also note that the quote gives India motive. To the best of my knowledge the government of India, at least in its modern form, has not peddled its nation in any official capacity as a source of great spiritual knowledge. Mote tot he point, the quote means to say that India is a nation claimed by people who present themselves as spiritually knowledgeable to be a source of spiritual knowledge, but of course that knocks even more wind out of this quote's sails, hence why such phrasing was probably not even considered.

I understand why you feel like the Steve Jobs anecdote was meant as a rebuttal, but I think you make a bit of a caricature of the intent behind it.

Mentioning, in a matter-of-fact way things like "a state of mystical attainment the Hindus call dhyana" suggests an uncritical attitude towards the ideas you're discussing, and maybe an idealized view of India. The Steve Jobs anecdote can be read as just a cautionary note against that kind of uncritical/idealized attitude, a way of pointing out that it's a lot easier to have that kind of attitude when you're viewing something from afar, rather than an attempt to argue "everything you said is wrong."

(Though here, I might have pointed you towards what Julia Sweeney has said about eastern religion instead to make the same point.)

Actually, I'd go farther than that. Your final sentence is exactly backwards. The fundamental rationalist technique here is learning to make a distinction between a vaguely hostile comment and the extreme claim that "there is minimal possibility that any Indian people ever discovered interesting mental techniques."

I agree with your main point of "always keep the basics in mind", and I found your case study interesting, though I sense some emotional undertones due to phrases like "I don't like being told I'm wrong any more than anyone else does", "Nor do I accept the defense", "declaration of war and a hijack attempt of the train of thought", etc.

So I'd just like to remind (everyone, not just Yvain) that an upvote does not necessarily mean "agreement".

I voted the comment up, but not because I "agreed" with it[1], nor because I wanted to "shut up hippies", but merely because I found it interesting and felt it earned my endorsement as a comment worth reading. I agree with Yvain's description of the anecdote as "short, witty, flattering, and utterly opaque to reason." I don't think "utterly opaque to reason" is sufficient evidence of dark-art-usage.

If I tell a joke, or a pun, they too can be utterly opaque to reason. But that's fine because I'm not trying to convince anyone of any position, but just to share some entertainment.

That's how I interpreted that particular comment: an entertaining and interesting anecdote that doesn't need to actually be true to be entertaining and interesting.

That said, it doesn't matter what my (or Yvain's) interpretation of the comment is. If people have made the mistake (been taken in by the fallacies) that Yvain listed in this post, then the post is valuable on LW, because it helps promote rationality.

1: What does it mean to agree with an anecdote? To agree that the events described in the anecdote actually occurred? I certainly don't know first hand whether or not Steve Jobs actually went to India, actually saw those things, and said what the anecdote claimed he said. I guess in this specific context, "agree" means to be convinced by the anecdote that Crowley (and by extension, Yvain) is wrong. So in that sense, I certainly don't "agree" with the anecdote. As an aside, I also don't agree that "the East should look to the West for enlightenment" (but I don't agree with its converse either, and I don't agree with "nobody should look to anybody for enlightenment"). I guess, to clarify, I consider "don't agree" to be a distinct concept from "do disagree".

I'm not one of those fallacy classification nuts, but for completeness' sake, this is a fallacy of composition.

I disagree. It's more of a hasty generalization. A hasty generalization is assuming all Americans are creationists due to America having some creationists. Composition would be assuming America is creationist because some (or even all) Americans are creationist.

Anyone who said "Dr. A should not be learning spelling from Yvain, Yvain should be learning science from Dr. A" would be missing the point. If Dr. A wants to learn spelling, he might as well learn it from me. And best of all if we both learn from each other!

I believe that formally, the best of all is if you and Dr. A employ comparative advantage, with him doing your science and you doing his spelling.

Some of your points are valid---for one, we should very much be guarded against convenient and witty anecdotes, and it does not follow as a theorem that every place where there are good ideas must automatically be free of poverty and injustice.

But I actually can't agree with your argument than "enlightenment" is a fallacy of equivocation. It IS the Enlightenment values of Bacon and Newton that brought us the enlightenment of vaccination and electricity---that's not a coincidence. And "spiritual enlightenment" is either something good or it isn't; if it is, then it ought to have some meaning in terms of actual happiness of actual human beings in the actual world. If your definition of "spiritual enlightenment" is so far removed from actual happiness and suffering that it would allow poverty and disease to persist on a massive scale (in order to placate invisible gods?), then I want nothing of your so-called "enlightenment".

Does this mean that there are no smart people in India, no good ideas that could be characterized as Indian? Of course not. But it does mean that there is a real correlation between the West and reason---and that this is not a coincidence but a causal link.

Suppose "spiritual enlightenment" = "memetic wireheading". You would expect it to be more prevalent in places with worse material living standards, both because people who are chanting mantras aren't building stuff, and because people who are already comfy have less incentive to try.

and India the acknowledged master of the third definition I thought that was more pop culture cliche than actually conventional wisdom, and even in pop culture east asian buddhists might come out ahead. Measured in terms of simply being poor, India is fortunately ahead (or behind, if we consider poverty good) of a number of countries.

herefore, there is minimal possibility that any Indian people ever discovered interesting mental techniques. You're turning a generalization into an absolute claim. A possible belief is that only "western/enlightenment" thinking produces interesting mental techniques and so any Indians (of which there are a very large number) would be part of the minority that were westernized. The majority of Indians should generally look westward, even though there are also many westerners who are unenlightened (though perhaps spiritual creationists).

It would seem that my skills for this are lacking. All i saw was 'Silly story, most likely fake, bullocks and to be ignored'. If i had to carefully pick apart everything wrong with similar stories, I wouldn't do anything but that, considering the internet. I can't in any way deny that it's a bad skill and that i shouldn't learn it, since it's a basic ground for avoiding the higher level challenges. Simply having a sense of 'something is wrong with this, and this person wants something, and i don't trust this' won't get me anywhere near as far, but hopefully it's sufficient to keep me skeptical enough to not fall for such things. Thank you. I may practice this whenever i see more of such silliness

The Insitute For Propaganda Analysis was specifically created to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts. Then they were shut down by Dolores Umbridge. But they left an heir.

Anecdotally, given that suffering and poor conditions are sometimes equated with learning greater control of the self, this is sort of like going looking for some trees and refusing to step into the forest because there is too much wood there.

"Annoyance wants us to stop talking about fancy techniques and get back to basics."

No. I don't think that we - as a group - have ever gotten around to the basics, and so we can't go back to them. How can we return to a place we've never been?

It is vital always to begin at the beginning. It is especially important when it comes to rationality, because there's nothing but the beginning. Looking for the complex, we pass over the simple because it doesn't fit what we expect, and so the solution eludes us.

Thank-you! It's not hard to see how that anecdote gains such approval - a figure many of us approve of at least a bit, flattery of our outlandish intellectual (and for many, political) principles, and a nice verbal twist at the end.

I agree with your conclusion. Defending against the Dark Arts used by 'my side' is far more important than defending against the Dark Arts of the enemy. The Dark Side is already good at rejecting the enemies fallacies anyway.

Nor do I accept the defense that it was not specifically posted with the conclusion "Therefore, ignore Crowley's views on yoga." Merely placing it directly below an article on enlightenment from India is a declaration of war and a hijack attempt on the train of thought. Saying "I hear people of African descent have a higher violent crime rate" is not a neutral act when spoken right before a job interview with a black person.

Another good point, and relevant even if the five fallacies weren't involved. Placing sound rational arguments in contexts where they can manipulate thinking away from rational thinking is one of the most sinister dark tactics. War!

Nor do I accept the defense that it was not specifically posted with the conclusion "Therefore, ignore Crowley's views on yoga." Merely placing it directly below an article on enlightenment from India is a declaration of war and a hijack attempt on the train of thought.

Nonetheless, that is my defense. You're right that that could be inferred from the context. But It wasn't in my mind at all to tell people to ignore Crowley. I just wanted to tell an amusing anecdote. I wrote a slightly longer comment, then changed my mind and deleted the other parts, without re-checking whether the deletions and the context interacted.

I was sloppy. Sorry. I'm keeping the 17 upvotes, though. :)

I wish you'd tried sending me an email, or responding with a comment saying "Is that what you meant to say?", before writing a whole post about it.