Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014

In our ridiculous societal climate, if you're not the chief inquisitor you'll be the target of the next shitstorm yourself, #MIThateswomen. You're mostly getting punished for underreacting, so you err on the side of overreacting.

If you can't beat'em, join'em. If they are crazy, the best way to be safe is to (pretend to) lead them (unless you can avoid them, which wasn't an option).

This seems like a gross and unprecedented overreaction

Welcome to the brave new world. Blood and games, keeps us busy from dealing with the issues that matter.

Noooooooooooooo!!!!

I don't care if Walter Lewin is actually Stalin in disguise, those videos are awesome.

Does, um, anybody know if someone is linking to a backup somewhere (cough)gwern(cough)?

Richard Feynman may have been a creep-and-a-half, but it would be a shame to stop publishing the Feynman Lectures on Physics on that regard.

(That said, Richard Feynman is dead and therefore cannot sexually harass any of his current readers.)

It's MIT - they have lots of compelling lecturers. Far more likely one of them will be tasked with producing a replacement series long before then. Actually, that's probably already in motion.

Recorded on Prediction Book here.

The key question is whether this action increases or reduces the amount of people that watch the lectures. Has anybody any guesses?

It does seem to me that if there were someone on Less Wrong with a background in PR (or constitutional law, or the Yugoslav conflict,

To fill that last gap while we wait for an actual expert to arrive, I offer my own reading list on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Actually, it is also a watching list, because I recommend doing as I did by starting with

• The Death of Yugoslavia (1995), 6-part documentary produced by Norma Percy & Brian Lapping with the BBC (and the Discovery Channel and VPRO, among others)

Watching TV science documentaries mostly soured me on documentaries in general, because I realized they have a woeful information density compared to academic books. But as an introduction to a tranche of history, a lower density documentary* was extremely useful for learning the names & places I needed to know to understand chapter- and book-length treatments of the wars.

If I read someone's name in a book I'm likely to forget it before it crops up again, but if I see ten clips of someone answering questions with their name hovering by their head, I have a good chance of remembering who they are. (Something I like a lot about the documentary is that it's not stingy with the name captions.) It also helps that the series mixes things up with photographs, maps, tourist adverts, state TV cartoons, contemporary news reports (and yes, old Yugoslav TV looks about as you'd expect it to), at least one snippet of hidden camera footage, recordings of phone calls, and amateur camcorder film.

A downside of Death of Yugoslavia is that it's too old to cover the war in Kosovo, but it's still indirectly helpful there because it gives a fair amount of background information about the province. I've also seen allegations that the film's English translations are tendentiously inaccurate, but the only remotely reliable source I have for those claims is a couple of references to ICTY transcripts in the documentary's Wikipedia article.

Once you know the broad structure of the wars, it's time for books. The documentary has an accompanying book, also called The Death of Yugoslavia, and I've yet to find an academic who dislikes it, but I haven't read it. I assumed it was a bit redundant after watching the series, and I wanted something else. I wanted academic books with contributions from many people of different nationalities (to reduce the risk of reading one-sided propaganda), written in English, and available for free somewhere on the Internet. Which led me to:

• Charles Ingrao & Thomas Emmert (eds.), Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholars' Initiative (1st ed. 2010, 2nd ed. 2012)
• Jasminka Udovički & James Ridgeway (eds.), Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia (2000)
• Sabrina P. Ramet, Thinking about Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates about the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo (2005)

The books are all a bit different. Confronting is very much an ivory tower product, with each chapter drafted by its own team, and each team headed by a pair of researchers who wrote a first draft for multiple rounds of critique & editing. The line-up of contributors has 300+ people from 30 countries, including every ex-Yugoslav country, and the introduction describes an arduous composition process which makes me picture a Yugoslavia-themed IPCC. Burn This House is a more straightforward edited volume with chapters by 11 authors from different fields (journalism, theology, history, Yugoslav foreign affairs, broadcasting, academia, and think-tank punditry). Finally, Thinking is basically a compilation of Sabrina Ramet's reviews of "more than 130[!] books about the troubled region", so you get some idea of what many scholars think even though the book is a single person's effort. All three books sport copious references to specific sources.

None of the books are perfect. The e-book of Burn This House is missing the pictures, replacing them with boxes labelled "Image Not Available". Confronting and Burn This House both suffer from typos and similar slip-ups, some of which corrupt dates and other numbers. I made a note of a few examples from my copy of Confronting:

1. it is not true that in "December 1991 the European Community (EC) had just redesignated itself as the European Union (EU) with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty", because that treaty was signed on February 7, 1992
2. it is arithmetically impossible for the ICTY's budget to have had "a tenfold increase" from "$276,000" to "$278,500,000"
3. chapter 9's title page mentions the "three-part documentary film" The Fall of Yugoslavia, which does not exist (the authors confused The Death of Yugoslavia with the later series The Fall of Milošević)
4. every time it gives the date when Operation Storm began (August 4, 1995), the book gets it right, except in the most relevant chapter, "The War in Croatia, 1991-1995", which mis-dates it to "2 August"

Ramet's Thinking has much less of this, though I have spotted at least one iffy statement. p. 22 says, "[m]ore than 200,000 people died in Bosnia during the war of 1992-5", a number broadly accepted when Ramet was writing, but since halved to around 100,000 (on which see Calic & Mitrović's "Ethnic Cleansing and War Crimes, 1991-1995" in Confronting).

So, worthwhile as these books are, they still call for critical thinking and careful attention. Fortunately, the bulk of the problems which set off my bullshit detector are unintentional bloopers like those I just listed, rather than vague warning signs which give me a creeping sense of "I can't put my finger on specific factual errors, but I doubt I'm getting a full, fair picture here".

Two exceptions do fall into that last category, namely the chapters on the Kosovo war by Udovički in Burn This House, and by Gow & Hadžić in Confronting. Udovički gives me pause by guilelessly citing Washington Times articles, a Cato Institute speaker, and Diane Johnstone. Gow & Hadžić take an oddly uncritical perspective on the West's actions in Kosovo, focusing on evidence supporting NATO's bombing of Serbia & Montenegro, failing to rebut opposing evidence, and arguing against charges of NATO war crimes on the naive basis that the ICTY didn't think the charges worth pursuing (and that NATO ran its mission plans past lawyers before executing those plans).

Other books. My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocities is an edited volume about justice and social reconstruction in ex-Yugoslavia & Rwanda. Quite dry, but some of the chapters have interesting data or descriptions of how war crime courts and other post-war projects work. Sarajevo Under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime is an inessential but engrossing ethnography documenting life in (duh) besieged Sarajevo. Debating the End of Yugoslavia, a just-released anthology springing from this conference, might prove to be a solid literature review in the vein of Ramet, but more up to date.

* Which is not to say that Death of Yugoslavia dilutes its facts to the point of becoming boring. It goes at a steady clip — except for the final half hour, which covers the juddering stop-start progress towards a peace agreement in great detail.

PR is a quite wide field. I personally have been multiple times on TV, radio and mainstream newspapers for the topic of Quantified Self.

One of the best books to read on PR is likely Trust Me I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday. Ryan Holiday is a nerd and was Director of Marketing for the clothing company American Apparel. He also did PR for a few authors such as Robert Greene and Tucker Max.

Even when you don't want to use some of the dark arts technqiues he writes about, reading his description of how US newsmedia works, is likely very useful.

I don't know how useful I can be, but I have friends whose opinions I can ask. Fields: botany, biological conservation, zoology, genetics.

Start posting it monthly then.

And here it is, as a pdf! (I finally thought of trying to log in as a subscriber)

I have it in hard copy, but all attempts so far to scan or photograph it have been foiled. I'm working on it, though; by far the best media piece on Less Wrong I've seen so far.

ETA - To give you an idea: the author personally attended a CFAR workshop and visited MIRI, and upon closer inspection one can make out part of the Map of Bay Area Memespace in one of the otherwise-trite collage illustrations.

First quote about Lesswrong:

I browsed venal tech-trade publications, and tried and failed to read Less Wrong, which was written as if for aliens.

Frustratingly, I have the hard copy right in front of me, but have no access to a decent camera or a scanner. >:|

completely blanking on them seems indicative of immature understanding.

Or of question ambiguity. If the word exists on many layers, and they're not sure which one you're asking about, they might get stuck there. I notice that I mostly agree with your questions (a 'statistic' and 'money' are both fairly crisp ideas that have a clear use in their respective fields, and so even just pointing at what they're used for is a decent definition), but that bramflake's suggestions all seem problematic.

This is somewhat unfair. If you already think someone's a blowhard, and you want to take the wind out of their sails, go for it, but a lot of people who have some legitimate expertise won't have a definition at their fingertips.

Or if they do know, you'll tip them off that you don't think much of them.

Or they might give a legitimate answer that differs from your own flawed understanding. In which case you're just a jerk to judge them by it.

Chemistry: "What is a bond between two atoms?" or "What is a reaction?"

Linguistics: "What is a word?" or "What is a language?"

This seems incredibly obnoxious and I don't understand how it's helpful. It reminds me of a little kid playing the "Why?" game. Regardless of whether someone can provide a precise exact definition for "money", I think we all understand what it is on some level. You don't have to define every single word you use in a conversation, because the definitions are already assumed to be understood... that's the whole point of having words. I agree that there are situations where two people might fundamentally disagree on the definition of a word they are using and unless they define it they will never get anywhere (e.g. utilitarians and deontologists arguing over what is "good"), but I don't see how these situations are like that.

I'm not an economist or statistician but:

Money: an item with no inherent worth of its own, but is understood to have a specific value and can be traded for goods and services

Statistics: facts about the world that are expressed in quantitative form

I don't know how either of those advanced my understanding.

Also I have had the opposite problem with academia, I find it really annoying how every professor feels like they have to spend the first day of class on "what is design?" or "what is psychology?" or "what is logic?" or etc. etc.

Languages : what's a syllable?

I don't really like these questions. "What exactly is a number?" doesn't really have an answer. I can give the standard answer about representing integers as certain sets. And I give the details of constructing the real numbers either as cuts or Cauchy sequences of rationals. But neither answer is very satisfying imo. Saying that integers "are" certain kinds of sets seems wrong to me (as it does to Tim Gowers). My feeling is I don't know what numbers exactly are.

I understand you probably are going to attack someone's expertise if they blank and can't say anything. But people react to things differently. I could imagine a version of myself who was didn't realize she needed to spout information even if she couldn't answer the question fully.

The other problem is my best friend studied computer science not mathematics. She is however much more intelligent than myself. Her knowledge of math is really quite good. She can give the "standard answer" to "what is an integer" but cannot give the details of a construction of the real numbers (I just asked her).

So I really think we should be careful about these gotcha questions.

I'm not sure this has something to do with Imaginary expertise. If you ask a 10 year old kid what money happens to be, it probably gives you a straightforward answer.

On the other hand an expert might understand flaws of various different definitions of money and therefore won't give you a straightforward answer.

This seems like a fun exercise!

Genetics: "what is a gene?"

Evolution: "what is a species?" / "what is an adaption?"

Physics: "what is energy?"

I appreciate your reasoning, but...

First, I assume this exchange takes place among a group (part of my personal definition of “mouthing off”).

I further assume that your goal is to disparage the “pseudo-blowhard”.

Given these assumptions, your strategy can only succeed if you “blank” the pseudo-blowhard AND if the group doesn’t believe your question is trivial AND ALSO if the group does not confuse this blanking with a reasonable reaction to a surprisingly difficult question.

I think the odds are against you. Furthermore, if you do not succeed, I predict the group will think less of you. Your question will seem like a waste of time, an unwelcome redirection of the conversation, or a lame attempt to express your disagreement with the speaker.

I like 'what is a statistic?" and "what exactly is money?". I'm not sure how I feel about "what exactly are numbers?", though. Quaternions are called numbers, surreal numbers are called numbers, 2-by-2 matrices with real coefficients are not called numbers, integers mod p are called numbers... It's a messy term that doesn't correspond to any simple territory as far as I'm aware.

I agree with this. However, there are philosophers who criticize this practice. For instance, Peter Unger recently published a vehement criticism of mainstream analytic philosophy, Empty Ideas.

One influential view is that we should not try to "analyze" pre-theoretical concepts, but rather construct fruitful, exact and simple "explications". If you have that view, definitions do not become interesting for their own sake. Rather, terms and concepts are a tool in the pursuit of knowledge, which can be more or less effective. See Carnap's dicussion in Logical Foundations of Probability, pp. 3-20 (esp. p. 7).

That said, it is true that many philosophers continue to write papers on the Gettier problem in a very classical essentialist fashion, along the lines you are describing. The same goes for many other philosophical discussions (e.g. on truth, reasons, etc).

I think that there is a selection effect at work here: those who think this is silly move on to other things while those who think that it isn't keep on doing it. This creates the illusion that more people think this is a good and interesting form of philosophy than is actually the case.

Of course now and again some outsiders get so fed up with this that they write a book on it to attack it. Another similar example of this (in addition to Unger) is Ladyman and Ross's attack on mainstream analytic metaphysics (which treats questions like "is the statue and the lump of clay that is made of distinct or identical objects?). I suspect that many others feel, however, that although this kind of philosophy is a bit of a nuisance, there are other more pressing problems more worth focusing on. For instance, I suspect Nick Bostrom doesn't like this kind of philosophy, but as far as I know he hasn't spent much time criticizing it, thinking there are other problems which are more important to spend time on.

Also, it seems surprisingly hard to weed out. The kind of criticism that Carnap gave is at least a century old, but the Gettier problem and other similar problems are still treated seriously.

An interesting argument for why people who are critical of this kind of philosophy should do something about it is, though, that it presents a great opportunity cost:

Why should something as “quixotic”, “mostly harmless”, and null as academic philosophy rouse any strong feelings whatsoever?

Because of the opportunity cost. Harmless-and-null philosophy is crowding out something better, and has been doing so since 1950 or so. Philosophy did not have to be what it is today; it was made what it is by purposeful, destructive action.

why so many highly intelligent, extremely thoughtful philosophers have spent so much time on a (seemingly) ridiculous discussion?

That has been my exact reaction to most of the "big" questions, with a few exceptions.

As for the "justified true belief" "definition", each word in it is already so poorly defined, you might as well give up on it. My personal working definition of knowledge is the capability to accurately predict the outcome(s) of a certain (set of) action(s). Which probably matches an existing camp or two, not that I care.

If they'd taboo the word "knowledge" would there be anything left to discuss?

Yes.

If we want to have an AI that knows things we have to be specific about what knowledge is. If we have unrealistic naive concepts we will never get the knowledge into the AI.

If you want an university to teach knowledge, then it makes sense to have an idea of what the university is supposed to teach.

If you want to decide whether someone has depression, than it makes sense to ask what you mean with the sentence: "Alice has depression." Currently it might mean: "A trained psychologist has found that Alice fulfills the criteria of the DSM-V for depression." It would be possible to get saner way to deal with the issue if we would have a better grasp on the underlying ontology.

Based on certain ideas of knowledge people reject certain approaches as pseudoscience because they don't fulfill the criteria of what's believed to be necessary for knowledge generation.

Yes, philosophers tend to be interested in the issue of conceptual analysis. Different philosophers will have a different understanding of what conceptual analysis is but one story goes something like the following. First, we start out with a rough, intuitive sense of the concepts that we use and this gives us a series of criteria for each concept (perhaps with free will one criteria would be that it relates to moral responsibility in some way and another would be it relates to the ability to do otherwise in some way). Then we try to find a more precise account of the concept that does the best (though not necessarily perfect) job of satisfying these criteria.

I personally find the level of focus on conceptual analysis in philosophy frustrating so I'm not sure that I can do justice to a defence of it. I know many very intelligent people who think it is indispensible to our reasoning though so it may well be deserving of further reflection. If you're interested in such reflection I suggest that you read Frank Jacksons, "From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis". It's a short book and gives a good sense of how contemporary philosophers think about conceptual analysis (in terms of what conceptual analysis is, btw, Jackson says the following: "The short answer is that conceptual analysis is the very business of addressing when and whether a story told in one vocabulary is made true by one told in some allegedly more fundamental vocabulary.")

Off the top of my head, why might someone think conceptual analysis is important? First, conceptual analysis is all about getting clear on our terms. If you're discussing free will, it seems like a really bad idea to just debate without making clear what you mean by free will. So it seems useful to get clear on our terms.

Myself, I'm tempted to say we should get clear on our terms by stipulation (though note that even this involves a small amount of conceptual analysis or I would be just as likely to stipulate that "free will" means "eating my hat" as I would be to stipulate that it means "my decisions flow from my deliberative process": and many philosophers only use conceptual analysis in this easily-defendable manner). So I would stipulate what various meanings of free will are, say which we do and do not have and leave it to each individual to figure out how that makes them feel (which type of free will they care about).

However, a lot of people don't find this very helpful. They care about FREE WILL or MORALITY or BEING THE SAME PERSON TOMORROW (a.k.a. personal identity). And they need to know what the best realiser of the criteria that they have for this concept is to know what they care about. So if you tell a lot of people that they have free-will-1 and not free-will-2, they don't care about this: they care whether they have FREE WILL and so they need to find out which of free-will-1 and free-will-2 is a better realiser of their concept before they can work out whether they have the sort of free will that they care about. Insofar as I don't think telling people what they should desire (no, you should desire free-will-1, regardless of the nature of your concept of FREE WILL), I don't really have any objection to the claim that such a person needs to carry out a more robust project of conceptual analysis (though I feel no need to join them on the road they're travelling).

All that said, standard epistemology (as opposed to formal epistemology) is one of the worst areas of philosophy to study if you're uninterested in these conceptual debates as such debates are pretty much the entire of the field (where in many other areas of philosophy they play a smaller, though often still substantial, role).

But Dick posits that “the density of Jupiter is little more than that of water, and that of Saturn about the density of cork.” Jupiter, therefore, would have a gravity only twice as great as Earth’s—not so terrible in the grand scheme of things...

Well, that's kind of close. The average density of Saturn is in fact less than that of water, and the gravity at its cloudtops is only very slightly higher than at Earth's surface. Jupiter's isn't that bad, either, at ~2.5g.

After about a year of being unemployed, I found a job (hooray), but it's not a job I want to do for a long time.

In So Good They Can't Ignore You, Cal Newport argues that the path to enjoying a job goes primarily through being good at that job, not liking the job when first starting it. I suspect there is much to be gained by devoting yourself to your current job and getting good at it. Even if you transition to another job, the self-control and emotional maturity you learn by doing this is likely to transfer.

(He also argues that it's better to be in a field where quality is detectable and valuable; if you're doing commodity work, than being especially good is unlikely to get you far. But I think there's a psychological component as well: it is highly likely your coworkers and employers can detect a shift from disliking the job to liking the job, and you might be surprised at how much that transition will get you in terms of respect and power on the job.)

Look around your current company and see if there's another job in there you'd like better (or which would suck less). Switching jobs inside a company is often easier than switching companies.

Ask someone to find a job for you. Family and close friends will often do this for free. Others might if they like you and they trust you'll remember you owe them a favor. Your girlfriend might, because it means you get more time together.

Learn how to slack and not get caught. If you're in an office, there are HowTos. If not, you can still determine which parts of your job are safest to slack off at.

If you haven't, become friends with someone who has the kind of job you want. If you have, deepen that relationship and ask to be introduced to similar friends. As long as you never directly beg for a job, it is perfectly alright to say you're looking for a job in that area.

All of this is assuming that one year of unemployment was entirely due to factors outside your control. This is very unlikely. You could almost certainly raise your employability in lots of ways that you haven't used. Move to a place with a better job market for example, dress better (to use the Halo effect), or whatever it is - basically remove some of the differences between you and the kind of person who gets the job you want.

For more advice, be a lot more specific about your situation. What kind of job do you want, why don't you have it, how much are you willing to sacrifice to get it?

If you're interested in IT, talk to someone in your area working in IT about the options for somebody without a degree in IT to get a job in that field. In the US at least, there are a number of mini certifications that would take a lot less than 3 years. Similarly, you should explore a variety of more easily obtained technical vocations. I am not sure what the options in Belgium are. 3 years spent towards only a slight improvement sounds like a negative return on investment.

Are you sure cutting 15 minutes from each of the four non-work things would make you go insane?

How many hours of sleep do you get per day, on average? That seems to me the most plausible option here to cut down on without suffering any psychological or emotional effects, although of course if you're not getting much sleep as it is, it's probably best not to go with this idea. At any rate, if you sleep roughly 8 to 10 hours a day, do you think you could cut down on sleeping for maybe an hour or so, possibly by setting an alarm, or is that unfeasible?

I'm here until Thursday.

Not to derail the post, but I saw on your blog you had IQ testing done. I just had it done, about to get the results.

Do you have any recommendations for resources that will help me make sense of the results? My motivation in taking the test was to see what types of problems/domains I might be good at (relative to my own performance in other domains).

The links were broken for me.

I picking up my kit from the post office tomorrow. I'm also gifting all four grandparents with kits for Christmas. I would be very interested to hear what you plan to do with your data.

Look at this site:

http://www.23andyou.com/3rdparty

I haven't looked at it closely yet, but it may prove valuable. I would love to hear suggestions from other people on the site about what I should do with my data, especially given that all my grandparents will do it, which is probably very rare at this point in history.

Look at SNPs corresponding to methylation defects, and run a self experiment on any interventions that drop out of that.

According to Stephen Pinker, protests can turn individual knowledge into mutual knowledge

In individual knowledge, A knows X and B knows X. In mutual knowledge A knows X, B knows X, A knows that B knows X; B knows and A knows X; A knows that B knows that A knows X ad infinitum. And this is a difference that has profound consequences.

For example, why is freedom of assembly enshrined as a fundamental right in a democracy and why are political revolutions often triggered when a crowd gathers in a public square to challenge the president in his palace. Well it is because

when people were at home everyone knew that they loathed the dictator, but no-one knew that other people knew that other people knew that they knew. Once you assemble in a place where everyone can see everyone else everyone knows that everyone else knows that everyone else knows that the dictator is loathed, and that gives them the collective power to challenge the authority of the dictator who otherwise could kick off dissenters one at a time.

This suggests that protests may lead to something in a particular case when most people already have individual knowledge, but they do not have mutual knowledge yet. For example, suppose those people really care about some issue and have idea what to do, then if participating in protests is risky, that signals that all those protesters are willing to take risks in order to achieve their goal (curiously, in this particular case, if protesting is safe (as it is in most Western countries), the signal might be less clear). This way individual knowledge becomes mutual knowledge. So if it is the lack of mutual knowledge that prevents their goals from being achieved, then protests might help. Otherwise, if it is something else that prevents solution (e.g.lack of idea how to solve a problem, various game theoretic (or coordination) problems that are not solved by going from individual to mutual knowledge, etc.) from being achieved, they are probably much more likely to be useless.

In my area, protests are largely social gatherings of like minded people. I asked protesters on three occasions last year and only two of a couple dozen protesters thought they were reaching an audience that does not already agree. I stress this was not a scientific study, but at least average for anecdote.

Do protests actually work?

You need to define your goals. Do protests work to achieve what?

I was wondering that too; personally, I have no idea how to even begin answering the question. It would seem that at least some protests do work, as evidenced by the civil rights movement during the Martin Luther King era; but I don't know if this is true in general.

Have a look at this post from Death is Bad Blog. It won't answer your questions, but it will help you shine more light on it.

Are e.g. the Ferguson/police crime protests a good way of attacking the problem?

What problem? That Blacks aren't free to steal from and intimidate Asian store owners and then charge at a police officer going for his gun?

Upvoted, though you should probably adjust for quality somehow. As Eliezer wrote here:

There are stories which are better than Worm, and stories which were written faster than Worm, but I don’t know of any epic which was ever written faster and better than Worm.

I haven't found creatine to have much mental effect, but once you start trying it I recommend trying some intense exercise - creatine made it dramatically more comfortable.

From what I understand, it's only table top if you don't count the laser.

At last! Research in plasma accelerators is gaining momentum...

I had no idea Nathaniel Branden was a psychotherapist, or that he's partially to blame for the self-esteem movement! I always vaguely assumed he was just an Objectivist.

Does anyone consider the recently deceased Nathaniel Branden an important intellectual? He based his career on making grandiose claims about "self-esteem," yet mainstream psychological research doesn't support his views:

Being wrong doesn't mean you weren't important. The self-esteem movement affected a lot of schools and was pretty popular; to the extent he's to blame for it, then he was indeed important.

Please keep us updated!

How long until someone produces a suspiciously similar paper?

Before promoting a petition it would make sense to write a good one on the topic.

Currently at 13 signatures, I'm not optimistic about its prospects.

it seems like this isn't incentivising people to post strongly enough.

You don't want to incentivise people to make top-level posts, you want to incentivise them to contribute excellent content, and it doesn't matter much if it's in the top-level post or the comments.

The guy who thought the value of the product must reflect the labour that went into it was Karl Marx. He was wrong.

Don't posts get ten times the karma as comments?

The law change is just "if it was already illegal to put it on a DVD and sell it, now it's also illegal for other kinds of porn", so if anything I'd consider it a step forward, making the laws consistent and bringing already-existing shitty laws into the spotlight. Although possibly I'm having too much faith in the public and in their ability to influence the government.

I'm not sure that the actors are politicians instead of burocrats.

What would attract you to read an introductory textbook in a field very far from your own?

Curiosity.

Also, practical necessity, of course.

Unless the quality of life is reduced because they have a false belief that it would increase, and I can prove to a sufficient degree that that belief is false, I'd say "it's pretty much never wrong". Is it really wrong to get paid for constructing a church if I think organized religion makes people worse off? And I certainly wouldn't want someone applying that principle to me, because I know how bad other people are determining what reduces the quality of my life. It's this logic which leads to large soda bans.

I usually approach this sort of question by modeling people as approximations to ideal agents who reliably act in such a way as to actually optimize the world for their own values.

If I consider a hypothetical person who very closely approximates that ideal, I'd say it's generally+ not at all wrong to enable them to significantly reduce the quality of their own life... they will either do so, or not, depending on their own values.

If I consider the other extreme, a hypothetical person who reliably acts in such a way as to optimize the world for the opposite of their own values, I'd say it's generally+ wrong to enable them to make any effective choices at all.

Either way, their happiness is largely irrelevant to me except insofar as it's subsumed in their values, and whether I benefit from their actions is irrelevant.

That said: obviously I'm more inclined to motivated cognition when I benefit, and therefore need to be a lot more scrupulous about whether my thinking has gone completely off the rails.

There's something to be said for the rule of thumb that if a line of reasoning tells me it's OK for me to act in ways that predictably lower the quality of other people's lives and benefit mine, I should reject that line of reasoning as flawed... not because that's necessarily the case, but because human minds being what they are that's the way to bet.

+ There are exceptions in cases where I think their values are themselves wrong, but I think that's a different conversation.

I disagree with this sentiment. If anything, giving criticism and downvoting are alternatives, not things that go together. For example, since I don't like this idea I might have just downvoted this comment. But since I'm responding to it I'm not going to do that; it isn't necessary to downvote if I'm going to express my criticism anyway, and most likely it wouldn't be helpful either, since you'd probably just be annoyed by the downvote.

In other words, your comment is basically a criticizing of downvoting in general; if that is a reasonable preference, we should just remove the possibility of downvoting at all.

I'm retracting this because in retrospect, I don't think it was a good idea to post this (I was rather tired when I wrote this--not a state of mind known for its good judgement.), and I'd rather not worry about having this as a potential karma sink. While I still agree with what I wrote, I don't think it was necessary to post about it, as I think most have similar preferences, and I can see how some would read it as whining (Though that's not what I was going for.).

An explanation is better than a vote, sure, but isn't a vote still better than nothing at all? And up is better than down in a vacuum, but up given good is as valuable as down given bad, no? It reminds me of someone's description of pain as the greatest gift we never wanted. It is information and information tends to be good. I get not liking it, but value it. There's no cash value to high karma.

This doesn't sound like a system that would be easy for less intelligent/educated voters to use. I wouldn't be surprised if it would lead to a number of voters voting for candidates they didn't intend to vote for. Additionally, many more potential voters might refrain from voting at all because of the complexity of the system.

It seems like several people are against having a meta sub-thread in the Open Thread. I thought it would be a cool thing to have, I'm provisionally assuming I was wrong. If no one objects, I'll revert back to the norm of not having one in any future OTs I post.

American historical accounts of the Revolutionary War usually don't explore whether the revolutionists had reasonable grievances

For what it's worth, I've been in the UK since about age four and everything I learned about the American Revolution took the view that the Americans were basically in the right. I don't know how typical this is, but if it is then one explanation (not the only one but maybe the most plausible) is that actually that's the conclusion most reasonable people would come to when looking at the available evidence, and the most plausible explanation of that is that actually the Americans were (according to typical present-day values) in the right.

crimethink

I don't think this sort of overheated language is helpful. No one is going to put you in prison (or even fine you, or even mock you gently) for thinking that current views of the Enlightenment may be misleadingly positive.

These excessively emotional responses resemble how [...]

Emotional responses are also what one would expect if a thing has (really, truly) been established only with difficulty and much opposition and turned out to be extremely beneficial, and if the person making the response is worried that it's being attacked again.

It is usually best to determine that something is wrong before undertaking to explain the mental pathologies that produce it. (The idea described at the other end of that link is about doing this to beliefs, but I think one can say much the same about attitudes.)

Did our ancestors [...] invent the Enlightenment [...] to manage some kind of terror

This seems like one hell of a leap. There are things other than fear of death that lead people to respond emotionally to things. I already mentioned one above, but there are plenty of unflattering ones if NRx has already made it impossible for you to take seriously the possibility that admirers of "Enlightenment values" might be sincere and sane: for instance, maybe people like David Brin have so much of their personal identity invested in such values that criticism of them feels itself like a personal threat. Or maybe they don't really believe in the Enlightenment any more than you do, but they recognize (as you do) the extent to which present-day Western society is built on it, and fear the consequences if it's overthrown.

The Enlightenment began with Epicurus. Perhaps even earlier, but Epicurus is the earliest source we have. Perhaps for as long as one man has said "God", another has said "Man".

I've been reading "Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Revolution", by Matthew Stewart, since seeing a quote from it on the current quotes thread. That, and another book I read this year, "Victorian Sensation", suggest a different history of all this.

This is just a quick outline, or I'd have to spend days writing this up. "Epicurus' Dangerous Idea", as Stewart calls it, was simply this: we live in and are part of a material universe. There are no gods, or if there are they don't care about us, or they're metaphors for our own ideals, but at any rate they're not up there in the sky watching out for us and answering our prayers. We are all we have, and we are made of atoms that have come together for a little while, and when we die and they come apart again, we are gone.

Well, of course we are, any of us here might say, but following Yvain's method of reading philosophy backwards, we should ask, what made this idea so offensive to people from the ancient Greeks onward? God, or the Gods, were part of people's everyday mental furniture. The Gods taught us virtue and set our foot on the right road. Evil acts were, quite literally, offences against the Gods. God made all this: when you looked at the world, you were looking at the work of God. God moved the sun, or the sun was a god. God brought sickness, and recovery from sickness. God hardened the heart of the Pharoah and inspired the saints. God quickened the seed in the ground and in the womb, and God decreed that our years were three score and ten.

And Epicurus said "Atoms" and started an itch that never went away.

From that we eventually got to really practising the idea, universal now, that you can find out how stuff works by looking at it. And we've never found anything to contradict Epicurus' original vision. People like Galileo and Newton, and all the scientists before them, put foundations under Epicurus' speculations by making major discoveries about how the universe worked, and God was nowhere to be found. "I have no need of that hypothesis" runs the anecdote of Laplace and Napoleon, but the idea has been around since ancient times. The poet Kabir wrote in the 15th century:

There is nothing but water in the holy pools.
I know, I have been swimming in them.

All the gods sculpted of wood or ivory can't say a word.
I know, I have been crying out to them.

"Victorian Sensation" is a book about another book, Robert Chambers' "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation". (If you know Chambers' English Dictionary, that was published by Robert and his brother William, who were publishers and literary figures in Scotland.) "Vestiges" was first published anonymously in 1844, and ran through many editions. It was nothing less than a summary of the scientific knowledge of the time, as it related to the structure of the universe, the geological history of the Earth, and the development of species. This was well before Darwin's Origin. Darwin read Vestiges and considered the book an important one.

The atheistic implications of the work were evident to everyone, even though Chambers, like many writers on these things before him, was careful to attribute the marvellous clockwork to the divine hand setting it in motion. But what need of God in a universe that ran by itself?

What sustained the social order in earlier times, the social order that neoreactionaries like to praise so much, was religion. When God is not in His Heaven, overseeing all, rewarding the good and punishing the evil, whither Man? But how can that belief be sustained, in the face of the inexorable power of the single most dangerous idea of all: that you can observe a lot by looking?

John C. Wright is the only example of a Christian neoreactionary I've encountered. There may be others, but all the others I've seen here on LW or on the sites that have from time to time been linked to, say not a word of religion, beyond praising its moral character. None profess any faith themselves, although other than advancedatheist's choice of moniker, I have not noticed them professing atheism either. They want the virtue of past times without the religion that was its foundation. They are silent about how to expel the elephant from the drawing room without letting the bull into the china shop.

To find virtue in a material world: a grand project. Who will carry it out?

There are a lot of problems with what you've wrote here, and I think that gjm's comment is a pretty good response. However, there is a glimmer of truth in your comment. There were definite attempts to portray pre-1600s cultures as more stagnant and backwards than they were. There are two clear-cut examples. The first is the invention of the Iron Maiden) which was not an actual medieval torture device. (It is worth noting here that actual medieval tortures were still pretty bad. See Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" for some discussion of the better documented horrors.) The second is the claim that medievals by and large believed that the world was flat. While, some did so, and even some church fathers did so, they were by and large a minority. The belief became more common as a Protestant slur against Catholics and gradually became a more general belief.

More generally, there have been issues of narrative. There's a standard narrative, often taught in high-school physics classes that portrays no major development in physics between Aristotle and Galileo. This is deeply wrong. Galileo and others of his time-period would not have made the advances they did were it not for people like Oresme, Buridan, and al-Bitruji. Among other important results, they developed the idea of "impetus" which was a precursor to the idea of momentum. It is unlikely that the thinkers in the late 1500s and early 1600s would have made the progress they did without these ideas. But it is also important to note that this may to some extent not be an issue of motivated falsification of history or anything like that. It may simply be a combination of that simple narratives are easy and that it would have been difficult in past times to actually have access to many historical sources. In many ways, one has more access today to many medieval texts than someone in the 1800s would have had.

Also, it really, really doesn't help to use overblown terms like "crimethink" and it is especially dangerous to fall into the thought-process that what one is thinking is somehow persectuced. Once one falls into that trap it makes the cognitive dissonance much more difficult to deal with when one finds data that might cause one to adjust one's beliefs. The fact that all the examples above are well known to historians and widely discussed shows how far any of this is from anything resembling throughtcrime.

Little observed fact: The Enlightenment was a (small r) reactionary movement, in the sense of wanting not just to preserve the status quo but to go back to a Greco-Roman status quo ante, and declaring the intermediate period the "middle" or "dark ages".

Doesn't this line of thinking pretty much end up portraying a sort of sociopathic troll — a person who possess no values of his or her own, but who is able to provoke to anger anyone who has values — as the ideal?