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I put in an application. But I realize that I think I forgot to include my LW username (the site was having issues so I couldn't check.) So here it is. I'm pretty sure you won't have trouble attaching it to my real name. :P
(Also, feel free to delete this comment once it's been registered with the proper authorities.)
I agree with your basic analysis of how the "ugh field" works, but I wouldn't be so quick to categorically label it as a problem - cultivating an "ugh field" could also be an effective anti-akrasia technique if honed properly. What if you manage to train your usual (wasteful) displacement activities to trigger the "ugh field", so that your new "displacement" activities become what you originally intended to do to begin with?
I'd like to think that I've encountered some success by basically doing this myself - I probably avoid seductive time-wasters just by having a visceral reaction of disgust for even considering them. It's not perfect, but it's a habit I think can be cultivated in the right direction.
I recently got into some arguments with foodies I know on the merits (or lack thereof) of organic / local / free-range / etc. food, and this is a topic where I find it very difficult to find sources of information that I trust as reflective of some sort of expert consensus (insofar as one can be said to exist.) Does anyone have any recommendations for books or articles on nutrition/health that holds up under critical scrutiny? I trust a lot of you as filters on these issues.
I realize that I'm late to the game on this post, but I have to say that as economist, I found the take home point about revealed preference to be quite interesting, and it makes me wonder about the extent to which further neuroscience research will find systematic disjunctions in everyday circumstances between what motivates us and what gives us pleasure. Undoubtedly this would be leveraged into new sorts of paternalistic arguments... I'm guessing we'll need another decade or two before we have the neuropaternalist's equivalent of Nudge, however.
My sympathies.
I've given the occasional thought to what I'd do if I ever found myself in this kind of situation. And although I can't speak to my will to go through with it at the time, I'd honestly probably choose to die. Not because of concerns about my human dignity or some kind of depression that comes with a diminished quality of life, but just because my discounted present value will probably be heavily negative, meaning that I'm tying up resources that could be better-used than keeping me alive. I can't speak about whether this applies to your situation, not knowing how much treatment costs nor what you do in your life, but if it were me... yeah.
Usually I wouldn't admit to thinking this way because it strikes people as being really bizarre, but I figure if any group would at least be able to understand where I'm coming from, it'd be here.
But I do seriously admire your ability to hold your head high in an extremely adversarial situation... keep it up.
(Oh, and the DPV concern is also why I'm skeptical of cryonics, but I'm open to arguments showing that it really is worthwhile.)
Maybe this isn't my most valuable skill, but lately I've been much better at setting to a routine and sticking to it in the absence of external enforcement: "Do your readings for class over the weekend. Go into the lab to work on research several days per week. Go to the regular seminars. Keep up on RSS feeds and extra readings in the evenings." Naturally there are virtues to flexibility as well, but just floating through my day as an optimized routine and avoiding the problems associated with time-inconsistent preferences has really helped my productivity in the past few months.
It's a photoshopped image of a Mortal Kombat tournament ladder. Once Behe defeats Dawkins he gets to debate Motaro.
[Edit]
Actually, he'd probably go straight to Shao Kahn... I just can't see a centaur being a good advocate for Darwinism.
I don't know enough about all the BhTV participants to argue that it is actually the case
I'm quite sure that there are political participants who would fare worse than Behe on any of the dimensions you'd offer. I guess one could lack the expertise to evaluate more than a subset of participants, however, in which case one could apply the principle consistently..
People find creationism more disturbing than ghost hunters because (among other reasons) creationism is making inroads in the educational system in USA, which could have very serious effects. I'm not sure why I even have to mention this
You have to mention this precisely because it's disingenuous to hide behind the purely non-political justifications of the boycott - you end up trying to draw up a non-political dividing line which just so happens to exclude the viewpoints you have political objections to. This is precisely why I expressed skepticism that there's a non-arbitrary principle for the unique objection to Behe, because if the political considerations are a necessary factor in the boycott, there isn't one, unless one wants to get into a broader defense of one's particular political sympathies... which most people will avoid because they realize that "people who I dislike sufficiently shouldn't be given platforms to speak on" is a principle that isn't going to sway one's opponents.
Of course it isn't.
It sounds like those are reasons to avoid engaging Creationists, not BhTV in general. If this is going to expand into a point about lowering BhTV's intellectual standards like you mentioned above... then I find it odd to argue that one podcast could have such a powerful marginal effect on the enjoyment one derives from the site, unless you're using some weird criteria where your overall evaluation of BhTV is based on the least intellectual podcast it hosts at any given time.
And I would be surprised if the worst podcast on BhTV by the criteria you described were Behe's - rom a lot of comments on Sean and Carl's posts, plenty of people would love to see Megan McArdle boycotted as well. I'd imagine that most people's list of "least rational" targets to successively knock off would end up looking awfully partisan (get Megan, and then Jonah Goldburg, and then that annoying Will Wilkinson!), which fuels my skepticism here. I'd submit that if a diavlog with a "ghost hunter" was uploaded, people would find it annoying but the reaction would be otherwise subdued.
because those sorts of dialogues affect the general reputation of the site and thus the reputation of those who speak there.
So is it necessitated for consistency's sake that those who would boycott BhTV over this incident must also boycott all other forums with lower intellectual standards... which would basically include all mainstream organizations? Somehow I don't believe that it's this simple.
The question I'm curious about is why a Creationist video on BhTV apparently creates reputational pollution in a way that a Creationist video on Youtube does not. My guess is that this has to do with BhTV being a smaller and more-exclusive community than Youtube, and this confers some benefits to "insiders".
A "thematic forum"? Could you elaborate on this?
Wow, I haven't seen Phil Plait's post until now. Bloggingheads "called Creationism science"? I can only guess what tortured reasoning gave rise to this claim.
But I think, Eliezer, that you're being too charitable to those who are jumping ship. Sean and Carl aren't doing so because they're anti-accomodationist, they just can't stand the thought of being within 300 internet meters of Creationists if they don't think they can leverage the situation against them. Whether this particularized form of distaste is justifiable is an interesting issue and one I look forward to losing more karma points arguing here. Suffice to say, I would be surprised if there's a non-arbitrary standard that would dictate that advocating Creationism is the most boycott-worthy of all views represented on BhTV.
But this does raise a lot of issues that I'd like to see developed here a little more. We talk about "raising the sanity waterline", but there's not much discussion of how exactly this would be done, what exact institutions and rules of rhetorical engagement tend to actually promote becoming less wrong. One thought that I was toying around with was that irrationality, like many other problems of insufficient virtue, is something that should be attacked from the demand side, not the supply side - meaning that boycotts on ideologies should be looked upon skeptically. I suspect that much of my discomfort with "silencing" tactics arises from my background in the social sciences, where politics frequently manages to honest inquiry because of well-intentioned tactics such as those employed by those who would boycott Bloggingheads for daring to host a podcast they found irresponsible.
I haven't seen BhTV endorse Creationism as science in any official capacity.
You're shifting the goalposts some. I'm not defending the original decision to invite Behe. I'm questioning the notion that inviting Behe is such an egregious offense against BHTV's "respectability" that it should be boycotted. I wouldn't boycott BHTV if 90% of the diavlogs were replaced by midget porn, if it meant that I would get the occasional episode of Free Will.
I think Behe's critics should just admit that what's really motivating the reaction is the notion that Creationists not only should not be given forums to speak, but those who do grant Creationists forums to speak should be actively identified and boycotted in a way which is reserved for an arguably arbitrarily-defined set of social undesirables. This isn't an indefensible position, but people have to admit to holding this belief (or some similar belief which is constructed in a more-charitable manner) before a meaningful debate can be enjoined.
[Edit]
Reading over the comments section of the CV posts, it looks like a lot of people are quick to point to Megan McArdle as the political crackpot equivalent of Behe. Should her presence be boycotted too as detrimental to the site? Where should the line be drawn? Where do you actually think the line would be drawn, if not along questionable ideological lines? Why have a line at all?
So BHTV can't both enjoy the participation of respectable academics and also host the occasional crackpot? There exists no such universe where the two could possibly coincide? Is there some implicit assumption here that there's a fixed amount of BHTV episodes, each of which will feature either crackpots or respectable academics? Even if this were so, wouldn't the reasonable response be to skip over the crackpots rather than avoiding the entire medium? The only justifiable rationale I can see for skipping over BHTV because of this is if you just watched diavlogs at random and having crackpots degraded the signal:noise ratio of the site. But I doubt that you, I, Sean, Carl, or your average Bloggingheads viewer navigates the site in this manner.
Even though I profoundly degree with Behe's epistemology (and theology), which should go without saying in these parts, I found the debate interesting (I think irreducible complexity is a neat topic), certainly moreso than I've enjoyed other diavlogs. Can anyone honestly say that Behe's presence is less valuable than any other podcast on the website? I doubt it, and thus it strikes me as disingenuous that the unique response his presence generates can be explained away purely through outrage at the notion that somewhere, someone's time may be wasted.
And I didn't include the "people whom others don't like" line as a defense of creationism per se, but as a broader point about silencing views found in contempt. To rip off Will Wilkinson, I'd probably venture to assert that unrepentant Marxists are just as high on the crackpottery scale as Creationists, but I highly doubt we'd see people abandon the site in protest in BHTV hosted some of them. "Respectability" in this context is a tricky term to use, since "respectability" tends to be conferred by social fashions just as much as actual correspondence to whatever virtues we've deemed to be worthy of respect. On a more base level, I suspect that many participants in this community have been dismissed as "crackpots" in some context or other before, and are skeptical of the neutrality and intellectual virtues of those who tend to yield the power of the censor. This isn't a philosophical defense of subjectivism or postmodernism, but an institutional defense of the rough reasons why we don't just go ahead and burn Behe at the stake.
What harm is done by bringing on an astrologer? At worst it fail to amuse.
But it's obvious you're not talking about the diavlog's impact on you... you're concerned with the poor, unwashed masses who might actually be left to form their own opinions from the available information. Well, that's very nice of you, but I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that it's safe to expose people to views which might be labeled as "crackpottery" by some.
Thanks for the link. I saw the original Behe podcast and was surprised when it suddenly disappeared with a brief note from an admin. I haven't been able to follow up on this matter much since it hasn't generated much buzz, but I'll look forward to reading these links - if people are boycotting Bloggingheads for giving platforms to people whom they don't like.... well, that's an interesting precedent to set which should be scrutinized carefully.
One person's "overarching narrative" is another person's set of Bayesian priors.
Take, for example, your pollution discussion. An economics textbook will tell you that there is an ideal level of taxation, yes. However, it won't tell you about regulatory capture, mission creep, the Hayekian knowledge problem, etc. There is always a correct set of contextual data to be used to interpret and resolve problems in isolation, yes - but determining what this set is and how we should interpret the probabilities of various events occurring is pretty much always going to invoke an overarching narrative unless you really, really think that this screws everything up.
But as an economist - a Masonomics student, no less - I'm inclined to see a greater harm in "markets fail, so assume a benevolent social planner and imagine what policies she could implement" approach to solving economic questions than the harms of dirtying one's self in the morass of historical context. This is why social science is hard - and why it should be hard. It's not that we should be indifferent to the injection of ideology into these debates, but that it's liable to create greater harm if we try to avoid all questions which cannot yield precise analytical answers which are self-apparent to reasonable minds.
Hopefully I'm not strawmanning your point here - maybe you're primarily trying to explain how ideology mucks things up, but I also get the impression that you think it's reasonably feasible to avoid questions that lend themselves to ideological answers... I definitely would disagree with such an assertion.
I believe the favored gender-neutral third-person subject pronoun du jour is "zie."
ie. "Zie bought hir shoes at Walmart."
Isn't social acceptance of saying rude but not false things exactly what you're arguing in favor of?
I don't think so, unless you're implying that the armchair theorizing in this community is always rude. I'd prefer to presume that not to be the case unless there's evidence otherwise... and I conceded in my top-level reply to this thread that there sometimes is (in my view.)
Why is it necessarily more rational to disregard "social consequences"?
I think it's not irrational per se, just that it probably wouldn't fly in this community as a substantive consideration in whether an argument should or should be presented here. Usually it's considered eminently rude (but not strictly false) to say that the members of your own ingroup are too dumb/biased to discuss a given topic fairly.
I suppose I could also try to bootstrap this into an argument for a strong presumption against restricting speech due to its expected "social consequences" in general, but I think my original points suffice.
To prohibit generalizations about gender without overwhelming hard data is usually to in effect silence the topic.
I think the concern is that a lot of these generalizations aren't being made through a good-faith attempt to unbiasedly order one's observations about the world. A lot of people see these arguments and have an (arguably often justified) prior that the individuals who make them are biased and/or bigoted. I realize that it can be frustrating to be told that you're being criticized because your arguments resemble those made by morally-reprehensible people, but.... it's often not unjustified for people to come to the table with those assumptions.
You also have the less-defensible argument sometimes being made that we shouldn't make these theories lightly because they often lead to cryptosexism. That probably won't fly in a rationalist discussion community, but it does in many other communities where the "social consequences" of one's speech are supposed to be a serious factor in its moral evaluation.
I have to concur with the overall sentiment of this post. It bothers me more than a bit that sweeping generalizations about gender behaviors are made using armchair "just-so" evopsych stories. I even consider myself a relatively ardent supporter of evopsych in general, but a lot of the discussions of gender relationships seem to be motivated by an undercurrent of bitterness rather than an objective desire to understand the reality of gender differences. I realize that this is a vague ad hominem critique, and I could probably attempt to back this up by specific examples and analysis, but.... I think it's just more imperative to call this stuff out as it arises.
I remember Razib on GNXP making fun of the demographic poll done here, that this is a community of young white male nerds. Oftentimes it shows... I often wonder what would happen if a Jezebel blogger stumbled upon this place.
Well, there are complaints about "Apple premiums" on pricing, but if those actually exist they're most likely largely the result of the fact that the company can "exploit" its devoted fanbase...
I think Apple is a good choice, though. I'd also point to Prius or hybrid vehicles in general or other items of objectively-good quality which turn into status signals of various sorts... and then you see criticisms aimed at the signalers and not the underlying goods or their functionality. Or the criticisms are aimed at the fact that the fans overstate the value of their choice objects, which doesn't exactly impinge the actual value.
Most of the rules are mostly there for the sake of legal cover - the only things that are strongly enforced are:
a) Child pornography bans. b) Bans on organizing illegal activities, namely "raids" on other websites that can result in serious damage. c) Mass spam, especially spam that is meant to propagate scripts that are used for further spamming. d) Topicality rules. This only applies to some of the boards.
Moderation is most reliable for (a). 4chan is hardly a well-tended garden, let alone a "thoughtfully organized" one. Moderation is often capricious as well, with certain memes being unofficially targeted every once in a while (furries, Boxxy, etc.) It's hard to really find an apt term or even a metaphor to properly summarize 4chan's governing ethos... some kind of chaotic swarm or something, perhaps.
No one's done a definite estimate of the impacts, but "Project Chanology" did attract thousands of protestors and a lot of mainstream media attention. I didn't mean to argue that 4chan has never accomplished anything positive, or even that there isn't a lot of creative activity there - I just don't see any of it as having advanced the frontiers of human understanding in any meaningful sense.
I can't think of a specific example that a broad audience might know about, but it's relatively easy to see how this could arise. Take a community of "idiots", by whatever criteria we'd use to apply the term to the lone troll. Many of them exist which espouse all sorts of nonsense. Throw in someone who actually understands the topics which these people purport to discuss. Unless that person is incredibly subtle and eloquent, they will be denounced as an idiot in any number of ways.
I can speak here from my own experience as an economist who's tried to make arguments about public choice and decentralized knowledge to a general (online) audience in order to defend free markets. A lot of crowds really will have none of it. I think this is a frustration which even the best libertarian-leaning individuals have run into. But given persistence, one can gain ground... and subsequently be accused of "ruining" a safe space which was reserved for the narrow worldview which you challenged. In face, any community with "safe space" disclaimers is probably extremely vulnerable to this - I just doubt you've engaged with many.
Lots of memes come out of 4chan. I'm not sure I'd call any of them "good" in any way beyond their being amusing. (Of note: "4chan was never good" is a meme in and of itself.)
The thousand 13-year old Bayesian LW would never "build up" anything approximating rationality, I'd conjecture. It would select for rational arguments to some extent, but it would also select for creative new obscenities, threads about how to get laid, and rationalist imagefloods (whatever that would consist of) being spammed over and over. 4chan has almost 200 million posts and I can't think of any meaningful contribution it has made to human knowledge.
Don't get me wrong, it has its purpose, but I don't believe you could ever get a community with a 4chan-style atmosphere to promote any sort of epistemic virtues, largely because I think what it would take to be noticed there would almost intrinsically require some kind of major violation of those virtues.
"Don't believe in yourself! Believe that I believe in you!"
If you're trying to quote Gurren-Lagann here, I believe you botched the quote. "Believe in me who believes in you!" But maybe it was dubbed differently. In any case, I do find some amusement in your approvingly quoting a show which was more or less premised on a rejection of rationality. "Throw away your logic and kick reason to the curb!" I'll have to remember that for the next anti-rationalism quotes thread.
But anyways, I did like this post, although as you implicitly concede it's just one narrative of community development among many. I'm sure that there have been as many communities to have fallen due to despotic moderation or impoverished by rigid ideological guidelines as there have been ruined in the ways described in the OP. Oftentimes the "idiots" who "ruin" the comm are actually the lonely voices of reason. It's a fine line to walk, and I look forward to someday seeing a modern-day Machiavelli write a tract on "The Internet Community Moderator". Because it really is that tricky.
I'd worry that:
a) It would be incredibly difficult to initially accumulate karma to begin with if it turned out that most posts that weren't "Introduce yourself!" had a decent karma requirement.
b) You'd end up excluding non-regulars who might have very substantial contributions to specific discussions from participating in those discussions. For example, I'm an economist, and most of my posts have been and probably will be in topics that touch on economic concepts. But I don't have much karma as a consequence, and I'd think it'd be to the community's detriment if I was excluded for that reason.
So if the slave were allowed to choose his own level of effort, he would no longer be a slave?
I think you have a point with what you're saying (and I'm predisposed against believing that the taxation/slavery analogy has meaning), but I don't think being a slave is incompatible with some autonomy.
Utilitarianism doesn't describe how you should feel, it simply describes "the good". It's very possible that if accepting utilitarianism's implications is so abhorrent to you that the world would be a worse place because you do it (because you're unhappy, or because embracing utilitarianism might actually make you worse at promoting utility), then by all means... don't endorse it, at least not at some given level you find repugnant. This is what Derek Parfit labels a "self-effacing" philosophy, I believe.
There are a variety of approaches to actually being a practicing utilitarian, however. Obviously we don't have the computational power required to properly deduce every future consequence of our actions, so at a practical level utilitarians will always support heuristics of some sort. One of these heuristics may dictate that you should always prefer serial killers to be shot over your sister for the kinds of reasons that gjm describes. This might not always lead to the right conclusion from a utilitarian perspective, but it probably wouldn't be a blameworthy one, as you did the best you could under incomplete information about the universe.
I'd point out a couple problems here:
Firstly, "controlled experiments" is simply an ideal which is no more achieved in the physical sciences than in the social ones. The various experimental methods employed by scientists differ only in the degree to which they're uncontrolled. Popperian falsifiability has been criticized in all scientific contexts for these reasons. I believe that Quine's discussions of this issue are the best-known... suffice to say, the Austrians need to come up with a better reason for dismissing the scientific method as applied to economics versus the scientific method as applied to other disciplines - but alas, this would probably require them to wade into the kind of messy empirical issues which they seem to abhor.
Secondly, even if scientific knowledge of economic phenomena could be rejected for the above reasons, the fact is that Austrian economists still routinely make empirical predictions based on praxeological reasoning which seem incredibly difficult to support based on that reasoning alone. See the OP's part about Mises on price controls - no purely praxeological account can determine that price controls will cause non-price rationing. So the criticism is that Austrians do not actually practice what they preach, largely because if they did so they would have very little to say about the real world.
Unfortunately, Austrians more than any other group typify that classic Paul Samuelson quote: "Economists have correctly predicted nine out of the last five recessions." It's easy to make arguments about how trying to circumvent the market process will lead to calamity, and eventually you'll be correct. But if you want to find an Austrian economist to respect, find one who will actually make concrete economic predictions that are falsifiable. It's my impression that many of them simply will not, often on philosophical grounds.
What in particular do you not understand? I think there are plenty of problems with Austrian arguments (and the OP does a good job of explaining some of them), but I can't say I've run into many cases where I felt that I just didn't understand what was going on. Do you mean that different Austrian economists make fundamentally incompatible arguments, or that the arguments that they do make just... don't say anything meaningful?
Actually, without some ability to do that in the future, long-term planning would be impossible. Whether one has the ability in the present to uphold obligations to the past is only relevant to future time-consistency insofar as we think this directly lends itself to having this ability in the future, and... I think it's far from clear whether that relationship will reliably occur, and even whether it should occur.
Oh, hey Tim. :D Not particularly surprised to see other classmates in these parts, but it's still a neat occurrence.
And of course I recognize the dogmatic tendencies of the Mises Institute crowd, but I guess my broader worry is that their particular style becomes conflated with Austrian economics in general. It's my impression that these failings aren't recognized in GMU's self-identified Austrian faculty, but I could be wrong.
Small quibble: I think it's unfair to many Austrians to imply that their school inherently eschews the type of mathematical formalisms that many prominent Austrians did, in fact, reject. Or at least, insofar as they do so, it's based on more than simply saying that the map doesn't reflect the territory, and therefore we must throw it out - they make elaborate arguments about how the map's systematic inaccuracies make it a poor representation of the territory. (Apologies if I'm using the map/territory metaphor poorly.)
Admittedly, this opinion goes against what seems to be reflected on the almighty Wikipedia, and I realize that pinning down the essential features of a school of thought is a pursuit which is fraught with problems, but my impression is that there are a substantial number of Austrians who do not reject modeling per se (as was the case of Hayek), and labeling this tendency as a deviation from Austrian thought strikes me as a No True Scotsman argument. Perhaps someone more familiar with the Austrian school could correct me on this, however.