8 ms·

Your first question is very strange. I say "I guess X is a thing that happens sometimes" (and went on to say: but I don't see much sign that it's happening in t

by gjm11 2y ago

Your first question is very strange. I say "I guess X is a thing that happens sometimes" (and went on to say: but I don't see much sign that it's happening in these particular cases, and if you claim it is then I'd like to see some evidence). Your response is: "Can you prove that X doesn't happen?". If you regard that discussion between NdGT and CJ as showing how dumb a well-respected scientist can be, then it seems to me it would be useful for you to explain what about it shows that. (So far, my requests for clarification and explanation and explicitness from you have been completely ignored.) Could you give a few examples to show that atheists and/or scientists (of course those two categories are not at all the same) think their intelligence or rationality is "absolute"? (It would also be nice to know what you mean by that; I don't know what it would mean to call someone "absolutely intelligent" or "absolutely rational", unless what it would mean is that they never make any mistakes, always draw all inferences that would be valid, etc., and if you think anyone believes that about themselves then once again I would like to see some evidence.)

mistermann 2y ago
Let's see if we can agree on a fundamental concept. Imagine a child in grade 5 who gets straight A's, whereas his classmates do not. People will judge this child as smart. But put the child up against some PhD's in each respective field, and the child will no longer be considered smart (you would have to hide his age in the experiment perhaps); the child is only "smart" relative to his peers. Hopefully you're with me so far. Here's the tricky part: the PhD's are (abstractly, but less so concretely) in the same situation as the child: they are only smart relative to their peers (~all other humans) - on an absolute scale (what is possible, as opposed to (what the person doing the thinking has knowledge of[1]) what exists, aka: "[the] reality"), they too are "dumb" (in a relative sense, in that (for example[1]) they cannot solve all solvable problems presented to them, without making errors). [1] this, at both individual and societal/cultural levels, is fundamentally important to this class of problem space. There are many things that reliably (necessarily?[1]) trigger System 1 intuition/hallucination in humans, and at least three of them are in play here: the unknown, ideology, and culture (which dictates cognitive, conversational, logical, and many other norms; what "is" is downstream from culture (cultural / psychological conditioning...like training an LLM)). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychology-normative-cognition/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychology-normative-cogn... Noteworthy: the article is subject to the very phenomenon it is describing; it is recursively self-referential. So too is this conversation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Self-referential_paradoxes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Self-referential_pa... https://www.astronomytrek.com/the-bootstrap-paradox-explained/ https://www.astronomytrek.com/the-bootstrap-paradox-explaine... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_Silver_Blaze https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_Silver_Blaz... EDIT: this popular anecdote might be the best articulation of the concept I'm trying to get at: https://partsolutions.com/supersonic-speed-check-tales-from-the-sr-71-blackbird/ https://partsolutions.com/supersonic-speed-check-tales-from-...
- gjm11 2y ago
  Yes, obviously I agree that someone can be smart relative to one set of people (or criteria, or problems, or whatever) and stupid relative to another. And yes, I agree that we are all much stupider than a hypothetical superintelligence might be. And I have no idea why you call this "the tricky part"; it isn't tricky at all. (Except that comparing against "what is possible" is tricky, because there are different sorts of possibility. How smart am I relative to what I might be if I had better habits and less self-deception? What about relative to if I had as good a brain as any mere human could have? Relative to the cleverest things that could exist within our universe, obeying the laws of physics? Relative to a god that isn't bound by such petty concerns? I think those answers might all be very different from one another.) This all seems absolutely obvious to me, and I suspect it is approximately equally obvious to (say) Richard Dawkins or Sean Carroll. In particular, I see no reason to think that those people or others like them think, still less claim, to be free of cognitive limitations and errors. Evidently you think there is something wrong with them in this general area -- but you seem strangely reluctant to be quite explicit about what your complaint is, and to my (doubtless not-perfectly-comprehending) eyes it seems that you alternate between implying, though not quite saying explicitly, that there is something specially, unusually, wrong about these people, and pointing out universal limitations that everyone, or pretty much everyone, suffers from. I started writing a few paragraphs engaging with various actual possibilities for what you might be saying about those people and why you might think it bad, but instead of doing that I'll give you another opportunity to tell me. I'm getting bored of having to guess what you have in mind, and then having you ignore my attempts to engage with it.
  - mistermann 2y ago
    > And yes, I agree that we are all much stupider than a hypothetical superintelligence might be. I do not like this framing - it makes it sound as if it is absurd, not realistic, etc. Imagine where we'd be if we used that sort of thinking when it came to the rights of women or POC (actually, that sort of thinking was used on both, which is part of the problem of why we still have major issues in these areas). > And I have no idea why you call this "the tricky part"; it isn't tricky at all. a) Rewind the conversation. b) Is there an implicit "for me" suffix on "it isn't tricky at all"? Because let me tell you, a lot of people struggle with what seem like basic concepts / techniques. > (Except that comparing against "what is possible" is tricky, because there are different sorts of possibility. How smart am I relative to what I might be if I had better habits and less self-deception? What about relative to if I had as good a brain as any mere human could have? Relative to the cleverest things that could exist within our universe, obeying the laws of physics? Relative to a god that isn't bound by such petty concerns? I think those answers might all be very different from one another.) Now imagine this at a system level, where there are only a few different educational methodologies applied to agents in the system, and improving on these methodologies "isn't exactly high priority". Now imagine such a system where improving upon, say, ever advanced weaponry to kill each other is a high priority. Wow, that'd be crazy. > ...and I suspect it is approximately equally obvious to (say) Richard Dawkins or Sean Carroll. Of the two of us, who do you think has consumed more of their respective content? And who do you think applies greater attention to error during consumption? And who do you think has tighter standards? > I see no reason to think that Note that "seeing" is a function of looking, as well as psychological conditioning / emergence, as well as some other things. > those people or others like them think, still less claim, to be free of cognitive limitations and errors. Not explicitly and absolutely (do you see that I see your framing?), but they do assert, either implicitly or explicitly, that "religious people" (imagine the gnashing of teeth if that was replaced with Jewish people! lol) make errors due to their style of thinking, and that they are superior in this regard, because they use scientific thinking....which brings us right back to my question: "If one declares one's mind to operate in a specific way, it operates that way? How does that work?" (which you never answered, by the way). It is a fact that they claim superiority, and it is a fact that they make the exact same sorts/classes/categories of errors as religious people do in their thinking. TikTok has literally thousands of videos, and my feed is tuned to them...I watch these guys all the time. I find scientific materialists and the way they think to be very interesting, if even just for the entertainment value (like watching Monty Python, except in real life, and everyone is being serious). They also make great use of this technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy Let me know if you'd like to argue about it, it is one of my favorites! > that there is something specially, unusually, wrong about these people All Humans make errors when thinking. These specific Humans regularly advertise their superiority in thinking. Also: they are influential, they spread their incorrect beliefs and bad thinking styles into other agents (just pop into the comments section on Reddit or TikTok to see the mass delusion up close and personal) in this system I am stuck in. Much of this world (which is a mess) runs according to the flawed ideology these people preach. So, I pay attention to it. (Note: I fully acknowledge that were it not for science, we would almost certainly be in even worse shape...but reality doesn't have to operate as a false dichotomy, or on fundamentalist ideology. It just currently happens to (due to the ideology).) > and pointing out universal limitations that everyone, or pretty much everyone, suffers from I don't like the word "limitations" here, as it implies (or could be interpreted as asserting) something that cannot be fixed. It wasn't all that long ago that the general public couldn't do basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. This was largely solved with education. Have we reached the apex of what can be done? Have we covered all the important bases? Do we have a good understanding of the degree to which education, perhaps certain kinds of education (maybe not currently in the curriculum), could rectify a lot of the intractable problems that still plague humanity? Does anyone care? Are people even able to care about such details, or might it require a certain kind of education? > I started writing a few paragraphs engaging with various actual possibilities for what you might be saying about those people and why you might think it bad, but instead of doing that I'll give you another opportunity to tell me. Are you looking for some sort of a slam dunk over and above "scientific materialists suffer from the very same delusions and faith based thinking the religious people they mock do"? Sorry, I don't have one of those for you (I could make some additional accusations of specific harm they've caused that is overlooked if you would like?). But if that (I am happy to discuss the truth value of it, in detail) alone isn't enough to cause you concern, then you and I have very different styles of thinking regarding risk management, system optimization, etc. I might say "each to his own", except that overlooks that the wellbeing of others is a function of the whole. This was an extremely popular idea during COVID, but it has kinda gone out of style now that the risk to Westerners has subsided. This is but one trait of Westerners that I do not like and think should be addressed, I have a very long list.

by gjm11 2y ago

mistermann 2y ago

Let's see if we can agree on a fundamental concept. Imagine a child in grade 5 who gets straight A's, whereas his classmates do not. People will judge this child as smart. But put the child up against some PhD's in each respective field, and the child will no longer be considered smart (you would have to hide his age in the experiment perhaps); the child is only "smart" relative to his peers. Hopefully you're with me so far. Here's the tricky part: the PhD's are (abstractly, but less so concretely) in the same situation as the child: they are only smart relative to their peers (~all other humans) - on an absolute scale (what is possible, as opposed to (what the person doing the thinking has knowledge of[1]) what exists, aka: "[the] reality"), they too are "dumb" (in a relative sense, in that (for example[1]) they cannot solve all solvable problems presented to them, without making errors). [1] this, at both individual and societal/cultural levels, is fundamentally important to this class of problem space. There are many things that reliably (necessarily?[1]) trigger System 1 intuition/hallucination in humans, and at least three of them are in play here: the unknown, ideology, and culture (which dictates cognitive, conversational, logical, and many other norms; what "is" is downstream from culture (cultural / psychological conditioning...like training an LLM)). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychology-normative-cognition/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychology-normative-cogn... Noteworthy: the article is subject to the very phenomenon it is describing; it is recursively self-referential. So too is this conversation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Self-referential_paradoxes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Self-referential_pa... https://www.astronomytrek.com/the-bootstrap-paradox-explained/ https://www.astronomytrek.com/the-bootstrap-paradox-explaine... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_Silver_Blaze https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_Silver_Blaz... EDIT: this popular anecdote might be the best articulation of the concept I'm trying to get at: https://partsolutions.com/supersonic-speed-check-tales-from-the-sr-71-blackbird/ https://partsolutions.com/supersonic-speed-check-tales-from-...

gjm11 2y ago
Yes, obviously I agree that someone can be smart relative to one set of people (or criteria, or problems, or whatever) and stupid relative to another. And yes, I agree that we are all much stupider than a hypothetical superintelligence might be. And I have no idea why you call this "the tricky part"; it isn't tricky at all. (Except that comparing against "what is possible" is tricky, because there are different sorts of possibility. How smart am I relative to what I might be if I had better habits and less self-deception? What about relative to if I had as good a brain as any mere human could have? Relative to the cleverest things that could exist within our universe, obeying the laws of physics? Relative to a god that isn't bound by such petty concerns? I think those answers might all be very different from one another.) This all seems absolutely obvious to me, and I suspect it is approximately equally obvious to (say) Richard Dawkins or Sean Carroll. In particular, I see no reason to think that those people or others like them think, still less claim, to be free of cognitive limitations and errors. Evidently you think there is something wrong with them in this general area -- but you seem strangely reluctant to be quite explicit about what your complaint is, and to my (doubtless not-perfectly-comprehending) eyes it seems that you alternate between implying, though not quite saying explicitly, that there is something specially, unusually, wrong about these people, and pointing out universal limitations that everyone, or pretty much everyone, suffers from. I started writing a few paragraphs engaging with various actual possibilities for what you might be saying about those people and why you might think it bad, but instead of doing that I'll give you another opportunity to tell me. I'm getting bored of having to guess what you have in mind, and then having you ignore my attempts to engage with it.
- mistermann 2y ago
  > And yes, I agree that we are all much stupider than a hypothetical superintelligence might be. I do not like this framing - it makes it sound as if it is absurd, not realistic, etc. Imagine where we'd be if we used that sort of thinking when it came to the rights of women or POC (actually, that sort of thinking was used on both, which is part of the problem of why we still have major issues in these areas). > And I have no idea why you call this "the tricky part"; it isn't tricky at all. a) Rewind the conversation. b) Is there an implicit "for me" suffix on "it isn't tricky at all"? Because let me tell you, a lot of people struggle with what seem like basic concepts / techniques. > (Except that comparing against "what is possible" is tricky, because there are different sorts of possibility. How smart am I relative to what I might be if I had better habits and less self-deception? What about relative to if I had as good a brain as any mere human could have? Relative to the cleverest things that could exist within our universe, obeying the laws of physics? Relative to a god that isn't bound by such petty concerns? I think those answers might all be very different from one another.) Now imagine this at a system level, where there are only a few different educational methodologies applied to agents in the system, and improving on these methodologies "isn't exactly high priority". Now imagine such a system where improving upon, say, ever advanced weaponry to kill each other is a high priority. Wow, that'd be crazy. > ...and I suspect it is approximately equally obvious to (say) Richard Dawkins or Sean Carroll. Of the two of us, who do you think has consumed more of their respective content? And who do you think applies greater attention to error during consumption? And who do you think has tighter standards? > I see no reason to think that Note that "seeing" is a function of looking, as well as psychological conditioning / emergence, as well as some other things. > those people or others like them think, still less claim, to be free of cognitive limitations and errors. Not explicitly and absolutely (do you see that I see your framing?), but they do assert, either implicitly or explicitly, that "religious people" (imagine the gnashing of teeth if that was replaced with Jewish people! lol) make errors due to their style of thinking, and that they are superior in this regard, because they use scientific thinking....which brings us right back to my question: "If one declares one's mind to operate in a specific way, it operates that way? How does that work?" (which you never answered, by the way). It is a fact that they claim superiority, and it is a fact that they make the exact same sorts/classes/categories of errors as religious people do in their thinking. TikTok has literally thousands of videos, and my feed is tuned to them...I watch these guys all the time. I find scientific materialists and the way they think to be very interesting, if even just for the entertainment value (like watching Monty Python, except in real life, and everyone is being serious). They also make great use of this technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy Let me know if you'd like to argue about it, it is one of my favorites! > that there is something specially, unusually, wrong about these people All Humans make errors when thinking. These specific Humans regularly advertise their superiority in thinking. Also: they are influential, they spread their incorrect beliefs and bad thinking styles into other agents (just pop into the comments section on Reddit or TikTok to see the mass delusion up close and personal) in this system I am stuck in. Much of this world (which is a mess) runs according to the flawed ideology these people preach. So, I pay attention to it. (Note: I fully acknowledge that were it not for science, we would almost certainly be in even worse shape...but reality doesn't have to operate as a false dichotomy, or on fundamentalist ideology. It just currently happens to (due to the ideology).) > and pointing out universal limitations that everyone, or pretty much everyone, suffers from I don't like the word "limitations" here, as it implies (or could be interpreted as asserting) something that cannot be fixed. It wasn't all that long ago that the general public couldn't do basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. This was largely solved with education. Have we reached the apex of what can be done? Have we covered all the important bases? Do we have a good understanding of the degree to which education, perhaps certain kinds of education (maybe not currently in the curriculum), could rectify a lot of the intractable problems that still plague humanity? Does anyone care? Are people even able to care about such details, or might it require a certain kind of education? > I started writing a few paragraphs engaging with various actual possibilities for what you might be saying about those people and why you might think it bad, but instead of doing that I'll give you another opportunity to tell me. Are you looking for some sort of a slam dunk over and above "scientific materialists suffer from the very same delusions and faith based thinking the religious people they mock do"? Sorry, I don't have one of those for you (I could make some additional accusations of specific harm they've caused that is overlooked if you would like?). But if that (I am happy to discuss the truth value of it, in detail) alone isn't enough to cause you concern, then you and I have very different styles of thinking regarding risk management, system optimization, etc. I might say "each to his own", except that overlooks that the wellbeing of others is a function of the whole. This was an extremely popular idea during COVID, but it has kinda gone out of style now that the risk to Westerners has subsided. This is but one trait of Westerners that I do not like and think should be addressed, I have a very long list.