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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,

by 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.
- gjm11 2y ago
  (General note: I will respond to arguments and evidence and so forth; I will not respond to mere sneering, beyond noting that it's there.) I don't understand your complaint about "this framing". Exactly what parallel with civil rights are you drawing? Yes, there's an implicit "for me" on "it isn't tricky", just as there's an implicit "for you" when you say "here's the tricky part". (Do not try to pretend that you were not intending to talk down to me; of course you were. And still are.) Yes, I too would like more money and time and effort going into education and less into weapons. It is not relevant which of us has consumed more Dawkins or Carroll or whatever. If you think I am wrong in thinking that it is obvious to those people that they are finite and fallible and so forth, then show some evidence rather than just saying you know better. In so far as I understand what complaint you are making about scientific-type atheists, I think it is unreasonable. You say that they point out bad thinking on the part of religious people; yes, they do. (You haven't, so far at least, suggested that they're wrong about that.) You say: booooo, they're hypocrites because they're making similar errors themselves. I say: they aren't claiming perfection, that's just something you made up; they are implicitly claiming to be doing better than the people they're criticizing, and I think they're generally right about that: they seem to me to be doing quite a lot better. I have the impression that you disagree, but I'm not sure how we could realistically resolve that disagreement. I can't help noticing that your argument seems to depend very strongly on what errors, and how bad, and how many of them, the likes of Dawkins and Carroll make when arguing about religion -- but that the nearest you've come to giving a concrete example of their alleged errors is an objection to the "atheism just means not positively believing in gods" thing. (And that when I asked for some clarification on this, you ignored me.) I don't think I agree with (what I take to be) your estimation of how bad their errors are. I might be able to be more concrete if you were more concrete, but you seem determined not to be. You've suggested a few times that I should take your word for it because you've watched a lot of videos with atheists in, but I'm afraid your argumentation here hasn't so far given me much reason to trust your assessment of the quality of their thinking. Your suggestion that there might be better modes of education that effectively stop people making (as I take it you mean) broad classes of cognitive errors is interesting. Do you have specific suggestions for what sort of education might bring that about? Do you have specific reasons for thinking it would work? My impression is that the more obvious ways of trying to help people not make cognitive errors tend to be pretty ineffective. (I think people who pay attention to cognitive errors and try to make fewer of them do, in fact, tend to make fewer of them -- though I don't have objective quantitative evidence for this, only casual observation over the years -- but I don't think it's mostly because learning about cognitive errors and trying to make fewer of them is very effective, it's more because the sort of person who does that is the sort of person who is already likely to be making fewer cognitive errors.) Thank you for clarifying that you are not making a claim beyond "scientific materialists suffer from the very same delusions and faith based thinking the religious people they mock do". I'm not sure how much we disagree about this -- it depends on just what "the very same" means. (Obviously they're not literally the exact same; if you think they're just as bad then we disagree but it doesn't seem like the sort of thing it's easy to give clear-cut evidence of; if you are claiming only "cognitive errors with similar patterns, though different in detail and possibly less often and less severely" then we probably agree, though I think we disagree about how much sneering at the scientific materialists this justifies.) I completely agree with you that the general crapness of human thinking is a serious problem. I'm not sure whether we agree about what fraction of that problem is specifically about scientific materialists. You clearly feel (or, I guess, find it convenient to give the impression that you feel, but I'm happy to take this at face value) that I don't care about it enough, whereas you do; for my part, I am not convinced, and I don't think one can tell how much someone cares about human irrationality by how enthusiastically they sneer at other people on the internet.

by gjm11 2y ago

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.

gjm11 2y ago
(General note: I will respond to arguments and evidence and so forth; I will not respond to mere sneering, beyond noting that it's there.) I don't understand your complaint about "this framing". Exactly what parallel with civil rights are you drawing? Yes, there's an implicit "for me" on "it isn't tricky", just as there's an implicit "for you" when you say "here's the tricky part". (Do not try to pretend that you were not intending to talk down to me; of course you were. And still are.) Yes, I too would like more money and time and effort going into education and less into weapons. It is not relevant which of us has consumed more Dawkins or Carroll or whatever. If you think I am wrong in thinking that it is obvious to those people that they are finite and fallible and so forth, then show some evidence rather than just saying you know better. In so far as I understand what complaint you are making about scientific-type atheists, I think it is unreasonable. You say that they point out bad thinking on the part of religious people; yes, they do. (You haven't, so far at least, suggested that they're wrong about that.) You say: booooo, they're hypocrites because they're making similar errors themselves. I say: they aren't claiming perfection, that's just something you made up; they are implicitly claiming to be doing better than the people they're criticizing, and I think they're generally right about that: they seem to me to be doing quite a lot better. I have the impression that you disagree, but I'm not sure how we could realistically resolve that disagreement. I can't help noticing that your argument seems to depend very strongly on what errors, and how bad, and how many of them, the likes of Dawkins and Carroll make when arguing about religion -- but that the nearest you've come to giving a concrete example of their alleged errors is an objection to the "atheism just means not positively believing in gods" thing. (And that when I asked for some clarification on this, you ignored me.) I don't think I agree with (what I take to be) your estimation of how bad their errors are. I might be able to be more concrete if you were more concrete, but you seem determined not to be. You've suggested a few times that I should take your word for it because you've watched a lot of videos with atheists in, but I'm afraid your argumentation here hasn't so far given me much reason to trust your assessment of the quality of their thinking. Your suggestion that there might be better modes of education that effectively stop people making (as I take it you mean) broad classes of cognitive errors is interesting. Do you have specific suggestions for what sort of education might bring that about? Do you have specific reasons for thinking it would work? My impression is that the more obvious ways of trying to help people not make cognitive errors tend to be pretty ineffective. (I think people who pay attention to cognitive errors and try to make fewer of them do, in fact, tend to make fewer of them -- though I don't have objective quantitative evidence for this, only casual observation over the years -- but I don't think it's mostly because learning about cognitive errors and trying to make fewer of them is very effective, it's more because the sort of person who does that is the sort of person who is already likely to be making fewer cognitive errors.) Thank you for clarifying that you are not making a claim beyond "scientific materialists suffer from the very same delusions and faith based thinking the religious people they mock do". I'm not sure how much we disagree about this -- it depends on just what "the very same" means. (Obviously they're not literally the exact same; if you think they're just as bad then we disagree but it doesn't seem like the sort of thing it's easy to give clear-cut evidence of; if you are claiming only "cognitive errors with similar patterns, though different in detail and possibly less often and less severely" then we probably agree, though I think we disagree about how much sneering at the scientific materialists this justifies.) I completely agree with you that the general crapness of human thinking is a serious problem. I'm not sure whether we agree about what fraction of that problem is specifically about scientific materialists. You clearly feel (or, I guess, find it convenient to give the impression that you feel, but I'm happy to take this at face value) that I don't care about it enough, whereas you do; for my part, I am not convinced, and I don't think one can tell how much someone cares about human irrationality by how enthusiastically they sneer at other people on the internet.