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Pavlov posted:I'd assume because politics is a topic that even a group of 'rational' people will commonly digress on. LW wouldn't be able to handle that because if everyone there is 'rational' then how could they all come to such different answers? Basically they need an echo chamber if they want to keep their sense of superiority, and you can't have that if people actually have a diverse array of opinions on important topics.
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Oct 17, 2014 15:04
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I confess I'm sympathetic to his characterisation of politics as tribal viewpoints rather than reasoned positions, although I'm very far from sold on the idea that you can reason your way to The Best Society. But then I read this, right at the bottom: quote:I find a lot of online feminism very triggering, because it seems to me to have nothing to do with women and be transparently about marginalizing nerdy men as creeps who are not really human. This means that even when I support and agree with feminists and want to help them, I am constantly trying to drag my brain out of panic mode that their seemingly valuable projects are just deep cover for attempts to hurt me. For gently caress's sake.
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Oct 17, 2014 15:31
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The Less Wrong Mock Thread: I find a lot of online feminism very triggering
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Oct 17, 2014 15:38
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"All of this feminism was about me the whole time! Those bitches!"
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Oct 17, 2014 16:05
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LW has this weird thing where you have to make gestures at being above it all even while being clearly partisan when talking about politics.
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Oct 17, 2014 16:13
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The Vosgian Beast posted:LW has this weird thing where you have to make gestures at being above it all even while being clearly partisan when talking about politics.
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Oct 17, 2014 16:18
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potatocubed posted:I confess I'm sympathetic to his characterisation of politics as tribal viewpoints rather than reasoned positions, although I'm very far from sold on the idea that you can reason your way to The Best Society. See I'm suspicious as hell about this, because his "fellow travelers" on the road of civilization-making are literal actual fascists.
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Oct 17, 2014 16:27
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The Vosgian Beast posted:See I'm suspicious as hell about this, because his "fellow travelers" on the road of civilization-making are literal actual fascists. It would be a pretty big stretch to call neoreactionaries Scott's "fellow travelers." http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/
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Oct 17, 2014 16:47
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Silver2195 posted:It would be a pretty big stretch to call neoreactionaries Scott's "fellow travelers." You know, he has spent hour after hour examining how Moldbug makes no sense, but that hasn't stopped him from approvingly quoting NRx in various blogposts, pretending that all the racism is just trolling to prevent people who can't take The Harsh Truths Reactionaries Are Throwing Down from getting in, and attacking people who criticize NRx on grounds that aren't his grounds of "mild quibbling about empirical errors". Also constant, constant talk of how smart neoreactionaries are.
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Oct 17, 2014 17:23
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Cardiovorax posted:That sort of thing is specifically called negative utilitarianism, not nihilism. I believe these people call themselves antinatalists. I ran into them when reading Thomas Ligotti fan sites.
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Oct 17, 2014 18:19
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Hate Fibration posted:I believe these people call themselves antinatalists. I ran into them when reading Thomas Ligotti fan sites.
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Oct 17, 2014 18:23
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Hate Fibration posted:I believe these people call themselves antinatalists. I ran into them when reading Thomas Ligotti fan sites. Oh man antinatalism, that brings back some crazy memories of a weird time in my life. It kind of says something that even when I was going through some serious anxiety issues, antinatalists seemed pretty stupid.
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Oct 17, 2014 19:07
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There was a D&D thread a few years back where some legit anti-natalists jumped in. It was exactly as stupid as it sounds.
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Oct 17, 2014 19:34
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The Vosgian Beast posted:You know, he has spent hour after hour examining how Moldbug makes no sense, but that hasn't stopped him from approvingly quoting NRx in various blogposts, pretending that all the racism is just trolling to prevent people who can't take The Harsh Truths Reactionaries Are Throwing Down from getting in, and attacking people who criticize NRx on grounds that aren't his grounds of "mild quibbling about empirical errors". Also, as he put it, "smart leftists won't show up where neorecationaries are allowed to talk" (hmm, I wonder why? Must be their thrice-damned "object level thinking"). He refuses to ban people simply for saying things like "all women are stupider and weaker than men, they're basically children", but if you get emotional about that kind of thing then the banhammer swingeth free. I can't tell if it was deliberate but he certainly has succeeded in engineering a pretty hosed up comments section.
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Oct 17, 2014 20:27
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bartlebyshop posted:He refuses to ban people simply for saying things like "all women are stupider and weaker than men, they're basically children", but if you get emotional about that kind of thing then the banhammer swingeth free. Ah this is great. You don't have any examples to link do you? It's funny how guys like this seem to think reason and logic are basically infallible, while emotion is basically always wrong. One would think counterexamples are very easy to show, e.g. logic is garbage in, garbage out. I suppose it's harder to show that emotion is "right" a lot of the time. I always like the example of trying to get a date with rationality and no emotion, but then such pursuits are probably beneath them.
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Oct 17, 2014 21:37
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Epitope posted:Ah this is great. You don't have any examples to link do you? They would direct you to a PUA site so you can rationally optimize your dating strategy.
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Oct 17, 2014 22:36
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Everybody go search "Ferguson" on that SSC page. I'll wait.
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Oct 17, 2014 23:02
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Epitope posted:Ah this is great. You don't have any examples to link do you? The secret is realizing almost all "rationalist" beliefs are based on emotion. Once you try arguing with them outside of their little hugboxes they'll breakdown and give you a chance to play argument fallacy bingo, unless they're actually honest with themselves in which case they'll probably start to come around (though it's better to just assume this won't happen). Edit: Political Whores posted:Everybody go search "Ferguson" on that SSC page. I'll wait. I was able to get "Both sides are politicizing this equally" before it became too insufferable, does he say anything stupider? MizPiz fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Oct 17, 2014 |
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Oct 17, 2014 23:05
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Political Whores posted:Everybody go search "Ferguson" on that SSC page. I'll wait. 
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Oct 17, 2014 23:09
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How the blue tribe has politicized the story of a black thug getting justifiably getting put down after attacking a cop. E: and people roundly agreeing with the statement
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Oct 17, 2014 23:34
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Epitope posted:Ah this is great. You don't have any examples to link do you? In this thread, at point 3, he talks about his NRx bannination policy. Keep in mind the current comments state is an improvement over what went on before. This is a great example of the kind of comment you can make at SSC and not get banned. On the other hand, several leftists (Multiheaded is probably the most obvious) get continual bans/probations for being churlish.
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Oct 18, 2014 03:42
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So SSC, the great rationalist paradise on the net, can have people openly argue that women are weak, stupid and dishonest. Insert GIF of Orson Welles clapping.
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Oct 18, 2014 04:13
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Another moment in "SSC comments greatest hits" is this, where someone argues committing a campaign of genocide and slavery in the Americas was overall good because of all the utilons people today have gained from it.
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Oct 18, 2014 04:19
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It can be both enlightening and loving depressing when you can know what race someone is just by stuff they write on the internet.
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Oct 18, 2014 04:48
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Uhg, kinda sorry I asked for those links. Disgusting. Still amused by the irrationality of rationalists though. The stated purpose of that blog is analyzing how we believe ridiculous stuff and justify it with faulty arguments (or something like that). I guess he thinks being aware of these phenomenon makes them not apply to him though, cuz the blog is a whole mess of faulty arguments supporting his somewhat abhorrent beliefs.
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Oct 18, 2014 06:43
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Oh man antinatalism, that brings back some crazy memories of a weird time in my life. I encountered them when my anxiety issues were peaking too! And even to me, in my battered state, they were absolutely insane. But that anxiety is also HOW I encountered them. I quite like Thomas Ligotti's writing, he's a wonderful horror writer. Lovecraft with better prose, and he's not powered by racism. But horror, in general, is a small doses genre, and the reason the stories resonated so strongly with me at the time was because of my anxiety. The people who steep themselves Horror are very off. Very very off. And Ligotti's fanbase is where I found them. So here I am, reading people on a horror forum where I went to find people talking about neat horror stories, were talking about the futility and horror of life, and how no amount of suffering justifies any amount of pleasure etc, with a splitting migraine, having fainting episodes because my anxiety is causing stomach trouble leading to malnutrition, and on the verge of panic 24/7. I am still AGOG at how absurd these ideas are. Fun fact: I found "traditionalists" on the Ligotti fan forums too. They were railing against degeneracy in modern culture. Crazy types, all around. To make up for this derail, some content: Less Wrong still begs for funding And the comments on this post are an absolute delight. quote:It's funny how guys like this seem to think reason and logic are basically infallible, while emotion is basically always wrong. One would think counterexamples are very easy to show, e.g. logic is garbage in, garbage out. I suppose it's harder to show that emotion is "right" a lot of the time. I always like the example of trying to get a date with rationality and no emotion, but then such pursuits are probably beneath them. I think the best point against this is that human emotional states and their rational processing are hopelessly intertwined. To separate them is a fool's endeavor. This is something anyone who has dealt with a mental illness understands. And it's one of the principles behind cognitive behavioral therapy. In which case if you're trying to be rational, then your goal is actually also to cultivate an emotional and psychological state most conducive to rational analysis. But they would never admit that because BEEPBOOP I AM ROBOT. Hate Fibration fucked around with this message at 09:51 on Oct 18, 2014 |
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Oct 18, 2014 09:44
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Epitope posted:Still amused by the irrationality of rationalists though. The stated purpose of that blog is analyzing how we believe ridiculous stuff and justify it with faulty arguments (or something like that). I guess he thinks being aware of these phenomenon makes them not apply to him though, cuz the blog is a whole mess of faulty arguments supporting his somewhat abhorrent beliefs. The best you can really hope for is to be able to say "I know I'm biased because everyone is but I don't know what I'm wrong about." and even then you still think you're right, because it's impossible to not believe what you believe.
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Oct 18, 2014 11:58
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Hate Fibration posted:
Some Idiot posted:The MIRI has been criticized for not doing much except publishing papers. ... Okay. So I have recently discovered that I am wrong about MIRI *never* publishing a peer reviewed paper. They have published at least three, in actual journals. Not prestigious ones, but not "pay us $50 and we'll publish anything" journals either. For comparison, in the decade that MIRI has been funding silicon valley wages for its dozen or so "researchers", their paper output is about 60% of what my thesis advisor (a real AI researcher, paid a hell of a lot less than "blog posts pay the bills" Yudkowsky) put out last year. How can you be at all familiar with publishing rates and think that MIRI is doing even a remotely acceptable job?
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Oct 18, 2014 13:38
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SolTerrasa posted:... Okay. So I have recently discovered that I am wrong about MIRI *never* publishing a peer reviewed paper. They have published at least three, in actual journals. Not prestigious ones, but not "pay us $50 and we'll publish anything" journals either. For comparison, in the decade that MIRI has been funding silicon valley wages for its dozen or so "researchers", their paper output is about 60% of what my thesis advisor (a real AI researcher, paid a hell of a lot less than "blog posts pay the bills" Yudkowsky) put out last year. How can you be at all familiar with publishing rates and think that MIRI is doing even a remotely acceptable job?
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Oct 18, 2014 19:00
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IT people I could understand, but to be even a semi-decent software engineer you have to at least get an undergraduate degree. You pick up on that sort of thing, even if you don't work on it yourself.
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Oct 18, 2014 19:05
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Cardiovorax posted:IT people I could understand, but to be even a semi-decent software engineer you have to at least get an undergraduate degree. You pick up on that sort of thing, even if you don't work on it yourself.
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Oct 18, 2014 19:09
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Nessus posted:I dunno, if your entire focus is on learning programming languages and poo poo, and you ignore academic activities except in so far as they impact your future earning potential, and disdain various other coursework because it's just dumb liberal arts indoctrination poo poo if it's not a directly marketable job skill, you might well have no idea. Albeit more due to willful ignorance than anything.
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Oct 18, 2014 19:13
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Cardiovorax posted:IT people I could understand, but to be even a semi-decent software engineer you have to at least get an undergraduate degree. You pick up on that sort of thing, even if you don't work on it yourself. Cardiovorax posted:You'd have to go to a really lovely university for that. You barely learn any programming at all in college-grade computer science courses, it's all logic, theoretical computing, math and electronics. You certainly couldn't graduate on just that. Why is that? I've personally run into a lot of people in software engineering (professionals and students) who don't have undergraduate degrees and it generally seems to lend itself really well to self-teaching. The skills you've listed in the second post seem pretty domain-specific (I'm not going to trivialize them by saying they don't matter at all) and pretty much every self-taught person I've met who was worth his salt in one of those areas was as competent or more competent than the students I met who trudged through the material involuntarily. (I'm judging this based on professional and extracurricular projects, not on schoolwork) At least at my college (which is unexceptional, but reasonably well-regarded), the CS courses aren't quite taught to the lowest-common denominator but the assumption seems to be that the strongest candidates will probably self-teach anyway, so the material in the courses is more fundamental and less abstruse. Don't get me wrong: a lot of self-taught programmers are really horrible, but I don't think they're that much worse than the caliber of programmers in an ordinary intro class. And the non-intro classes I've taken seem to have been composed pretty heavily of people who self-taught anyway. (Disclaimer: CS undergrad here, heavily self-taught, probably roughly middling competence, doesn't know jack.)
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Oct 18, 2014 19:48
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Maybe I'm using the word software engineer differently than you are. I don't really consider programming CS work because it's the easiest part of it, like learning how to write before you study literature. If you can program in any language, you can program in every language. It doesn't take a lot of education or skill. The other stuff is what's hard - formulating the goals, deciding what is and isn't possible, planning and designing algorithms, whiteboxing and blackboxing, optimizing and minimizing complexity... and that's just for software, you'd be learning a lot more than that here. We treat colleges differently than the US does, though - very few people ever study, comparatively, and if you do it's because you mean to make a serious career of it. For regular jobs, you'd just do an apprenticeship.
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Oct 18, 2014 20:18
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Ok, so in the US, you can get programming work without a degree. The problem is a lot of good programming work does require you to have a degree, especially for larger companies. These days programmers are often largely self-taught, and have to continue self-teaching, because the field changes so fast. Being self taught can lead to some pretty glaring blind spots in your repertoire though, and a degree helps companies know you have your basics covered without having to drill you on everything themselves.
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Oct 18, 2014 21:17
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Cardiovorax posted:Maybe I'm using the word software engineer differently than you are. I don't really consider programming CS work because it's the easiest part of it, like learning how to write before you study literature. If you can program in any language, you can program in every language. It doesn't take a lot of education or skill. The other stuff is what's hard - formulating the goals, deciding what is and isn't possible, planning and designing algorithms, whiteboxing and blackboxing, optimizing and minimizing complexity... and that's just for software, you'd be learning a lot more than that here. I may be misunderstanding you, but I also think you're misunderstanding me, because the concerns you've listed are IMHO what most of the programmers I know think of as what distinguishes a good programmer. Even those who don't know much about programming think of a good programmer as someone who executes interesting projects, not someone who writes heaps of code, because whether you're experienced or not the actual act of writing code is completely uninteresting. I'm still not sure why you'd argue that these are skills that can only be learned (or at least better be learned) in an academic context, mostly because it contradicts my personal experience. I'm also skeptical of academic attempts to formally describe what the ideal design process is because a lot of what I've run up against seems to fall into a) process-for-the-sake-of-process territory -- for instance, UML, a kind of diagram that exists for the sake of representing Java programs in a type-unchecked, machine-unreadable format -- or b) shallow, assumption-riddled ("every language is Java") exposition about ideas that have existed informally and more generally for quite a while -- i.e. most of the Gang of Four patterns and methodology. I don't think these kinds of efforts are necessarily bad but, while I've been pretty disappointed in the efforts to teach design I've personally come across, I've been pretty impressed by the intuitions of the self-taught programmers I know, and it makes me feel as if there's a significant distance between academic attempts to codify the field and actual innovation among its practitioners, which makes academia potentially a poor sole/primary source for information. (I hope I don't come off as too judgmental, but it might be kind of inevitable.) Krotera fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Oct 18, 2014 |
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Oct 18, 2014 21:18
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Well, because that stuff is complicated. I mean, really complicated. Sure, you can just buy the textbooks and teach yourself, but that's really true of anything. The kind of person who could do that and succeed is pretty rare. How many of those self-taught people could come up with a concept like the Random Forest, though? That's not trivial stuff just anyone can do. It involves complicated math and a deep understanding of statistics and machine learning. A good programmer is like a carpenter. He can build a house and might even know his individual tools better than any architect, but he's not the one who designs skyscrapers. You need to know more than how to nail two boards together for huge and innovative projects like that.
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Oct 18, 2014 21:31
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What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong? seems like a gold mine in the making. So far there's quite a few "I used to think all humans are as smart as I am, but it turned out that they're all stupid" entries.
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Oct 18, 2014 21:38
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Cardiovorax posted:Well, because that stuff is complicated. I mean, really complicated. Sure, you can just buy the textbooks and teach yourself, but that's really true of anything. The kind of person who could do that and succeed is pretty rare. True, but most undergrads won't learn about the random forest either, unless they go out of their way to take a machine learning class in their last year. From what I understand, most industry programmers don't go for higher level degrees either. Krotera posted:- snip - No one likes UML diagrams. People use them because sometimes they're useful anyway. Kind of like catheters.
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Oct 18, 2014 21:45
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How many people would reimplement a thing like Random Forest? I'm a little sympathetic here because I understand that "I can google it" is not a valid answer when the problem requires a working understanding of a field, but to me it's generally seemed like software development is a little bit too wide to expect anybody to have knowledge that deep on every occasion. (or even most occasions) I'd be surprised if the graduates I know were able to exposit about algorithms like that if they weren't either researching them or employed implementing them. I also suspect that a lot of software is too large and too complicated for anyone -- including the architect! -- to understand exactly how it works. So we reach the point where googling it starts to seem feasible -- for algorithms whose shape doesn't influence the entire behavior of a project (i.e. which don't need you to completely switch from poll-based to callback-based interfaces) and for projects whose components are sufficiently loosely-coupled only the implementor needs to understand them, and to everyone else they might as well be a black box. For instance, if you had linked me the PDF spec and asked if any programmer on the street could have implemented it, I'd say no. But unlike a lot of field knowledge, I don't think things along the lines of the PDF spec are the sorts of thing everyone involved on a project needs to grok, and if I were an architect I don't think I would need to understand it at all other than that it's a document format which [some project requirements: i.e., it can't necessarily be translated back to text]. So this gets us to the other part of your argument, which seems to suppose two things: - big projects require knowledge that can usually only come from academic sources (the only alternative you seem to have in mind to taking a course is reading a textbook) - the strategies used to approach small problems do not apply to large problems So you've got these really complicated things in mind that only apply to large problems and can't be learned nonacademically (alternative: from experience, from working on other people's projects which tackle the problems), but I still don't think you've explained what they are. I don't think there's nothing there, because if I thought there wasn't anything there, I wouldn't be studying CS. (although if it weren't covered by scholarships I probably wouldn't be paying thousands just to satisfy my curiosity) But I'm really curious about what it is and the things you've listed so far seem to be mostly small-picture design features that have little to do with the overall structure of a program, and while they're interesting and useful and possibly applicable to a lot of other arguments, they don't seem to be the kind of example you'd need to demonstrate the specific point I'm disputing. And what kind of bugs me is that you switched to arguing analogistically right at the point where specific examples would have told me the most, but you used specific examples when I think they made the least difference. Krotera fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Oct 18, 2014 |
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Oct 18, 2014 21:46
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