NOTE: None of my substantive posts use the CC BY license. They’re from before the 2022-12-01 cutoff. I’m quitting the forum due to the new licensing rule.
I write about philosophy: https://criticalfallibilism.com
Disagree with me? I have a debate policy you may use: https://www.elliottemple.com/debate-policy
How about challenging my conclusion that energy depletion is a problem neglected by many, and that we’re starting to hit limits to growth ?
OK, as a kind of demonstration, I will try engaging about this some, and I will even skip over asking about why this issue is an important priority compared to alternative issues.
First question: What thinkers/ideas have you read that disagree with you, and what did you do to address them and conclude that they’re wrong?
Do you believe misquoting violates consent similarly to deadnaming, and should have a similar norm against it? Yes or no?
What sort of examples do you want? Do you want me to call out specific individuals who misquoted and say that’s bad? You could look through my comment history and find some examples if you want to, but I thought drawing attention to and shaming those people would be bad.
It’s easier to discuss whether misquoting is very bad for truth seeking, and mistreats a victim, without simultaneously making it a discussion about whether particular individuals in the community are bad.
The deadnaming article has a one paragraph summary near the start. It also has the text:
I think this norm [against deadnaming] is good. I think the same norm should be applied to misquoting for the same reasons. It currently isn’t (context).
The links clarify that EA does not have a strong norm against misquoting. What’s the problem? Maybe you missed that part when skimming? It’s in the introduction immediately before the article summary. The rest of the article does not attempt to argue this point; it’s talking about something else which builds on this premise.
Why is this even controversial? If I tell you a misquote or poor cite in the sequences or some other literature you like, you aren’t going to care much or start taking actions regarding the problem (such as checking whether the same author made more errors of a similar nature), right? You don’t believe that misquoting is like deadnaming someone and should have a similar norm against it because it’s hurtful to the victim in addition to being poor scholarship, do you? Don’t you disagree with me and know that you disagree with me? The norm I’m advocating is not normal nor popular with any large group. So, fine, disagree with me – but I find it a really bizarre reaction for people who disagree with me to dismiss my arguments on the basis that I’m obviously right and this is a waste of time due to being uncontroversial common knowledge. Most people think stuff like “People are sloppy sometimes, which isn’t a big deal.” instead of thinking, “Being sloppy with quotes in particular isn’t acceptable. Use copy/paste. If you must type something in, triple check it. There’s no real excuse for quotes to be inaccurate in tiny ways; that’s really bad even if the wording changes do not substantively change the meaning.”
I’d like to first establish that this issue matters, and only second, potentially point out some specific examples. As long as I don’t think anyone considers misquoting to actually be very bad, I don’t think it’s a good idea to bring up examples of people doing it. Also I don’t think the problem is a few individuals behaving badly; it’s a widespread problem of community attitudes and norms. The community simply doesn’t value this kind of accuracy and is OK with misquotes; in that context, it’s unfair to be very hard on individuals who get caught misquoting, so that’s another reason not to name and shame anyone. If i give examples people will just tell me that the misquote didn’t change the conclusion in that case and therefore doesn’t really matter (rather than agreeing with me), which is not the point. Misquotes mistreat the person quoted like deadnaming, and also like other inaccuracies they’re bad for truth seeking whether or not they change the conclusion. These are not popular claims, but I think they’re important, so I tried to argue and explain them, and neither of these claims would be served well by examples because they’re both about concepts not concretes. And if people don’t like conceptual articles, or struggle to understand them, or don’t like long articles … fine whatever, but saying that people agree with me, when they don’t, is really weird.
Also regarding evaluating a book, I just did 4 demonstrations for EA at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yKd7Co5LznH4BE54t/game-i-find-three-errors-in-your-favorite-text and 3 of them include a screen recording of my whole process.
This would centralize the information in one spot (that you can redirect people to in future debates and works).
I have tried many centralizing or organizing things. Here’s an example of one which has gotten almost no response or interest: https://www.elliottemple.com/reason-and-morality/
Anyway, I have plenty more things I could try. I have plenty to say. And I know there’s plenty of room for improvement in my stuff including regarding organization. I will keep posting things at EA for now. Even if I stop, I’ll keep posting at my own sites. Even if no one listens, it doesn’t matter so much; I like figuring out and writing about these things; it’s my favorite activity.
An unrelated note: I liked your post on the damage big companies were doing on your forum.
FYI, it’s hard for me to know what post you mean without a link or title because I have thousands of posts, and I often have multiple posts about the same topic.
I don’t really understand why you think the damage they do is not compatible with capitalism—I don’t see anything in the definition of capitalism that would preclude such an outcome.
The definition of capitalism involves a free market where the initiation of force (including fraud) is prohibited. Today, fraud is pretty widespread at large companies. Also, many versions of capitalism allow the government to use force, but they do not allow the government to meddle in the economy and give advantages to some companies over others which are derived from the government’s use of force (so some companies are, indirectly via the government, using force against competitors). Those are just two examples (of many).
(I may not reply further about capitalism or anything political, but I thought that would be short and maybe helpful.)
so you can’t distinguish between people who have something to hide and people who would be ok with the concept if they had heard about it.
You can tell them about the debate policy concept and see how they react. You can also look at whether they respond to criticisms of their work. You can also make a tree of the field and look at whether that expert is contributing important nodes to it or not.
I don’t see such a practice becoming mainstream for the next few decades.
I think it could become important, widespread and influential in a few years if it had a few thousand initial supporters. I think getting even 100 initial supporters is the biggest obstacle, then turning that into a bigger group is second. Then once you have a bigger group that can be vocal enough in online discussions, they can get noticed by popular intellectuals and bring up debate policies to them and get responses of some kinds. Then you just need one famous guy to like the idea and it can get a lot more attention and it will then be possible to say “X has a debate policy; why don’t you?” And I can imagine tons of fans bringing that up in comment sections persistently for many of the popular online intellectuals. It’s easy to imagine fans of e.g. Jordan Peterson bugging him about it endlessly until he does it.
I think the reason that doesn’t happen is that most people don’t actually seem to want it, like it or care, so getting to even 100 supporters of the idea is very hard. The issue IMO is the masses resisting, rejecting or not caring about the idea (of the few who see it, most dislike or ignore it), including at EA, for reasons I don’t understand well enough.
For instance, let’s take someone like Nate Hagens. How would you go to judge his reliability?
I glanced at the table of contents and saw mention of Malthus. That’s a topic I know about, so I could read that section and be in a pretty good position to evaluate it or catch errors. Finding a section where I have expertise and checking that is a useful technique.
There’s a fairly common thing where people read the newspaper talking about their field and they are like “wow it’s so bad. this is so amateurish and full of obvious errors”. Then they read the newspaper on any other topic and believe the quality is decent. It isn’t. You should expect the correctness of the parts you know less about to probably be similar to the part you know a lot about.
At a glance at the Malthus section, the book seems to be on the same side as Malthus, which I disagree with. So a specific thing I’d look for is whether the book brings up and tries to address some of the arguments on my side that I regard as important. If it ignores the side of the debate I favor, and doesn’t have any criticisms of anything I believe, that’d be bad. I did a text search for “Godwin” and there are no results. (Godwin is a classical liberal political philosopher from the same time period as Malthus who I like a lot. He wrote a book about why Malthus was wrong.) There are also no results for “Burke” and no mention of Adam Smith (nor turgot, bastiat, condorcet, mises, rothbard, hayek). I see it as a potentially bad sign to look at old thinkers/writers only to bring up one who is on your side without talking about other ideas from the time period including disagreements and competing viewpoints. It can indicate bias to cherry pick one past thinker to bring up.
That’s inconclusive. Maybe it gives fair summaries of rival viewpoints and criticizes them; I didn’t look enough to actually know. I don’t want to spend more time and energy on this right now (also I dislike the format and would want to download a copy of the book to read it more). I think it gives you some idea about ways to approach this – methods – even though I didn’t actually do much. Also, in my experience, the majority of books like this will fail at fact checking at least once if you check five random cites, so that would be worth checking if you care about whether the facts in the book are trustworthy.
I’m actually interested in that—if you have found sources and documents that provide a better picture of how brains work, I’d be interested. The way I work in debate is that if you provide somehing that explains the world in a better way than my current explanation, then I’ll use it.
I have already tried telling people about evolutionary psychology and many other topics that they are interested in.
I determined that it mostly doesn’t work due to incorrect debate methodology, lack of intellectual skills (e.g. tree-making skills or any alternative to accomplish the same organizational purposes), too-low intellectual standards (like being dismissive of “small” errors instead of thinking errors merit post mortems), lack of persistence, quitting mid-discussion without explanation (often due to bias against claims you’re losing to in debate), poor project management, getting emotional, lack of background knowledge, lack of willingness to get new background knowledge mid-discussion, unwillingness to proceed in small, organized steps, imprecision, etc.
Hence I’ve focused on topics with priority which I believe are basically necessary prerequisite issues before dealing with the other stuff productively.
In other words, I determined that standard, widespread, common sense norms for rationality and debate are inadequate to reach true conclusions about evolutionary psychology, AGI, animal welfare, capitalism, what charity interventions should be pursued, and so on. The meta and methodological issues need to be dealt with first. And people’s disinterest in those issues and resistance to dealing with them is a sign of irrationality and bias – it’s part of the problem.
So I don’t want to attempt to discuss evolutionary psychology with you because I don’t think it will work well due to those other issues. I don’t think you will discuss such a complex, hard issue in a way that will actually lead to a correct conclusion, even if that requires e.g. reading books and practicing skills as part of the process (which I suspect it would require). Like you’ll make an inductivist or justificationist argument, and then I’ll mention that Popper refuted that, and then to resolve the issue we’ll need a whole sub-discussion where you engage with Popper in a way capable of reaching an accurate conclusion. That will lead to some alternatives like you could read and study Popper, or you could review the literature for Popper critics who already did that who you could endorse, or you could argue that Popper is actually irrelevant, or there are other options but none are particularly easy. And there can be many layers of sub-issues, like most people should significantly improve their reading skills before it’s reasonable to try to read a lot of complex literature and expect to find the truth (rather than doing it more for practice), and people should improve their grammar skills before expecting to write clear enough statements in debates, and people should improve their math and logic skills before expecting to actually get much right in debates, and people should improve their introspection skills before expecting to make reasonably unbiased claims in debates (and also so they can more accurately monitor when they’re defensive or emotional).
I tried, many times, starting with an object level issue, discussing it until a few errors happened, and then trying to pivot the discussion to the issues which caused and/or prevented correction of those errors. I tried using an initial discussion as a demonstration that the meta problems actually exist, that the debate won’t work and will be full of errors, etc. I found basically that no one ever wanted to pivot to the meta topic. Having a few errors pointed out did not open their eyes to a bigger picture problem. One of the typical responses is doing a quick, superficial “fix” for each error and then wanting to move on without thinking about root causes, what process caused the error, what other errors the same process would cause, etc.
Sorry you took it that way.
This is an archetypical non-apology that puts blame on the person you’re speaking to. It’s a well known stereotype of how to do fake apologies. If you picked up this speech pattern by accident because it’s a common pattern that you’ve heard a lot, and you don’t realize what it means, then I wanted to warn you because you’ll have a high chance of offending people by apologizing this way. I think maybe it’s an accident here because I didn’t get a hostile vibe from you in the rest; this one sentence doesn’t fit well. It’s also an inaccurate sentence since I didn’t take it that way. I said how it reads. I spoke directly about interpretations rather than simply having one interpretation I took for granted and replied based on. I showed awareness that it could be read, interpreted or intended in multiple ways. I was helpfully letting you know about a problem rather than being offended.
The alternatives are things like:
raise intellectual standards
have debate policies
use rational debate to reject lots of bad ideas
judge public intellectuals by how they handle debate, and judge ideas by the current objective state of the debate
read and engage with some other philosophers (e.g. Popper, Goldratt and myself)
actually write down what’s wrong with the bad philosophers in a clear way instead of just disliking them (this will facilitate debating and reaching conclusions about which ones are actually good)
investigate what philosophical premises you hold, and their sources, and reconsider them
There are sub-steps, e.g. to raise intellectual standards people need to improve their ability to read, write and analyze text, and practice that until a significantly higher skill level and effectiveness is intuitive/easy. That can be broken down into smaller steps such as learning grammar, learning to make sentence tree diagrams, learning to make paragraph tree diagrams, learning to make multi-paragraph tree diagrams, etc.
I have a forum people can join and plenty of writing and videos which include actionable suggestions about steps to take. I’ve also have proposed things that I think people can picture, like that all arguments are addressed in truth-seeking and time-efficient ways instead of ignored. If that was universal, it would have consequences such as it being possible to go to a charity or company and telling them some ideas and making some arguments and then, if you’re right, they probably change. If 10% of charities were open to changing due to rational argument, it’d enable a lot of resources to be used more effectively.
BTW, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have much confidence in your political opinions (or spend much time or effort on them) without doing those other kinds of activities first.
I think you’re mistaken about evolutionary psychology and brains, but I don’t know how to correct you (and many other people similar to you) because your approach is not optimized for debate and (boring!?) scholarship like mine. That is one of many topics where I’d have some things to say if people changed their debate methodology, scholarly standards, etc. (I already tried debating this topic and many others in the past, but I found that it didn’t work well enough and I identified issues like debate methodology as the root cause of various failures.)
I also agree with and already (try to) do some of what you say. I have lots of material breaking things into smaller parts and making it easier to learn. But there are difficulties, e.g. when the parts are small then the value from each one individually (usually) becomes small too. To get a big result people have to learn many small parts and combine them, which can be hard and require persistence and project management. You’re not really saying anything new to me, which is fine, but FYI I already know about additional difficulties which it’s harder to find answers for.
The brain is better at processing stuff that is concrete. Visual stuff like pictures.
I’m personally not a very visual thinker and I’m good at abstract thinking. This reads to me as denying my lived experience or forgetting that other types of people exist. If you had said that the majority of people like pictures, then I could have agreed with you. It’s not that big a deal – I’m used to ignoring comments that assume I don’t exist or make general statements about what people are like which do not apply to me. I’m not going to get offended and stop talking to you over it. But I thought it was relevant enough to mention.
Attracting readers is a different activity than truth seeking. Articles should be evaluated primarily by whether people can refute what the article says or not. If I avoid errors that anyone knows about, then I’ve done a great job. A rational forum should be able to notice that, value it and engage with it, without me doing anything extra to get attention.
Truth seeking and attracting typical readers are different skills. People usually aren’t great at both. A community that emphasizes and rewards attracting will tend to get issues wrong and alienate rational people.
I got to a major, motivating point (“a bias where long criticism is frequently ignored”) in the third sentence. If someone is unable to recognize that as something to care about, or gets bored before getting that far, then I don’t think they’re the right audience for me. They could also find out about “Method: Reply to the First Important Error” by reading the bullet point outline.
I read far worse writing all the time. It’s not a big deal. Readers should be flexible and tolerant, learn to skim as desired, etc. They should also pick up on less prominent quality signals like clarity.
Any time I spend on polishing means less writing and research. I write or edit daily. I used to edit/polish less and publish more, and I still think that might have been better. There are tradeoffs. I now have a few hundred thousand unpublished words awaiting editing, including over 30,000 words in EA-related drafts since I started posting here.
I’m also more concerned with attracting especially smart, knowledgeable, high-effort readers than attracting a large number of readers. Put another way, the things you’re asking for are not how I decide what articles or authors to read.
Anyway, I appreciate the feedback. I intentionally added some summary to some articles recently, which I viewed as similar to an abstract from an academic paper. I’m not necessarily against that kind of thing, but I do have concerns to take into account.
Questions like: How can I show that this theoretical stuff can be useful in the real world ?
I have answers to this and various other things, but I don’t have short, convincing answers that work with pre-existing shared premises with most people. The difficulty is too much background knowledge is different. My ideas make more sense and can be explained in shorter ways if someone knows a lot about Karl Popper’s ideas. My Popperian background and perspective clashes with the Bayesian perspectives here and it’s not mainstream either. (There are no large Popperian communities comparable to LW or EA to go talk to instead.)
The lack of enough shared premises is also, in my experience, one of the main reasons people don’t like to debate with me. People usually don’t want to rethink fundamental issues and actually don’t know how to. If you go to a chemist and say “I disagree with the physics premises that all your chemistry ideas are based on”, they maybe won’t know how to, or want to, debate physics with you. People mostly want to talk about stuff within their field that they know about, not talk about premises that some other type of person would know about. The obvious solution to this is talk to philosophers, but unfortunately philosophy is one of the worst and most broken fields and there’s basically no one reasonable to talk to and almost no one doing reasonable work. Because philosophy is so broken, people should stop trusting it and getting premises from it. Everything else is downstream of philosophy, so it’s hurting EA and everything else. But this is a rather abstract issue which, so far, I haven’t been able to get many people to care much about.
I could phrase it using more specifics but then people will disagree with me. E.g. “induction is wrong so...” will get denials that induction is wrong. (Induction is one of the main things Popper criticized. I don’t think any philosopher has ever given a reasonable rebuttal to defend induction. I’ve gone through a lot of literature on that issue and asked a lot of people.) The people who deny induction is wrong consistently want to take next steps that I think are the wrong approach, such as debating induction without using literature references or ignoring the issue. Whereas I think the next step should basically be to review the literature instead of making ad hoc arguments. But that’s work. I’ve done that work but people don’t want to trust my results (which is fine) and also don’t want to do the work themselves, which leaves it difficult to make progress.
I wouldn’t count on many people learning these skills in such a context.
Each individual thing is a solvable problem. But, yes, I don’t expect many people to solve a long list of problems. But I still claim it is possible.
Here’s some of the info https://criticalfallibilism.com/practice-and-mastery/
Increasing such suffering via one’s marginal consumption [of factory-farmed meat or farmed fish] is bad on virtually all consequentialist views.
The issue isn’t your consumption at the margin. The issue is all of your consumption (actually purchasing) of these foods.
It is widely acknowledged that, to human psychology, racism is a ticking bomb that we should make a consistent effort to steer away from, lest we corrode our collective attitudes and in turn end up systematically exploiting and harming certain groups of individuals.
A ticking bomb (approximately) hasn’t caused any harm yet. Racism has already caused immense harm. So that analogy is wrong. And it’s presented as something the author claims is widely acknowledged, so that’s wrong too.
Common sense suggests that we cannot think clearly about the moral status of a given group of individuals as long as we eat them.
Common sense says that it’s difficult to think clearly when you have some large incentive or bias. But it doesn’t make an impossibility claim (“cannot”).
Title:
Underappreciated consequentialist reasons to avoid consuming animal products
Later:
we should adhere to stricter principles than a naive consequentialist analysis might imply.
A good reason to adhere to reasonably strict principles is that, if we loosen our principles and leave everything up for case-by-case calculation, we open the door for biases to sneak in.
The title suggests he’ll give arguments from a consequentialist perspective, but then he started arguing with consequentialism (at least the “naive” types, but he didn’t explain what types exist and how the naive and non-naive types differ).
Part of what’s going on here is that Popperian epistemology says, in brief summary, we learn by critical thinking and debate (both within our mind and with others). Bayesian epistemology does not say that. It (comparatively) downplays the roles of debate and criticism.
In the Popperian view, a rational debate is basically the same process as rational thinking but externalized to involve other people. Or put the other way around, trying to make critical arguments about ideas in your head that you’re considering is one of the main aspects of thinking.
I’m unaware of any Bayesian who claims to have adequate knowledge of Popper who has written some kind of refutation of Popperian epistemology, or who endorses and takes responsibility for a particular refutation written by someone familiar with Popper’s views. This is asymmetric. Popper wrote refutations of Bayesian ideas and generally made a significant effort to critically analyze other schools of thought besides his own and to engage with critics.
Also, if you want people to debate you, maybe you should make a shortlist of the top things you feel would be productive to debate you on. : )
The things I’m most interested in debating are broad, big picture issues like about debate methodology or what the current state of the Popper/Bayes debate is (e.g. what literature exists, what is answered by what, what is unanswered). Attempts to debate other topics will turn into big picture discussions anyway because I will challenge premises, foundations or methodology.
The debate topic doesn’t really matter to me because, if it isn’t one of these big picture issues, I’ll just change the topic. The bigger picture issues have logical priority. Reaching a conclusion related to e.g. poverty depends on debate and thinking methodology, what epistemology is correct, what knowledge is, what is a good argument, what does it take to reach a conclusion about an issue, how should people behave during debates, when should people use literature references or write fresh arguments, etc. I don’t want to name some attention-getting issues as potential debate topics and then effectively bait-and-switch people by only talking philosophy. I’ll either talk about the issues I think have logical priority or else, if we disagree about that, then about which issues have logical priority and why. Either way it’ll be fairly far removed from any EA causes, though it’ll have implications for EA causes.
OK. Would you write a thesis statement that you think is true, and expect me to disagree with, that you’d like to debate? (Or a thesis for me that you want to refute would also work.) So we can clarify what we’re debating.
I just wrote some comments today without being informed they would use the CC BY license, and I don’t want to license them that way. I guess I should go delete them? But I don’t think the license is revokable, so does that even work? But I never consented to the license so it shouldn’t be in force in the first place...
Then I went to put up a post, which I’d already finished writing, and a thing about the license popped up. I did not agree to it, the popup is gone now, and I can’t get it back by reloading the page or starting a new post again.
I see nothing by the posting or commenting forms that persistently notifies people about the license. Just the one-time popup that disappears forever(?) even if not agreed to.
This is not OK.
Also basically I don’t want to use the forum anymore because I don’t want to use the CC BY license :(