NelsonRushton
Doctorate in mathematics, specializing in probability theory, from the University of Georgia. Masters in AI from the University of Georgia. 15 years as a computer science professor at Texas Tech. Now I work as a logician for an AI startup. Married with one son. He's an awesome little dude.
I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit, and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I think there is noise in the signal.
User ID: 2940
First things first: the tweet is just wrong on its face, unless you would have me believe that the people who protested against racially integrated schools in 1960s America were really in the right all along (hot take if so).
Good point. Not to mention the pro slavery mobs who used to riot and destroy the buildings and printing presses of anti-slavery newspapers. There were over 100 documented cases of this in the pre-Civil-War era in the United States [source].
By the way, the pro-slavery rioters were Democrats, and Democrat politicians and police often looked the other way as it happened. That pattern continued on straight from Andrew Jackson in the 1830's to Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960's. Fast forward to today: some things have changed, and some have stayed the same. Black is the new white; BLM is the new KKK, and Democrats are the new... Democrats!
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
the net upvotes tell the story of which way TheMotte leans ideologically.
It is a little sad, for The Motte, that it can be assumed people upvote arguments whose conclusions they agree with (as opposed to meritorious arguments on all sides).
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Good info. Another factor that exacerbates this problem is exchange rates. If you look at the GDP of China, it is 17.7 trillion nominal, but 33 trillion measured in PPP (link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China). That is to say, if you take the total output of the Chinese economy in yuan, and convert the yuan to dollars at market exchange rates (a guy grows a bag of oranges and sells them to his neighbor for 15 yuan = 2.1 dollars), you'd get 17.7 trillion dollars -- but if you take the actual stuff that they make, and sold it in the US for dollars (guy grows the same bag of oranges and sells it to you for 4.2 dollars), you'd get 33 trillion. Why the difference? because the dollar is, still for now, the world's preferred reserve currency; ergo, people want dollars more than they want yuan; dollars have a sole source (the US Govt), and so a dollar buys a lot of oranges, and a lot of everything else, on the world market.
This is great for people in the US who buy imported manufactured goods -- but is not so great for people who work manufacturing jobs in the US. If it costs a US auto worker $500 a month to feed his family, it only costs the competing Chinese laborer $268 (dollar equivalent) to buy the same amount of food. The same goes for other necessities across the board, so the Chinese worker can comfortably work for just over half of what the American worker does (in dollars) and enjoy the same standard of living. Pretty hard for American car companies to compete under those conditions.
NelsonRushton
24d ago
Let's say both sides are equal. In that case, "deterrent to future attacks" is equivalent to "tit for tat forever". This obviously doesn't work.
Doesn't work compared to what? I would rather have intermittent tit for tat forever than constant tit for tit forever, which is the salient alternative. Deterrence is not about being stronger than your attacker; it is about making it persistently, conspicuously not-worthwhile for him to victimize you. That is how it works in prison, for example. Either you fight periodically, win or lose, or your horizons get broadened in a really interesting way.
NelsonRushton
24d ago
Notably absent among your conjectures 1-4 is deterrent to future attacks. That is the obvious top of the stack.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
To be a really fine point on this, what happens in the real world when there is an armed resistance against a government that lacks maximal willingness and ability to kill 'em all and let God (or Allah, as it were) sort 'em out? The most salient example in a first-world nation seems like the Irish Republican Army and their experience is not at all consistent with the idea that armed resistance doesn't do anything
Amen.
Also, I would look at the low (single digit percent) compliance rate with the "assault weapons" bans in Connecticut and New York. They knew (from sales records) who had the guns, so why didn't they go door to door and confiscate them? Because their owners had already demonstrated that they were willing to become felons on a matter of principle, so some of them just might be willing to shoot it out with the cops. And if even one, let alone three or five, of those incidents happened, where the gun owner was killed by the police in the raid along with possibly one or more cops, it would spark a backlash that would be very bad for the politicians who ordered the raid. Hence, those laws are not being enforced.
Also, if you are from NY or CT and are one of the patriots who didn't register your "assault weapon", then you are a friend of mine -- and if we ever meet dinner is on me.
Original to theMotte
Sorry it took me so long to respond to this. Thanks for the thoughtful engagement.
@NelsonRushton: It is a mistake to picture a code of conduct that benefits "the community": each person is, after all, a member of multiple overlapping communities of various sizes and levels of cohesion, whose interests are frequently in conflict with each other.
@coffee_enjoyer: This is your brain on 20th century propaganda. More seriously, nobody in the past had any problem understanding what their in-group was. It was ethnicity and religion.
Shared ethnicity and/or religion is a matter of degree, not a Boolean function. What looks like the same ethnicity or religion from afar, or in one conflict, may look like different ethnicities or religions when you zoom in, or look at a different conflict. This is nothing new. For example, the Book of Joshua, written at the latest around 600 BC, records nations being formally subdivided into hierarchies of tribes, clans, and families:
So Joshua got up early in the morning and brought Israel forward by tribes, and the tribe of Judah was selected. So he brought the family of Judah forward, and he selected the family of the Zerahites; then he brought the family of the Zerahites forward man by man, and Zabdi was selected. And he brought his household forward man by man; and Achan, son of Carmi, son of Zabdi, son of Zerah, from the tribe of Judah, was selected.
And these various hierarchies were well known to endure conflicts of interest, if not outright enmity, at every level of the hierarchy, from civil war between tribes (and coalitions of tribes) within a nation, right down to nuclear families:
Then the men of Judah gave a shout: and as the men of Judah [Southern Israel] shouted, it came to pass, that God smote Jeroboam and all [Northern] Israel before Abijah and Judah. [2 Chronicles: 15]
And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. [Genesis 4:8]
So what your "ingroup" looks like depend on the particular conflict we are looking at, and the level of structure at which the conflict takes place. These conflicts can be life and death at all levels, and someone who is in your ingroup during a conflict at one level may be in the outgroup in a conflict at another level on another occasion. This phenomenon is a major theme -- arguably the major theme -- of the oldest written documents that exist on every continent where writing was discovered. In Greece and Isarael, for example, those documents were composed orally in the iron age based on legendary events of the bronze age. If that is my brain on propaganda, it isn't 20'th century propaganda.
@coffee_enjoyer: Utilitarianism as a practical framework comes with huge benefits for an in-group, just not when seen as a top-level explanation of morality... Another way that utilitarianism can help us practically is by creating rules which govern interaction between groups without privileging any one group...
Let's imagine a Medieval man at arms, standing atop a rampart, says to his comrade, "Aristotle wrote that an object falls at a speed proportional to its weight. Wanna see?" Then he takes a boulder and shoves it off the edge of the castle wall, and it falls on an enemy soldier and squishes him. "Good ol' Aristotle," he says, "What would we do without him?".
By analogy, your post describes some interesting examples of groups with competing interests entering into agreements, binding one way or another, that tend to benefit everyone involved. But I do not believe they are really deploying utilitarianism as a moral theory (as opposed to some other theory to morally justify their actions, if indeed they feel the need to morally justify them at all), and I do not believe that the success of their stratagems is evidence for utilitarianism. That is, Aristotle in my story analogous to, say, John Stuart Mill in yours. For your examples to count as anecdotal evidence of the normative force of utilitarianism, you would have to argue that the people in those stories were acting morally -- not just that they benefitted from what they did -- by comparison with what they would have done if they had acted on some other moral theory. For your examples to count as evidence of the efficacy of utilitarianism, you would have to argue that (1) they were thinking in utilitarian terms, as opposed to some other moral theory, and (2) other groups that employ competing theories fare worse by comparison.
Good writeup
I appreciate you saying so.
I suspect that people are drawn to rule utilitarianism because it resolves a certain bind they find themselves in. Let's suppose that I have a landlord who is an all around scumbag, and I don't like him. Suppose I know that, if he needed a live saving medical procedure that cost, say, $10,000, and asked me to help out, I would say no. So his life is worth less to me than $10,000. On the other hand, if I had an opportunity to do him in and take $10,000 in the bargain, and get away clean like Raskolnikov, I would not do it. I think people with certain worldviews feel obliged to articulate an explanation of why that is not irrational, and within those same worldviews, they don't have much to cling to in formulating the explanation. Dostoyevsky's explanation would probably strike them as unscientific. They don't realize that if they keep that up, their grandson might actually do it.
Or maybe, they need a pretext for pointing a finger at the people they feel are doing wrong, and being able to say more authoritative sounding than "boo!", that, again, flies within their worldview.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
I spent about half an hour on this post. The longest draft was a paragraph, but my eventual opinion was that the connection, for those who had read Frankenstein, would be more dramatic if I left it at that. If the post is deficient, it is not from lack of effort but lack of ability.
The easy solution is to simply reject the idea of "our community".
This may be an ideal solution, but I do not believe it is an easy solution. A community collectively and instinctively puts people in categories, assigns default characteristics to people in these categories, views the categories as part of the identity of its members, and views the categories as competing factions. If you think you can easily (or totally) escape buying into that factionalism, I think you are under an illusion. The trick is not to eliminate identity groups as functional units of society, but to make the competition between them honest, healthy, and based on furthering interests that are shared among the identity groups.
I feel the OP's pain. But the closer you are to God, the less it will matter to you whether you are a member of a group that happens to suffer from an epidemic of foolishness (whether it is biological or cultural). Moreover, if your people are acting like fools, you dissociate yourself from the foolishness precisely to the extent that you call it out. For example, as a white Christian Republican, my people have a history of irrational and immoral hatred for gays. As a Southerner from Alabama, my people have a history of hypocritically identifying as Christian while also having racist contempt for blacks. If I call those sins out, I am not stained by them. I can actually feel my conscience being freed when I acknowledge them. But, to the extent that I remain silent about those corporate sins of my own people, and at the same time identify as members of those groups, I am truly guilty by association (whether I am individually an offender or not).
The same thing goes for other groups. If you are a Muslim and that is part of your identity, that does not make you part of the problems of Islamic fascism, genocidal antisemitism, and terrorism -- but, if you aren't talking about those problems in the Muslim world and calling them out, then you are part of the problems -- even if you don't advocate for Sharia law, or hate jews, or fly airplanes into buildings. Similarly, if you are black, and you aren't talking about the problems of black supremacy, anti-intellectualism, deadbeat dads, serially pregnant welfare moms, gang violence, or whatever you honestly see as the problems in your community, then you are part of those problems. On the other hand, if you are vocally calling them out and trying to address those issues, then you are not part of the problem -- and also, you are fundamentally part of a bigger identity group called "Honest, caring people".
Correct me if I am wrong, self_made_human, but it seems to me that the unstated premise of your position is this: if someone holds an uncertain belief, and then they see something, and they revise their degree of certainty based on what they saw, and if they are acting rationally, then they must be doing Bayesian updating. Do you affirm that?
I think a lot of people fall into the trap of thinking probabilities are the only rational way of representing and reasoning with uncertain information because, unless they take an AI class, it is the only method covered in a typical undergraduate curriculum. This leaves them with the impression that "probability" means degree of belief, "probability theory" means the logic of reasoning about degrees of belief, and that the problem has been settled of the right way to do such reasoning. If all of that were true, and if Bayes rule were the only way to update beliefs using probability theory, then the unstated premise above would be correct. The problems are that (1) none of that is true, and (2) even when we use probability theory to update our beliefs, we are not always using Bayes rule.
Probability theory is actually a specific set of axioms that constitutes one particular way of reasoning about degrees of belief. There are well developed alternatives to probability theory -- including certainty factors (as used in Mycin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin), Dempster-Schafer evidence theory, backpropagation (as used in large language models such as ChatGPT), and many others, which are often more effective than probability theory for particular applications -- none of which use Bayes formula or can even be incidentally described by it. Moreover, even among belief-updating methods that do use probability theory, the most frequently used approach in scientific literature is parametric statistics -- which (as I point out in a separate reply) does not use Bayesian updating.
If you claim that physicists, for example, routinely use Bayesian updating, and you claim to hold that belief for a good reason, then you should be able to give evidence that they are thinking in terms of conditional probabilities (satisfying the axioms of probability) and updating them by Bayes equation -- which is a much more specific claim than that they merely change their degrees of belief after making observations in an effective manner.
NelsonRushton
10d ago
From reading Nixonland, he documents a bunch of right wing protestors doing the same thing left wing protestors did in the 1960's. We never really hear about it though. We only hear about left wing protestors vs police or the National Guard.
How many is a bunch, and what counts as the same thing? I'm curious to see a list of these and I challenge you to a game: you name a documented act of Republican act of mob violence (where most of the protesters presumably self-identified as republicans and at least one person was injured), and I will name two Democrat acts of mob violence, etc., back and forth for as long as you can come up with them. "A dollar a ball until the loser says quit" [The Hustler].
NelsonRushton
22d ago
guess I’m confused why you think rule utilitarianism is uniquely required or faulty for the situation you describe.
I don't think rule utilitarianism is uniquely required; it just seems to be the most common candidate for a theory of absolute morality based on Enlightenment epistemology. I don't think the other candidates are any better.
Even if I like my neighbor, why am I the only option for $10k?
It is an element of the hypothetical.
What moral system would demand the $10k payment?
What facially seems to merit the $10K payment is not a particular moral theory, but the situation that (1) I would not pay $10K to save his life, therefore (2) his life is worth less to me than $10K, (3) I have an opportunity to do away with him and collect $10, and (4) I am allegedly a rational agent; so by #2, #3, and #4 I should be expected to pull a Raskolnikov. Yet I don't. What requires a moral theory is to resolve the paradox (or am I just being a sentimental sucker?).
NelsonRushton
24d ago
It's not the individual story, it's the statistical mismatch between stories generally and reality. If there was a murder mystery series and it turned out the murderer was a Jew 75% of the time, and it wasn't set in Israel, it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the writers must have something against Jews.
Just have to say that is awesome and I will have to remember it.
While it is true that Dr. Frankenstein wanted to know something, I think to state that as his motive, and leave it at that, leaves out what is most essential. I submit that Victor Frankenstein has more in common with Faust, or Elric of Melniboné than he does with, say, Paul Erdos, or Thomas Edison (doesn't it feel so?). Like Faust and Elric, but unlike Erdos or Edison, Dr. Frankenstein commits copious moral transgressions in the service of his compulsive quest (e.g., desecrating dead bodies, theft, vivisection). In his effort to cross certain boundaries as a far term objective, he crosses boundaries that he knows, or ought now, should not be crossed in the here and now. He could have violated those boundaries in a quest for knowledge, or, like Elric or Gilgamesh, in a quest for something else. So, I think Frankenstein's quest for knowledge is relatively incidental while his quest by forbidden means, for what he ought to know is within the exclusive dominion of the gods is essential. Like Prometheus.
If this analogy [I presume you mean the analogy between the trans-mania and Frankenstein] has any legs, it has to be about the desire to see if man can be turned into woman and vice versa, about transhumanism and the escape from the binding of natural laws without regard for prevailing morality... Not the petty bureaucratic impulse of classification and normalization that moves Canada as a nation and its managerial ilk today, which itself is justified by conforming to a morality, not disregard for it.
From this I suspect one difference between you and me is that I believe Dr. Frankenstein -- along with Faust, and Elric, and the trans-mutilators -- are recklessly crosswise of morality plain and simple, not merely "prevailing" morality. They all lie to themselves to justify the intoxicating ecstasy of crossing boundaries, and seeming, for the time being, to get away with it. Like Prometheus.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
The definitive portrayal of Dr. Frankenstein, of course, is Mary Shelly's novel. Before I respond to this, I am curious whether you (@IGI-111) have read the book, and, in case you have, whether, upon reflection, you think it is accurate to describe Dr. Frankenstein's driving motive as "lust for knowledge".
Not to derail, and it's possible that you're still right, since I don't know what exactly constitutes hatred for you, but I do think the scriptures are pretty clear that homosexual sex is bad.
Important enough question for a derail, IMO. What constitutes hatred, for me, is taking carnal delight in the pain and loss (or prospective pain and loss) of another person. This is as opposed to indignation, by which I mean making a judgment that someone's conduct is immoral and, if it rises to a certain level, calls for punishment. In that light, my case is twofold. First (as I think @Felagund anticipated),
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. [Matthew 25: 42-45 KJV]
Jesus doesn't say "I was in prison for something I did not do and ye visited me not", or "I was in prison for a minor offense, and you visited me not". The people who count as the least of our brothers include people who have actually committed a major offense. So I think it is consistent, and indeed only right, to judge an action as a sin without hating the person who committed it. If my brother drove home drunk from a night on the town, or even murdered someone, I could acknowledge that as wrong, or gravely wrong in the latter case, without hating him.
Second, the Bible does condemn homosexual sodomy. Just as strongly, it condemns witchcraft, idol worship, working on Saturday, cursing your parents, eating meat of an animal that been strangled, consuming animal blood (e.g., blood sausage), premarital sex, and many other things which call for the death penalty under Mosaic law. Some of these prohibitions, including idol worship, consuming animal blood, and eating the meat of a strangled animal, carry over explicitly into New Testament law [cf. Acts 15]. Bible believing Christians, as a rule, do not take all of those seriously as sins, let alone call for death by stoning for all of them -- so they have to square with that one way or another.
But of all ways to square with it, to arbitrarily pick one of those alleged sins and lift it up as an abomination on Biblical grounds, while discounting or ignoring the rest, and then to use that capricious choice to justify hating another person, is not only hypocritical but blasphemous -- insofar as it also recklessly puts your bigoted words in God's mouth. Yet, as a group characteristic, that is what Evangelicals [my people] have historically done, and to some degree continue to do, in large numbers by comparison with the general population. I'm not saying we all do it or ever did; I am saying that (1) we did/do it significantly more than our outgroups in the Western world (e.g., white collar Democrats), (2) those of us who do not vocally acknowledge that are part of the problem.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
A prior is a function from subsets of a given sample space to [0,1]. A sampling method is a description of a procedure that gives enough detail that I should be able to repeat the procedure and expect to get results not statistically significantly different from yours. I don't see either of those things here. Did I miss something?
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Looking at blades of grass won't help you because you have prior knowledge that blades of grass aren't crows, and actually looking at them provides you with no additional evidence that is not subsumed by your existing knowledge. If you started picking random things in the universe without prior knowledge of whether they are crows, and then it turned out that they were all non-black non-crows, that would be evidence.
Thanks for the statistically literate post. So please tell me,
If you started picking random things in the universe without prior knowledge of whether they are crows, and then it turned out that they were all non-black non-crows, that would be evidence.
by what rule of inference? If you say Bayes, it would be nice if you sketch your priors and your sampling method, to lend some plausibility to the answer.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
I’m failing to understand why this is a bar any epistemology needs to clear... science as a method verifiably works at improving our material lives because it produces sufficiently accurate information. The utility is the payoff, but the correlation to reality is what enables it.
I did not say that any epistemology needed to clear that bar. If your position is that science a collection of useful fictions, and that discerning the (literally true) laws of nature falls outside the scope of its business, then your position is immune to my argument. For myself, I am a little more romantic about the goals of science.
But is says nothing whatever about future performance, or about the "reliability" of a theory.
I think I see now why I, like many people, misread Popper. Frankly, I think the position he expresses here is so egg-headed that I did not anticipate it. He implicitly conditions future performance (aka reliability) on justified confidence in general, literal truth, and so winds up concluding that theories of physical world have only two levels of reliability: known false, and other. This position hamstrings his theory of corroboration with respect to establishing a rational basis for action -- and that moves him to the bottom of my reading list for philosophy of science. It's not that his work has no intellectual merit (it's all very interesting); it's just that I have better things to do, because I am interested science as a rational basis for discriminating between alternative courses of action, and in philosophy of science as an articulated theory of the rules of evidence for doing so.
It appears that Popper (1) accepts the essence of my argument in the original post, but (2) doesn't believe in miracles -- which commits him to his position on reliability and future-performance, and also makes his theory of corroboration impotent a basis for rational action. I share his view of (1) but not (2).
For clarity, do you agree with the Popper on this (that corroboration says nothing whatever about the future performance of a theory)?
Faith is believing in something that can neither be proven nor disproven with existing methods.
I think the idea of faith as firm belief without evidence is a power grab by fundamentalist clergymen who do not want to be questioned on their axioms. My idea of faith is something entirely different. When the Marines say semper fidelis (always faithful), they are not talking about firm belief in the Marine Corps without evidence; they are talking about doing their duty in relation to the Corps.
To illustrate, imagine (God forbid) my wife is in a coma, it is unknown whether she was brain dead, and it is unknown whether she can perceive what was going on around her. I have two choices: (1) I can say, well she may well already be gone, so I am going to leave her alone in the bed indefinitely, or (2) I can say she might be in there; if she is, she wants to hear from me, so I will go sit by her and hold her hand and talk to her until the situation is resolved for better or worse. That is faith in the sense of faithfulness (Greek pistis, Latin fidelis) in the relationship -- even a relationship with someone who may or may not be in there (or out there), as long as there is hope.
NelsonRushton
9d ago
My claim of fact is that the Democratic party has, since its inception with Andrew Jackson, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, through the civil rights era, and up to this very day, tended to be the party of (1) racial caste systems, (2) illegal mob violence, (3) censorship, and (4) you-work-I-eat, from slavery to welfare.
The nuance here is that (1) we don't know if the election was rigged, and (2) that, by itself, is the problem. Every week I hear people say there is no evidence that the election was rigged. That is the wrong place to put the burden of proof. There is no evidence that the 1946 Russian elections were rigged either, but as Stalin said, "It's not who votes that matters, but who counts." The question is not whether there is evidence the election was rigged, but whether the election was conducted in such a way that there would be evidence if the election were rigged. I think the answer to that question is no -- because if it were yes, Democrats would say that and back it up instead of gaming the burden of proof a la Stalin.
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