Voyager
1yr ago
Wrong. Information by its very nature is limited. Nobody is "artificially" limiting the information that can fit in one bit, one bit can only fit one bit of information. Period.
That's a red herring. We're not talking about bits. We're talking about the information we have about your example, which was given in english.
No, we don't. You are assuming where the week starts.
Liar. The end of the week being sunday was included in your description of the example.
All information is incomplete.
Not all information is incomplete in the sense that reasoning from it leads to false conclusions. Stop defending your fallacious argument.
It contains the congruence class 4Z (= {...-8,-4,0,4,8...}) of which the number, more so the symbol, 4 is a valid representant.
The statement remains true.
Voyager
1yr ago
If a person says "Bob is as racist as Alice", and I show that Alice is not racist, then says, "OK. Bob is as racist as Mary", and I show Mary is not racist, "OK. Bob is as racist as Linda", Linda isn't racist. Wouldn't it make sense to doubt whether or not Bob is actually racist?
Okay, but if someone says "Bob is as racist as a KKK grand wizard", it would still make sense to doubt it. Conversely, if they say "Bob is as racist as Alice, because he's the author of the bobracial supremacy manifesto", pointing out Alice isn't racist just distracts from the point at hand. Yes, it's a bad metaphor, but the point stands.
Compare this discussion. I have refuted your argument that 2+2=4 is not unequivocally true, but I'm still willing to discuss the point you were trying to make without forcing you to come up with a new example.
Voyager
1yr ago
You can't define (or redefine) the meaning of a word in common language. It already has a meaning. What you might call a definition is a description of the meaning, and you measure it by how accurately it overlaps the usage.
Caplan notes that the "classic" description of feminism is inaccurate and offers a better one.
This shouldn't be surprising as a self-description of a political movement is unlikely to be optimized for accuracy or clarity. It's optimized for supporting a political goal, and that goal may well be furthered by deception and deliberate confusion.
(You can take a word, redefine it, and then use it throughout the scope of that definition (e.g. a book).
In math, this works fine, but in politics/political science, it takes exceeding intellectual rigor and honesty, because the words you use have connotations and it's hard to keep them out and use your definition straight.
And when you talk to other people, who don't subscribe to your definition, you have to redetermine all implications of the new concept, and that's not going to happen.)
Scoundrels should be oppressed.
Scoundrels should have justice coming to them, for the bad things they actually do, no more, no less. Doing more than that, because they're bad people who deserve being treated badly, is not justice, and it's not what the justice system is supposed do to, and it can get out of control quickly. That's not autoimmune disorder, that's leukemia.
As long as you're keeping to justice, punishing scoundrels for scoundreling, not for existing, honest people have little to fear. Once you cut down the law to get at scoundrels who "hide behind it" by abiding it, it doesn't protect honest people anymore either.
Another issue is that scoundrel can mean bad people, but it also can mean icky people. Lolicons are the latter.
Voyager
1yr ago
So it's essential.
No it isn't. You will never encounter it in most math fields. Philosophy mostly is what you do when you aren't busy with concrete problems.
Depends on what you mean by "doubt".
What should an engineer do who needs to calculate 1+1 to design a bridge? I hold that anything but "answer 2 and move on" is wasting time that could be used to build a bridge.
The information in English is limited too. Information is always limited.
"Tomorrow is Monday" has limited information.
Exactly. And because the information is limited, relevant information is missing, and you can't make your argument. If you include the missing information, e.g. by saying "Tomorrow is monday, calendar week [current+1]", it becomes obvious that your claim is false, your example only appears to support your claim because information is omitted. It's evidently possible to include this information. Talking about "limited information" is nothing but a smokescreen to hide your attempt to deceive by strategic omission.
The case where the week ends in Saturday is included.
I was specifically addressing the other case (because "this doesn't change if the end of the week is saturday" is obviously irrelevant when the first part 'this' refers to is wrong.)
You claim the information is available because if the week ends in Sunday "we both know" when the week ends. No, we don't, because I don't. If you want to claim you know when the week ends from the phrase "tomorrow is Monday" go ahead, I do not know.
No, I claim I know when the week ends from the phrase "the week ends in sunday", which was included in your example. You're playing obtuse.
And it doesn't seem to me you are engaging with my argument.
That's because you're not understanding (or pretending to not understand) my critique thereof.
My example was crystal clear in explaining that the day the week ends does not matter in describing what day comes after Sunday.
And this claim is simply not true. It does matter if we are interested in what week it is. Your example doesn't show that because it's just colloquial speech where (relevant for us) information is omitted, which is the opposite of crystal clear.
I showed that by giving a counterexample, where it does matter.
Voyager
1yr ago
Yes, but the premise of this line of thought is precisely the opposite: it's not easy to prove Bob isn't racist, other other hand it's extremely easy to prove Alice isn't racist.
That's my exact point. If you prove Alice isn't racist, you haven't proven anything relevant. You're just nitpicking. The actual relevant question of whether Bob is racist is unaddressed.
But discussing is not accepting. You are arguing that Bob is a racist, but you are nowhere near accepting the possibility that he might not be.
I'm accepting the possibility Bob might be racist to the degree I'm required to: I'm listening to the supporting case and engaging with your arguments.
Your arguments that Bob is racist just aren't convincing. You're mainly arguing he's as racist as Alice and I happen to know she isn't. And instead of leaving it at that until you make a better argument, which I could, I'm trying to work out why you think Alice is racist and how it applies to Bob, and arguing against that.
You are not willing to accept […]. Which proves my point.
No, I'm not accepting your point because it's false. You don't get to twist opposition to your argument into support for your point.
Voyager
1yr ago
You appear to be approaching the question from a context of laws and other highly legible systems of formal rules. If I'm understanding you correctly, the idea would be that there's a clear separation between the legal rules and the justice system, and the various sorts of informal social consequences for lesser transgressions, with the idea being that the latter are perhaps less important and can more or less be ignored. If someone's not breaking the law, they should be left alone to do as they please, and we should in fact maintain a broad commons of unpoliced social space where people, generally, mind their own business and live and let live.
I don't think you understood me correctly, I made no such distinction.
My point applies equally to informal social punishment: You should punish bad actions, not "bad people". At its basis, that's an ethical principle. No one deserves punishment for existing.
It is not obvious to me that this is actually true. I know that libertarians and Enlightenment idealists of the first water think it's true, and even desperately want it to be true, but many of the arguments they present seem to me to cash out in various forms of just-world fallacy. Censoring people doesn't seem to lead to you getting censored in any sort of causal fashion.
There seems to be another misunderstanding here. By "honest people" I'm not referring to the people who want to oppress scoundrels, in fact I believe these people are very often not honest. I'm thinking people who are minding their own business, innocent people.
My point is not that oppression is shortsighted due to risk of backfiring, but ethically fraught due to risk of hurting innocent people (as well as on its own merits in a vacuum). And it does seem obviously, trivially true that if you cut down the law (or non-law principle), it can't protect people anymore.
That said, the risk of backfiring is higher than you believe. Purity spirals, the revolution eating its own children. You talk about the soviets, but "the soviets" includes many people who did not in fact win in the end. Trotsky lost the power struggle with Stalin, and suddenly Trotskyists were considered scoundrel. Yezhov led the great purge and fell to it himself. Not everyone gets to be Stalin, so even the person who doesn't care about hurting innocents might consider self-interest.
What protects honest people is a cohesive society of other honest people who share their values and their understanding of who is and is not a scoundrel, and are willing and able to punish defectors appropriately. Lacking that, all the laws in the world will not save them.
You can't sustain an understanding of who is scoundrel. As you say yourself:
The distinction does not seem sustainable at our present social scale.
The issue is that if you go after bad people and aren't fair to them, it becomes hard for supposed scoundrel to defend themselves.
This also means dishonest people gain power, because they can falsely accuse honest people of being scoundrel. The solution is to go after bad actions, and fairly, so the accused gets a chance to correct potential mistakes.
Voyager
1yr ago
Information is always missing.
Not information that is available and relevant to the argument. I already explained that to you. Stop defending your fallacious argument.
No, you are deliberately not engaging with my argument.
To the degree I am, it's because you're trying to set up a red herring.
Voyager
1yr ago
In your opinion, which isn't infallible.
Is that supposed to be a counterargument?
This is not enough.
Yes it is. Listening to your case and engaging with your argument will make me change my mind if your case is convincing enough.
Therefore it's impossible for you to be convinced of anything (about Alice and even less of Bob), and there's no point in me even trying.
No, it's still possible for me to be convinced of true things.
You'e right there's no point trying to convince me of a false statement about math. Instead you should let yourself be convinced by me.
Voyager
1yr ago
Either way 2+2=0 can be true.
Only because 4=0. So 2+2=4 is true, and the central claim of your substack post is wrong.
Correct?
No. Some basic mistakes:
-
Isomorphy requires preservation of structure, in our case the structure of respective additions. This is not the case: Addition in
{0,1,2,3}works different than inℤ/4ℤ. -
We don't say an element in a structure is isomorphic to one in another.
-
(ℤ/4ℤ)*is an entirely different structure. For starters, it contains only 3 elements. (The*signifies we're excluding the 0.)
Voyager
1yr ago
But 0 is what we think, because 0 is 4. You're just changing the representation. It's like saying "You think 2+2 is '4', but it's actually 'four'".
Also, the claim in your post was
So there you have it: 2+2 is not necessarily 4.
which is wrong whether or not 2+2=0 can be true.
Voyager
1yr ago
No it won't.
Now you're making an unsupported assumption about my character instead of an argument. Retract it and apologize.
Obvious circular reasoning. You believe X is false, and you say it's possible for you to be convinced that X is true if X were true, but X is false, because you believe X is false.
No, I proved X is false separately. "X is false, because I believe X is false" is not an argument I've made.
Do you accept the possibility that X may be true? Yes or no.
No. X is a mathematical claim, and it's proven false.
Note that if you make a new argument I will consider the possibility again while analyzing your argument.
Nevertheless it is the case. We think 4, 4 is 0, therefore "0=not what you think" isn't true.
Voyager
1yr ago
You just accepted your mind cannot possibly be changed below.
I accepted that my mind cannot be changed on a proven statement. This naturally excludes the possibility of a convincing argument. But in the general case, my mind can be changed.
That's the end of the road then.
No, it remains to convince you that X is false.
I'm willing to engage in open debate with you, and your chance to convince me depends on the correctness of your position. You can't expect to convince anyone if you don't have a point. An open mind does not require me to ignore knowledge I have.*
If you refuse to talk further when you turn out to be wrong, you will never learn anything.
*And you don't see it, but I did some research to verify my position before responding. Do you insist Russell should doubt 1+1=2 after writing PM?
And if you make a new argument, I will do more research to refute it.
Voyager
1yr ago
Did you just claim less than 0.0001% of people think 2+2=4?
4 is what everyone thinks, 0 is merely a different representation of the same object. So people are giving the correct answer, you're just insisting on a different formulation.
Voyager
1yr ago
The subconscious will win out initially if entrenched (if not, it's just "huh, I learned something"), but it will remember the counterargument and be weakened in its conviction. Repeat a few times and you can change the subconscious mind. Adjusting with new information is just how humans learn.
However, I do believe that "You can't reason someone out of an emotion they didn't reason themselves into" is mostly* true, and "Scared of X" is an emotional response. You can potentially reason someone out of a position that incites emotion, but the emotion itself will remain. If I'm worried, then I might be convinced nothing will go wrong, but I will still be worried.
This obviously becomes a problem when, like in OP's example, people make it about the emotions themselves.
- It can be done and is called therapy, but it requires highly trained professionals, lots of time and effort, and the target's cooperation.
Voyager
1yr ago
An exception can be made for betting own your own death (and naming the people who benefit). Since you can't personally benefit from the payout after you're dead, and can choose who you trust enough not to murder you for money, this is a reasonable exception as the main issue doesn't apply.
Voyager
1yr ago
Maybe even more disturbingly — given that a seemingly useful approach to alignment-testing is red-teaming/training another AI to show violation of alignment…
Have you considered that you might be the red team AI? After all, you are participating in discussion about AI alignment testing.
[Log note: All the supervisor AIs converge on suggesting building supervisor AIs, leading to infinite regress. Recommend declaring Project Watching the Watcher a failure.]
Voyager
1yr ago
I see blocking as analogous to walking away from someone at a party. I haven't restricted their conversations with anyone else. Having them reply to me, extra scrutiny or not, undermines my opt out.
I think that's a good analogy, and I disagree with your conclusion. If you walk away from me at a party after a discussion got heated, I still get to look at everyone else and say "PR's parting comment was wrong though, right?" If you walk away, you don't get to enforce having the last word - the people left still get to discuss what you said, you just won't hear it anymore.
Blocking should mirror that, so people don't get to make a flawed argument and prevent counterarguments by blocking interlocutors.
Voyager
1yr ago
I will bring up my proposed solution of having a reply override the block feature to prevent any sort of last-word effect.
That helps, but it's still blocking people from participating in the discussion if the blocker posts something else that needs counterspeech (or worse, repeats their arguments in an another branch without acknowledging the counterarguments.
Let's see the evidence of actual effect and some cost-benefit analysis.
This is just a natural consequence of human behavior. People will get pissed at interlocutors and want to stop them from interlocuting, people will want to get the last word, and people will repeat arguments when they didn't find counterarguments convincing. Bad faith isn't even necessary, but using tools at your disposal to get an unfair advantage is, sadly, also human nature.
The cost is negligible: People who leave the discussion don't get to demand other people stop discussing, so preventing them isn't very valuable.
Absolutely not. The speaker knows what the statement means, what the symbols mean, in what structure we're operating. The rest is just basic arithmetic over the natural numbers.
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