dovetailing
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User ID: 2225
dovetailing
1yr ago
I have, of course, a lot of disagreements with this comment, but in the spirit of explaining things rather than re-waging the Great Internet Atheism-vs-Religion Wars (I was a teenager 20 years ago; I ought to know better now) I wanted to focus on two things that are a bit more meta-level and more relevant specifically to rationality.
All else being equal, a simple hypothesis or prior should be privileged over a more complex one when they are equally as good at explaining the evidence, or predicting the future. That is a basic consequence of probability theory, complexity needs to be justified.
There are two points to be made here. The first is that Occam's razor, the simplicity prior, and the particular formal version based on Kolmogorov complexity, are all assumptions, not inevitable consequences of logic. Probability theory tells you how to update your prior based on evidence (....if, somehow, you can know the probabilities of all your observations conditional on each of the potential hypotheses, which in this context is an unrealistically big ask); it can't tell you what your prior should be. A simplicity prior is not an unreasonable choice in many contexts, but it's (a) not actually practical for many things (do you know all possible hypotheses and their exact complexity?) and (b) it's not the only possible choice.
The second is that it seems likely to be impossible to even evaluate simplicity or conditional probabilities when you are dealing with radically different ontologies, and it's not at all clear that e.g. the claim that physics and the existing physical universe is the brute fact of reality is in any way simpler than the claim that a Person is. Certainly I'll grant that "the physical universe, but also God/supernatural/nonphysical stuff tacked on" is more complicated than pure materialism, but that's explicitly not what the alternative is.
An analogy for those who know about the demoscene: a long, intricate demo certainly looks more complicated than a random short clip on Youtube, but it is much simpler in an information-theory sense, being generated from a small executable. Given that we don't know any real equivalent of "the shortest possible code" for either a materialist or Theistic account of the reality, I don't think it's even in principal possible to judge the complexity of either.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness is a sign that our existing knowledge and theories are insufficient for the task of explaining everything
This misses the point. There are certainly many problems that, when substituted for "the Hard Problem of Consciousness" here, would make this statement a valid criticism. For instance, if someone tried to argue that the fact that science can't account for Abiogenesis is a knock-down argument against materialism, this would be a good point. The fact that we have no good idea how abiogenesis could occur is some evidence against its occurring by natural means, but in the future new evidence or a better understanding of chemistry might turn things around, just as biochemistry did for the properties of organic life as it is now.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness is another matter. The problem is not that current science can't explain it; the problem is that ontological materialism excludes consciousness (in the sense those of us talking about the Hard Problem mean) entirely. There's no way to get an "I", a first-person perspective, in a materialist ontology, any more than it's possible to get moral realism. And I don't know about you, but I'm quite a bit more certain that I exist than I am that the external world exists, let alone of any laws of physics or theories about what other things might or might not exist, simply for the reason I have direct, unmediated observation of the fact of my existence, which I don't have of physical things. Not to go full #DescartesWasRight here, but he's a lot more right about this than many people give him credit for.
To get at something of my frustration here, let me present a fictional dialogue between a normal person "Matt" and a person with a rather odd ontology, "Noah":
Noah: "The whole universe is just a number. Everything is just some digits or properties of this number. All is number!"
Matt: "But this rock isn't a number! It's not even the same sort of thing as a number! It's stuff, matter, not something abstract like a number."
Noah: "What do you mean? How do you know that stuff isn't just properties of a number. After all, you know that atoms can be counted, mass can be measured, positions can be located, as numbers. Numbers are everywhere. We can express everything about your rock as some numbers, and thus, of course, as digits in one Great Number which is the whole universe."
Matt: "Sure, numbers are useful for measuring things. But a rock isn't just its measurements -- it's made of stuff; it has actual existence."
Noah: "I don't know what you mean by 'actual existence', or 'stuff' or 'matter', and I don't think you do either. Sure, I'll grant that there are things about a rock that we don't know how to measure yet, so we don't fully know how it is part of the Great Number. But it's just a matter of time."
Matt: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
Whenever I talk to materialists about consciousness, I feel just like Matt talking to Noah. If you actually don't get it, I don't know what to say to you.
And this leads into some final thoughts which are connected to both of these. The elephant in the room here, the simplest ontology that nobody wants no believe -- maybe that nobody can believe: Solipsism. Why believe in the existence of anything external to yourself at all? A universe with just one thing is simpler than any hypothesis other than one with nothing (not tenable for the obvious reason). It can easily account for all your putative observations (i.e. they are not actually observations of anything at all). And yet, despite the talk of Boltzmann brains, which is functionally the same thing (if you are just a brain in the void, why do you think your observations of the laws of physics have any meaning -- and thus why is the fact that QM may permit Boltzmann brains any evidence whatsoever about whether you might be one?), I don't think I've heard people insist that solipsism is the only rational position. Frankly, the reason I'm not a solipsist is not that I have a good argument that it's false; rather, I just can't believe it -- I have an arational certainty -- generously, direct apprehension of a truth -- that solipsism is false and I'm not the only thing that exists.
And if we aren't rationally required to be solipsists, well, isn't that giving the whole game away in terms of trying to evaluate ontologies with the same tools one uses for day-to-day reasoning about more bounded questions?
(A more complete version of this comment would relate this to questions about model uncertainty and why, practically, 10^-9 is no more a "real" credence level than 0 is, but this comment is far too long already.)
dovetailing
2yr ago
Relatedly, I maintain that the left vs right spectrum are best understood as religious schism within the western enlightment, with the adhearants of Locke and Rousseau on one side and the adhearants of Hobbes on the other.
Which implies that left vs right politics are fundamentally post-Christian.
Drawing this out a bit further: I believe you are right that the alt-right and woke left are, in many ways, cut from the same cloth. But the "red tribe," even the overtly religious part, is just as much a product of modernity and is in many ways post-Christian in outlook, despite the Christian trappings.
I rather think this is a bad thing.
dovetailing
7mo ago
Surely it's less strange than all the other stuff he's done to get to this point, right? Like, a random guy in drag insisting on using the women's room, that's separately a strong signal of weirdness/sketchiness. But if he's convinced himself that he's a woman at this point, and (quite possibly, though I couldn't say for sure) been on hormones and had surgeries to get there, then surely that's the strange part, not the part where he subsequently wants to use the women's restroom.
dovetailing
9mo ago
I suppose they also have the issue that their leadership class is mostly celibate as well (including female religious), which also opens them up to accusations like, "Of course you don't empathise, you will never have to deal with this".
One of those convenient sticks to hit the dog with. Of course the Orthodox and Eastern Catholics have married priests (and even some widower Bishops with adult children, at least in the Orthodox church) and are just as pro-life, which somehow doesn't come up. (And you can find plenty of pro-life Evangelicals even in the squishier groups that ordain women.)
dovetailing
1yr ago
I'd like to talk about Adderall.
A bit of background: I've had ADHD symptoms my whole life (though the hyperactive part greatly diminished in adulthood), but was never treated because I (a) won the lottery of fascinations (math and computers) and (b) have enough raw intelligence that I was able to excel academically through undergrad. Ever since I started grad school, however, my difficulty with focus has plagued my work, and though I managed to muddle through, I'm much less successful than you might otherwise expect, and my subpar (per my own standards, I guess) productivity at work has negatively impacted my mental health. I've been lucky if I can get a couple hours of productive work in a day -- and I don't mean "I had to go to meetings and that interrupted my flow state" (though there's that too) but "I got distracted by some math problem / thinking about a video game / reading a forum / etc and lost a couple hours with nothing to show for it". I've self-medicated a bit with coffee in the past, but I haven't used it as much recently as after a hiatus, I noticed that drinking enough to make any dent in my problem was also enough to cause me sleep trouble the following night (even if I only had it in the morning) and was very much not generally worth it. Somehow I'm still productive enough to keep a senior software engineer job without (many) complaints from management or coworkers, but I'm always feeling like I'm on the verge of failing to adequately do my job.
So my wife persuaded me that just maybe my persistent difficulty focusing on tasks is due to ADHD rather than being incorrigibly lazy. I saw a psychiatrist and she prescribed Adderall, 10mg up to 3 times daily. The pharmacy finally filled the prescription and I started taking it yesterday (Wednesday).
I took two doses yesterday: one at about 10:30 AM when I started work, and one at about 2:30 PM, about 20 minutes after I noticed the effects starting to wear off. The first dose was weird: it helped very noticeably with my ability to focus on a task, my ability to get started on a larger new task (previously I'd have to wait for the perfect moment psychologically for this), and my ability to maintain focus when switching tasks while waiting for a coworker to do code review. On the other hand, I got the jitters - as if I'd had too much coffee, or was very nervous about something, except that I wasn't nervous, I just had the somatic symptoms (this was really confusing). (Other than these jitters my fidgeting/pacing decreased.) The second dose had the same cognitive effects as the first, but without the jitters. I had as many productive hours in one day yesterday as I typically have in three (though it's worth noting that my usual distribution is highly uneven) and got a commensurate amount accomplished.
Miracle drug, right? Well, remember how drinking too much coffee would give me sleep troubles? Yeah, that. I had a hard time winding down last night (even though the mental effects had otherwise worn off), took longer than usual to fall asleep, and woke up in the wee hours of the morning and couldn't get back to sleep. This is not totally out of distribution for me (in fact it's similar to something I've had happen two or three times in the last month without any drugs) but it's suggestive. I'm pretty tired now, but not "I'm a zombie and can't function" tired, at least at the moment -- again, a bit unusual for how little sleep I got but not out of distribution. I really hope this goes away (or I can find a dosing regime that doesn't do this to me) because I really want to be consistently productive for once in my life.
My psychiatrist suggested when prescribing that I could cut the dose in half if I felt "high" or had significant side effects after the first few doses, or that I could try taking only one dose if it was effective enough to get me started on the right foot and I didn't crash after it wore off (which I didn't). I'm planning to take one or two 5mg doses today and see if it's still as effective; I don't want to screw up my currently fragile sleep even more.
Does anyone else here have experience with Adderall for ADHD? With insomnia as a side effect? With dosing (looking online, 10 mg per dose is a bit higher than normal for an initial dose)? Obviously I'll bring all the details to my psychiatrist next week for my followup, but there's bound to be some people here with the right experiences and insight to get some initial feedback or suggestions.
dovetailing
1yr ago
Surely most of that (in the paper, I mean) is selection effects? I expect that there's a substantial barrier to entry for completing SRS at a university hospital (the selection criterion for that paper) and that the barriers are higher for AGPs since they don't match the stereotypical / ideologically acceptable profile. (I also suspect a similar effect causes these studies to underestimate AGP in that population. People who want a thing tend to say what gatekeepers want to hear, and those that don't... don't make it past the gatekeepers as much.)
Of course I'm also saying this as someone who suffers from AGP (though much, much less than I did in my teens / early 20s -- mental habits do make a difference) and also ticks many of the usual boxes: high intelligence, nerdy, family history both of mental illness and of joint hypermobility / connective tissue problems. So make of that what you will.
dovetailing
2yr ago
I think it's a small proportion but I also think that unfortunately they are the loudest and most visible and most online.
It seems we differ in our estimates here. Maybe it would help to draw a distinction between, let's say, people with disordered sexual desires (in which group I would include any autogynephilia in natal males), and people who are "visible perverts" (you know about them because they do perverted things in public or are publicly loud about their proclivities). I agree that the latter group is rare and unrepresentative of trans people, and it's crazy that the trans lobby doesn't want to get rid of them (probably this is downstream of "pride" stuff). I think, though, that the former group includes probably the majority of MtF trans individuals as well as a decent percentage of men who don't transition. This is probably not usually acknowledged because it's perceived as unflattering to trans people, and to be fair the people loudly crowing about how "it's just a fetish" are being cruel and are not helping the matter.
I think we ought to have some charity even for the "visible perverts" crowd; they need it even if they don't deserve it -- but what I'm really referring to here is the other group. Right now all they are hearing is either total silence, "Eww, you pervert", or "That means you're really a woman deep down! You must be trans!" I think there is a need for counseling, along the lines of "So, you know how you really really want to be female? And how you find that idea sexually arousing, too? Yeah, that's a thing; it's something a bit wrong with you, but it doesn't mean either that you are disgusting or that you are 'really' a woman or should try to become one. Let's try to help you figure out how to deal with your feelings."
dovetailing
2yr ago
And somebody have the backbone to stand up to those for whom it is a sexual fetish, identify it as such, and tell them they're not transgender, they're perverts
Perhaps I can prevail upon you to be kind to perverts? I encourage you to read my essay downthread; I believe the thing you are referring to is more common, and more complicated, than you think -- but that aside, surely having disordered desires should be treated as a mental illness, in much the same vein as the other things you describe?
dovetailing
7mo ago
this is the same thing as saying 'men who commit to physical transition don't do so for AGP reasons'
No, this claim (not the one you place in quotation marks, but your claim that that statement is equivalent to the claim that transitioners are not "just acting out a fetish") is exactly what I'm disagreeing with! Saying that AGP is "just a fetish" --- at least as a blanket claim; it may be for some cases --- is reductive to the point of being nearly as wrong as the people who deny its relevance. You might as well say if someone is sexually attracted to their spouse that they only got married just because they're horny.
dovetailing
7mo ago
I checked out that archival link to 4chan. I have to say, there definitely is a heavy selection effect going on there, but at least it's a different one than the the other places I've looked.
I find 4chan slang and culture to be extremely offputting, but a certain subset of the population there at least has the "brutally honest" thing going. (Or maybe they're being hyperbolic or making shit up for fun. Hard to tell sometimes...)
dovetailing
10mo ago
Yeah, I don't say anything online that I wouldn't be willing to own. But I've been (slightly) concerned with two possible scenarios:
- I'm applying for a job in the future, employer searches [my other username], turns up that I've been willing to state non-current-year-PC opinions about homosexuality/trans/abortion/etc., and that acts as a marginal push away from them actually hiring me. (Argument that this shouldn't matter: I'm not likely to be desperate and if an employer can't tolerate that, then I probably don't want to work for them anyway.)
- I share something I wrote under [my other username] with some people I know in real life (mostly social conservatives), they decide to google [my other username] and find some personal or 'icky' stuff I've written about here, like about my past personal experiences with autogynephilia and related things, or my book review of Men Trapped in Men's Bodies, or something like that, and then there is social weirdness because they now think I'm a pervert or something. (Argument that this shouldn't matter: how likely are people to search like that anyway? As long as I don't literally link to my writing at TheMotte from something I post under [my other username], how likely are they to turn up the stuff here even if they do google me? And for that matter how likely is someone seeing what I've written likely to make things weird? I have no idea about any of these.)
dovetailing
10mo ago
You didn't ask me but I have some recs too.
- Oxygen Not Included (2019). Probably my favorite game of all time. Don't let the cutesy art fool you; under the survival / colony sim surface this is an incredibly addictive engineering sandbox game. Tame a volcano for a steady supply of aluminum! Build a geothermal plant powered by the magma in your planetoid's core! Construct a giant counterflow heat exchanger to boil crude oil into petroleum for your power generators... which produce water as a byproduct... which can be purified and fed into oil wells for more crude oil. Build little rockets to colonize other planetoids, and figure out logistics to ship resources around for your megaprojects. Exploit the hell out of the game's physics. Or, you know, just tame the magic critters that eat weird magic plants and grow shearable plastic scales. The expansions add a lot and are well worth the price.
- Anything from the (now defunct) Zachtronics. Engineering / automation / programming puzzle games of many flavors. My favorite is still probably their first title, SpaceChem (2011), despite its lack of polish, because of how insanely hard (and rewarding) some of the levels are. If you want something more forgiving, there's Opus Magnum (2017); for silly assembly programming fun there's TIS-100 (2015) and Shenzhen I/O (2016). I have heard good things about Exapunks (2018) but never got around to it because of the titles above and below.
- Obligatory Rimworld (2018). You probably know this one. Colony sim. It's good. I haven't played with the latest expansion though.
- Seconding Baba is You; best non-Zachtronics puzzle game I've played (and probably better than half of the Zachtronics ones too).
- Also Obligatory Terraria (2011 but somehow still getting free updates) If you played many years ago but not in the last few, it's worth trying it out again.
- Slay the Spire (2019), despite being way too popular, is also Actually Good, but it is even more Actually Addicting so I'm not sure I'd recommend it.
- Noita (2020) is a roguelike platformer spell programming sort of thing and I am so bad at it (mostly because I am bad at the roguelike platformer part). It has an enormous world full of zany secrets too.
- Understand (2020). Another puzzle game, but this one is like doing IQ test pattern finding questions. Except actually fun? If you like this sort of thing, you will love it; if you don't, then you will be incredibly bored but at least it's only 4 bucks.
dovetailing
11mo ago
If the only thesis here is that Christianity has different values than pagan warrior types, this is indeed obvious and not a penetrating insight. In that case I have no idea why any of this is worth discussing at all, and the language about "master morality" and "slave morality" is nothing more than vacuous rhetorical dressing invented out of sophistry and a dislike of the Christian values. Maybe that's what it is; I don't have a very high opinion of Nietzsche or his sycophants.
On the other hand, all the talk of "slave morality" being based on resentment and cutting down tall poppies and exalting incapacity to do things seems to suggest some additional substance to the characterization; the problem is that this additional substance does not describe Christianity at all! If you read what people actually said about ascetics, you will find that they are frequently described as disciplined athletes (this is literally what the word means), or as fighting battles against demons; they are lauded not for sitting around doing nothing, but for successfully pursuing explicit, positive values; the physical deprivations of the ascetic are not ends to themselves, nor suffered because they must be, but are deliberately and with great difficulty enacted in service of spiritual goals. And similarly the martyrs are held up as examples not for their bad luck in becoming victims, but for their willingness to endure torture or death rather than give up and renounce their faith. "From a Vitalist perspective, all of these groups are Losers" is just another way of saying that they have radically different values; it's not a point in favor of the Christian values being different in the way that is being claimed.
dovetailing
11mo ago
Maybe he wants to have abundance for all?
dovetailing
11mo ago
hillbilly rather than redneck
I always understood that "redneck" was a general term referring to poor(er) rural, white, mostly southern Americans, including Appalachians south of Pennsylvania, which would generally (though not totally) encompass "hillbilly" -- a person living in rural Appalachia or the Ozarks -- rather than excluding it. ("Hillbilly" is also generally more derogatory -- or at least some people seem to think so; I definitely recall people trying to make a distinction between "rednecks" (themselves) who were, well, definitely Appalachian rednecks and probably hillbillies by most people's estimation, and the "hillbillies" who lived way out in the boonies.)
Is it common to interpret the terms as mutually exclusive, or am I misreading your sense here?
dovetailing
1yr ago
Roti Prata is delicious. Go to a hawker center get some.
dovetailing
1yr ago
This was a great recommendation -- I'm enjoying it very much. It's like the game show version of a puzzle hunt.
Why aren't any American game shows even close to this good?
dovetailing
1yr ago
I ordered an l-theanine supplement (green tea also has caffeine, I don't want to mix that in and I'm not a huge fan of the flavor anyway) on your advice; the palpitations and insomnia [edit: I think some of the insomnia is secondary to palpitations continuing way past the other effects] sucked (at least the serious jitters were only with the first dose). Would you recommend taking it with the Adderall or in the evening?
dovetailing
1yr ago
Right, what I was also gesturing at above is that there is probably an additional selection effect, in the form of needing to work the system, for female attracted / AGP people, since their motivations are thought to be more "disreputable" (not sure the right word here).
However, on further reflection, 122 is an astounding mean, even for a combination of selection effects and real differences, and makes me wonder if there is something wrong here. That's a mean substantially larger than what you get pulling only from the population of 4-year college graduates. At this point I think I'll reserve any judgment about the explanation of these numbers.
dovetailing
1yr ago
I think some sort of filter, like the new-user filter for comments (maybe there is a stricter filter for top-levels?). I can see it when logged in but not otherwise, so I assume it will show up as soon as a mod gets around to approving it.
dovetailing
1yr ago
Hm, I see that I can't see it when logged out. I must somehow still be subject to a filter/delay for top-level posts. Well, hopefully it will get approved soon.
dovetailing
1yr ago
Essay now in progress, I'm up to about 1300 words already. It will definitely be a top level post.
dovetailing
1yr ago
So is "you know someone who works there" pretty much the only way to signal general competence? I suppose the question, then, is: how does anyone get hired any other way even if their resume ticks all the boxes? If a resume doing X well doesn't signal general competence enough to be hired to do Y absent having someone on the inside who can vouch for you... then why would it be a sufficient signal to get hired to do X? (Maybe the answer is, it isn't, which is why the whole search process is terrible on both sides?)
Not going into too much detail to avoid self-doxxing but I was hired directly into a senior role from academia with no industry experience... I did have a personal recommendation then, and I guess I didn't give enough credit to how important that was for getting my foot in the door.
dovetailing
1yr ago
Mere Christianity has a lot of good content, but if you end up finding it a bit simplistic in places, it's good to remember that it was originally a bunch of general-audience radio talks, so that kind of comes with the territory. As far as C.S. Lewis goes I recommend The Problem of Pain and Miracles for deeper treatments of their titular matters. They aren't perfect, but they are very good.
Lewis also has a number of good shorter essays (often adapted from talks) that are maybe not apologetics as such, but are also high quality and in the same vein. I remember finding "On Obstinacy in Belief" insightful, for instance. I can try to dig up a more complete list (I'll need to skim and remind myself from my collection) if you are interested.
Another poster has already recommended Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man by Chesterton, which are very good but have quite a different tone and approach (and are much less recent). Lewis is more philosophical but also chattier; Chesterton has a better prose style as well as much more of a flair for melodrama and wordplay -- he often presents his ideas in a way optimized for emotional and/or intellectual punch rather than for clarity or airtight logic. (That doesn't mean his ideas aren't good -- they usually are -- but it rubs some people the wrong way.)
On the flip side, I anti-recommend... most pop-apologetics, frankly, and that means most of the recent stuff. Pretty much all of it (that I've seen, at least, though I haven't been paying careful attention to the space) is more or less in Lewis's shadow and is either just dishonest or a worse version of Lewis.
I have not read most of the books on that list, but from the ones I have it does not bode well. The Great Gatsby is fine, but massively overrated. The same goes for Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Others are mediocre at best with a lot of flaws (Lord of the Flies) or simply execrable (On The Road, a book whose only redeeming quality is that it did an excellent job of making me detest the narrator). And the authors of the list seem to take pleasure in selecting books which had, at one point or another, been banned for obscenity, which certainly sheds some light on their criteria for greatness.
On the other hand, the books they chose not to include are also telling. How can you make a list of the best 100 twentieth-century novels and not include The Lord of the Rings (a contender for #1, and it's not in their list of 100!)? They also seem to think that anything that could be construed as "children's literature" is beneath them, though for my money this includes some of the best literature. Notably omitted is Anne of Green Gables as well as, as far as I can tell, every single Newbery winner (I'd single out A Wrinkle in Time, as well as it's more-mature sequel A Swiftly Tilting Planet (not a Newbery winner), as being particularly good).
All of which is to say, this list surely embodies somebody's idea of a good book, but it's somebody to whose recommendations I'd give negative weight.
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