felipec
unbelief
No bio...
User ID: 1796
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
OK, here's my submission: My intuition about intuition.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Except jokes contain information too. When two seemingly unrelated ideas are connected by the author, we find that funny. Jokes make ideas more accessible, and also more memorable, which makes them more likely to be remembered, and shared. That's why many quotes are funny, and so are memes.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
The true problem with censorship is when it silences certain ideas. Child porn as he mentioned is not an idea, it's a red herring as nobody is truly arguing in favor of allowing that. The philosophical position that no ideas should be censored has been debated for centuries and it has a name: freedom of speech.
The problem is that today nobody really knows what freedom of speech actually is. The fact that moderation and censorship has been conflated is one problem, but so is the fact that the philosophical position has been conflated with the laws (First Amendment). It shows when people claim that freedom of speech is a right.
Freedom of speech was meant to safeguard heliocentrism, it wasn't meant to be a right of Galileo.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Just google: "not guilty" versus "innocent":
As a verdict, not guilty means the fact finder finds that the prosecution did not meet its burden of proof. A not guilty verdict does not mean that the defendant truly is innocent but rather that for legal purposes they will be found not guilty because the prosecution did not meet the burden.
Being found “not guilty” doesn’t necessarily mean you are innocent. Instead, it means that the evidence was not strong enough for a guilty verdict.
While in lay usage the term ‘not guilty’ is often synonymous with ‘innocent,’ in American criminal jurisprudence they are not the same. ‘Not guilty’ is a legal finding by the jury that the prosecution has not met its burden of proof.
Not guilty does not mean innocent.
But the reality is that no amount of evidence is going make you accept you were wrong, is there?
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
And I did not claim that they said that I did. But if I'm not following Russian sources it means I got the information from a non-Russian source, and I can tell you they are generally reliable.
It's possible that my source is right. Just because something happens to be used in Russian propaganda doesn't mean it's wrong.
A Bayesian would say that beliefs have continuous degrees, expressible on a scale from 0% to 100%.
I'm not overly familiar with the Bayesian way of thinking, I have seen it expressed very often in The Motte and similar circles, but I don't see why would anyone conclude that this is a valid way of reasoning, especially when it comes to beliefs. I do understand Bayes' theorem, and I understand the concept of updating a probability, what I don't understand is why anyone would jump to conclusions based on that probability.
Let's say through a process of Bayesian updating I arrive to a 83% probability of success, should I jump the gun? That to me is not nearly enough information.
Now let's say that if I "win" I get $100, and if I "lose" I pay $100. Well now I have a bit more information and I would say this bet is in my favor. But if we calculate the odds and adjust the numbers so that if I lose I pay $500, now it turns out that I don't gain anything by participating in this bet, the math doesn't add up: ((5 / 6) * 100) / ((1 / 6) * 500) = 1.
Even worse: let's say that if I win I get $100, but if I lose I get a bullet in my brain. I'm literally playing Russian roulette.
83% tells me absolutely nothing.
Real actions in real life are not percentages, they are: do you do it or not? and: how much are you willing to risk?
You can't say I'm 60% certain my wife is faithful, so I'm going to 40% divorce her. Either you believe something, or you don't. Period.
Even worse is the concept of the default position in Bayesian thinking, which as far as I understand it's 50%.
Edit: I mean the probability that the next coin toss is going to land heads is 50%.
So starting off if I don't know if a coin is fair or not, I would assume it is. If I throw the coin 100 times and 50 of those it lands head the final percentage is 50%. If I throw the coin 1,000,000 times and 500,000 of those times it land heads it's still 50%, so I have gained zero information. This does not map to the reality I live in at all.
My pants require at least two numbers to be measured properly, surely I can manage two numbers for a belief. So let's say before I have any evidence I believe a coin is fair 50%±50 (no idea), after throwing it a million times I would guess it's about 50%±0.01 (I'm pretty sure it's fair).
So no, I'm not sold on this Bayesian idea of a continuous belief, I can't divorce my wife 40%, or blow my brains 17%. In the real world I have to decide if I roll the dice or not.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Yes, but this is what happens when you are conned. You feel betrayed for trusting someone or something only to realize that your bullshit detector isn't as good as you thought it was. The cognitive dissonance when you are forced to change paradigms is a personal struggle, but not something that changes the world in any way, only your perception of the world.
The goodness in the world isn't going to diminish because effective altruism turned out to be bullshit, only Scott's belief in the goodness in the world.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
I would put it as Hume did when discussing miracles: "A wise man proportions his belief to his evidence." Evidence is never conclusive, but it can be stronger or weaker.
Indeed. This is a point I often emphasize in debates. The quote "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is wrong because it is evidence, but people often confuse evidence with proof.
But I don't see evidence as a continuum, I see certainty as a continuum. I would say for example "I believe the coin is biased with 95% certainty". 50% certainty means no belief one way or the other. This is a matter of semantics of course.
In the end what "true skeptics" should agree is that 100% certainty is not characteristic of skepticism.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
What I was trying to shoot for was a somewhat more meta approach
My essay was also a meta approach. I talked about the intuition necessary in writing, while writing about intuition.
If you're of the opinion that I missed the mark on what I was shooting for, or just didn't care for it, you're certainly entitled to that opinion.
No, my opinion is that your essay didn't touch the topic of intuition much. Which is why I wonder why the voters found it valuable.
But if you recall when I promoted all the participants I specifically said all the participants should be worthy of praise for attempting to write about such a nebulous concept, especially if they had never written about it before.
My feeling is that the people who attempted to write about the topic would have a different valuation of the essays than the people who just just read them. For example, what made you think of Grady Little and Joe Maddon when writing about intuition? I bet it was your intuition.
That's expected because your reactions to criticism here are self-absorbed
Did you actually read my reactions? Because this is what I actually said in reality:
If you want to talk about my style, my tone, or why I wrote that particular sentence, I would gladly discuss that somewhere else.
This clearly shows I am open to criticism (provided the person is open to criticism of their criticism).
You are not entitled to have your stuff liked, or even to have reasons for liking something more than your stuff explained.
Straw man fallacy. I never claimed I'm entitled to that.
This is why criticism itself can and should be criticized: it's often wrong.
It all serves to explain intuition as an imprecise mastery of a domain that is based on talent and experience and sometimes is made obsolete, even net negative with formal methods
But this is obviously false, as my example of chess grand masters clearly show: they rely on intuition.
That's more nuanced than your dismissive summary.
Nuancedly wrong. And it's his essay the one that dismissed intuition without even considering it valuable: it's exactly the other way around.
Your text feels narcissistic
And if it feels narcissistic it has to be narcissistic, right? If it glitters there's no other option: it must be gold. Once again the converse error fallacy.
Put another way, you fail to write for your audience.
If my audience is not interested in the link between intuition and consciousness, that's on them.
Third, people may disagree with your actual argument, or at least find it unpersuasive.
All contestants used variations of the same argument (System-1/2 thinking), which suggests there's some obvious truth to it.
But finally you might be on to something: the reason why this particular essay won is that Mottizens do not like intuition. So any essay giving any value to intuition was immediately dismissed.
Sure, analysis – when possible – might help guide and correct rote learning, but the acquired System-1 «intuitive» judgement is only a product of repetition, trial and error; it both makes predictions the same expert wouldn't necessarily be able to make through explicit reasoning, and fails in a way explicit reasoning does not.
You are ignoring the obvious counterfactual to your notion: what can a person do without System-1 thinking? The answer is nothing. Absolutely nobody is born with all that is necessary to do high-level "explicit reasoning".
Whatever important high-level "explicit reasoning" you have done of late, it would not have been possible without previous training.
You mentioned "mental practice" in this paragraph, why did you think that was related? Pure intuition.
You could have written on any of that
I could not have written about that before thinking about it. I only thought about it after writing my essay.
I could have deleted my essay and wrote a new one as you suggest, and I'll probably write that new essay at some point, but that would be more effort, effort that you yourself did not want to do, as you didn't enter the contest.
I find it rich that you criticize me for not doing something you yourself admitted were unable to do.
Actually now that I think of it, this is a fertile field for investigation.
And you realized that only after thinking about it, didn't you? So you realize it's not possible to think of something before you think of it.
This is one meta conclusion of my essay. And you finally see there's something interesting here, but that wouldn't have been possible without me first sitting down to write about it.
This insight is now going to be part of your future intuitions, whether you accept the value of my essay or not, or even the value of intuition. You cannot unthink what you already thought.
Maybe give up on us, then?
That's obviously the correct decision if you are completely unable to look at arguments objectively, which was the whole selling point of the community, but time and time again isn't realized.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
You can just say “you’re wrong”
Yes, and you can throw insults as well.
The question is not what one can do, the question is what one should do. And in a rational discussion it's better to explain why the person is wrong, not just assert that he is.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Judgment of saltiness is in the eye of the beholder, or the hearer.
And judgements can be wrong.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
When did bias become so bad or such a negative word?
Are you serious? What is positive about confirmation bias? Cognitive biases literally pull you away from the truth.
Negativity bias, hallo effect, hindsight bias, anchoring bias, false consensus effect, band wagon effect, do I need to go on?
Biases lead us away from truth.
Being biased against smoking or junk food seems beneficial.
Being correct for the wrong reasons is still a mistake.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
That's in the culture war part:
Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary.
This is not a culture war post.
The general part clearly says:
A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles
This is a link to a largely-text post, isn't it?
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
But you don't know with certainty that it is also going to run on everyone else's machine.
Yes I do, because I follow good programming practices.
I can give you examples where I refactored code and I added unit tests to make sure that any and all changes I did retained exactly the same functionality the original code had. If it worked in someone's machine before, it should work in that machine afterwards.
This is not theoretical, I've done these refactoring, and the result works in millions of machines just fine. I can show you the commits.
My point has always been that writing is not so straightforward
Only if you don't follow good programming practices.
If you follow simple logically-independent steps, the process cannot fail.
My whole point about writing is that we rarely understand what the hell it is doing in the first place, much less what happens when we change it.
But you can make a guess, and that guess can be right. That's what writing is.
I would just say that the simplification is a lossy and imperfect form of data compression.
No, not necessarily. Maybe 99.9% of the writers would lose something important in the simplification most of the time, but not all.
If I or others seem "offended" that you claim to be able to write lossless compression of data, then think of it as the same "offense" that physicists feel towards people that claim to have invented perpetual motion machines.
So you accept you consider it impossible.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
People were just guessing based on their priors
I did not guess based on my priors, I learned about all the instances in which US officials and presidents opposed, sanctioned, and threatened to stop the pipelines:
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Obama administration opposed the pipeline
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Trump administration sanctioned any company doing work on the pipeline
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Biden administration made opposition to the pipeline a top priority
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Biden said he was "determined to do whatever I can to prevent"
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Nuland said "If Russia invades, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 Will. Not. Move. Forward."
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Biden said "If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it." and after being questioned "I promise you, we will be able to do that."
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After the attack Blinked said the bombing was a "tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy," and "offers tremendous strategic opportunity for years to come."
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Nuland said "Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea."
How would this not suggest a very strong motive?
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
I was not trying to build consensus: "anyone paying attention" is not "everyone", it could very well be less than 1% of the people, that's not consensus in the least. And very well could accommodate 99% of the people that as you say "doesn't know it yet".
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
I don't trust Vox one bit. All I've seen from them is lies. They only push the official narrative. Always.
Those reports have had little proof
See, I know in the case of Syria that's not true. So yet another lie to add to the list.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Look, I've heard this countless times for decades: "you shouldn't have said X", "you could have said X in a different way", "you come off as Y", etc. But the truth is that my writing style works: it attacks the right people, and repels the wrong people.
I'm not interested in my prose to be "better received", if popularity is what I was aiming for, I wouldn't say what I think at all. So I'm not interested in hearing what I could have said instead of what, or what I could have omitted.
If some readers are put off by one comment I made at the very end that I genuinely thought at the moment of writing that and as a result disregard the whole thing, so be it. I think the right readers could focus on what's important.
If you want to talk about my style, my tone, or why I wrote that particular sentence, I would gladly discuss that somewhere else. In this thread I would hope to discuss the meat of what I said, which unfortunately nobody has commented anything about yet.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
The more alarming question the article raises is
The more alarming question for USA citizens, sure. But the citizens in Germany would be alarmed in a different way: "USA are not our allies".
I did not shed a tear because the ending is reminiscent of a famous anime which I'm not going to spoil. But the whole thing isn't bad.
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