This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The idea seems to be that «a hypothetical», as a form of syllogism, has some minimum complexity/minimum description length that cannot be represented in a mind that has e.g. working memory corresponding to a given IQ – the minimally sufficient thought, even optimally chunked thanks to experience, just breaks down from noise and signal decay, in the same way complex mathematical expressions or rich verbal statements or puzzles break down for people of somewhat higher level.
That model strikes me as implausible because a basic hypothetical is very simple and people who struggle with understanding that ought to struggle even with speech.
On the other hand, using a hypothetical in practice usually involves thinking through some scenario diverging from known reality, which recruits imagination and a mental scratchpad with some non-negligible context length. So there are at least two levels of understanding – a hypothetical is an asymmetric function of sorts; you can check if it makes sense, but you're not necessarily able to use it as the first step in a reasoning chain that the other party's trying to prompt you into. In that case, it's prudent to concede your failure, drop the entire line of argument and just output the «okay smart guy, not listening» before you're tricked.
Of course intelligence is heterogenous (modestly so, given that g accounts for most variation, but still), and hypotheticals of different nature ought to be unequal in MDL. Additionally, Wason selection task shows that some ecologically valid concepts allow for efficient application of what seems to be the same basic algorithm – we don't have general-purpose theorem provers in our heads, more like a population of heuristics and cached partial solutions for specific cases. So people can be «good» at some hypotheticals but flounder when provided a novel one. Weeding out those specific cases is what good test design is about.
I wouldn’t be so surprised, at least with speech; they‘re different areas of the brain (and cognition, probably), and the way Broca‘s and Wernicke’s areas correspond to speech production seem much more fundamental and binary than whatever thing is to intelligence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link