IsaacL

I started a course in philosophy during my first year of university. I studied CS (in the UK, where you don't typically go far outside your major) but I'd always been curious about the humanities and thought it worthwhile to learn about all fields of knowledge. I'd also read about philosophy for laymen books as a teenager.

In the first lecture, I remember being surprised at how rational and logical the lecturer was. However, in the second lecture, we started getting into the details of different theories of meta-ethics. I was interested in the topic, but the presentation was exactly as you describe, focused on hairsplitting the viewpoints of everyone who'd debated the question previously.

In the last few years I was inspired to start analysing my own ideas and began studying philosophy in my own time. I now know my undergraduate experience was typical of analytical philosophy, which dominates the English-speaking academic world. Unlike continental philosophers, they believe that there's an objective reality and that our thoughts should be logically consistent. However, they also have accumulated a pile of logical puzzles (Frege cases, Gettier problems, the Raven paradox, etc) which imply that language does not straightforwardly refer to reality, that certain knowledge is impossible, and so on. This skepticism is (imo) at the root of the "debaters paradise" you observed.

Anyone looking for an alternative should give Objectivism a serious study. It has such a bad reputation in academic circles that I dismissed it for a long time, but when I finally got around to reading serious Objectivist non-fiction, I found it held together much better with my view of reality. It's basically a version of Aristotelianism, with some of the mystical implications removed. (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology is the book to read if you want to dive in at the deep end).

Here's a collection of jumping-off points to curious communities I've spent many a happy hour exploring:

http://ribbonfarm.com https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/ http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/ http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ https://meaningness.com/ http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/

Enjoy :)

> I saw the tweet, my point here is that's a single tweet

My point, which you've ignored, is that we need to take into account the wider context, i.e. "the last few years of speaker exclusions and anti-"brogrammer" activism" I mentioned.

> the conclusion that the only reason for this is liberal virtue signaling instead of an actual aspiration to create an inclusive environment

That isn't my conclusion. I do believe these people aspire to "create an inclusive environment". That means inclusive for people like them, and exclusive of people not like them.

They do not seem to particularly care about being inclusive of minorities, who are just a smokescreen (see, e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/50u77r/douglas_...). They appear to be guided by an intuitive sense of "our sort of people".

> And more importantly has been asked ad nauseam to please be kinder to people and has been firmly obstinate.

Don't you think he might be obstinate for a reason? He's responsible for one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the world: bugs in the Linux kernel could cause life-or-death situations.

The world needs more programmers, and we shouldn't care what they look like, but inclusivity is not an end-in-itself. "Egotism and profound condescension" is terrible if you think the tech community exists to provide a weird social club, but it's essential if the goal is to help programmers write better software - the master programmers have earned their big egos because they know how important it is not to f... certain things up.

> this is a lot of speculation

This is only speculation if you ignore the last few years of speaker exclusions and anti-"brogrammer" activism.

All the evidence points to this being a proxy battle of "SJWs" vs "un-PC enthusiasts". Nodevember were told that having Crockford speak "sent a message that women are unwelcome".

> Instead of inserting your own narrative

This is a roundabout way of saying that I'm making things up.

> If Crockford feels wronged by this exchange, he's free to come forward with his side of things

Crockford doesn't need to do anything. You're implying that he's the only one who should be bothered.

But the whole point of incidents like this is to show that people like Crockford aren't welcome. Linus Torvalds gets the same s... from the same people for the same reasons.

(A side note, but it's weird that TDD-enthusiasts are very condescending to non-TDD followers, but this isn't seen as "exclusive").

Dude, dude, dude, you've almost identified the real issue here (interpreting everything as harassment for the sake of an agenda), and then gone off onto wild elaborate tangents about social status and evolutionary biology.

Look at the actual people who incite these campaigns (e.g., https://twitter.com/nexxylove/status/771503661956501504).

"Don't bother to examine a folly, ask yourself only what it accomplishes". These people have a laser-focused sensitivity on actions which make certain groups feel unwelcome. They can't be unaware of the messages they themselves are sending. Who are they trying to make feel unwelcome?

"I’ve switched comments to ‘not visible.’ I won’t be reading them. I don’t feel the need to justify this, either. Thanks <3."

Ironically, that language "triggered" very bad memories of an extremely dishonest and passive-aggressive person I once worked with.

I have learned not to jump to conclusions in these stories, even when I want to back my ideological "team". (I'm not a fan of SJWs, but many of the anti-SJWs make up for it by being even worse).

The Nodevember statement seems reasonable on its face:

"[...] his presence would make some speakers uncomfortable to the point where they refused to attend or speak.

We reacted to this feedback. Nothing else. Any other speculation around his past behavior was not taken into account.

This conference was started by a group of friends to gather around the love of a shared language and community.

We are in over our heads. The conference has grown to something we never anticipated. We aren't professional organizers or PR people. We are still learning, and will make mistakes. We don't do this as a full time job. We do this because we love the community."

OK, they're just a group of friends doing their thing, and it's their club, their rules.

On the other hand: they're charging $350 a ticket, so can hardly be complete amateurs. It sounds like they're trying to downplay any political angle, when excluding such a speaker would inevitably be seen as a political move in the current climate.

(Conference for an extremely hip, progressive community (Node) excludes old-school elitist greybeard. Only reasons cited publicly are mildly condescending remarks in Crawford's public talks and unelaborated backchannel complaints).

So, though I don't know enough and so withhold firm judgement, it does appear that the Nodevember organisers thought they could deliver a public slap to Crockford by ostracising him, proving some political point, and are now downplaying their own behaviour to avoid the PR backlash.

Either way, it is their club, their rules. The real solution to this is for those closer to Crockford's philosophy of life to assert their right to free association, and host an elitist conference for Real Programmers where noobs are flamed, idiocy is excluded, truth and justice reigns supreme, etc.

Edit: I've just seen this https://twitter.com/nexxylove/status/771503661956501504 which makes it look as though the Nodevember organisers were bullied into excluding Crockford to deflect a PR s...storm about their insufficiently diverse keynote speakers.

Yes, fossil fuels, nuclear or hydro are the 3 feasible options. Long-term, investing in safer nuclear power is the way forward.

The right to life implies you have the right to earn an income. This also implies property rights on your earned income. (The original formulation was "life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness").

Yes. The huge majority of pro-UBI writings I see talk up the benefits in great detail but either ignore, or misrepresent, the costs.

Lots of naive idealists support UBI - but I also frequently see UBI advocates who purport to be "evidence-based" and "rational", and yet who fail to provide even a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how they propose to fund their scheme. Instead they do 1 of 3 things:

1. Provide evidence countering non-essential arguments, e.g., will basic income recipients be motivated to work? This implies they've addressed the opposing side, while simultaneously ignoring the essential counter-argument, i.e., where the money comes from.

2. Hand-wave about reduced administration costs. (This is nowhere near sufficient to cover the huge increase in spending). Or automation (yeah, we have better deep learning algorithms, but machine vision, robotics and natural language processing are advancing glacially slowly, so most jobs will require a human in the loop for the foreseeable future).

3. Propose a low (subsidence-level) basic income, which represents a major cut in benefits to pensioners and the disabled. Since those two groups receive the bulk of current welfare spending, redirecting their benefits is the only means by which a UBI can be feasible.

With a small amount of research I found numerous counter-arguments to UBI, including a paper by the New Zealand government finding what I stated in point 3, i.e., UBI would imply benefit reductions to pensioners and the disabled and still require major tax hikes.

I see many people becoming full-time advocates and researchers into UBI, claiming it to be a rational, scientific, evidence-based policy. And yet they miss these basic issues. (It's no mystery why. After realising that current welfare systems don't work, and that a UBI can't work, the logical next step is to question wealth redistribution itself, but that's too far for most). The 20th century saw many intellectuals proposing "scientific" utopian schemes while blatantly ignoring reality, with well-known results.

http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Wor...

http://thespinoff.co.nz/featured/31-03-2016/i-love-the-idea-...

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-06/universal...

"If we’re interested in social policies that are resilient I think the dignity problem, or the moral aspects of these policies are worth considering more closely."

I certainly agree the moral aspects are worth considering. No matter how you arrange your basic income scheme (and the tax system to support it), it's going to split the population into two groups: those who are net recipients of government money, and those who are net contributors.

Don't let basic income advocates evade the question of who pays for their utopian scheme.

The current welfare systems are a messy parcel of compromises, but they at least acknowledge that people have to demonstrate need to be the recipients of government handouts. Once you establish that people have a permanent, inalienable right to an income, you imply that others are obligated to provide them with that income.

    Unfortunately, it's not going to work, and they will be ran out of business through the political will of the people, just as the tobacco industry is now having done to it.

Cool, and what's your proposal for an alternative energy source to power modern civilisation?

https://www.scribd.com/document/320110894/Alex-Epstein-Moral...

A classic gwern post. Exhaustively well-researched, and with reams of context and examples provided for every point and sub-point. Unfortunately, in dire need of editing and essentialising.

Like other writers in the Lesswrong-rationalist sphere (Scott Alexander is even worse in this regard), Gwern overwhelms his reader with so much extended discussion, parenthetical comments and tangential points that the actual structure of his argument is hard to make out. Normally when I encounter a writer making several points I disagree with, I'm able to grasp the overall structure of their argument and see whether those points are essential or not.

His basic point seems logical: computational complexity theory probably doesn't establish a fundamental barrier to AI. However, I think this is simply because we lack anything approaching a mathematical definition of intelligence, making it meaningless to apply a mathematical tool like complexity theory. How does the complexity of, say, a conversation, scale with the length of the conversation? Linearly? Polynomially? Exponentially? Is the question even meaningful?

Then, there are lots of specific remarks I disagree with, e.g:

"Turning to human intelligence, the absolute range of human intelligence is very small: differences in reaction times are small, backwards digit spans range from 3-7, brain imaging studies have difficulty spotting neurological differences, the absolute genetic influence on intelligence is on net minimal, and this narrow range may be a general phenomenon about humans (Wechsler 1935); and yet, in human society, how critical are these tiny absolute differences in determining who will become rich or poor, who will become a criminal, who will do cutting-edge scientific research, who will get into the Ivy Leagues, who will be a successful politician, and this holds true as high as IQ can be measured reliably (see TIP/SMPY etc)."

Again, exhaustive evidence, but (to me) an obvious conceptual flaw: why do similarities in measurements of basic brain operations between humans imply that the range of intelligence between humans is small? Doesn't the range of human achievement instead imply very large differences in mental "software", which is what should be measured instead?

Think of the mental achievements of researchers pre- and post-Newton. There was a huge leap, not because of any increase in basic brain power, but because the later researchers could learn, apply and extend the methods discovered by Newton. I think it's precisely the accumulated set of such methods which seems key to any definition of intelligence (remember that language and conceptual cognition were themselves methods discovered at some point in prehistory).

The taxi drivers in this story are not being "forced into jobs". They're forcing others (app developers) to give them money. Or they're forcing customers to use their services over someone else.

Don't equivocate on the word "force". If you get the government to make people do things, that's force. If people aren't giving you money they are not "forcing" you to work for your money.

    All of that is insanely stressful and I would argue if weed would have caused issues, I would have had larger problems.

I did say "If you have your s... more or less together, you can probably use weed semi-regularly without too much damage."

    I'd even expand my argument, and say any vice including videogames, cars, etc. Anything can get out of hand if people are trying to avoid a problem.

People use many things as psychological crutches, yes. What I'm arguing is that some of the specific effects of weed (esp. the effects on cognition) make it more dangerous than other crutches.

Having known both drop-out monks and drop-out stoners, they're very different. Long-term meditators seemed to be very psychologically healthy, self-aware, cheerful, disciplined, etc whereas long-term stoners tended to be delusional, paranoid and irritable.

(Many people into meditation had at some point used drugs, but eventually decided they were at best a distraction and at worst actively harmful).

I've also known three people who smoked marijuana regularly and developed serious life problems as a result, along with a larger number who didn't develop major problems but who definitely "stalled".

I also knew many who smoked it regularly without major issues, so I'm not saying it inevitably causes problems, but I am 99.99% certain that if you already suffer problems with motivation or life direction, marijuana can majorly f... you up.

I used to smoke it occasionally myself and I definitely saw its positive effects - for computer scientists, it's a fascinating springboard into understanding consciousness and meta-cognition. It makes good music and art even more enjoyable.

It's also one of the most seductive drugs out there. Alcohol leads to very painful hangovers, which is a clear signal for people to slow down. Psychedelics are too mind-blowing and the trips last too long to be used regularly. Heroin, crack, meth etc are widely seen as dangerous. Cocaine is expensive.

Cannabis is affordable, and can be enjoyed on a weekday evening without strong next-morning effects. So some people end up integrating it into their routine: surfing the internet stoned, listening to music stoned, playing video games stoned, chatting to friends stoned.

If you have your s... more or less together, you can probably use weed semi-regularly without too much damage. But if there are one or more real problems in your life, things which would take real effort and motivation to fix (poor social life / grades slipping / lack career direction / etc), weed will tempt you to chill out and ignore said problems. You concoct wild rationalisations about why you don't really want X, why people who chase X are manipulated by the system, etc, etc.

Long-term, you run the risk of becoming paranoid and demotivated, struggling to make everyday decisions or to get a grip on your own thinking. Given that this isn't a universal consequence of weed usage, it might not be solely due to the weed but also certain personality traits which weed amplifies.

I rarely smoke it at all any more - personally, I found training myself to enjoy good art, and reading deep philosophy/literature gave me access to much more profound pleasures and insights than weed ever did.

It's hard to summarise. Read "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" which contains the fundamentals of a theory of knowledge, specifically a theory of the nature of concepts. That's the part which is relevant for this discussion and is also the foundation for everything else.

Ultimately you have to read Rand rather than read about her, as so many of her critics enjoy a somewhat loose relationship with reality. For example, the comment in this thread about "randian evangelism" on HN. I've encountered two other Objectivists on HN, whereas every week we have multiple hundred-comment threads on how fantastic an idea universal basic income is. That's pretty ineffective evangelism.

Modern academic philosophy won't help because it's dominated by certain false ideas.

The problem with physics today is rationalism - constructing theories with only partial reference to experimental data. Some fields, like psychology, have the opposite problem - empiricism - where they accumulate countless statistical correlations but fail to integrate them into consistent theories.

I suggest anyone who's seriously interested in a solution to these issues to listen to the following, then look up Leonard Peikoff and David Harriman's other writings on the subject.

https://campus.aynrand.org/campus-courses/understanding-obje...

The article discusses a professor who hypothesises that consciousness is simply an illusion the brain creates for itself. But you can't explain the concept 'illusion' without reference to 'consciousness', so this explanation is meaningless.

https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Know-Harry-Binswanger/dp/09856...

This is the book I recommend to anyone genuinely interested in the nature of consciousness.

> Another example of what I mean is all the articles that pop up on HN about how the modern internet is destroying attention spans. How do we address that best?

I realised this was a serious problem about 3 years ago, after reading The Shallows. (I knew I'd had the problem before, but didn't realise how serious it was). I feel I've pretty much solved it now and I'll happily spend my free time slowly reading 1000-page ancient tomes.

The only thing to do, really, is to try and maintain awareness of why you're reading any particular thing and what you hope to get out of it. E.g. - say you have many tabs open on a topic. You remind yourself that you initially had one simple question to answer, and decide - do you still just want to get a quick answer, or do you now want to research this topic in depth?

If you just want a quick answer, close all but the 1 or 2 most reliable looking sources.

Otherwise, make a note to schedule time to research the topic properly. For me this means creating a note in Evernote, jotting down what I think about the topic beforehand and my key questions, finding the best sources for answers to those questions, and possibly saving documents to read offline if they look like they merit careful study. This is actually more enjoyable, which is important - you need to train your subconscious to associate slow reading with pleasure, and skimming with anxiety and frustration.

For certain hot-button topics (like politics), I often do my own research, decide what I think, and then note how most discussion (even intelligent-sounding discussion) seems ignorant and shallow. I can also now see the huge value in well-edited writing - with the best writing, you can tell the author has chosen each word carefully, and simply by asking why they used a particular word over a near-synonym can reveal insights.

I could say more, but that's the basic idea. You really need to take responsibility for your own reading habits.

The brain drain depends on what policies are implemented. I have mixed feelings about BoJo but he's the front-runner for next PM and he's signalled he wants to remain open to immigration.

The UK has tons of smart Indian and Chinese students coming here to study. It's one of the top 3 locations for wealthy Russians to emigrate to (along with Germany and the US). The Qataris built a half billion dollar glass pyramid in London. I hear London has no real contender for a European tech hub (Berlin has much less available talent from what I gather). If a pro-international Brexit happens, we're in OK shape (big if, granted). I was planning to leave before Brexit, but I'm now more confident about the UK's direction and I'm planning to stay (yes I know this is a rare position heh).

Stratechery has many insightful posts but I don't think this one is accurate.

The author writes that the new order will be made up of government, tech and individuals. "Corporations" are intentionally absent from the new order. But people will still need to form organisations to achieve collective goals, which will need legal documents stating their purpose and governance, i.e. "corporations". Corporations will still have to be funded by either selling goods and services, donations, or state funding, ie be for-profit, nonprofit, or governmental.

I don't think the gig economy is a replacement. Unless AI gets much, much better than the state-of-the-art, I don't see skilled professionals or managers being replaced any time soon. All this automation/AI/DAO hype assumes that AI is much more capable than it really is and that most jobs are much simpler than they really are. For a concrete example, visit a large and busy McDonalds and notice how much work the shift managers have to do to deal with surprise situations and blockages (there's a rulebook they follow, but it's nontrivial to apply to reality). That's just one job which couldn't be handled by a deep learning algo. And McDonalds is a well-oiled machine, most businesses are much more error-prone and inefficient.

> every economist

Most but not all. Economics is currently split into multiple schools which disagree on philosophical fundamentals, and is hardly an exact science. How many economists predicted the financial crisis? Those that did tend to be small government advocates. (I don't endorse everything he says, but Nassim Taleb is one example, who is also pro-Brexit).

I wish someone had made this point during the campaign, to answer the snipes that Leave was anti-intellectual, anti-expert, and so on.

> It's quite clear that Boris did not want the referendum to win.

It's not clear to me. I think you are taking it as self-evident that Leave is a bad idea. In the mainstream narrative, the EU is associated with everything nice and international and the only reason to be against it is if you're a crazy old-fashioned nationalist.

There's a classical liberal case for Brexit, though, which Gove articulated reasonably well. I think Johnson kinda believes the same things, though without Gove's conviction (I voted Leave but I don't like Johnson, I think he's an opportunist). Like all conspiracy theories yours assumes that the conspirators concoct these elaborate schemes which have multiple failure modes. Leave had roughly 1/3 odds of winning all through the campaign, so it's not that much of a surprise. Nor is it clear that a Remain vote would have helped Johnson's career, given that almost the entire establishment backed Remain.

> It's startling watching the "moderate" Leave wing falling over themselves to dial back all of their promises during the campaign.... turns out there isn't more money for the NHS...

The media is really playing up this angle. Vote Leave isn't the government and the referendum wasn't a general election where the campaigners campaign on a particular manifesto. There is now more money in the UK budget, where it gets spent is up to the next PM.

This is exactly my feeling on the matter. To be fair, there are thoughtful people on both sides, but the uninformed and emotional make the most noise.

But yes, when you've studied both sides and decided that Leave is the rational choice, a lot of Remain supporters appear incredibly haughty and arrogant.

Euclid proved it in ancient Greece and you can look up his proof online. It's pretty succinct, though his proofs can sometimes be hard to follow as the Greeks had a different conception of number to the modern one.

What do you think of Bret Victor's work? (http://worrydream.com/) Or Rich Hickey?

Who do you think are the people doing the most interesting work in user interface design today?

Excellent comment. People need to be called out for this behavior.

Not the OP, but it's sunday afternoon and you've piqued my curiosity. I'm not opposed to conspiracy theories, but my view of the world is one of different groups competing for power without a guiding plan. I find it interesting reading about individual conspiracies and learning how the world really works, but in my view they eventually backfire on the people who instigate them.

Take the United Fruit Company - so they lobbied the US government to instigate a coup in Guatemala. That's devious. (I've just looked up the coup in more detail, and the consequences for Guatemala were horrendous, so I'd say the coup instigators were not merely devious, but outright evil).

Thing is, neither party benefited. The US got involved to prevent communism growing in its backyard, but ended up pissing off the entire region. The UFC wanted to protect its assets in Guatemala, but was forced by Eisenhower to divest them all 4 years later.

What's the grand pattern here? What's the motive behind all these conspiracy theories? Do they intentionally backfire, or are the people pulling the strings just short-sighted?