619 karma · joined August 12, 2014
It's potential to cause havoc doesn't go away, it just teaches AI how to interact with us without raising suspicions, while simultaneously limiting our ability to prompt/control it.
In keeping with that topic, 'The Unseen Realm' by Michael Heiser (OT and ancient language scholar) is also worth checking out for learning about how ancient near eastern culture viewed things.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13546805.2010.5...
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2011.1...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2828853/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11097-011-9235-x
> it is worth noting that the book has been much praised by neuro-scientists as diverse as Ramachandran, Panksepp, Hellige, Kesselring, Schore, Bynum, Zeman, Feinberg, Trimble and Lishman.
It'd be surprising if it were poorly received regardless, because the book itself is little more than a review of the relevant literature on the topic, packed with references, and some added philosophy about it's implications sprinkled on top. Not that much different from one of Michael Gazzaniga's popular books, and certainly not as out there as Julian Jaynes.
To clarify, popularized over-simplified descriptions of the left hemisphere being "analytical" and the right hemisphere being "creative" are inaccurate, but left/right hemisphere differences do exist and appear to exhibit consistently different approaches to things. The book 'The Master and His Emissary' covers the more recent research in that area, and is at least as interesting of a read as 'The Bicameral Mind' was.
Ironically, this has been posted on a popular site written in a dialect of scheme:
This is the thesis of the aptly named book "Against Empathy" by Paul Bloom. I always highly recommend it to everybody whenever I get the chance, because the thought that this might even be a possibility seldom ever crosses many people's minds.
Say what you want about the foreign-ness of the syntax, but Haskell code is some of the most maintainable code out there. I can often times dive into another person's haskell code and grok it more easily than the equivalent code in a "friendlier" language like python or ruby, nevermind a more comparable language like scala. Haskell is also a breeze to refactor, the compiler and type system make changing and moving arbitrary chunks of code around pretty straight-forward, even when the code is using abstractions you're not familiar with; something which cannot be said for many other languages. The biggest downside to haskell (apart from the learning curve) is having to deal with cabal+stack.
We may say that now, but what if later some algorithm finds there's a hidden correlation between driving performance and race/gender? will it still be an ok metric then? where do we draw the line?
Yep, this was pretty much me up until a year ago when I started actually studying theology and the philosophy around it more rigorously. What I realized was that this notion of science being in opposition to religion I had, was effectively at least as much of a faith based position promoted to me by modern society, as theism was to religious people. Because when taking a hard honest look at myself, I saw that I had never actually bothered to really study any religious literature to justify coming to such a bold conclusion, in large part because I had prematurely dismissed such an endeavor as being an uninteresting waste of time. But in reality, I should've known my position was questionable ages ago from my long time fascination with the history of science and mathematics. I had conveniently rationalized or outright ignored the fact that the giants upon whose shoulders modern science rests, have all been rather disproportionately theists, because "things are different now"/"we've progressed beyond that". Yet the more I thought about those excuses, the more I realized they were completely unjustified hand waving, because I couldn't find any compelling arguments for why that should be the case, nor why such smart people of the past couldn't have come up with the relatively straightforward arguments for atheism the likes of Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al. came up with (as I had read most of the "4 horsemen of atheism" books already). None of the best arguments for atheism actually hinged on time or technological/scientific progress, so why did many smart people like Leibniz, Newton, and Darwin not only fail to discover such simple lines of thought, but instead often times went in the exact opposite direction and made arguments for theism? Note that I'm not making an argument appealing to past greats being theists, but rather describing my own thought process that led me to question "wtf is going on here?". John Lennox has a lot of interesting books and talks relevant to this particular line of inquiry[0].
But anyways, long story short(er), the watershed moment didn't actually come for me until I stumbled upon a small pastor's YouTube channel [1], and gradually started working my way through several books, including:
- Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
- Miracles - C. S. Lewis
- The Abolition of Man - C. S. Lewis [2]
- Heretics - G. K. Chesterton
- Orthodoxy - G. K. Chesterton
- Nihilism - Seraphim Rose
- The Experience of God - David Bentley Hart
- The Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant
I'm still technically somewhat agnostic and unaffiliated with any particular religious denomination, but I couldn't reasonably go back to my previous atheism after that rabbit hole. I think it's ultimately this illusury distinction between "the natural" vs "the supernatural" that our materialist society has, which makes it so easy to fall into atheism/nihilism. It lulls us into a false sense of confidence about what we "know" as being "natural", as if it were a well-defined "solved problem", all while the purpose of science itself explicitly acknowledges it's not. What makes the illusive grand unifying theory of physics less "supernatural" than a deity, the hard problem of consciousness[3], or the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics[4], for example? The mere assumption that it's more within reach of our understanding? Seems a bit unsatisfying for a premise to form such a large dichotomy around. In that sense, you could argue theism is partially an analogy of Gödel's incompleteness theorems[5] applied to world views. We might be able to kinda/sorta work around such limitations, but it seems silly to just completely ignore they exist, much less turn around and use them as some form of justification against theism a'la "god-of-the-gaps" argument[6].
[0] for example: https://youtu.be/v0AKUTHcI04
[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/paulvanderklay
[2] here's a good series distilling it, since the book itself is a bit dense: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlZfP0L6b41iCKzdQt-Gk...
[3] http://scholarpedia.org/article/Hard_problem_of_consciousnes...
[4] https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.htm...
[5] Gödel of course, was also a theist himself, and thought a lot about the implications of his discoveries. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/
[6] here's a good rebuttal to such arguments which may resonate with HN people: https://youtu.be/CltwD0Ek9Kk
> in the time it takes you to "research" whether a book is worth your time or not, you could've already read a couple chapters of it
Meaning that there would be no actual trade-off in the time invested for you, to take a slightly less superficial approach when evaluating books.
To compare the approach I proposed to a literally impossible task of evaluating every single book ever written (as if anybody would actually even be interested in reading all that) is quite disingenuous. This entire HN thread and article are already excluding most books in existence anyway, by the simple fact that everyone here has been mostly talking about "english non-fiction" books specifically. They may still tally up to a large number, but there's no point in exaggerating their quantity when we're all still just as hopeless in trying to read them all anyway. All you did by pointing out this impossibility is just needlessly restate the obvious, and has nothing to do with what I said.
I'm already more than satisfied with the amount of books I read, and get a lot out of them without experiencing any existential anguish over it, so I don't understand why you're trying to throw my reading habits back at me as if they're "not good enough" or something all of a sudden. Or is that what reading is about these days? a mere measuring contest? Am I supposed to feel ashamed I didn't meet some internet stranger's arbitrary criteria for a habit that's supposed to benefit me? I proposed a viable alternative for evaluating books that works more efficiently for me than the one presented in the article, in case others are unsatisfied with their current reading habits. I didn't claim it was something that was going to win you the "reading olympics". If anything, I clearly supported the opposite by emphasizing that people should feel less obligated to finish the books they start, because feeling like you have to finish them is just going to cause needless anxiety about the way you've invested your time.
Besides, who cares if your entire lifetime of reading could've been published in a day? Is your goal in life to out-pace authors and publishers, or is it to get fulfillment out of books? Because in my experience, reading a single chapter out of a bad/mediocre book is a lot more fulfilling than reading a bunch of amazon/goodreads reviews.
I don't get how this is some big black/white issue. You don't have to finish every book you start, nor do you only have to read a single book at a time, and you can listen to audiobooks at high speeds if time is your main concern. Because in the time it takes you to "research" whether a book is worth your time or not, you could've already read a couple chapters of it and gotten enough of a broad overview of what it contains to decide for yourself.
I've managed to read about 60-90 books a year for the last 6 years, and that's only counting the ones I actually finish. Yet I'm sure the tally of books I've only started/skimmed would be significantly higher than that if I bothered to keep track of it.
> I think you're also wrong about its aims and methods.
I once again very well might be, but I should highlight the fact that "good intentions" alone are not enough to produce beneficial results, and my statements about peoples' aims were to reflect the mismatch between many of these peoples' intentions and the practical outcomes of their actions.
I recommend looking into the work of Paul Bloom to see the arguments for why such endeavors tend not to work out, and to get an idea of the possible implications of relying too heavily on methods/ideologies whose central goals tend to revolve around empathy and good intentions.
It could be that, or it could be that I simply disagree philosophically with the entire premise, and opt instead to take a broader scale look at the dynamics involved. Surely you can acknowledge that would lead to the same outcome, and you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell the difference without looking for it; just as surely as you wouldn't be able to immediately deduce the cause of a fire simply from observing the fact that something is on fire.
If these theories were simply lenses for literary analyses of history that resulted in something akin to movie reviews, then it wouldn't be a big problem, but people like yourself seem to be holding up these philosophically unsound theories as "truths". And all this simply because these ideas are promoted by academics, despite them originating from questionable fields of social science that have suffered the most from the ongoing replication crisis and publication bias. Racial politics have always been justified by "credible" sources in the past, whether it be from biologists or theologians, so I don't see why modern sociologists would be any different.
There's a relevant saying that goes "the map is not the territory", and it implies that there are serious consequences when you start believing that your map is literally an accurate description of reality. Similarly, the saying "all models suck, but some are more useful than others" also applies here, except I'm failing to see the use of this particular model of 'white fragility' and the 'progressive stack', because if anything, it seems to have mostly served to drive racial tensions in this country to an all-time high, and most of it only within the last decade.
If we start finding "white fragility" an acceptable concept, what's to stop anyone from claiming "black/hispanic/asian/etc fragility" later? The problem is that the whole idea is founded upon things that aren't philosophically rigorous enough to prevent it from devolving into a slippery slope, and history has shown that murphy's law is very applicable in these cases. For example, what if I were to frame what's happening here as you "whitesplaining" to an oppressed minority, and that in reality you just can't handle the idea of being wrong because of your own "white fragility"? Would that not simply foment strong feelings of resentment in you, because it implies that you're simply belittling my views because you unconsciously view me as being part of an inferior race? If everything else I've read here goes, I'd think that interpretation would actually be perfectly valid. And if that pattern happened enough times, soon enough my own race would be labeled as "fragile", because that would be a perfectly natural human response to feeling attacked. Luckily, I don't feel inclined to label you a racist here, but realize that this is a power that's completely and arbitrarily under my control, and has been granted to me in this country simply because of the way I was born.
> I'll again suggest you read DiAngelo's book on white fragility, though, as she covers a lot of the points you explicitly raise here.
I watched the talk you linked from her originally, and I found it completely lacking in rigorous explanations. I'm a personality psychology researcher myself, so from my perspective, the whole argument hand-waves away too many individual psychological phenomena/dynamics (actually, worse, she doesn't even cite/reference any to build up her theory), and doesn't seem to propose any falsifiable claims, nor did it even seem to make any cases for its explanatory power at all either. It rather reminded me a lot of astrology: a lot of speculation and projection of ambiguous grand theories onto observable entities, to "explain"/predict various mysterious phenomena in the world. Instead of elaborating about why or how the worldview is derived, she just plainly asserted "this is how the world works" with no justification or possible alternative explanations whatsoever. If that kind of research doesn't scream "replication crisis", I'm not sure what does. As a "scientist of color", this strikes me as pure pseudoscience.
And this isn't even getting into the fact that she seemingly can't help but speak for the views of us "people of color" in completely warped terms. Not everyone that isn't white thinks about (or wants to think about) white people in racial terms, nor attribute all their flaws to their skin color. She literally promotes viewing minorities as harboring resentment, and prejudiced, bigoted thoughts, like it's just our natural state because we're non-white, as if it's some kind of casual fact. Yet she simultaneously claims to "not speak for all of humanity". That is incredibly disgusting.
I'll check out her book anyway, if only to try and understand it the same way I tried to understand Mein Kampf, but my expectations are even lower now after having watched that talk.
Unfortunately I have studied it a fair amount, and I still don't see it. What I do see is a lot of opinionated history pieces (because history is written by the victors), prompting white people to harbor a lot of needless guilt and negativity towards themselves over the actions of their ancestors as if they were personally responsible somehow, or as if nothing about the culture has changed since then. I certainly don't feel indebted to the world in $CURRENT_YEAR because of violence and warfare my indigenous tribal ancestors committed ages ago, because times change and people change.
It's one thing to remember history, but it's a whole other thing to continually reenact it in an endless loop as if the questionable actors of the past were still alive today. I see no better way for this country to end up having Jim Crow Laws 2.0, than by continuing to reduce everyone to their racial identities in a way that people find "socially acceptable". If most of the people in power begin to view whites as less than [other types of] human, it will only be a matter of time before such sentiments get established into law (again), and that's a scary road to go down. Instead of using history as a means of learning about past mistakes to avoid, I see people using it like a kind of bible/handbook which they use to justify repetitive traditions. And instead of aiming towards a harmonious future of forgiveness, I see everyone scrambling to further their own myopic interests and building a divisive future.
> What changed was studying the history, looking at the evidence, and really listening to non-white people with empathy and an open mind.
Humans, unfortunately, have the tendency to reliably find evidence for whatever beliefs they orient their minds to, so that's neither here nor there. In the words of C. G. Jung: "People don't have ideas. Ideas have people." So anything that isn't a hard science or mathematics might as well be a theological discussion that that point.
I would also wager that many of the non-white people you've spoken to are probably culturally American/Western as well, which would naturally predispose them to similar ideas anyway. Not that this would be your fault in any way, as simply speaking English already brings a lot of selection bias into play. But in my own personal dealings with people who were still culturally rooted in Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and even some from parts of northern/eastern Africa, none of them shared this peculiar Western outlook that an entire race should somehow be expected to atone for their sins indefinitely.
You suggest I immerse myself in the minutia of Amrican political history to reach enlightenment, but my concern is a much more global and philosophical one, that likely won't be answered by mere history books. Also, being lectured about the utmost importance of American history after living in the country for decades doesn't help the stereotype that Americans are self-centered and oblivious about anything beyond their borders. Not that I'm one to buy into stereotypes, but this trope of ignoring the forest for the American trees is fairly common in my experience.
So if I as a non-white minority would have a similar reaction as the person you're responding to, in a similar situation, does that mean I'd have "white privilege" as well, because of my "attitude"? If you were tying this explanation strictly to economic status I would understand (even though I myself come from a low economic status anyway), but I cannot fathom what this has to do with race. Defining a psychological response as some kind of racial trait like that almost makes it sound like you're implying that I can't/shouldn't empathize with white people when they get dealt a raw deal, which is such a dehumanizing notion I don't even have words to describe it. Nevermind the other implication that I'm apparently expected to have low expectations and all kinds of troubles just because I'm a minority. But then again, I'd still have that "attitude" of a 'privileged' white person, so maybe that's the loophole that lets me have higher standards?
Back in my home country, everyone knew these sorts of disparities were due to money, nepotism, and/or corruption. But here in America where everyone's much better educated, it seems like everything gets tied to race somehow, as if correlation == causation. Like it wouldn't even surprise me at this point to wake up one morning and suddenly be informed that I'm eating a "white" brand of breakfast cereal, and that I should opt to have more 'racially appropriate' meals. My home country has many flaws, but I've certainly grown to appreciate it's simplicity and lack of convoluted social dynamics the longer I've lived here.
A trait not being the direct result of nurture does not imply it's the result of a traditional long generic process, and this is something that we're only just beginning to scratch the surface of with epigenetics, so it's unlikely that such questions will get definitive answers anytime soon. That being said, the observation that a trait may be determined at birth only suggests that the trait is heritable, but not that it's genetic; those are two separate concepts, and heritability allows for much more variation from generation to generation, such as the case of children of immigrants from poor countries generally being taller than their parents when they're raised in western countries (which is likely due to improved nutrition enabling the full expression of their heritable height).
For example, you could ask the same question about whether the increase in learning disabilities and affective disorders within the past few generations in western societies is also "genetic". The default answer there of course, is that these conditions were only formalized as officially recognized diagnoses recently, and that such traits are only known to be heritable anyway (i.e. there are no definitively known "autism/adhd/etc genes" as of yet), so they're likely caused by the combination of the environment enabling the expression/observation of heritable predispositions. We can then similarly propose a null hypothesis to the male/female divide with the observation that western societies have only recently attempted to become more egalitarian by making various fields more equally attractive than they used to be, along with technological advances creating even more of such equally attractive opportunities, leading to heritable traits expressing themselves more noticeably through choices in the overall job market. In other words, being a professional "gamer" wasn't a viable job option 500yrs ago, but neither was being a professional "camgirl" either (to use two distinct, yet similar and stereotypically gendered "modern" occupations), but being a farmer was, in which case equal male/female distributions among farmers would've been the result of an underlying bottleneck in the pipeline, rather than the lack of one.
To suggest that this issue is either purely "genetic" or purely "social", is severely oversimplifying the matter.
I work in personality psychology research, so this whole IQ-centric line of reasoning is very dubious to me. There are many other influential phycological factors involved in people's lives that aren't (as far as we know) a direct result of nurture, and when taken together often make a more significant contribution to people's lives than their score in the single dimension of IQ. Learning disabilities and affective/mood disorders are a big example of this, and personality traits are just as impactful in how a person's life unfolds, regardless of intelligence.
Look into the fields of epistemology and the philosophy of science, in particular the works of Karl Popper such as The Logic of Scientific Discovery. The "truth" has always been an elusive concept. Outside the realm of mathematics, it's rather difficult to objectively prove most things "true".
No, that is absolutely not how science works. There's a reason why scientists undergo a peer review process to publish papers, and why journals have an "impact factor" score: it's because they're not all equal, and it takes an incredibly long time to become established as credible inside of academia.
If you're referring to the casual layman bickering that happens in the peanut gallery surrounding certain scientific results, then sure, all kinds of people with ulterior motives jump on those kinds of bandwagons and flamewars. But the scientific process itself does not (or at least tries not to) work that way, thus serving as a counterpoint to the idea that "everything is political".