curi

dear downmodders,

please spare yters. take me instead.

your comment is far too long to post on twitter.

http://notexactlyrocketscience.wordpress.com/2007/12/19/shor...

still wish you were a pygmie?

no it's worse. i can paste longer text in AIM

not until bookmarks are easy to search through. which their might be a plugin for but that's not easy enough.

the text field is a little too hard to notice in safari given the pre-entered text. i suggest adding a thicker border and using javascript to select it on pageload.

The original headline editorialized.

yeah. you might also be interested to look at my thread history to see some of the other stuff i get downmodded for. a few are: a question about what dates someone meant, a comment that lotto odds are public knowledge (questioning the point of the post which asked about what the odds "really" are), a "+1 informative" joke that's at -9 for some reason.

edit: btw this thread wasn't a representative example. disagreeing with pg increases downmods. if it'd been someone else it might not have happened.

and i was getting some downmods by people who didn't like the link or title but who can't downmod the submission itself so downmod comments intead.

i've read the guidelines.

edit: heh, the thing i was replying to was removed by an edit

....

thanks. replies like this one make me glad i posted this.

In what range of years do you think most of the imagining was done?

umm the odds are public knowledge?

they are easy to make. just make one when you have an idea you want to post. post again next time you have an idea you want to post. the drawback of not doing this is deleting those potential posts for no reason.

+1 informative

The original headline is disagreeable to me. Most of the content of the article is disagreeable to me. It is not a neutral article. There is no simple neutral way to post it.

It is not a bad headline, it is an opinionated headline (based on text from the article). I understand that you disagree with my point of view. Please understand that I disagree with yours, too. The "tangential direction" you are complaining about is the reason I posted the article. I would not have posted it otherwise. You should be glad that people who disagree can still be helpful each other, rather than complaining that your free ice cream wasn't the appropriate flavor.

+1 for info about actual usage of tests like this

So for example I rarely concentrated very hard in class, but enjoyed to for 12 hour days at chess tournaments. I knew plenty of similar people, some of whom were diagnosed with things like ADHD.

I'm not saying all children are good at concentration. I doubt most of the kids who stand still well are very good at concentration. It's just not what is being tested for and not what schools really care about.

They wanted kids to stand still when told to. That's not concentration they are looking for.

The part I put in the headline is what I thought was most interesting.

Most of the rest seemed to consist of saying that lack of obedience in modern children indicates something is wrong with them. And finding things to blame this on, like toys.

I don't think the issue was self-discipline because the example of how they studied it was about whether the children would stand still when someone else told them to.

First a note about ignorance, because I've sometimes had conversations with a somewhat opposite claim. People say things like, "We agree children have great ignorance. This sometimes causes disagreements when they don't know the answer to something, but think they do. And children can be very stubborn, so in those cases their ignorance requires that we force them to the right decision." Here rather than figuring that if the only thing present is ignorance there will be no problems, they have said that ignorance causes problems. And in particular, ignorance can cause a child to stubbornly disagree on a subject he knows little about. This is false, and perhaps important to how I see these issues. If a child thinks he knows enough to comment about something, let alone to be stubborn, that is not a matter of ignorance, that is an idea he has.

In fact, a lot of beliefs on parenting amount to trying to say both, "Children are so ignorant and gullible that they'll believe almost anything. They pick up bad ideas very easily." And, "Children are so stubborn that they never listen to my good ideas." But you can't have it both ways. If a child can pick up ideas causing him to disagree with his parent, there have also been opportunities for him to be persuaded of ideas in agreement with his parent. The parent is blaming his ideas' lack of appeal on the child's stubbornness, while denying the appeal of rival ideas based on the child's gullibility.

Here we have a different issue. We accept (or I do, and I'm clarifying, and if you don't we should probably discuss that) that ignorance is nothing to fear (indeed people face it all the time when exploring a new field.) And we further accept that ideas that are part of a truth seeking process are nothing to fear. Those will be amenable to criticism, improvement, persuasion. But what if a person has thoughts or preferences that are very unreasonable, or not even intended to be reasonable, or not created via a rational process? I will answer each of these cases separately.

'Very unreasonable' ideas are nothing more than ideas that the speaker strongly disagrees with. This isn't actually a comment on whether the process behind them is truth seeking, or whether they are held open to change.

Ideas that aren't intended to be reasonable are harder to address. But people aren't perfectly consistent, so sometimes it doesn't turn out to be much of a problem. Just because someone's philosophy isn't compatible with taking advice for good reasons (they deny their being such thing as truer reasons, say) doesn't mean they won't sometimes take your advice.

But if it is a problem, then we can focus on something else: why doesn't this person intend to be reasonable? He has a bad idea about how to approach life. He has little or mistaken understanding of what approaches will solve his problems, or will be enjoyable. Many people have an idea something like, "arguments are unpleasant" and avoid them. They can be! But there are ways of thinking and arguing which make them pleasant and helpful. One could begin by teaching/explaining those, and then the person could try using reason, find it's a good thing, and then intend to have reasonable ideas and make some effort to hold his ideas open to rational improvement. There is a rational path forward.

(Note for upcoming paragraph: By 'knowledge' I do not mean justified, true belief. What I mean is closer to 'understanding' or 'good ideas'.)

What about ideas that aren't created via a rational process? Well, like what? All knowledge is created via conjectures and criticism, aka evolution. If you actually left out criticism entirely it wouldn't be possible to get anywhere: very bad guesses would run amuck. You might think that some people are a bit like that. But that would underestimate how difficult daily life is. For example, having a conversation about the weather in English requires rational processes. You have to make guesses about whether the other person is talking to you, and what he means to say, and you have to criticize those guesses. If you don't, you won't create knowledge. In particular, you won't create knowledge of what he's trying to communicate. You won't understand and won't be able to reply coherently. Forming your own sentences is also a matter of knowledge creation. You must create knowledge of which words would express your intended meaning (not to mention what intended meanings should be said or not).

These conjectures and refutations that create knowledge mostly take place at a sub-conscious level. But we know they must be taking place or people would not be able to function at all for practical tasks or simple conversations. Whether there is a different way of creating knowledge is another can of worms, which we can discuss if you'd like, but I'll omit it for now.

The reason I went through each case of, "what if a person has thoughts or preferences that are very unreasonable, or not even intended to be reasonable, or not created via a rational process?" separately is that they are actually distinct claims. They are intended to be roughly synonymous descriptions of something, but they aren't. The question contains misconceptions about the types of situations it is intending to describe. When what's going wrong in each situation is understood more precisely, then it's easier to address.

We may still be wondering about those times people seem very unreasonable, agree they were unreasonable afterwards, and do intend to be truth seeking and rational. What could be going on there if they are, at least subconsciously, thinking with rational, knowledge-creating processes?

Part of the answer is that people make mistakes.

Part is that people generally have mistakes in their ideas about what their personality and ideas are. One consequences is that many mistaken ideas they "used to have" are actually still in their personality, but they don't realize it.

Part is memes, which really needs a separate post as well as a note that I think most published ideas about memes are terrible, so this may not be what you expect.

I'll stop here for now. Let me know what you think. No hurry.

PS I've bookmarked this thread and will check periodically unless you want to suggest another approach.

The Fabric of Reality - David Deutsch

Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hoftstadter

Karl Popper's books (too many to list)

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

the method for 7 works because:

you want to know if 8765 is divisible by 7. take the one's digit and multiply by 21. this gets a number that is divisible by 7 so you can subtract it. this will clear the last digit because we're subtracting this:

last digit * 1 + last digit * 20.

now we have a number that ends in a zero. in this case: 8660

now divide by 10. we can do that because that's dividing by 2 and 5 and that won't affect whether or not 7 can go into the number.

now we have a number to deal with that's at least one digit shorter. repeat until it's obvious if the remaining number divides by 7 or not.

Want to give a couple edifying examples?

PS Have you read any Edmund Burke? Got an opinion of him?

Well don't encourage that ;p

Epistemology from The Fabric of Reality (to start)

What did I do wrong, specifically? What should I change, specifically?

Are you saying maybe he took away voting because I wrote annoying comments?

I don't think he'd enjoy that email, so I haven't sent it. He chose not to contact me about this, presumably for a reason.

This, on the other hand, is a public thread where it's relevant to the topic in the parent comments. I haven't asked pg to read this thread, so it's not my problem if he chooses to.

It's not a matter of different standards, it's a matter of: if you can't lead active yc users, why would you be able to lead an influx of new reddit (or techcrunch or whatever) users?

rms for example is apologetic and offered to do what you wanted. a new user from reddit probably wouldn't do that. but despite this, you still lead in a way that alienates rms.

in my case, i haven't apologized or offered to change my behavior because you never notified me of doing something wrong or asked me to change any behavior. that's bad leadership too. if you want me to follow some rules you have to tell me.