I read Scott Alexander’s blog and hang out with people who read his blog and/or hang out with him.  Scott Alexander hangs out online with Wesley Morganston, a guy who once went to a white separatist conference.

I don’t know why Scott Alexander hangs out with Wesley Morganston – who just strikes me as a pretentious, uninteresting racist – and that fact that he does so, and also writes a blog I like in a lot of ways, is something that honestly creeps me out.  But while we’re talking about Bad People (suppose for now that we are all Bad People, since that is the conceit of this post) let’s do away with such subtleties.

Tumblr user nostalgebraist is two degrees of separation away from a guy who once went to a white separatist conference.  You, who hang out with tumblr user nostalgebraist, are at most three degrees of separation away from a guy who once went to a white separatist conference.

Since we’re talking about Bad People here let’s just dispense with all subtlety and draw a great big glob that encompasses you and me and Scott Alexander and Wesley Morganston.  This is vastly imprecise, but hey, it’s vast imprecision for a good cause!  Let’s pick a name for it, doesn’t matter what it is.  Since you’re in it, why not call it the “[insert your name here] crowd.”

Gee, isn’t the [insert your name here] crowd fucked up?

The [insert your name here] crowd includes people who go to white separatist conferences.

And you, well, you are the sort of person who is typified by going to white separatist conferences.  Bet you didn’t know that, huh?

This is all very, very silly.

Isaac, I’m sorry about being so suddenly harsh online last night when talking about the atheist stuff.  You happened to be pressing one of my anger buttons and I’m never very clear about where these buttons are until after they are pressed

For future reference I just really dislike anything that seems to me like the line of thought “guilt by association within a large and heterogenous mental category is okay if the category is made up of Bad People”

Because in my mind this line of thought is responsible for a lot of evil and the only way to make sure you are not using it for evil is to be vigilant and try to do it as little as possible

I’m not going to say you have to be careful about keeping track of precisely what popular atheist writers think for their sake, because really I don’t care about them per se, but lack of care for them as a category strikes me as the same cognitive mechanism that, elsewhere, underlies racism and misogyny and any other worldview that tends to involve thinking of people as typified by their worst and/or most alien and baffling members

Once people in a “bad” group can be slandered with arbitrary imprecision by citing the worst things you can think of in that group you get this sort of Six Degrees of Separation From Hitler thing going on, where anyone can look arbitrarily bad once they’ve been placed in the group (perhaps spuriously, perhaps for reasons they cannot control).  "Yeah there may actually be nothing truly worth objecting to about this woman’s behavior but she does generic woman things, just like that one woman I really hate, and you know, women.  Spiteful italicized emphasis"

“You know Those People do bad things, I heard about one on the news the other day”

You can’t solve these problem by just saying “I have chosen the ‘right’ group of Those People” because to your enemies their chosen groups seem “right” too.  If you happen to be not doing evil here it is by moral luck.  The only way to be sure is to just not do the thing

And yes the thing is hard to avoid entirely because it seems like it’s pretty deeply built into human thinking or something but that’s just how it is being human.  Sometimes you gotta work against your own very nature

Anyway I could be wrong about this, I know not everyone thinks agrees with me here, but this is one of those behaviors that seems to me like it should be obviously proscribed and when people do it casually it’s like everyone has suddenly started saying that 2+2=5 and expecting me to agree

Yawning Mental Void: “there are so many things in the world and you will never quite manage to put them in anything like a sensible order, and as you scramble pathetically to establish maybe a syllogism here, an analogy there, the mystic voice of intuition whispers the answers to everyone else.  you are not playing the same game they are and you never were.  they will ‘like’ your contributions and deem your 'perspective’ 'interesting’ and even 'refreshing’ but don’t be fooled.  these are code words for 'born without a conduit to the gods above.’  as always, in everything, if you have to ask you’ll never know”

rob nostalgebraist: "yeah i know but can you stop yelling at me so i can like watch a movie or maybe get some work done or something lol"

Today’s subway station thoughts:

I originally got into reading Less Wrong because it seemed a lot like academia except with people whose minds worked more like mine.  A version of academia where I wouldn’t have to act like I agreed with ideas that made no sense to me, like:

• Once a thinker is famous, you can (or should) never rightfully displace them from fame by arguing or by citing new information; the best you can do is produce a “critique.”  If sufficiently damning, your “critique” will eventually be read alongside the original thinker to achieve some sort of synthesis (?).
• The respectable way to think about a topic is not to look at information about it and think about that information sensibly; it’s to read an extremely wide range of famous thinkers, then “apply” them to the issue.  You must do this to be “an intellectual.”
• Any thinker can be “applied” to any issue, but they must be treated as stand-ins for static, fixed sets of ideas rather than people of their time.  Aristotle and David Hume can be brought back from the grave to speak upon, say, modern political issues.  But they must say exactly the things they said centuries ago, even though they would surely say other things if they were alive today.
• All famous books are famous for a reason.  There is something good somewhere in Plato’s Republic, even if you can’t see it.
• There are no stock phrases that shouldn’t be reified.  If you can say the words “free will” or “the self” then there must be a set of True and False propositions about these things, and we can usefully talk about them by using these phrases.  Asking whether such a concept makes sense in the first place is anti-intellectual.
• As a consequence of the previous point, “the hard problem of consciousness” is a sensible and non-misleading term.
• You should accept and enjoy, and ideally practice, a turgid, imprecise style of writing that is totally inconsistent with any standard of good writing that exists outside of academia.  You don’t need to think carefully about the definitions of the words you use – in fact, it is better if you don’t, as long as you use big words.  Say “ontology” instead of “stuff,” “irreducible” instead of “unavoidable,” “instigate” instead of “cause.”  (This sounds like I’m attacking humanists, but most scientists can’t write either.  If that sounds arrogant of me to say, well, it probably is.  But I just mean relative to ordinary standards of writing – what you’d find in average-quality magazines, newspapers, essay collections, etc.)
• Etc., etc., etc.

Then I learned about Friendly AI, prediction markets, pop Bayesianism, the bad fanfic, “politics is the mind-killer but we’re all libertarians somehow,” and many other things in Less Wrong that didn’t make sense to me either and seemed like in-group shibboleths that I would never be comfortable with.

(The point of writing all this is that it’s funny to think of HPMoR as Less Wrong’s equivalent of Plato’s Republic.)

Lately I’ve been trying to be honest with myself about how, for lack of a better word, “impure” my motivations for learning about things are – and to try to use my knowledge of that fact to make myself learn things.

E.g. I was reading a little while ago about the controversy over Wendy Doniger’s book “The Hindus: An Alternative History.”  Doniger is a famous scholar but that book that got a lot of bad press for being (ostensibly) inaccurate and also offensive towards Hindus.  (Some of the claims that were supposed to be offensive against Hindus were claims about Hindu texts being sexist, so things got pretty complicated.)

Reading this stuff made me want to read the book.  Then I chastised myself for that reaction, because why should I read an inaccurate, controversial book about Hinduism when I’ve never read any other book about Hinduism?  Wasn’t I just being driven by love of controversy and excitement rather than love of knowledge?

The answer is: unequivocally yes.  But the fact is that controversy and excitement are big motivators for me.  So if I sit down with Doniger’s book, I might actually read it.  And, if I’m realistic with myself, I am probably never going to sit down with an ordinary, sober book about Hinduism.

So the facts of the case are 1) I don’t know shit about Hinduism and 2) realistically, I’m either going to get the “controversial” account from Wendy Doniger or not get any account at all and continue not knowing shit.  And the controversial account is probably better than none.  (For one thing, it might kindle an enduring interest that will drive me to read other, probably better sources.)

I like controversy, I like conflict, I like big exciting claims and sexy “alternative” versions of things even if they’re likely to be bullshit.  I don't like these traits of mine, but I can’t change them, so I might as well try to use them.  Eventually I might even learn something!

I just don’t have any patience anymore for this idea that “beautiful prose” is this thing that can be totally isolated from content or context and consists mainly in sounding like James Joyce and writing really long sentences using as many different registers as possible

Writing is an art form and art can include … subtlety? restraint? single-minded intensity of purpose? modulation of pace and tone? realism, e.g., writing the way a character would actually write?  Kinds of beauty or quality that don’t lend themselves to ejaculatory metaphors (“gushing fountains of prose”)?

I think Ambien CR is messing with my mood without actually helping me sleep better.

I’m more confident of this now that 1) my mood has continued to be off since I raised the possibility a little while ago, and 2) I’ve now learned that not one, but both of my parents have had bad experiences with it.

I’m going to stop taking it and see what happens.  (This post will help remind me when I did this and how I was feeling at the time)

One of the problems with disliking yourself is that if/when people like you, you end up thinking of that as a point of conflict or disagreement, maybe even a failing on their part.

I want to know people who share my interests and tendencies but when those interests and tendencies start to include “disdain for my interests and tendencies” everything becomes more confusing (and amusing).

Also, just in general, I should probably say this:

If you tell me I am doing something wrong, and it’s not clear to me what was wrong about it (which is often going to be the case), I am going to spend some time trying to figure it out.  This may look like I am arguing with you, or nitpicking, or playing devil’s advocate.  I’ll try to minimize the extent to which it seems like these things, but ultimately I will take looking bad or being obnoxious in the moment over not knowing why I am hurting people.

I will never just say “oh, sorry, I won’t do it again” if I don’t really understand what “it” means or why I shouldn’t do it.  Because that would mean I probably will do it again.  That brief, decisive apology would sound nice in the moment, but I would be lying, and I would be misleading you about my future behavior.  And I don’t want to do that.

Though I guess more generally I’ve always been confused by the whole “just don’t push your beliefs on others!” thing, as it seems like it can easily slide into a sort of condescending fake “respect” rather than actual respect for others’ beliefs

E.g. a former student in my graduate program was a fundamentalist Christian and tried to convert a lot of people in the department to his religion.  Almost everyone else seemed annoyed by this and responded to him with some version of the message “believe what you want, but it’s rude to push it on others.”

My response was to think, “okay, as my friend, it’s understandable that this guy is doing what he thinks will save my soul, and I owe it to him to take that seriously and explain to him my reasons for not believing in this stuff.”  This resulted in hours of polite but sometimes intense conversation in which we talked about reconciling faith with science (we were both science grad students), my moral worries about the Old Testament, etc.  He never managed to convert me, but he seemed very happy that someone was actually talking to him about this stuff and responding to him in a non-dismissive way.

I dunno, the way people talk about religion is generally one of those things that Rob Doesn’t Get