I agree I think the US has these.
Yeah sure, I agree.
Right, yes I can see that that’s different to my law.
No I think the US does have laws like these, and I can’t see more things that micarchism requires. And I don’t think that most of the time that companies are getting away with doing bad but legal things. So I find it convincing.
I don’t think enforcement of fraud laws necessarily implies more regulation. I was thinking of possibilities where they could come packaged. For example, a center-left president is particularly anti-fraud. That president could actually be helping capitalism now and even more for the future without realizing it.
I think watermarking AI content is a really important idea that could make a really big difference in the world.
I don’t know if it’s technically feasible (if anyone knows a lot about that, please share!). This article claims the technology is good enough and that Google is doing it, but that other AI companies refuse to use effective watermarking because they don’t want to watermark (they’d rather help cheating students, spammers, botters, deep fakers, etc., who are a lot of their customers).
I like this song. It’s a poem from 2020 attacking Elon Musk and silicon valley.
I wrote a YouTube comment:
Another theoretical solution besides deterrence is spreading classical liberal ideas including specifically about the harmony of men’s interests. If most people are persuaded of the right mindset – in particular that everyone including them personally can gain much more through peace and voluntary cooperation than through war or other force, crime, right’s violations, etc. – then that would make a huge difference. This does not provide any sort of practical short term solution, only a potential long term approach.
I got one more reply from @johnsinclair4621:
@curi42 You are like a vulgar marxist in your defensive relationship with the sacred texts.
Who cares what the texts say? I read the Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Locke’s discourses in a marxist oriented reading group and we all agreed that especially Smith’s is a pretty good book. Now what?
The thing is that politics are never the realisation of some ideas expressed in a book. People have their own agendas and maybe use this or that theorem to justify them. People claiming to realise Smith or Locke spearheaded a lot of changes and reforms that were pretty disadvantageous for a lot of other people. Therefore they have a pretty bad reputation especially in regions fucked over by their champions.
Does this mean that classical liberal ideas are therefore wrong? No, that does not follow. But like, being „right“ doesn’t mean much in the realm of politics and the simple act of „spreading“ liberal ideas leads nowhere. The Russian state doesn’t engage in war because they don’t know the truth. They do it because it serves their perceived interests.
Among other things, I read him as declining my discussion offer (he neither requested discussion nor tried to meet the criterion I brought up for further discussion). I didn’t reply.
? All I have to go off of is the screenshot you posted, but that seems like quite an intense statement for just asking for errors in classical liberal books.
I have no economic knowledge but is that really as problematic as he makes it seem? I remember reading some free-market type stuff that said that Smith and Locke could be compatible with Marx. I don’t know if thats true, but if it is. It seems like hes unaware.
Hmm. Seems like he’s confusing ideas with their advocates too? Also it feels like he doesn’t think ideas have much to do with reality at all.
I think I get this view in a way. It’s similar to the view that goes, “When it comes to someone’s feelings, facts and logic don’t mean a thing.” I don’t know how to argue against both views, cuz I see some truth to them. Like if a person doesn’t see how a solution works for their problem then it doesn’t matter if the solution actually solves their problem or not.
Yeah it was too much. He seemed tilted, triggered, insecure, reactive, low status, high effort, bothered, wanting control over me, etc.
Using Duolingo can provide a good example of practicing something. It’s very practice based. It’s not perfect. It barely explains anything and mostly just makes you practice and figure out some patterns and concepts yourself. Each practice problem is designed to be short and easy. One of their goals is you do a bunch of small, easy steps and then after a while you actually made some progress without it ever being hard. I don’t think it’s ideal but it’s pretty decent. It can be a good resource by itself to start with and if you get more advanced it can be good paired with some other resources.
A lot of other language learning apps are too hard, at least at the beginning. They give you less repetition and introduce more words and concepts faster. There’s something good about how easy Duo tries to be and the emphasis on high volume practice.
If you do Duolingo for a month it could give you some perspective on philosophy practice. It has you do way way more practice problems than I’ve ever seen anyone do for philosophy (or grammar). And it keeps the problems way shorter, faster and easier than I see people do for philosophy. And doing lots like that actually does work – do it for a while and you will know more than when you started.
Language (and math and some other topics) is good for auto-generated practice problems with answer keys. It’s hard to do so much practice in philosophy without answer keys. Still, one could try and get closer. Doing a larger number of easier problems would have some benefits even without answer keys – you just have to avoid repeating the same errors many, many times and never catching on (which is something that shouldn’t be too common when sticking to easy enough problems, and which other forum members or a tutor might spot just from skimming some answers without checking them all).
@Eternity @LMD I’d recommend you both do 15min/day of duolingo for a month to get more experience doing a larger number of easier practice problems. Any language you want is fine (though the courses are worse quality for some languages, especially more obscure ones. I don’t know all the details. The non-English courses they’ve put the most work into are Spanish and French). The languages I’ve done a bit of are Spanish and Japanese. Any language where you don’t have to learn a new alphabet is easier, so if you don’t care much, I’d recommend against dealing with a new alphabet. Also big alphabets are a problem. In the short term, learning a small new alphabet makes things harder, but you’ll get used to it eventually. But learning 2000+ Kanji is both a short and long term difficulty. Japanese also has significantly different sentence structure compared to English or Spanish (which are similar to each other), which is interesting but also harder.
A whole lesson in Duo can be like 20 practice problems and take 3 minutes. You could easily do 100 problems per day and over 3000 problems in a month.
PS You can force quit and reopen the app to skip ads.
What are your opinions on comprehensible input/immersion vs traditional methods?
I noticed comprehensible input could be motivated by empiricism and traditional grammar and translation methods could be motivated by rationalism. I’ve never seen someone argue for their methods with empiricism or rationalism, but the philosophies and methods seem to match.
After reading this I started learning Spanish on Duolingo three days ago. I’ve done over an hour of exercises so far. I’ve found it fun, and haven’t found it hard. So far, I’m planning to continue doing it at least for a month and then will see.
I recently found out that smoking has health benefits. I now feel pretty lied to.
Smoking apparently significantly reduces the chance of getting Parkinson’s Disease or Ulcerative Colitis, and can help with some other stuff. That doesn’t mean smoking is a good idea; it has big downsides too. But the anti-smoking propaganda I’ve been exposed to presented smoking as purely bad, which apparently isn’t true.
I don’t know how much smoking is required to get what benefits. I wonder if historically people smoked small amounts (I’d think most people couldn’t afford more) and got some benefits with less downside. I don’t know and have other things to research. I’ve just found that many traditional human practices have some sort of (sometimes hidden) wisdom and benefit to them, and I wonder if smoking could be another example. And then sometimes modern changes, like mass production or modifications with new technologies, can make things worse (like enabling smoking a lot instead of a little). This comes up with a lot of food where traditional recipes are healthier than a lot of modern ultra processed food. And traditional food practices often have nutritionally beneficial food pairings, and do things to reduce downsides of foods, that people were using long before science could explain the benefits.
In Mac Safari, you can go to the CF forum homepage, click the share button and choose Add to Dock. This lets the CF forum act like its own separate app instead of a browser tab. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad but I’m trying it out. Also, someone said this can improve performance of various web apps that you leave open a long time that use a lot of memory.
Rationalistic people (stereotypically more often men) think they’re so smart and clever when they’re actually just wrong and bad at analysis. They’re argumentative based on their poor quality analysis, and sometimes they are arguing with people with correct, more reasonable intuitions who don’t know how to argue those points well, so sometimes they get their way when they’re wrong (this guy didn’t get his way in this particular case). People who would read a philosophy forum correlate with the kind of people who make this kind of error, so this may be relevant to you.
Besides the risk of rationalistically arguing with other people when you’re wrong, there is also a risk of rationalistically arguing with yourself and overruling your own wiser intuitions.
Rationalistic = using the appearance of reason but not actually using reason correctly. Similar to scientistic = using the appearance of science but not doing good science.
You may want to pause the video and think about it after he says the scenario but before he gives his current opinion with the benefit of hindsight.
I paused. I couldn’t really tell what I preferred. I thought about another option that wasn’t a beach holiday, but was a similar style of holiday getaway thing, and I think I did prefer that (because I’m not a fan of beaches, and I think it was premised on him liking beach holidays and couches?). I think I only gave the holiday much thought because of your prompt to think carefully about it. I think if I had just seen this on the internet organically I would’ve thought that the couch was perhaps better and not considered the holiday much. I had a similar thought of: the couch will last longer. I continued watching undecided.
What do you think the main error being made here is? identifying with ‘rational’ reasoning, as opposed to less explicit reasoning?
What should one look out for to notice this in themselves?
What’s the alternative to using even your bad analysis skills? Using more just intuition?
It makes sense that one should be aware of your analysis skills and avoid getting into fights about conclusions that depend on them.
I suppose a problem here is that it turned into a big fight between him and his wife. How could that have been avoided? Perhaps being more agnostic or undecided about what would actually be better? Being more open minded, more honest?
The scenario was ambiguous, especially before he explained his answer in retrospect. What is their income like? What would the couch replace? Do they current sit on the floor?
He said they got the couch six months later and made other comments. My impression is their income was OK and their couch-alternative was OK. So with that extra information the vacation more clearly makes sense.
That’s interesting because vacations often last longer than couches: you can remember the vacation long after you got rid of the couch.
And you can get a couch later, but a first wedding anniversary is something you don’t get back later.
No. What I thought was notable was combining a focus on explicit reasoning with poor explicit reasoning. It’s not that hard to come up with explicit reasoning in favor of the vacation. Even if his wife is a more intuitive thinker who can’t do that, if he’s going to focus on explicit reasoning then he should be able to brainstorm explicit positives to the vacation even with zero help from her. If he can’t do that, then he isn’t a good explicit thinker and shouldn’t rely on his explicit analysis.
One thing to watch for is that you argue with someone who thinks more intuitively than you, then later it turns out that you were wrong (in your own opinion).
Being less confident and argumentative when you don’t really know what you’re talking about. And yes also being more in touch with your own intuition instead of ignoring and suppressing it.
She was right, so he was the one who was really overconfident. So one way to avoid this kind of thing is for people to not be wildly overconfident. How? Don’t wildly overestimate your explicit analysis/logic skills. People who do that commonly end up basically acting like verbal bullies.
It’s context dependent too. He was dealing with an interpersonal relationship, not an abstract philosophy issue.
An additional thing people can do is learn to incorporate intuition into explicit discussion, including helping others with that. He could have asked his wife questions about her intuition and cooperatively created explicit knowledge about her intuition with her so that he could understand her and her point better. She might have been open to that. If not, I still bet she would have liked it more than the argument they had. I’ve written about how to do this like with asking yes/no questions to the intuition (works on your own intuition or someone else’s) to narrow down what it says and doesn’t say and figure out patterns it has:
I thought of this when reading over your intuition articles this morning:
Would it make sense for people, when in doubt, to generally to favour their intuitions instead of their explicit reasoning? My thinking is that if an idea of yours is in intuition form, then it’s a well practised and automatised idea. It’s something you’ve used a lot already.
It seems like there is a connection here with the idea of the value of traditional knowledge; on balance the traditions will contain more good ideas than new ideas.
It’s not that your intuitions will mainly be traditional knowledge, but just that they are ideas of yours that you’ve used more, they connect more to your ideas, and maybe you’ve done more error correction on?
This isn’t to say that you should do what you feel all the time, or that your intuitions are probably right, but perhaps just that they should be considered even more important, or taken more seriously, than even someone who thought intuitions weren’t to be dismissed might think. Rather than be considered equally important as conscious ideas (though they should be treated so in debate) they should maybe be considered for the purpose of personal problem solving, more important?
I just had this idea and it’s probably not coming out perfect but thought I’d share anyway.
No. When dealing with conflicts between ideas, the goal shouldn’t be to pick a winner and some losers. A rule of thumb about how to pick the winner is problematic because that’s the wrong goal. (This is related to Popper’s point that “Who should rule?” is the wrong question. The same issue expressed in more generic terms is “What should win?”)
There can’t be a mechanic rule for how to handle disagreements because it involves knowledge creation. It takes creativity.
My thinking is that if an idea of yours is in intuition form, then it’s a well practised and automatised idea. It’s something you’ve used a lot already.
Practice is one way to form an intuition. It’s one of the more reliable ways. But people form and unform intuitions all the time. If you watch a new movie, you will likely create intuitions about the characters and plot as you go, and some of them will be gone before the movie ends.
