Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Kolmogorov option

scottaaronson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 476 posts

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#201

Post by backpropaganda »

typon wrote: post #186

This was such an incredibly self serving post that it's almost funny. Thanks for the bravery Scott, you chose not to argue for what you believe in from your position of immense privilege. A martyr indeed. In any case, people like Scott and others in this thread sound so incredibly childish when talking about "rational" argument being the antidote to the venom of "political correctness" ruining western society. You kn…

PC is particularly harmful, since it restricts talking about controversial topics. Most of the other topics you picked has PC problems. For instance, income equality between the genders could be fixed if we recognize that there are innate differences between the genders, and actively work to make the workplace more inclusive to styles of working which would favor the other gender. Scott Alexander also argued that the constant proclamation that "tech has a sex problem" sends a message that tech is not for women. Such unhealthy fixation with "women in X" is arguable harming X's diversity plans more than helping. But this is not an opinion I'm allowed to have or discuss with you.

tl;dr: we need to fix communication which would allow us to fix other problems of today.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#202

Post by pjc50 »

beaconstudios wrote: post #190
pjc50 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damore is himself deeply buried in identity politics, as can be determined by his use of the codeword "Marxist intellectuals" in one of his footnotes.

rather than edge around your accusations, it might be better to state plainly what you're accusing him of. You're suggesting he's using "Marxist intellectuals" as a codeword for Jews, and that he's actually a Nazi (or at the very least a conspiracy theorist anti-semite) who is carefully wording his ideological diatribe so it sounds less ominous? This is usually the accusation that's thrown out by ideologues to silenc…

So why is he referencing Marxism in a discussion on gender? He's not actually referencing Marx, he's just .. labelling a bunch of people as Marxist? And therefore he is "accusing them of being secret ideologues on the other side", is he not?

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#203

Post by backpropaganda »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #102
cabalamat wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed not. Aaronson is talking about the general case when there are things you can't say that are indeed true. This is useful, because if you can come to correct conclusions for the general case, these conclusions will be useful in instances of that case.

Scott Aaronson is highly unlikely going to be siding with someone using pseudoscience to push their victim agenda. It's a great insult to the victims of Church oppression in the middle ages and of Soviet policy to compare their hardships to the "hardships" of men working at Google.

Have some self-awareness, good sir.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#204

Post by tome »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #182

This quote comes to mind: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, p…

Similarly,

> I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do.

> -- Charlie Munger

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#205

Post by backpropaganda »

red_admiral wrote: post #188

> This is where you build up fortresses of truth in places the ideological authorities don’t particularly understand or care about Isn't this exactly what safe spaces were originally meant to be?

Sure. I don't think anyone here is going to be embarrassed to call it a safe space. But safe spaces protect you from harm from individuals. The idea here is create spaces to protect you from the state.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#206

Post by 3pt14159 »

tpeo wrote: post #30

Besides ideological self-righteousness, Aaronson left out one important component of oppressive regimes, which I think is actually far more important: it takes a relatively large amount of people to topple a regime, while small groups as well as individuals do nothing but expose themselves by rebelling. So no individual with any regard for his own personal safety has any incentive to rebel, and will instead go along…

This is kinda a feature. If the response was linear authoritarian regimes could calibrate / plan the response.

The reason Ukraine was able to have a successful revolution is because it didn't look too bad until it was and then it flipped like a light switch.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#207

Post by cropsieboss »

ElmntOfSurprise wrote: post #153
jacalata wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then you start learning about the different distribution of ownership and access to personal computers among boys and girls, and it looks like the personal computer actually introduced the interest difference. The book Unlocking The Clubhouse has a bunch of discussion on this topic, if you're curious.

You mean that boys like computers more --> they buy more computers (or nag their parents about getting one), or that parents are more prone to give computers to boys --> girls never have the chance to get as interested? Interestingly, teenage girls seem to have more access to (desktop) computers than boys have nowadays: http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media/Files/Reports/201...

Just like teenage girls had more instrument playing experience than boys during an era when blues and jazz were starting to develop. Yet men lead the genre.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#208

Post by backpropaganda »

macrael wrote: post #51
fvdessen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fascinated by sentences like "He created a textbook hostile work environment." and "Freedom of Speech is not Freedom from Consequences". I see them more and more, repeated verbatim, to justify why someone had to be removed from his social environment, or physically assaulted. Justifying physical violence from ideological reasons by repeating mantras. I tought I wouldn't see that in my lifetime, that it was a thin…

Please read the first article I linked. It's written by an employment lawyer! "Hostile work environment" is not a mantra, it has a legal definition that our justice system has been workshopping for decades. Please consider that this is actually a complicated area that many smart people have been arguing about and refining for years and years. The famous "fire in a theatre" example shows that there are limits to free…

From the link you shared, a hostile environment is "workplace is permeated with discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult that is sufficiently severe or pervasive". Pray tell us , which parts of "men and women are biologically different, and this may lead to differences in preferences and abilities, as a bunch of science suggests" are intimidation, ridicule or insult? He also makes it clear that he's talking about population level statistics, not individuals. It's perfectly allowed to say that "men take up more public space", then it should be perfectly allowed to talk about other traits found in women as well.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#209

Post by nl »

Chris2048 wrote: post #185
nl wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if anything, anyone who's appalled by these things should actually be interested in studying the conditions under which these things might happen I agree with this very strongly. I'm not sure if (or why) this leads to the requirement to have a rational discussion with proponents of abhorrent ideas. It's interesting. I used to believe that abhorrent ideas should be confronted. But I'm not longer convinced - it see…

> I'm not sure if (or why) this leads to the requirement to have a rational discussion with proponents of abhorrent ideas. Who decides what is abhorrent? In what sense? Rational, yet undesirable? > abhorrent ideas should be confronted This is an entirely different think. A constructive (cooperative), rational discussion is different from an adversarial debate. > to allow abhorrent ideas to spread Again, who decides w…

I'm reluctant to get drawn into a discussion of who decides what ideas are abhorrent because it's a pretty big topic on its own.

BUT, I do think (hope?) we can agree that there are some ideas that are abhorrent. I use the example of race-based slavery above.

Why should I have a rational discussions about the economic benefits of race-based slavery? The cost/benefit analysis just doesn't seem to make sense - the cost is increased visibility of the arguments for race based slavery, and I'm unsure what possible benefits there are.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#210

Post by moduspol »

pavlov wrote: post #191
habitue wrote: post #33

Let's say this is about the Google memo. And let's say, for the sake of argument, you're a person who thinks Damore had some good points and some bad points but you think the hysterically censorious response to him was way over the line. But you don't want to become a pariah yourself, so you stay quiet about it. The argument Damore was making was fiddly, kind of subtle and takes a long time to explain, it's not worth…

Because no one stopped and offered a third option: actually discussing his argument, acknowledging where he was right, and discussing what he got wrong. You're assuming Damore's argument exists in a vacuum. But it doesn't. It had a stated purpose of changing HR and hiring policies at Google, and with that, the unavoidable implication that some of Damore's colleagues actually shouldn't be with the company. When you th…

> the unavoidable implication that some of Damore's colleagues actually shouldn't be with the company.

Any criticism of existing hiring policy would logically result in the same implication. If it's fair at all to question a hiring policy, this needs to be not taken personally.

Besides, presumably at one point, all the "pro-diversity" initiatives mentioned in the memo didn't exist, yet someone was able to make the case that they should. This, too, would be an implication that some of the existing colleagues shouldn't be there, because there should have been more diverse selections.

Yet nobody was making lists of people they "can't possibly work with" for having that opinion.

Post reply on HN