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The Kolmogorov option

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Re: The Kolmogorov option

#421

Post by danarmak »

geofft wrote: post #409
danarmak wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an important difference between silencing opinions that (you think) are very stupid for practical engineering reasons, and not wanting to work with the fools who hold them; and between silencing opinions because you think they are morally abhorrent and harmful just by being expressed, and punishing people for holding or expressing them. Morality is a psychologically distinct category. Being morally wrong is n…

I think that argues in favor of a swifter response to someone who is objectively wrong on a moral matter that's relevant to the company's business objectives than someone who's objectively wrong on a merely technical matter that's relevant to the company's business objectives, no? Maybe I'm misunderstanding you. I mean, we could argue that this isn't a moral matter, but the fact is that a huge number of employees at…

You're right that:

1. What is and isn't in the domain of morality is a matter of culture and history and current events; if enough people feel something is immoral, that makes it immoral pretty much by definition.

2. Immoral behavior is, and in some sense ought to be, punished more harshly and more swiftly than merely being factually wrong or incompetent.

But of course people never agree on what is moral or immoral, or even what should be moralized or amoral. In particular, I believe in and argue for the free discussion of factual claims in the pursuit of truth, and against the moralization of empirically-testable propositions. (So, I agree that moralizing such things is bad).

I can give lots of reasons for why this produces a better society (as well as better science and technology), but in the end it's only a better society for those who care at all about truth (and, inseparably, about working science and technology). If someone disagrees with this on moral grounds, and feels it's better to force everyone to lie if the truth might be offensive, then I probably won't convince them otherwise.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#422

Post by naasking »

Confusion wrote: post #75
icebraining wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: even if you want to defend a "middle" position, that doesn't mean every argument roughly in that area is worthy defending. I didn't read the memo, so I have no opinion its merits on their own, but considering the immediate response it had, I'd argue it's not worth defending, because it clearly wasn't written in a way that could ever have a hope of convincing anyone not already on the fence.

I think 'considering the immediate response' used to be a valuable heuristic, but isn't any more. Too many people have become too polarized. There are a bunch of folks from the tech industry on Twitter that I have followed for years, including some HN regulars, that are now, IMHO, in the 'too polarized' group. I no longer trust their opinion on various 'political' subjects to be the result of deliberate consideration…

> Every suggestion that maybe this Google guy wrote something reasonable was met with derision, including by these people I follow, effectively shouting down anyone who responded in a moderating way.

You could also consider the possibility that they're right to deride the memo. Many studies are easily read incorrectly or have counter studies showing the effects aren't what they thought.

But even if the memo were factually correct, I think a lot of this comes down to miscommunication. The current tech culture may drive women away for some reasons, even possibly benign ones having nothing to do with discrimination. Some, maybe most people like this culture without being biased against women in any way. That's all perfectly reasonable.

Other people think this culture could change so that it's more attractive to women, presumably thinking that we can preserve what's great about the current culture, but simply introduce new perspectives and so on.

That's also entirely reasonable, but obviously can't be true in all cases. Some changes will be inherently incompatible with existing culture. Certainly this will grate on some people who don't see the need for change. Whether the change needs to happen is a separate issue I won't touch.

The memo's arguments that women are inherently disinterested in the current tech culture are then completely moot, because the goal isn't to try and fit women into the existing culture, but to change the culture so that women want to join it. So you can maybe see why people can be so derisive of the memo's arguments: it's a complete straw man from their point of view.

I personally don't even think each side realizes what they're arguing for and how they differ. They're all talking past each other, and the derision just gets in the way, but I suppose that's human nature.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#423

Post by the8472 »

nl wrote: post #412
the8472 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he can back his arguments with research and they don't contain any logical flaws then one should at least entertain them for a few minutes. After all he might be (partially) right and do his employer a favor. If he is wrong in ways that could be honest mistakes then one should first try to point out the mistakes so he can retract his document until he can find stronger evidence or truly see the error of his ways.…

After all he might be (partially) right and do his employer a favor So your point is that if a racist argument is partially right and good for an employer then it's all good??!

It appears that my words must be doing a terrible job at conveying my intent.

My point is that you should engage in rational discussion even if you think the other side holds an abhorrent, immoral, inhumane viewpoint. And there are many good reasons to do so. And just one of those many reasons is that the other side might be right about some things. Another is that engaging them in discussion is a much better approach of showing them where they are wrong, just punishing someone for holding unpopular views is unlikely to achieve that goal. Another one that I have not mentioned yet is simple reciprocity, you want others to extend that kind openness to discussion towards you when they think you're holding some view that is abhorrent according to their moral value system.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#425

Post by unityByFreedom »

Bartweiss wrote: post #351
scandox wrote: post #173

I want to say this as respectfully as I can, but it isn't easy: the quality of discourse on these topics is really low on HN. At the same time I do think it's really important for them to be discussed. Time and again, though, I'm disappointed by how reductive and unmeditative these discussions are. I'm also surprised by how angry people seem. This is a site used by a lot of very smart people, but I think there is an…

I strongly agree with this. In the past, I've valued HN as source of uncommonly good discussion. I still feel that way about how pure-tech topics are handled here, and I think HN remains better than 90% of other discussion fora for politics. (Twitter, anyone?) But "better than 90% of alternatives" is completely compatible with "reductive, vicious, and uninformed". A particular frustration of mine: the scattering of d…

> I don't know what can be done about it within the HN format, though.

It's not the HN format. The nature vs. nurture [1] debate is one of the oldest in psychology. It's a spectrum, and we're not sure about a lot of things, so people discuss it often in the hopes that someone will provide research answering some new part this fundamental question of our lives. It's been going on for centuries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#426

Post by AndrewOMartin »

AndrewOMartin wrote: post #59
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…

A problem with this kind of analysis of the situation is that everyone thinks they're in the "subtle and qualified" camp.

Christ, what a shitstorm.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#427

Post by kolmogorovthrow »

danarmak wrote: post #413
hellopier wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some kind of guide about this? How can you beat a linguistic analysis? If you publish elsewhere and someone guesses to compare your work, are you screwed? Are there any programs that scan writing to determine if the writer's english is Canadian or American or British etc? Or maybe your gender? Could you use that to weed out any regional phrases, or use regional phrases from other places to confuse the text?…

I'm not any kind of expert on this. I don't have personal experience (obviously I wouldn't admit it if I did, but still); I'm just making educated guesses based on my knowledge technology, people, and the way that previous doxxing campaigns have succeeded. I hope someone else can answer your questions better; I don't want to mislead by sounding more authoritative than I should. I can't think offhand of someone in the…

Linguistic analysis is sometimes called stylometry, and (although I've never tried it) there's a tool to analyze your anon-posts against a corpus of your non-anon language to see how to unique it is and how to anonymize it: https://github.com/psal/anonymouth

My impression is that the average Joe doesn't have enough of a public corpus for this to make a difference. But if you're an academic who blogs both publicly and privately? You might want to check it out.

There have been a several recent cases of political doxing of pseudonymous users. Blogger "Delicious Tacos", alt-right Youtuber "Millenial Woes", /r/the_donald user "HanAssholeSolo", and several members of the alt-right blog "The Right Stuff" have all been exposed at varying levels by various organizations. , As far as I understand, they were all exposed through OPSEC violations in their content, rather than technical violations. In the US, calling out the SWAT team when the target forgets to VPN before logging on to IRC is reserved for black-hats and child pornographers, at least so far.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#428

Post by kolmogorovthrow »

hellopier wrote: post #404
danarmak wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of all, consistently apply the maximum level opsec right from the beginning. Even if the first hundred posts on your new blog are inoccuous, you can't let them be connected to you when five years from now you find out that you actually want to write about something controversial for once. The hardest part is planning ahead and investing a lot of time and effort before the point where you actually publish the dan…

Is there some kind of guide about this? How can you beat a linguistic analysis? If you publish elsewhere and someone guesses to compare your work, are you screwed? Are there any programs that scan writing to determine if the writer's english is Canadian or American or British etc? Or maybe your gender? Could you use that to weed out any regional phrases, or use regional phrases from other places to confuse the text?…

If you're behind a VPN, any cookies along with your browser fingerprint will still be bright red: https://panopticlick.eff.org/ If what you're doing is really sensitive, do it in a clean VM + Tor. If you're posting, you also need to consider keystroke fingerprinting although with language profiling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_dynamics

Most threat models don't require considering these things.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#429

Post by pron »

jack9 wrote: post #420
pron wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary. This is a subject I studied (although indirectly) at university, and that's why I could easily tell that the author of the manifesto is both ignorant and uninterested in the subject, which is why he quotes studies that are irrelevant even if their findings are representative. In other words, that he confuses the question of "natural inclination" with the problem of inclusion of women in tech shows th…

> he has done no research on the subject at all. Except for the citations. > why I could easily tell that the author of the manifesto is both ignorant and uninterested in the subject Continuing to attack the credibility of a largely factual statement (the memo in question) is still not compelling. If there was evidence supporting opposing viewpoints, even hypothetically, you might want to lead with that in your inter…

I am not attacking the cited papers, just their relevance. He might as well have said, "we should not fight global warming because of special relativity". Special relativity may be true, but if you think it relates to global warming, then you have done no research on global warming, as you clearly don't understand the problem. That he thinks that innate differences in interest between the sexes relates to the problem of including women in tech that is trying to be addressed by various "diversity" measures, shows that he doesn't understand what the problem is.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#430

Post by glenra »

sounds wrote: post #306
jancsika wrote: post #251

Two things: * for a society that enjoys even minimal levels of freedom of speech, the Kolmogorov option isn't easily distinguishable from opportunism or careerism. * for a society like the U.S. that enjoys minimal levels of freedom of speech, what is an example of an unspeakable truth ? Charles Murray's research exists. Brendan Eich is still rich. Richard Stallman has an extremely unpopular opinion about child porn o…

Here are three unspeakable truths for the United States. Bringing them up is a risk: there is almost no chance for calm, composed conversation. 1. The US Federal Government is not held accountable to the Constitution any more. 2. Income inequality is back to 1930's levels. Beside US Federal Government solutions, across-the-aisle solutions are attacked by corporations and large news sources. 3. Belief systems, their m…

Individual income inequality has been approximately flat for the last 50 years. The variety of income inequality that has increased is household inequality, but that's mostly driven by social changes as that metric is hugely sensitive to the nature and size of households. ( http://www.aei.org/publication/sorry-krugman-piketty-and-sti... )

Your #3 has always been true but is arguably less so today than in past given the continuing fragmentation and loss of authority of large news sources.

If your #1 is supposed to represent a change from some golden earlier era...which era are you thinking of, exactly?

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