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Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)

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Re: Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)

#61

Post by Lambent_Cactus »

civilized wrote: post #56
Lambent_Cactus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with signing up with an underground Straussian heretic network is that if you're not actually beset by the Inquisition or by Stalinism, you're likelier to trap yourself in an epistemic filter bubble than to discover some secret truth. Damore wasn't burned at the stake or shot in the head; he was fired from one especially cushy software job at a giant, publicly-traded company. And rather than grappling wit…

You were right about this for a while, although I sympathized with his bitterness. But now he actually ended up getting into art and he's really good. Check out his Twitter feed sometime. Very few people seem to bother sympathizing with the unwoke autistic nerd, but I feel happy for him that he transcended this deeply unfair, absurd, traumatic incident in his life and found something beautiful to do.

I did actually check out his twitter feed before writing this, where I saw that his bio, pinned tweet, and several of his most recent tweets (https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1456653034671517703, https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1453034087036424194, https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1448325924756332546), are all about either the memo controversy or other culture war grist. It's who he has decided to be.

Some of the AI-generated art is nice though, so more power to him on that.

Re: Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)

#62

Post by civilized »

Lambent_Cactus wrote: post #61
civilized wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were right about this for a while, although I sympathized with his bitterness. But now he actually ended up getting into art and he's really good. Check out his Twitter feed sometime. Very few people seem to bother sympathizing with the unwoke autistic nerd, but I feel happy for him that he transcended this deeply unfair, absurd, traumatic incident in his life and found something beautiful to do.

I did actually check out his twitter feed before writing this, where I saw that his bio, pinned tweet, and several of his most recent tweets ( https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1456653034671517703 , https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1453034087036424194 , https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1448325924756332546 ), are all about either the memo controversy or other culture war grist. It's who he has deci…

His pinned tweet is great. Never has a simple "lol" more sharply skewered elite hypocrisy. They want your opinion on how to boldly change things, but only if it agrees with their pre-existing orthodoxy on how to boldly change things. They're the exact same as the people they criticize in that article, if not far worse. The author of the piece he QTed is editor of Wired.com, one of the most vicious hate-brigaders and misinformers during the Damore affair.

The other ones you link are a little boring I grant. But I notice you're filtering away all the jokes and art and focusing on culture war things. Interesting choice there given that I was trying to draw your attention to the other stuff.

He doesn't just do AI art. He does beautiful original art. First tweet after the pinned one. It was quite striking to me, but seems you didn't notice it.

Consider asking yourself who is the one blinkered by obsession with the culture war?

Re: Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)

#63

Post by DarylZero »

heyitsguay wrote: post #45
Lambent_Cactus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with signing up with an underground Straussian heretic network is that if you're not actually beset by the Inquisition or by Stalinism, you're likelier to trap yourself in an epistemic filter bubble than to discover some secret truth. Damore wasn't burned at the stake or shot in the head; he was fired from one especially cushy software job at a giant, publicly-traded company. And rather than grappling wit…

I think you can draw parallels between that trajectory and the dynamics of "censorship" (moderation) on big social media platforms. You compare Twitter vs. Gab or Reddit vs. Voat, and these free speech alternatives get stuck in that alt-right filter bubble precisely because social media moderation has been largely (certainly not entirely) effective at targeting hatred and toxicity. When you only ban a bunch of hatefu…

>Similarly, if there had been hard, actionable truth at the core of Damore's claims, there would have been a huge opportunity to gather evidence and observe effects and come up with an organizational system that better reflected the reality of human social relationships.

Why would the opportunity to change the organizational system have anything to do with whether there was any truth to what he said?

Just being right doesn't create such opportunities.

Re: Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)

#64

Post by boppo1 »

RangerScience wrote: post #50
civilized wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think your characterization of Damore's document is deeply flawed, to an irresponsible degree, and I have no problem telling you that directly. The "insurmountable blockers" thing is particularly ridiculous, as I explain in another comment in this tree [1]. I do believe my comment is an appropriately nuanced critique of a flatly ridiculous position. I'm glad that you like SSC though and I'm sure we could get a…

Fosho. Rest of discussion in other tree; for here, just this bit. You said: > I would highly recommend you read the beginning of the linked SSC article That definitely reads to me like you saying I didn't read it. Can you take a moment and attempt to understand how that would come across as having that meaning?

Please run for office.

Re: Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)

#65

Post by boppo1 »

civilized wrote: post #52
RangerScience wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fosho. Rest of discussion in other tree; for here, just this bit. You said: > I would highly recommend you read the beginning of the linked SSC article That definitely reads to me like you saying I didn't read it. Can you take a moment and attempt to understand how that would come across as having that meaning?

That's fair. Sometimes when I want to make a point I just charge forward and don't think about the best way to manage how it will sound. "You didn't read X" to a stranger over the internet is an unfounded cheap shot I would never intentionally take.

You too. Please run for office.

Re: Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)

#66

Post by civilized »

boppo1 wrote: post #65
civilized wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair. Sometimes when I want to make a point I just charge forward and don't think about the best way to manage how it will sound. "You didn't read X" to a stranger over the internet is an unfounded cheap shot I would never intentionally take.

You too. Please run for office.

This concept is hilarious to me, but thank you, I will keep it in mind :)

Re: Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)

#67

Post by DarylZero »

marcosdumay wrote: post #7

Well, if you want to do it right, you don't just "not discuss" the orthodoxy, you go out of your way to make discussing the orthodoxy very clearly forbidden on the research circle. You put "we won't allow anybody to talk about lightning" on the first paragraph of your institution's code of conduct. You actively censor people discussing it, and do all you can to erase it from their history. On a related matter, people…

With Damore there are multiple lightning issues. One is a narrative that tries to equate women to men. Another is a narrative about income distribution that tries to provide justification for the inequality.

The equation of women to men is tacked onto the inequality justification like an epicycle. It has to be seen in that context.

All of the people inside Google politicking over wages should be viewed a kind of organized conspiracy to exclude outsiders from the golden goose's eggs. An economic narrative says wages are being traded for labor, but that's not how anything works operationally.

Re: Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)

#68

Post by nine_k »

civilized wrote: post #20
RangerScience wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found that JD's document was a moderately anti-diversity screed, tho. I did a deep read (the document, everything the document linked to, most of the things that those linked to) back when it all went down. IMO, while James raised a valid question ("how do we know any of this is working, or even can work?"), some of his mistakes were in attempting to answer it (instead of solidly beginning a conversation); attempti…

I would highly recommend you read the beginning of the linked SSC article. It's about people who had fresh perspectives getting shut down by authorities who were mad about what they said. And how those authorities always have an excuse in terms of something the person didn't say or do perfectly. If Damore didn't perfectly solve America's diversity problems in one swoop, I guess that's a mark against him -- but what a…

The problem with the reaction to Damore's paper, to my mind, that instead of people pointing at the paper's shortcomings and trying to refine the approach to see if the idea could make sense if researched with more rigor, they urgently rejected it wholesale because it was irritating to the sensitivities of the modern progress faith. Nobody wanted to be a target of a public scandal in which rational reasoning, or even being objectively right, is not a way to win.

The problem with human societies is that they crave faith, they crave an easy mental model of the world and an easy way to tell "us" from them, but science by construction is anti-faith, it's built of questioning everything.

Re: Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)

#69

Post by marcosdumay »

ajuc wrote: post #21
marcosdumay wrote: post #7

Well, if you want to do it right, you don't just "not discuss" the orthodoxy, you go out of your way to make discussing the orthodoxy very clearly forbidden on the research circle. You put "we won't allow anybody to talk about lightning" on the first paragraph of your institution's code of conduct. You actively censor people discussing it, and do all you can to erase it from their history. On a related matter, people…

> Well, if you want to do it right, you don't just "not discuss" the orthodoxy, you go out of your way to make discussing the orthodoxy very clearly forbidden on the research circle. Nah. That makes it a forbidden fruit attracting rebellious youth like nothing else. I've seen it happen in communist Poland regarding the Katyń massacre for example. You don't outright say "we don't talk about Katyń here" - that would ju…

You seem to be talking from the point of view of the powerful people that created the orthodoxy.

If you are pulling a Kolmogorov, it's because you have no attachment at all to the orthodoxy, and you'd prefer nobody to believe on it.

Re: Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning (2017)

#70

Post by clavicat »

RangerScience wrote: post #19
civilized wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, Mr. Damore. Author of a document the entire prestige media called an "anti-diversity screed" in perfect lockstep, even though anyone could read it for themselves and see it was nothing of the sort. 2017 sure was a year for the history books.

I found that JD's document was a moderately anti-diversity screed, tho. I did a deep read (the document, everything the document linked to, most of the things that those linked to) back when it all went down. IMO, while James raised a valid question ("how do we know any of this is working, or even can work?"), some of his mistakes were in attempting to answer it (instead of solidly beginning a conversation); attempti…

If Damore had instead offered his opinion that Google lacked diversity because of white-supremacist patriarchy, Donald Trump, and rapey tech bros, somehow I doubt that you would have conjured this list of excuses to pathologize him for voicing his opinion and provoking a mob to demand that he be deprived of his livelihood. No, you probably would have described the backlash as an atrocity being inflicted on a courageous voice for denouncing social injustice. This is a splendid example of a selective demand for rigor. In order to share an opinion, you apparently have to “do a substantive sociological investigation”—do you think the other parties in the same conversation were performing field studies and submitting their master’s thesis? You blame him for “not starting a discussion”—even though he had written what he did as a contribution to an ongoing discussion. You blame for having any certitude in his own opinion—I’m sure the mob baying for his head just really disliked fanaticism. Oh, he was supposed to recruit co-authors—this is an absurd demand that goes far beyond even what is expected of academic papers, which do have sole authors.

This is how ideologically dominant positions always shore up their hegemony. Every time an enemy of theirs fails to dot every I and cross every T, you can be sure that the regime will magnify their missteps all out of proportion and invent procedures that they failed to follow in order to justify whatever act of savage repression is visited on them.

>much of the core issue of equity is having people with one perspective answering important questions for people with a different perspective.

Again, remind me which “perspective” was calling for the other side to be rendered unemployable?

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