There are several approaches to exams and grading. Testing what the students have learned is a common one. In that approach, the highest grade is the expected one. You earn it if you have learned everything you are supposed to, or at least 90-95% of it. Lower grades are signs of failure.

In another approach, the exam is supposed to challenge the students. When I was undergrad, you only needed 80-85% of available points for the highest grade. Even the best students were expected to fail some assignments, because they would then learn from their mistakes. It was nice when it worked, but sometimes the problems just too difficult for no reason or required an insight nobody would ever find, expect by accident.

One grading approach is open-ended from the top and more common with theses than classes. If your work is everything one would expect, you get the second-highest or third-highest grade. Highest grades are only available for those who demonstrate understanding well beyond the scope of the class or the degree.

In France you only need half of the points. When I was in college, you had to have at least a mean of 10/20 (we grade on 20 points), and have no course below 8/20. The best students were usually around 16, 17. The worst were around 5. Most of the students were between 10 and 12. I like that system because it gives a vast field to grade people, and most people can always improve. You can also compensate some courses with others, but only to a point.

Meh, if your goal is for students to learn from mistakes, you can give them those any time during semester. No reason to put them on test. The best students will try to crack them, in fact, will spend more time that test allows on them. The difficult questions, especially in math or computer science, may take multiple days and attempts to solve. Going through that frustration is definitely learning experience. Putting time hour limit on it during test just weakens it.

> Highest grades are only available for those who demonstrate understanding well beyond the scope of the class or the degree.

In that point, it becomes in scope. Because "beyond scope" is infinite you have people guessing what "beyond scope" they should learn to gain it. The tests and exams should not be game.

Let it be know what are you going to test in advance.

In the second exam type, even a good student can't assume they can solve every problem within the time limit. They have to prioritize the problems based on how easy they expect them to be. The exam tests not only what the student has learned but also how well they understand what they can do and what they can't. The same can also apply to other types of assignments. For example, even a good student can't assume that they can solve every homework problem before the deadline.

The third grading approach is usually used for most important works. Under this scheme, the highest grades are reserved to those who do something exceptional. No matter what the expectations are, if you only meet them 100%, it's not sufficient for the highest grade.

As an example of the third approach, when I studied CS, our department gave the highest grade to only around 1 thesis in 100. There were no set criteria for the highest grade, except that the faculty had to agree that the work was beyond what one would expect from an excellent thesis. It was something not even a smart determined student could expect to gain, except by accident. Even the theses that got the highest grade were rather unexceptional in the grand scheme of things. Except the one that described an OS that runs on billions of devices today. That's the proper bar an undergraduate student should aim for if they want to guarantee the highest grade under this grading scheme.

This untrue implication. You can have difficult exercises that do require special insights with long solutions and still keep it within curriculum or "what you was expected to learn". What you cant do is to give them exercises that require one more chapter or invention of difficult to prove theorems that were not taught.

Sure we can learn some techniques and the way we approach things may let us tackle problems in a way that is more likely to work.

And yet I find it baffling that sometimes formal education wants a student to reach by themselves a conclusion that the brightest minds of mankind had a hard time getting there by themselves.

While spending a fraction of the time thinking about the problem, of course.

If you are meant to reproduce the way to the solution (having studied the method already), that's one thing. But if you are asking some student to come up with some bright idea that people spent years without being able to get it? Now that seems a little too much.

> In another approach, the exam is supposed to challenge the students. When I was undergrad, you only needed 80-85% of available points for the highest grade. Even the best students were expected to fail some assignments, because they would then learn from their mistakes. It was nice when it worked, but sometimes the problems just too difficult for no reason or required an insight nobody would ever find, expect by accident.

On a more holistic level, the second approach seems better in some ways. Except for exceptionally talented students, it removes the ability to achieve "perfection," so good students would become a little more resilient because their exposure to failure.

the problem with this, in the US at least, is that the STEM people might do this, but then the social science and humanities departments were using the other grading scheme. It got to be running joke that 90% of the social science students earned latin honors, while in the business school it was a small fraction of that and in the science school it was even smaller.

(which again brings us back to the thread topic I guess, when graduating with latin honors was hard it was a good way to indicate likely entry into the elite. Now that many can achieve latin honors they are no longer good for entry into the elite, but people still expect them to be.

Grade inflation in a nutshell.

I've seen a system where they grade on a curve, A is 4.0. But there's A*, which still gives a 4.0 on the transcript, but denotes that a student (or a group) were statistically far enough from those who got an A that they deserved special recognition (ie, the threshold for an A is 85% but someone managed to score a 98%).

Education needs to take a step back and reexamine what knowledge and understanding means. Right now it's basically a factory for memorization.

Just about every exam I had at university involved solving/proving at least one novel problem that we'd never seen before. For example we might have seen the proof of a statement under certain conditions, but on the exam you where asked if it was also true for a slight different condition. That isn't something you could do just through memorizing the proofs you'd been shown in class.

Memorizing and 'regurgitating' would most of the time get you a passing grade, but never a top grade.

It worked pretty well

I still have stress nightmares about op amps though

First, pedantically speaking it's not a fallacy (as in "logical fallacy"). It's just a statement that can be right or wrong.

And this is regardless of whether it has been repeated "since the start of history". It could still:

(a) be always true (everytime it has been repeated)

(b) be always false (everytime it has been repeated)

(c) be sometimes true and sometimes true

There's no logical necessity that it has to be (b) just because it's a "standard complaint".

In fact, given what we know about periods of acme and decline, and also for periods of stability, it's obviously (c). Sometimes the complain is correct.

So, the question is whether in this case, for this period, it has been true or false -- not a facile dismissal with the non-argument that "people has been saying that since forever, so it must always be false".

It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it. But I doubt it. If such a steady decline had been happening since the 8th century BC civilization ought to have collapsed several times over. Tellingly, no one ever says "kids these days are much better behaved than we were as kids", even when it's empirically true. For example, kids these days in the UK drink less than their parents did at that age, but they don't get any credit for it.

What's actually happening is likely sampling bias, where the person making the pronouncement is looking at a few bad apples as well as nostalgia biasing their recollection of their childhood.

On the contrary, that has been my interpretation of these signals since I first started hearing them.

All living things (cats, societies, lizards, civilizations) are born, have an adolescence of growth and development, then decay and die.

So there must be some brief period in the adolescence of a civilization where "kids these days" cannot be applied. Society is growing, developing and integrating.

After that brief period it may then, indeed, be possible for each successive generation to correctly identify and decry the decay of their (society/civilization).

It's not a contradiction, if each successive generation is more terrible than the one that came beforehand.

The OP considered this though, to quote: It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it. But I doubt it. If such a steady decline had been happening since the 8th century BC civilization ought to have collapsed several times over.

A contradiction leaves no doubt. It's not a contradiction then. A contradiction is not just something that is unlikely or infeasible, it is something impossible. It means that your set of beliefs is flawed and that at least one premise needs to be corrected for them to become consistent.

OldSecondHand is correct that it is possible for each generation to have been worse than the preceeding one. For example, the degradation might be so minute, or we may have started from such lofty heights, or the society has become more resilient to the degradation. It is possible, and therefore no contradiction. ...just unlikely.

Which it did, in some ways.

uhm, didn't it?

To the point of the fall or Athens and Greek empires, the fall of the hellenistic kingdoms, the fall of Rome, all the way to WWI and WWII, and that's just confined to the Western side of the world...

Not really. It's totally logically consistent if things are going downhill with each successive generation. (In fact, it would still be consistent if different things were going downhill, Gen 2 worse on X compared to Gen 1, and Gen 3 worse on Y compared to Gen 2, and so on). Whether that's the case it's another matter.

>It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it.

Exactly.

>But I doubt it.

I wouldn't be so sure.

Note also that since there are no permanent eternal standards standing outside of history, each generation only has to be worse by the standards of its previous generation, for the accusation to be true...

Illegal narcotics would like a word.

There is absolutely no contradiction, because in fact they are complaining about different things. Sometimes they are complaining about kids being more violent then they used to be. Other times they are complaining about kids being more rude, more passive, more drinking. Then they complain about kids dont more sport, less sport, reading too much, not reading enough.

If you abstract it away to "kids are bad", then yes, it sounds as if the complain was constantly the same. But that abstraction is manipulative.

> Tellingly, no one ever says "kids these days are much better behaved than we were as kids", even when it's empirically true.

I have in fact said that multiple times. The "no one ever says" part is not true either.

Yes, people are more likely to comment on negatives that affect them then on positives. That is true about literally anything, including software updates. And that still does not imply that every complain about bad software update should be shut down.

If ancient Mesopotamians were the pinnacle of civilisation, and we were degrading for a hundred generations, we ought to be living in caves by now. It would be measurable in wealth, IQ, rates of murder, crime, literacy, etc.

Every statistics avaliable indicates that we used to be more ignorant, more violent and less literate. So this complain belong in the same box as:

"back when I was young we used to talk to school 12 miles, through a blizzard, uphill, both ways!"

* technology accretes even if the quality of the average worker is declining across time. Thus tomorrow will still be better than today, at least from the point of view of things like technical advancement, regardless of what is happening within each person.

* population increases, so the smartest can still be smarter even if the average is declining

* Even if population is not increasing, improvements in communication and replication technology can mean that an increasingly smaller share of the brightest people anywhere in the world can design products that are replicated or simply assembled by masses of others, whereas in the past this required local designers. Think of how many people are truly needed to keep advances in jet engines happening. You have basically three companies that supply all the engines to the entire world.

* And one can even make up for the other -- e.g. in previous times all shoes were handcrafted, now they are mass produced. Thus a lower skilled person in a later period can still outproduce a higher skilled person in a previous period.

Now I'm not saying I necessarily buy the decline thesis. It's an intriguing thesis, basically that you can be pretty dumb and still thrive well enough to keep reproducing whereas in hunter gatherer societies you would have starved to death and so the population would on average be smarter due to the challenges they had to overcome. Maybe this is true, maybe it's not, but the objection that knowledge accretes does nothing to prove or disprove this hypothesis.

I cannot fathom how you possibly write this - surely you cannot be claiming that dumber and dumber workers develop better and better technology, or technology is some independent quantity that develops without human intervention, like a divine gift of some sort?

"a lower skilled person in a later period can still outproduce a higher skilled person in a previous period."

The last bloke operating the machine doesn't produce anything on his own, you have to compare the whole value chain, including the folks making the leather, making the tools and machines, etc. I am sure the old process includes plenty of people doing unskilled groundwork, although I would not bet my house on which way the dice would fall

That doesn't follow.

Civilization != technology.

And those previous generations weren't lamenting "kids these days have less technology than us", but "kids these days are worse in X, Y, Z" regarding ways of living.

Whats the difference between elusive 'X, Y Z' we can't define or measure, and 'X, Y, Z' that doesn't exist?

That's more of an argument that one can't really trust statistics. Or that they don't always measure what matters...

>Whats the difference between elusive 'X, Y Z' we can't define or measure, and 'X, Y, Z' that doesn't exist?

Well, we can define, and it does exist. Not sure if we can measure (not everything that exists can be measured in some meaningful way. Some things matter in qualitative ways).

So, for some concrete examples, the roman generations that followed the acme of Rome and steered it towards the decline had certain very specific characteristics. Less inclined to work for common good, more selfish, having less children (lamented by roman critics of the time, and which less to a big problem with economic dynamics, the army, and so on), more concerned with greed and self-indulgence, less interested in civic matters (which was the bread and butter of earlier generations), and so on.

The complaint itself is always there (absolutely always), and should be dismissed every time because it carries no information at all. This does not technically make it a logical fallacy (ironically, most logical fallacies carry more useful information), just a useless waste of time.

Of course meant "and sometimes false".

Having a grading philosophy that boils down to pass/fail A-F distributions is great from the perspective that there are students who paid for a class and the professor ensured that they had acceptable knowledge by the end of the course. The wide grade distributions tended to be hated by most students, but the few folks who scored well could make up for bad homeworks etc.

Now the curious thing about these two grading approaches is that I always recall the material of the classes with wide grade distributions with more fidelity than those graded on 100% or bust curves (which is saying something after 11 years). In hindsight I believe the "harder" problems sets lead to deeper learning as once could always see what the next skill progression was and incentivized taking risks on spending an extra few hours studying or working a problem to try and get a better score. I also wasn't afraid of coming up with a wrong answer through brave effort vs. looking for a pre-baked solution.

The Featured Article's core claim is that by adopting the 100% or bust style of grading that students optimize to avoid errors. This strongly incentivizes students to crib off of each others work, past homeworks, and other online sources to ensure that they've identified a truly correct answer. It also forces professors to keep problems closer to the book/lectures such that students are largely guaranteed success given some amount of student effort.

It could be that the older method of grading wasn't doing its job by selecting geniuses - but by incentivizing students to take risks. Is it that surprising that students who spent 16 years of school optimizing to avoid mistakes are extremely risk adverse?

Rationalism is almost by design going to be either different logic or a different position from what seems and feels like a good idea. That is why it gets its own word.

So while overt rationalists are often bad communicators, it is quite possible that what you are identifying is inherent in the message anyway. If the rationalists agree with common sense then there isn't much to talk about.

Plus it isn't rational to identify as a rationalist, so the really good rationalists are hard to spot.

Depends whether you're valuing broad acceptance or a tight-knit peer group of people who get you.

Though of course the real trick would be to have both, this can be hard in our omnisurveillance society. I just don't think it's a universal law that people who are easy to spot are bad at it. Certainly people who are bad at it are easy to spot.

That Scott guy is/was somewhat problematic, but recognizably smart. It’s one of maybe five people where I consciously notice someone’s intelligence.

The rest of that community is toxic and misguided, starting with the idea that emotions are somehow “bad’.

I cannot disprove that individual rationalists believe this, but to my knowledge it is not a community opinion.

The problem with emotions arises when you attach emotional valence to beliefs and conclusions, rather than outcomes.

Inasmuch as rationalists can be seen as down on emotions, it is because lots of people allow emotions to distort their thinking about reality. In other words, rather than having emotional preferences over outcomes, they have emotional preferences over beliefs and modes of reasoning. (That's why a core of rationalist technique (short [1] long [2]) is learning to emotionally tolerate the possibility of being mistaken.) This is indeed antithetical to rational thought, but it's hardly the only thing emotions are for.

There is nothing wrong with emotions. They just have no place in the process you use to arrive at beliefs about reality. In other words, rationality rejects the Pratchettian claim that you have to believe "the big [lies]: justice, mercy, duty." [3] Instead, it reframes those as evolved game-theoretic adaptations that are part of the iterated game you are playing with your peers, called "society." This places emotion in its proper context without invalidating it. Quite the opposite, it views emotion as a vital, useful part of human interaction and decisionmaking, rather than the generic default of "just part of what it means to be human".

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-gendlin

[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/how-to-actually-change-your-mi...

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/583655-hogfather

To me, this leads to almost indistinguishable outcomes as the straw vulcan.

If that's a straw Vulcan, we have moved very far away from Mr. Spock.

Do the rationalists realize that this is fundamentally a metaphysical or even theological argument?

In other words, the idea is that in understanding the game theoretic strategy that our brain is executing when we feel things - "get where it's coming from" - we can bring our emotions into harmony with our conscious beliefs, and either support our unconscious brain in its emotional reaction or reign it in where the evolutionary context is no longer valid.

(I'm not sure where you're coming from with "theological.")

This was an issue that Kant grappled with, in that the mind cannot distance itself from itself. When we "understand the game theoretic strategy that our brain is executing", we are still implicated in other "game theoretic strategies", we've just made certain ones manifest and chosen to ignore others.

That said, I still support the end-goal of "bringing emotions into harmony with our conscious beliefs", but often that requires turning in the opposite direction: asking questions to the emotions themselves rather than to the world, which requires an entirely different conceptual toolkit (e.g. psychoanalysis, Buddhist thought, etc).

I view evolutionary psychology as in the category of psychological divination techniques, in which a set of predetermined systematic constraints allow you to locate interesting patterns in your day to day life through a process of reorientation. In all sincerity, I suggest astrology as an alternative technique that avoids any normative connotations of "fitness" etc.

Come on, that's a stretch. I think it's clear from context that this is referring to unconscious vs conscious awareness, in the like one case where I failed to specifically highlight this distinction (because I wanted to head off just this claim). Both of course happen in the same slab of meat.

> This was an issue that Kant grappled with, in that the mind cannot distance itself from itself. When we "understand the game theoretic strategy that our brain is executing", we are still implicated in other "game theoretic strategies", we've just made certain ones manifest and chosen to ignore others.

Sure, but consider: [1] [2]. Of course conscious deliberation is just another strategy, but it's a strategy that benefits from clarity. There is no good reason why reason and deliberation should be unable to close over itself, let alone as "separate" a component as emotional state.

Reason is a strategy that rose to some prominence in human evolutionary history because it is extraordinarily effective at making sense of the natural world. (Note: There's some claims that reason rose to prominence because it made humans good at making up sensible claims to deceive others - but this sort of evolutionary history would still produce a system that's good at inference, if only as a side effect. Compare GANs.)

> that requires turning in the opposite direction: asking questions to the emotions themselves rather than to the world, which requires an entirely different conceptual toolkit

Now who's doing dualism? The emotions are part of and arose from within the world. Without looking at the historical context in which they evolved, you may not be able to even understand what they're trying to tell you.

And sure, a lot of evpsych is just-so trash. But especially around the game theory of emotions, I think the conclusions hold up.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/46qnWRSR7L2eyNbMA/the-lens-t...

[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPErvb8m9FapXCjhA/adaptation...

It can be done, but most rationalists never achieve this, in that it requires understanding the cause of emotion as it relates to one's own subjectivity. This often involves admitting hard truths about oneself, and is the process that psychoanalysis is intended to support. Instead they "rationalize", and come up with explanations like that one that follows, which don't understand the emotion so much as "explain it away" through what amounts to, as I said earlier, a metaphysical argument about the causal origins of the species.

> Reason is a strategy that rose to some prominence in human evolutionary history because it is extraordinarily effective at making sense of the natural world.

This sort of causal argument is why I tend to cringe at rationalist theory, because not only is it not necessarily true, there's no way to even tell if it were true.

> The emotions are part of and arose from within the world. Without looking at the historical context in which they evolved, you may not be able to even understand what they're trying to tell you.

Ironically I fully agree with this statement, except what I would mean by "historical context" is "the events in your own specific life that influenced your current sentiments", rather than history viewed as a totality. Again, a reference to the totality and causal origin of life; do you see why I describe it as theological or metaphysical? This is very similar in structure to Christian theories on the topic of e.g. original sin.

I mean, to be fair I'm leaning myself out the window a lot with that claim. But it seems plausible, and more importantly, the argument is resilient to why reason arose. I'm not saying this in a sense of "this is definitely why we have reason, and that's why I am right"; I'm more saying "even in this case where we don't necessarily have reason because it's useful," (note the alternate theory I list) "that is still no reason (heh) to expect it to mislead us." And I think we can confidently say that reason is useful today, at least, and submit as evidence approximately the last 10000 years of planetary history. I think it's not a big stretch to claim that the reason that reason is useful today may be the reason that it evolved to begin with.

> Ironically I fully agree with this statement, except what I would mean by "historical context" is "the events in your own specific life that influenced your current sentiments", rather than history viewed as a totality.

And again, I don't see why it has to be one or the other. Of course, even and especially in "events in your own life" it is ironically very easy to make up pat just-so stories to justify any reaction or sentiment. In comparison I honestly think evpsych is on a firmer footing, particularly given I don't think psychotherapy needs particularly to be correct about the causes it posits in order to function as therapy. Whereas if you are mistaken about the evolutionary cause of an emotion, you will completely misconstrue it and probably behave badly.

> It can be done, but most rationalists never achieve this, in that it requires understanding the cause of emotion as it relates to one's own subjectivity. This often involves admitting hard truths about oneself

For instance, I am very leery of the notion of "hard truths", because it imbues an argument with value based on the emotional work performed in reasoning it out. This is the exact sort of thing rationality says should not be expected to work. - Something does not become more or less true by being hard to admit; an untruth can be as hard to admit as a truth. You need to have a cognitive mechanism that is in principle capable of producing truths to begin with, in order to even arrive at a hard truth that you can emotionally reject. Without that, you're liable to just admit hard made-up claims as a form of catharsis.

Is something being hard to admit evidence that it is true? Yes, but weakly - if it weren't convincing enough to outweigh being hard to accept, you probably wouldn't even entertain it. (How to be convinced by things that are true but hard to accept is actually a core tenet of rationality - see How To Actually Change Your Mind linked above.) But you still have to do the work to arrive at a true belief about yourself to begin with.

There are plenty of cases of reason misleading, going wrong, perhaps as many or more as reason going right. But of course, judgment of right and wrong depends on your criteria, and reason will never help you achieve that which is prior to reason: faith, in the most basic form.

But, in rationalist theory, by positing itself as the means and also the end (we use reason to get closer to reason; we have faith in reason), the term forms the sort of self-sustaining loop that Zizek (or really Lacan) calls a "master signifier", and is also the essence of all theology. All other considerations are shoved under the bus, or else dictated by a sort of bland evolutionary ethical theorizing, like "minimizing suffering", without really interrogating what that even means (if they looked into older philosophy, they would see that thought itself could be considered a form of suffering). It is not necessarily bad to hold to a master signifier as such, as all faith exists in this form, but the rationalists seem especially unaware or unable to interrogate their beliefs to this level.

> I am very leery of the notion of "hard truths", because it imbues an argument with value based on the emotional work performed in reasoning it out.

This is a misunderstanding of what I meant to express, and I apologize for using that term. In my experience (and in the psychoanalytic literature), "hard truths" are "hard" because they involve noticing objective aspects of ourselves that we were previously blind to. The recognition often comes in a flash, with a sense of relief, rather than through some sort of laborious process (of course, the preparation for that flash might well be a laborious process of re-learning how to look!). The "hard truth" is being able to admit something like "actually, I'm not just out to get the truth. I want social recognition after all."

> Something does not become more or less true by being hard to admit; an untruth can be as hard to admit as a truth

Such a focus on truth in relation to psychological affairs feels, to me, wrong-headed, in that all truth is contingent, grounded in some act of judgment. Don't read this the wrong way: contingent != relative. It just means that we need to address the question of "how do I know that true things are true?".

The cultural impact of the enlightenment, especially of Kant, was to collapse "truth" into an intersubjective agreement based on sensory observation ("science"), but how can you achieve intersubjective agreement in affairs which are only observable to a single subject, such as "my emotions" (i.e. "how is psychology possible?")? This is where psychoanalysis had its real epistemological innovation: free association as a technique is a way of generating shared knowledge about what was formerly private. Christian "confession" functioned similarly. Modern behavioral psychology is several steps behind. But with or without such a technique, one can never really achieve the absolute (gnostic) truth about oneself, at least not without a strong frame that answers the question "under what circumstances is a given statement about myself true?"

It seems better to ask the question of "what do I want that I'm having difficulty achieving? And what factual observations about myself can I make, which demonstrate patterns that prevent me from achieving this?" Notice how this moves the direction of thought (of reason, even!) away from "finding the truth" and toward a more environmentally-oriented mode of "understanding", closer to what Plato meant by that term, with its connections to "wisdom". The "hard truth" here as I mean it, is noticing sites of competing desires, as Spinoza and Freud do in their discussions of "ambivalence", and then being willing to take a stance or a risk that attempts to resolve the tensions.

With that in mind...

> I don't think psychotherapy needs particularly to be correct about the causes it posits in order to function as therapy. Whereas if you are mistaken about the evolutionary cause of an emotion, you will completely misconstrue it and probably behave badly.

This is a feature, not a bug, because as I said earlier, the goal isn't to discover some absolute truth about yourself, but to solve problems. Evopsych explanations claim to provide truth, but actually serve to solve problems, through some intellectual sleight-of-hand.

Similarly, the use of reason in thought serves to solve problems, meet individual needs, even if framed as "uncovering the truth". This + my deep involvement in the rationalist world for several years is why I feel comfortable making statements like this one from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28198926

Right, but note what you are saying: reason going wrong.

I don't think I even need to add anything there. Your phrasing already reveals that there is "a rightness ... by which it may be judged" in reason that there is not in faith.

> But, in rationalist theory, by positing itself as the means and also the end (we use reason to get closer to reason; we have faith in reason), the term forms the sort of self-sustaining loop that Zizek (or really Lacan) calls a "master signifier", and is also the essence of all theology.

I agree that reason is ultimately circular. I even agree that religion can also be circular. (I disagree strongly that all religion is circular, or that religion is inherently circular, or even that religion inherently hinges on faith.) Nonetheless, I think that where religion is circular it is so in a different way from reason. When we reject the circularity of religion, we do so not because it is inherently wrong to posit a God that justifies everything, but because it is not useful. The very self-supporting structure of the faith, the retreat to an insulated core element, prevents its adherent from doing any cognitive or predictive work with it. Rather, I would argue the circularity of religion is a consequence of reason, a retreat into self-justifying tautology prompted by the failure of religion to compete with reason on its own grounds.

In other words, reason closes on itself in a way that shapes itself to a particular inherent standard ("that seems to be associated in some way with success in interacting with the natural world", my reason throws in, giving yet another reason why it is judged valuable under itself, argumentatively achieving nothing yet undeterred.) However, religious faith does not even have any such constraint.

> bland evolutionary ethical theorizing, like "minimizing suffering"

I don't know why you are talking about suffering. I was not talking about suffering. I have no idea where you are going with that.

Evolved animals don't seek to minimize suffering. They don't even seek to maximize propagation; they're just the result of a process of relentless selection for things that propagate.

> "hard truths" are "hard" because they involve noticing objective aspects of ourselves

I'm sorry, you were previously accusing rationality of putting too much faith in reason - and now we're supposed to just notice objective aspects of ourselves? With what absolute source of truth, exactly, are we supposed to do this?

> The recognition often comes in a flash, with a sense of relief, rather than through some sort of laborious process

Now, I myself am as much of an addict to this sort of sudden endorphin-supported flash of insight as the next nerd. But - though it is an indicator of a simple theory that supports the facts observed, that does not in itself suffice to establish truth, let alone "objective truth"!

I have a new theory: lots of rationalists are programmers because programmers are used to having the sudden flash of insight be wrong.

> "how do I know that true things are true?".

I mean - rationality in particular does not engage in any attempt to establish truth, so I feel this charge somewhat misses its mark. Rather, rationality seeks to improve the quality of one's beliefs by engaging in processes that interact with the presumption of an ordered natural world in order to come to beliefs that are, given that assumption, more likely to be true.

That's rather why it's called "Less Wrong" rather than "Objectively Right".

> but how can you achieve intersubjective agreement in affairs which are only observable to a single subject, such as "my emotions"

I have a rejoinder to this called "you are not a unique and beautiful snowflake" and also emotions are totally observable to others, like, it's usually not even hard. Doesn't even take blood tests or brain autopsy. When some dude beats my face in with a bottle cause I fucked his wife, I do not have a particular hard time parsing his emotional state - or the evolutionary reasons behind it! Emotions are interesting because they have effects, on yourself (the brain is part of the natural world!) but also on others through you. Honestly, the idea that emotions are primarily individual is just so weird to me. They seem one of the most shared aspects of humanity there is.

> It seems better to ask the question of "what do I want that I'm having difficulty achieving? And what factual observations about myself can I make, which demonstrate patterns that prevent me from achieving this?"

From what you're saying, I take it you have observed rationalists failing at this. But I mean, going just by the text and the people I know, this just seems like solid rational thinking. I don't see any contradiction here.

I brought this up because the EA community seems very closely associated with rationalist ideas. Although I'm sure there are other rationalist conceptions of "the good" out there, I've yet to see them clearly articulated.

> ...emotions...

Perhaps the word I should have used is "desire", as emotion springs from desire, and although specific emotional states are easily observable, the underlying desire is what often remains hidden, subject to the other's fantasies. But it's an aside at this point.

> That's rather why it's called "Less Wrong" rather than "Objectively Right".

I'm glad you brought this up, because it raises what I see as the key question, the crux of the matter: "Less Wrong" relative to whom? And for what end?

The EA community aren't even unified in minimizing suffering. Most of the formulations I've seen are about maximizing good life, though there are certainly people who care about suffering in the community. (I think it's mostly Tomasik.) I haven't seen any of them try to justify their preferences with evpsych though.

> I'm glad you brought this up, because it raises what I see as the key question, the crux of the matter: "Less Wrong" relative to whom? And for what end?

Once more: Less Wrong relative to a presumed-ordered natural world. To the end of shaping this world to be more in line with one's preferences.

The "natural world" doesn't have beliefs, the world itself cannot be right or wrong, it just is. So the question again is, Less Wrong relative to whom?

> To the end of shaping this world to be more in line with one's preferences.

And what if one is unsure of one's preferences?

What?

Okay, let me try really small steps.

We assume the natural world is ordered.

We assume that the brain holds beliefs, which are compressive/predictive patterns, about the observations of the natural world.

Inasmuch as these are predictive, and inasmuch as we can take multiple actions, then a belief can be qualitatively better or worse in selecting actions that make the world be more good by one's judgment.

Beliefs can fail to be appropriate to select actions on (at least) two metrics: they can be "right or wrong", or they can be "more or less useful."

An example of a wrong belief: if you think it is raining, and so you bring an umbrella, but it is not raining (the belief is wrong), then you have failed to improve your position: you are dry anyway, but now you are also carrying an umbrella, which is annoying.

An example of a useless belief: you can believe that your shirt has more fibers than the average shirt of its kind. This may be true, but even if it is true, there is no decision that you would make where the belief is instrumental in deciding which of the possible actions leads to a world that better matches your preference.

(Unless you have very specific preferences about clothing.)

The goal of becoming Less Wrong is for your brain to contain fewer beliefs that are wrong, and more beliefs that are right; and also (but less importantly) fewer beliefs that are useless, and more beliefs that are useful. The term "Less Wrong" does not refer to a comparison to some other existing human, but rather to the counterfactual outcome of failing to reflect on your thoughts - Less Wrong is a collection of techniques whose goal is, when applied, to make your brain have less wrong beliefs and less useless beliefs, in order to improve your ability to shape the world to your preferences. (Whether they actually achieve this is a hot topic of debate - but that is the standard which they set.)

> And what if one is unsure of one's preferences?

That depends on your preferences for your preferences. :)

In any case, setting your preferences is not the purpose of rationality. (Though as your preferences are part of the ordered natural world, rationality also aims to improve your ability to shape your preferences, this does not tend to be a central consideration.)

But in essence, yes.

(Though of course, again, the ultimate goal is to be better able to achieve preferred outcomes in the world, and if thinking only the word "blue" on repeat produced outcomes perfectly in line with your preferences, then rationality would espouse blue blue blue blue. But at that point, most of the techniques gathered under the label would be useless, because yadda yadda ordered world etc.)

Basically, I am personally of the belief that any "wrong" or "useless" beliefs that one holds are always actually useful, as all belief is instrumental. Ignorance is maintained because it serves a purpose.

I am also of the belief that the only way to determine why one holds a wrong belief is to understand the "emotional" or desire-based reason that underlies or supports it. Hence why I spent a lot of time above discussing emotions. We have seen in recent times the repeated failure of individuals to adjust their beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Why is this? My stance is that their "wrong" beliefs serve deep emotional needs for them. Most people have stronger desires than the desire to arrive at truth in their evaluation of the world.

The difference in emphasis here is shifting from "the brain as a prediction-making device" to "the human body including the brain is a system that acts to relieve tensions placed upon it", and that prediction-making is one biological strategy for doing so. Of course, better predictions can and will relieve more tension than worse predictions, but my stance is that being able to conceptualize the causes and nature of tension directly will lead to better outcomes, as it permits stronger meta-cognition.

I see the term "preference" doing a lot of work in rationalist thought, and I generally taboo it. The term comes from economics and fails IMO to adequately describe the nature of desire. But if I were to use the term in this instance, I would claim that disentangling one's preferences from internal conflict is the first step one should take prior to tackling the problem of rationality (because we need to know what we even want to get done before we figure out how to do it). This involves interrogating our beliefs about what our preferences are and why, which is something that the rationalist focus on the "world" seems uniquely unequipped for dealing with.

I hope this all makes sense!

(I'm having a lot of fun with this debate too, it's really forced me to firm up my understanding of faith and reason.)

> But if I were to use the term in this instance, I would claim that disentangling one's preferences from internal conflict is the first step one should take prior to tackling the problem of rationality (because we need to know what we even want to get done before we figure out how to do it). This involves interrogating our beliefs about what our preferences are and why, which is something that the rationalist focus on the "world" seems uniquely unequipped for dealing with.

I agree with this take! Though I think it's less that this is something rationality cannot do as that, well, Eliezer when he was writing the Sequences, had an overriding belief that put all his other preferences at risk. This tends to focus one's attention on strategy. :)

The most illuminating post on this, for me, is https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-... . You see this notion of "rationality is a tool to come to conclusions when the conclusions really really matter" all over his writing. I especially like the phrasing in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-de... :

> No one begins to truly search for the Way until their parents have failed them, their gods are dead, and their tools have shattered in their hand.

Which implies that to most people, the pursuit of individual rationality, possibly even above mental wellbeing, is counteradaptive.

(Man, does Eliezer have a way with words though.)

(To me, personally, the idea of holding wrong beliefs is like a persistent itch or annoyance. I do not have a driving need, but I also have few attachments. And, of course, I am a nerd, and this is all nerd cocaine. All that sums up to create an ideological space in which I am comfortable.)

This part particularly resonated with me:

> Your trust will not break, until you apply all that you have learned here and from other books, and take it as far as you can go, and find that this too fails you—that you have still been a fool, and no one warned you against it—that all the most important parts were left out of the guidance you received—that some of the most precious ideals you followed, steered you in the wrong direction—

> —and if you still have something to protect, so that you must keep going, and cannot resign and wisely acknowledge the limitations of rationality—

> —then you will be ready to start your journey as a rationalist.

My trust broke years ago, and I found the rationalists, and then I realized, unlike Yudkowsky (I guess?), that I didn't have something to protect. So, my personal goals are in that sense very different.

In my experience with the rationalist community as well, I found that most people I met didn't have a specific personal motivation beside their beliefs surrounding x-risk, and I personally find the set of axioms required to accept rationalist beliefs on x-risk a bit... difficult to swallow.

(Also, AI X-Risk makes a lot more sense if you're already habituated to thinking of the mind in terms of algorithm. 40% programmers: not a coincidence.)

I'm also a programmer and am very habituated in terms of thinking in algorithms, but when I had my "break", I realized that my beliefs were not working on a very deep level, and I needed something a lot stronger/deeper than rationality to push me out of whatever local extremum I was trapped in.

(I think we've run out of disagreements. Good talk?)

(Woe! A deeper rift than even incompatible epistemologies: incompatible chat clients!)

I'm happy to continue living in California because emotionally: * I like the weather * I like living close to mountains and beaches and deserts * I like my house and I'm too lazy to move

Rationally I should take the 10% pay cut to go full remote and move to a suburb of Indianapolis.

If under your goals living in California is optimal, then it is rational to live in California.

The point of, for instance, EA is not that giving to homeless people in New York when there's starving children in Africa is a bad goal- it's that it's an inconsistent goal when one also professes that human lives have equal value. And when one wants to live by that tenet, then EA offers better routes to optimizing lives saved.

What you described is exactly how rationalists think emotions are best wielded: you look at your/a situation and look at how you feel about it. They're your barometers for whether that which you believe to be your goal is actually your goal.

Emotions are misused when you treat factual beliefs as goals: then your emotions get attached to them, in unhealthy and cult-like ways.

Rationality is one approach to trying to believe fewer misguided things.

That doesn't make it easy and it doesn't mean that success rates at doing so aren't still wildly variable.

It doesn’t decide your goals, it just helps you reach them. The number of strawmen in this thread is far too high.

Ok, I'll bite. If it's the wrong emotions controlling you, what do you do then?

Please don't suggest any course of action that requires you to be in control.

Most people could get a college degree. It's mostly hard work. You don't need to be a genius. The few geniuses stay and do research, the normal people got out and apply what they learned to the world.

1970 or so it broke through, for reference.

> do you think we've all gotten that much smarter?

Yes but not in the way you imply. Having access to enough accurate information and being able to spend time efficiently to accumulate it, has catapulted large swathes of people into investing in a college education. These people who would have been stunted along the opportunity, genetic, and economic axes in the past. This is despite the horrendous increases, in costing, over the last 30 years (imo).

factors you're leaving out that i find much more persuasive -- low interest rates, federally guaranteed loans, credentialism/professional guild dynamics. a degree costs more and gets you less than it did in the past, but you're forced to get one to have most professional jobs. it's an obligate gatekeeping tax, the piece of paper that says you're allowed to be middle class.

The acquisition of degrees is just a form of specialization to avoid the effects of the current money system. The reason why large cities are so rich is that international investors prefer established cities. When parents put money into investments and their children follow that money out of their hometown into a large city. Considering how much we do to compensate the bad influences of our money system I seriously wonder when nations are going to change it. Probably in 2030.

The problem isn't "free market" or "capitalism" although the adherents of those ideas tend to love the existing money system. Of course there are also other non reproducible assets like land and patents but I feel like properly taxing land should be more than enough. Patents only slow down progress, they shouldn't make things worse.

There are two fundamental problems: 1. The velocity of money keeps going down. It's not circulating at all. Meaning fiat currency is becoming less and less a medium of exchange and instead turns into a store of value just like Bitcoin. 2. Positive interest only works with either a growing supply of money at constant velocity or an increase in velocity at fixed supply. Basically inflation via endless debt growth if there is no productivity growth or population growth.

Combine this with the rise in neoliberalism in politics which basically runs into the contradictions of money at every corner. Global trade? Causes deflation which lowers interest rates. Less regulation? Businesses become more efficient. More deflation. Austerity? More deflation. Union busting? Lower incomes mean more deflation. You see, at some point you have created more deflation than the money system can survive. What breaks isn't the economy, it's the people that end up breaking. To be fair to neoliberalism. If there wasn't this pesky zero lower bound on interest rates it could have worked.

I've read an article about the "negative impacts" of negative interest rates and it mentioned a complete subversion of the standard response regarding competition for interest rates. Countries will end up competing to have the lowest negative interest rate. Isn't that absurd? Countries like Zimbabwe, Greece or Turkey who are net borrowers would see negative interest rates that would pull their economy out of the gutter and yet it is considered a negative effect. It's actually weird how that article never mentioned inflation, as if it was dead for some reason.

Practical smarts has probably declined as a result.

I know the stereotype, but is there any evidence that “book smarts” and “street smarts” are mutually exclusive?

Is it possibly an artifact of an economy rewarding hyper-specialization?

I'm not sure if the whole book smart / street smart thing is a good example of what you're saying. Wouldn't that just be an example of people becoming well adapted to their environment (or in fact manipulating their environment)?