More on Gullibility

If your skill set is lying and you want power, the obvious strategy is to puff up the status of the gullible. (Previously. Subsequently.)

When a gull is responsible for their decisions, they will be rapidly disempowered. A fool and his money, etc. Their bad stewardship is rewarded with the destruction of the managed objects.

Every time a vote is mismanaged, power is redistributed from the prudent to the gullible. The resources the gull controls still get destroyed, but since votes are inalienable and equal, the destroyed resources are refreshed by leeching off the prudent. At least, until they're all destroyed, ref. Greece.



The liar must be amputated from the gull. There's only two ways to do this, either release the gull to fall into their self-inflicted pit, or else lie better than the professional liar.

The latter is remarkably feasible, because lying in service of truth is slightly easier. Some of the less dull gulls check the sources, and they'll find they were lead to believe true things.

The former doesn't involve lying for virtue, but it does mean making gulls irrelevant, and most likely dirt poor. It violates chivalrous principles in detail, as it amounts to attacking the weak, but consider the alternatives.



The other obvious strategy is to create and multiply more gulls.



The modern world overflows with frighteningly gullible gulls, who happen to be very hard-working. (Have you ever tested how gullible they are? I did.) The modern world doles out the highest-status positions according to liar championships.
Just a coincidence, I'm sure.

Juxtaposition

I'd rather do the Twitter juxtapositions on Twitter, but I don't think I can, and all suggestions are appreciated.
More volunteers to investigate disagreement also desired.


Economists' predictions record.

Vs,

All Economists Agree On.
Commentary at the places I got it from, Aretae and Blunt Object.

My bet is you agree with both, which makes for an interesting puzzle.
I'd prefer to keep it balanced, but this is recent and possibly relevant.

""It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" ~ Upton Sinclair"




Nydracu:
"The main problem with the right these days is that it tries too hard to flip everyone else off and just ends up looking dumb."

Therefore, me:
"I suppose since I'm acknowledging the existing of Tea Partiers, I should flip off OWS too. Pathetic me-too copy of something that sucked."




Also a non-dilemma, mainly interesting due to where these articles were published.

1. "People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say"

2. "Politico says it, out loud: voters are stupid people: http://politi.co/zFoGZa"

3. "The obvious starts to creep into the mainstream... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/opinion/the-age-of-innocence.html"

Victorian Era Still Ongoing

This one took me forever to put into words. One of the biggest problems in the Anglosphere is that everyone takes social conventions deathly seriously. Indeed so much so I have a new principle: the more who consider something Very Important, the less important it is likely to be.

(Second section a tangent about lying.)

As per title, the only question is whether current times are as uptight as Victorians, or more so. Only they're not uptight about sex, so of course nobody could ever confuse modern behaviour and being uptight...

I should be blunt. A healthy society does not give its own norms much credit, let alone anyone else's.

I mean come on. Gay marriage? Seriously? Talk about #firstworldproblems. And this literally considered a life-and-death situation? As in, the pro-gay marriage people want everyone else to die? I thought we were supposed to be fighting the perception of gays as melodramatic. Doctor, is one of your bottles labelled 'perspective?' We need about 1000 ccs, stat.

Of course, Jehu puts it most bluntly. Of course it is who...whom.

Gee guys, one group wants another group to all die. I wonder what this is about. This is totally unprecedented. It must be the end of history.



I should note that at least the actual murders are kept to a minimum. The death rhetoric seems to be just that - rhetoric. This is progress. Real progress, not Progressive progress.



And of course The People are completely taken in.

I must seriously propose that it is not only morally right, but actually a duty to lie to someone so gullible. (Part 2. Part 3.) Otherwise, you're just cheerfully ceding them to the Devil. Let me go through the logic.

If you asked such a gull, they would say not to lie to them. But this is only because they think they're not gullible, which is the keystone of the belief system that makes them gullible.[1] So, instead imagine you could make them understand that their only options were being taken in by you, and being taken in by the Devil. Which would they pick?

This would not be a serious problem if liars could be eradicated, and with that condition I'd say lying was wrong. I submit that our current society has competitive lying, with championships every four years. I additionally note that it is an overly-seriouly-taken social norm to pretend that liars are rare. Not to mention that the championships are considered Very Important.

This looks like I'm advocating that everyone lie. And indeed I am. Can you convince the Devil to stop lying? The less good it is for someone to be swayed by an anti-lying campaign, the more likely they are to be swayed.

I do suggest testing for gullibility. Lying to the non-gullible is counter-productive. Instead it is worthwhile to build trust in these cases.



[1] By contrast, I'm fully aware that lies go down smooth and easy. Luckily intellectual bulimia isn't unhealthy, or I'd be in a bad way.

What a Confirmed Prediction Looks Like

I recall saying I'd make a post about this.

Sadly there is trust involved, if you don't trust me or seriously distrust my memory, this post is pointless and you shouldn't read it.

"I shouldn't have posted in here. Now it pops up in my updated threads all the time and I have to endure all this pseudoscience."

Sounds at first glance like Iscariot is being a jerk. However, I know not to stop my analysis before I analyze all the information, and I realized he was probably feeling hurt and/or threatened by the suggestion. (Analysis details on request.) It would make Starfarer a significantly less fun game for him. (Test opportunity: what did he misinterpret about my idea and my intent?)

There's my prediction. Confirmation:

sdmike1:"I will also atempt to "demistiy" the gates in my next post"

Iscariot:"Do you have to?"

The result?

"Ok, I do understand that, shooting the sh*t about this kind of stuff is nerdy and a lot of fun, but I do hope none of it becomes canon-- trying to explain our silly game too much would be treading in hostile and unfamiliar territory."

Here's the trust bit. I have to have correctly remembered my prediction, not run confirmation bias on a vagueness, and not modified the memory by recalling it. I think these are very reasonable assumptions, but I know many disagree, and for those, this evidence is begging the question.



Nevertheless, that's my standard. If you think my standard is flawed, I want to hear about it. Second, now you can be precise about what my predictions and confirmations are worth.

Derren Lie Detection Part Two: Intuition

Okay, now I'll watch the one on intuition...

"Some people like to talk of intuition as a way of knowing truth."

Ha, already we know he disagrees.

"That gut reactions are as valid as evidenced-based facts."

Double mind-trick. First, what is a 'gut reaction' exactly? There's a lot of finesse in telling the difference between actual subconscious intuitions and unrelated brain chatter.

The way I tested it was I'd make an intuitive prediction, and a 'rational prediction,' and then I'd go with the rational prediction and evaluate what would have happened with the intuition in hindsight. Not once has a rational prediction been better than my intuitive prediction. Never. It has always been better to go with my gut instinct, sometimes freakishly better. I have made mistakes in interpretation, though, as tested against future situations - in a sense and ironically, the intuition can be rationally interpreted, by algorithm and rule. For example, I'm still a bit shaky on interpreting the intuition in situations like car salesman number two above, but the rule is that the time he's lying is associated with me thinking of lying, and/or that jarring interruptions are associated with lying.

This can be supercharged by using my intuition to suss out the correct associations to make. They're not guaranteed to be right but they're guaranteed to be better than trying to do it rationally. They also come with an uncertainty flag in cases where they're not all but guaranteed to be right.

So, a lot things that aren't gut reactions get called gut reactions by untrained intuitionists.

Second mind-trick, calling the second 'facts.' Priming anyone? Prejudice, anybody? For contrast, a neutral statement of Brown's opinion is that, "Intuitive hypotheses are less likely to be replicable than consciously deliberated hypotheses."

Oh hey, I found a third sophist mind-trick. "Evidence based." Where the hell do you think intuitions come from? If they weren't somehow causally linked to the situation, they'd be literally random. The question is simply whether their epistemology on the sensory evidence is better than what they intentionally teach in graduate school about interpreting evidence.


All this is intuitively obvious. Of course it is who...whom and Brown is part of a prospiracy with a particular agenda. Or possibly a dupe of powerful interests that don't know how to defend their power bases against intuition-based criticisms.

"It's a really silly way of thinking."

Empirically incorrect. You might try doing fact based experiments on that. I did experiments almost daily for over a decade, every single time my intuition had an opinion on my course of action.

Point: why would anyone evolve an intuition in the first place? You just going to throw out all that adaptive learning by the genome? Counterpoint: it is a bit weird that the intuition is not instinctively usable, it does take some practice and training. Luckily at least the activation trigger is instinctive, so you can turn it on at will without training.

You can't actually stop. You can only fool yourself, as Brown apparently has, into thinking you've stopped.

This is extremely useful for the kind of people who fund schools. Just a coincidence, I'm sure. Also extremely useful for people like me when they want to prey on people like Brown, as it makes it dead simple. Turning the table, I could do a whole post on the incidents where I got preyed upon while I was testing this idea, assuming I could recall the details, anyway.


Alrighty, that is it for exact quotes. I'm paraphrasing from now on. I seriously misremember his words - and when I correct them, they mean exactly what I thought they did. Only it takes five times as long to write.

"Did you ever play that game where you hold up a card and try to psychically intuit it? So what's this card."

Facepalm. Headdesk.

Because I only throw out hypotheses on evidence, I have tested this myself. Even trying to intuit it was immediately painful. Hmm, why is that?

"Hey intuition, what's on that card?"

The intuition is really smart. To whit, "What's on the card doesn't matter. At all, I'm not even going to pretend to try to work it out." Makes sense: the consciousness commands something like 0.5% of available neurons, the rest can't help but be smarter.

Even if, as per Brown's model, I thought intuition simply pulls information from the ether, does a database call on the operating system of physics, I still wouldn't be able to tell what the card says.

This is similar to one of the serious problems with parapsychological research. They don't test models. Their hypotheses barely rate as such. It would appear that's all who...whom too, just all a social game. Come to think, yes. I have to call politics on parapsych research. Maybe spooky stuff happens, maybe not, but there are no experiments on the subject, only masquerades. My own experiments cannot distinguish between spooky and not-spooky, so I'm agnostic. (And indifferent, as independent lines pin down how spookiness can be spooky, and it is boring.)


The interviewee opines,

"He's controlling my mind!"

If the subconscious can hear cues, it can also tell it is being told cues. I'm extremely skeptical this would work outside special circumstances. It won't work on things you actually care deeply about.

Though, I seem to have possibly noticed that sometimes, humans realize they don't care about a thing, and will look for something to care deeply about. It will work on this transition; these cues are as good as anything else to latch onto.

Lie Detection Through Body Language With Darren Brown

I was in a little lie-detection game in elementary school, at which I failed miserably. Among other tests, this made me think I can't detect lies. Turns out I'm wrong.

Part two is about intuition, planned for tomorrow. Don't forget I'm looking for disagreement experiment participants. Learn about ethics, learn about disagreement! Also, prove you care about ethics by spending actual effort on pinning them down.


Suggest trying it out yourself because this will spoil the data.

I welcome suggestions that I somehow didn't get it right, that I only thought I got it right, as long as you can go into details. Will return to this in part two.




















I went three for three.
I was expecting to go zero.

Derren was clearly doing his subtle convincing trick, and getting them to focus on lying about the cylinders. I did two of them by actually reading the body language and such - I don't know if Brown was doing that too - and the third I'm not sure how I did it.

Number one. "Pretty much that it's an eight cylinder. [...] Fact number four, pretty much...all the types of controls...you can manoeuvre it from the steering wheel."

What's going through his head; "Oh crap, I said 'pretty much.' I do that when I lie." He then projects, and thinks Brown can certainly see that this is his tell. So he says it again, this time on purpose. It almost worked on me, certainly. It came down to whether his looking down and awkwardness was normal or not.

In hindsight I suspect his awkwardness on fact four was the result of his confidence being jarred by realizing he did a tell. Self-awareness is self-destructive for liars... He's distracted by working out how to lie better, and can't focus well on what he's saying.


For the second, as he was talking about the cylinders, I immediately started thinking, "The first lied about the cylinders -" and then Brown interrupted me with the answer. This one was probably a bit too subtle for me to have used it in a real situation, I was gearing up to overthink it. Hard to tell because of the interruption before I could decide on my answer. Very easy to fool myself into thinking I'd have gotten the right answer in cases like these, so impossible to conclude I would have even if I would in fact have.

My subconscious is thinking about lying, because it detected a lie, and so my consciousness gets directed toward thinking about lying through resonance, priming, whatever you want to call it. The detectable difference is that it was the only part of the paragraph which is associated with me thinking about lying. Now I just have to convince my subconscious to think louder, or learn to think quieter myself, so I stop drowning it out. Problem is that if I intentionally don't think at all, it shuts down all thinking, not just conscious, rational thinking. I have to think, just...quietly. (Hmm, putting that in words may have given me an idea...)

I wasn't even sure at the time about my memory of the first lying about cylinders. However, I remembered the first lying about cylinders just as the second lied about cylinders. Gee, why might I do that. Notably, I'm still not sure how my subconscious knew he was lying there - perhaps I was picking up Brown's nudges.

Come to think, the second also felt jarring. "Hey, I was thinking about #1, and Derren's talking, don't interrupt." That's probably reliable too, I'm eager to test it.


Number three, two separate ways. First, I started thinking about how I'd arrange my lies, and my first instinct was to make it the first lie, because the normal thing is to put it in the middle so it doesn't get too much attention. The justification is probably B.S., but it is also subconscious-speak and likely your subconscious speaks the same code.
Secondly, once he started thinking, on his first thought, he looked down, while on the second and third, he made eye contact. "I thought I was pretty stone faced." Amusing.

"I know everything about that car," is also a lie. He may or may not be aware it is a lie, but he could figure it out if he wanted to. Specifically, it is bravado.

Hypothesis: Agreement With Research Project: Ethics

I have a hypothesis about disagreement. To test it, I want to use the problem of objective ethics. Basically, if I can find out the reason we can't agree on an ethical framework, I may be able to fix it. By contrast, if I don't bother to look, I'm guaranteed to be unable to fix it.

My habit of thinking  I'm done and later realizing I'm not will likely affect this post. In this case I plan to deal with it by updating without notice.



So, ethics. Who wants in?

Zeroth, note this is a test of how much you in fact care about ethics. How much patience do you have for attempts to solve the problem? Put up or shut up. I'm willing to keep this thread going until at least next year, with the exception of entertaining repetition.

First, procedure. Second whether it is in fact a solvable problem.

• Work out a spec for objective ethics
• Details:
• What are the necessary and sufficient conditions?
• Include inconsistency tests  
•   Purpose:
• Agree on what we're disagreeing about
•  Determine the candidates for matching the spec
• Basically, lay out what you think
• Pin down the disagreements
• Including disagreements on what we should be disagreeing about
• Including disagreements on how the procedure should go, indeed this should probably come earlier, but the logical hierarchy is what it is...
• Try to fix the disagreements
• My usual habit is to examine the cause and then change the causal facts
• This is where examining assumptions comes in. As rational thought is hardly the only way to come by a belief, this is merely one example. 
•  Presumably, fail. 
• But at least have a reasonable idea of why it failed.
• Maybe fix the fail, depending on what the causes are. 
• At least, predict why it will fail and test it. 

Next, the idea that it can't be solved.
We went to the moon. I can't go to the moon by myself. By contrast, solving a logical puzzle is just a matter of having enough time to invest. While unlikely, I'm not ruling out moral nihilism.
The major epistemic obstacle for the puzzle ties into a practical obstacle. To correct for random biases, it is best to do review by peers, and the practical matter is that to get more ethical behaviour, more have to follow the ethical codes which generally means agreeing to them.



As a complete tangent, has there been more ethics posts lately than usual? I'm even missing at least one, which I'll add if I remember it.
Foseti comments. Spandrell. Aretae links me to Hanson comments. A dude called Thinking Emotions.

How Government Schools Commit Epistemic Murder in the First Degree

It says only schools are places of learning and then forces you to go, creating the association between coercion and learning. The zeroth lesson is that you'll only learn if someone forces you to. Being forced is so unpleasant than most victims of a government school will avoid learning for the rest of their lives, creating epistemically dead quote-citizens-unquote.


Necessarily, this is true of any coercive quote-learning-unquote institution.

You want a good example of a limiting belief? This is a meta-example, it is the belief that you can't fix your beliefs. It is self-enforcing and utterly defeatist.

Have you also noticed that the ad hominem/verecundiam is extremely common, and indeed it often the only thing that will work? Can I get some historical perspective on this habit?

Hey guys, I wonder where the idea to distrust scientists comes from. Does it really matter whether scientists are in fact trustworthy or not?

I'd also like to point out some reinforcing broken-window fallacy. The students victims of these places see the teacher wrestling with below-average students. They don't see the teacher failing to prevent the learning of the above-average student, nor all the extracurricular learning that the more curious engage in.



Credit for this idea nexus goes to Fred, via. Mr. Reed argues that what the government is forcing children to learn isn't useful, and should be useful. I suggest that if that line of argument were worth the font it was typed with, government teachers would have long ago quit en-mass in despair, unable to weather the withering storm of criticism.

Fred almost gets to this hypothesis. "The public schools are worse than no schools for the quick. [...] To a remarkable extent, dumb-ass public schools are simply not necessary." Yes, but why?

Public schools are worse than no schools for everyone except the rulers of the victims. Who bankroll these schools. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.