Geoffrey Miller on Virtue Signaling (audio + slides)

This talk was given at the meeting Effective Altruism Global 2016. Includes a good warning about IQ signaling and some advice on how to market a movement to neurotypicals. Slides.

More Geoffrey Miller :-)

Trump, Putin, Stephen Cohen, Brawndo, and Electrolytes

Every now and then something jars me into thinking that Idiocracy has already arrived, a bit ahead of schedule. The CNN guy on the left is obviously from the "Brawndo's got electrolytes" school of reasoning that somehow passes for journalism these days. Stephen Cohen, a distinguished emeritus professor of Russian History, is a holdover from the previous era (sadly missed, at least by me) when logic and facts actually mattered.




See also Obama: "Don't do stupid sh*t" and Bear Baiting is Dangerous.

Death penalty

The Freeh report on Penn State, Sandusky, Paterno and other criminals has been released, confirming my expectations.

NYTimes: The most senior officials at Penn State University failed for more than a decade to take any steps to protect the children victimized by Jerry Sandusky, the longtime lieutenant to head football coach Joe Paterno, according to an independent investigation of the sexual abuse scandal that rocked the university last fall. 

“Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims,” said Louis J. Freeh, the former federal judge and director of the F.B.I. who oversaw the investigation. “The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized.”

NCAA are you listening? Give Penn State football the death penalty. What SMU did was nothing in comparison. This is one situation where we can be thankful for plaintiff's attorneys. Are Moody's credit rating analysts on top of this?

From Freeh's statement to the press:

... Messrs. Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley never demonstrated, through actions or words, any concern for the safety and well-being of Sandusky’s victims until after Sandusky’s arrest. 

In critical written correspondence that we uncovered on March 20th of this year, we see evidence of their proposed plan of action in February 2001 that included reporting allegations about Sandusky to the authorities. After Mr. Curley consulted with Mr. Paterno, however, they changed the plan and decided not to make a report to the authorities. Their failure to protect the February 9, 2001 child victim, or make attempts to identify him, created a dangerous situation for other unknown, unsuspecting young boys who were lured to the Penn State campus and football games by Sandusky and victimized repeatedly by him. 

Further, they exposed this child to additional harm by alerting Sandusky, who was the only one who knew the child’s identity, about what McQueary saw in the shower on the night of February 9, 2001.

... The evidence shows that these four men also knew about a 1998 criminal investigation of Sandusky relating to suspected sexual misconduct with a young boy in a Penn State football locker room shower. Again, they showed no concern about that victim. The evidence shows that Mr. Paterno was made aware of the 1998 investigation of Sandusky, followed it closely, but failed to take any action, even though Sandusky had been a key member of his coaching staff for almost 30 years, and had an office just steps away from Mr. Paterno’s. At the very least, Mr. Paterno could have alerted the entire football staff, in order to prevent Sandusky from bringing another child into the Lasch Building. Messrs. Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley also failed to alert the Board of Trustees about the 1998 investigation or take any further action against Mr. Sandusky. None of them even spoke to Sandusky about his conduct. In short, nothing was done and Sandusky was allowed to continue with impunity. 

Based on the evidence, the only known, intervening factor between the decision made on February 25, 2001 by Messrs. Spanier, Curley and Schulz to report the incident to the Department of Public Welfare, and then agreeing not to do so on February 27th, was Mr. Paterno’s February 26 th conversation with Mr. Curley.

Criminal negligence? You thought I was exaggerating when I used the word "criminals" above?


See Good riddance JoePa and ensuing discussion (11/2011 -- when the story first broke).

I think when the dust settles Sandusky is clearly guilty and JoePa looks very bad. 

... what are Joepa and McQueary thinking in subsequent weeks and years when they look at each other and at Sandusky as he passes them in the locker room? Does Joepa think McQueary was on drugs and made the whole thing up? Then why is McQueary in one of the top coaching positions? Perhaps you don't believe McQueary's testimony that he told Joepa all the details about the Sandusky encounter? 

Hard to believe "Saint Joe" didn't want to know all the facts when he met with McQueary the next day.

... If Paterno continues living this is all going to come out in the criminal trial and private lawsuits. Why did Sandusky not succeed Paterno as head coach, as was widely expected? What did Paterno know? How could Paterno and the grad assistant (now the WR coach) look each other in the eye year after year, knowing that Sandusky was still around, had an office in the building and ran football camps for young kids? Didn't they wonder what happened to that little boy in the showers after 2002? Obviously there was no law enforcement action as Sandusky remained a free man. To say that Paterno discharged his moral responsibility by reporting a watered down version of the event to his "superiors" is ridiculous. 

The whole thing makes me sick.

Eating disorder

Paul Graham against philosophy and literary theory

A good friend of mine did a PhD in philosophy at Stanford, specializing in language and mind and all things Wittgenstein. After several years as a professor at two leading universities, he left the field to earn a second PhD in neuroscience, working in a wet lab. I have a feeling he might agree with much that Paul Graham writes in the essay quoted below. In numerous conversations over the years about his dissertation research, I could never quite see the point...

Outside of math there's a limit to how far you can push words; in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings. Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well enough in everyday life that you don't notice. Words seem to work, just as Newtonian physics seems to. But you can always make them break if you push them far enough.

I would say that this has been, unfortunately for philosophy, the central fact of philosophy. Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean by "free." Do abstract ideas exist? Depends what you mean by "exist."

Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I'm not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.

...Curiously, however, the works they produced continued to attract new readers. Traditional philosophy occupies a kind of singularity in this respect. If you write in an unclear way about big ideas, you produce something that seems tantalizingly attractive to inexperienced but intellectually ambitious students. Till one knows better, it's hard to distinguish something that's hard to understand because the writer was unclear in his own mind from something like a mathematical proof that's hard to understand because the ideas it represents are hard to understand. To someone who hasn't learned the difference, traditional philosophy seems extremely attractive: as hard (and therefore impressive) as math, yet broader in scope. That was what lured me in as a high school student.

This singularity is even more singular in having its own defense built in. When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they're nonsense generally keep quiet. There's no way to prove a text is meaningless. The closest you can get is to show that the official judges of some class of texts can't distinguish them from placebos. [10]

And so instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected it was a waste of time just studied other things. That alone is fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy's claims. It's supposed to be about the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.

Because philosophy's flaws turned away the sort of people who might have corrected them, they tended to be self-perpetuating. Bertrand Russell wrote in a letter in 1912:

Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject. [11]

His response was to launch Wittgenstein at it, with dramatic results.

I think Wittgenstein deserves to be famous not for the discovery that most previous philosophy was a waste of time, which judging from the circumstantial evidence must have been made by every smart person who studied a little philosophy and declined to pursue it further, but for how he acted in response. [12] Instead of quietly switching to another field, he made a fuss, from inside. He was Gorbachev.

The field of philosophy is still shaken from the fright Wittgenstein gave it. [13] Later in life he spent a lot of time talking about how words worked. Since that seems to be allowed, that's what a lot of philosophers do now. Meanwhile, sensing a vacuum in the metaphysical speculation department, the people who used to do literary criticism have been edging Kantward, under new names like "literary theory," "critical theory," and when they're feeling ambitious, plain "theory." The writing is the familiar word salad:

Gender is not like some of the other grammatical modes which express precisely a mode of conception without any reality that corresponds to the conceptual mode, and consequently do not express precisely something in reality by which the intellect could be moved to conceive a thing the way it does, even where that motive is not something in the thing as such. [14]

The singularity I've described is not going away. There's a market for writing that sounds impressive and can't be disproven. There will always be both supply and demand. So if one group abandons this territory, there will always be others ready to occupy it.

...

[10] Sokal, Alan, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Social Text 46/47, pp. 217-252.

Abstract-sounding nonsense seems to be most attractive when it's aligned with some axe the audience already has to grind. If this is so we should find it's most popular with groups that are (or feel) weak. The powerful don't need its reassurance.

[11] Letter to Ottoline Morrell, December 1912. Quoted in:

Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991, p. 75.

[12] A preliminary result, that all metaphysics between Aristotle and 1783 had been a waste of time, is due to I. Kant.

[13] Wittgenstein asserted a sort of mastery to which the inhabitants of early 20th century Cambridge seem to have been peculiarly vulnerable—perhaps partly because so many had been raised religious and then stopped believing, so had a vacant space in their heads for someone to tell them what to do (others chose Marx or Cardinal Newman), and partly because a quiet, earnest place like Cambridge in that era had no natural immunity to messianic figures, just as European politics then had no natural immunity to dictators.

[14] This is actually from the Ordinatio of Duns Scotus (ca. 1300), with "number" replaced by "gender." Plus ca change.

Wolter, Allan (trans), Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, Nelson, 1963, p. 92.