Guys, these are students in an intro philosophy class who looked at a few introductory and recently promoted articles. Expecting them to genuinely struggle with the weird views expressed here would require them to a) encounter the weird views which they likely didn't do and b) feel that they in any way have the expertise to challenge those views. What is noteworthy about this is that the comments were mandatory. If you make everyone who read a few introductory articles write comments these are about the results you're going to get. The people who write comments on the internet are the small minority who feel strongly about something said here and competent enough to add or criticize. But that is a small fraction of the possible audience. So seeing comments that don't pattern match to the comments one normally reads on the Internet is not a good reason to conclude the students did not have genuinely positive reaction to what they read.
Most intro to philosophy classes are not made up of kids with any significant CS, cog sci, mathematical or physics background. Yes, they're taking Less Wrong to be authoritative. But they read a bunch of good, non-controversial articles and have little...
What is noteworthy about this is that the comments were mandatory.
The people who write comments on the internet are the small minority who feel strongly about something said here and competent enough to add or criticize. But that is a small fraction of the possible audience.
I can't stress on how important this is. Imagine that instead of up voting or down voting every LWer who read a popular article commented on it in a few sentences. What would that thread look like? Now imagine forcing a fraction of the people who didn't vote to write up a comment.
Now imagine you do this with a bunch of intelligent people who most definitely have not read the sequences.
Yeah, the comments are written in bullshitty language and tone because that's how one writes for authority figures you can't trust yet.
+1
I don't understand why Jack's comment hasn't been up voted more. LWers aren't being realistic in their expectations here. Also considering the odds I think we will likley be getting at least one new commenter out of this and perhaps several regular readers who liked the site and will be returning here.
Edit: When I commented it had just 3 up votes.
Though I agree with the many commenters who have pointed out the abundance of password-guessing, I don't share their cynicism. The end result of all of this is that ~30 people who otherwise wouldn't have heard of LW have now given it a cursory glance. And look at the first comment here--it seems like we have prompted a handful people to enjoy thinking about rationality who might not have done so otherwise. Isn't that part of why the community exists, after all?
Listen, blog, if I never see another comment starting with something like "After reading lesswrong.com I believe I have a better understanding of rationality", I'll spare this cute innocent kitten I'm holding out the window.
a few seconds pass
Ah, well, I never liked kittens.
I think the positive reactions are probably mostly a case of guessing the teacher's password. Perhaps the teacher conveyed a positive impression beforehand, but the default password guessing behavior would probably be to guess "teacher wants us to write about this appreciatively" regardless of whether he said anything additional about the site -- that would be expected for a community blog devoted to refining the art of {rationality, wisdom, justice, aesthetics, ...}.
After having read the comments, I can definitely sympathize with the students. It brought back memories of when I was in the same position in history or English class when we had to read something and write our reaction to it but with little clear direction about what was expected of us or how the teacher would grade, and not really caring about the subject matter. I know the process that produced the comments, and I would probably write the same things in their position, but not out of deficient intelligence or writing skill -- rather, because I don't see the point, and I'm just trying to make it through the class.
When it's something I have to do to graduate, I am particularly resentful, even if I would have otherwise liked reading it.
Edit: Except for the grammar. Although if I never proofread my work, it would look bad, and for the reasons above I might not be motivated to do that much.
I would say it was the other way around. It's easy to be against something, and it sets you above whatever you're criticising. It's much more difficult to sound smart while agreeing with something.
I discount the smart-soundingness of whatever I read accordingly.
ETA: Maybe that's one reason for this phenomenon: people trying to sound smart instead of trying to be smart.
Who is the philosopher, and where is this course being taught? The site contains no information about any of this.
Also, why doesn't the blog have a title? And what about the art? Who is depicted, and why was this picture chosen?
I think this is related enough and useful to mention. Feel free to downvote if I am wrong.
I am a student in this class taught by Scott Aaronson. Our class blog is linked there too, which may be of some value to LW readers. I think comments from people who are not enrolled in the class are okay, as long as they are sparse. The main point is for students to hash out their reactions to readings and in-class discussions, so if it becomes saturated with remote user comments, it may take away from the cohesive debate aspect.
The course is based around this essay ...
I really like that essay, and it was linked here before. I would have liked to enroll in the course.
The key insights I took away from the paper are:
No, a waterfall isn't simulating a chess program, because the mapping from one to the other would be "doing all the work". IOW, you can only say one computation implements another if there's a polynomial time reduction between the two that benefits from having the other as an oracle, which is not the case for waterfalls and chess.
Different choices of language have no asymptotic impact on complexity of descriptions, except to the extent that it limits expressive power. If you couldn't represent the concept of a differential equation, then Newton's gravitation would be no simpler than Ptolemy's epicycles: both would require a lot of table lookups to predict motion.
The Turing Test, as well as human-run tests in general (like a quiz in school) can be subsumed into the concept of interactive proofs, where assumptions about the subject plus random probes of their knowledge suffice to prove what they are capable of, without knowing how they implement or represent it.
When considering whether a machine can pass the Turing Te
Copy over my email comment:
Yes, interesting.
Some of them read like the student did not do much reading at all; a number echo strongly previous comments; and some put way too much stock on one post (eg. the Google one). They are overall suspiciously positive - we all should know that there is some extremely wrong or extremely unobvious or extremely unpopular positions taken on LW, so to see only positive or very luke-warm reactions...?
This is probably related to apparently you not providing any specific pointers or articles into LW. If you try it in the fut...
The responses are almost entirely bullshit. The students want to earn the maximum amount of credit for their responses; the maximum amount of credit is small compared to the exams; they're uncertain about how their comments will be evaluated; and the context of the blog doesn't encourage them to put much thought into them. Less Wrong is presented as a homework reading and is therefore authoritative. Thinking critically about the material on Less Wrong would require too much time and effort for such a trivial assignment, and comes with the risk of falling out of favor with an instructor who might not like critical thinking.
College is weird.
When I was an undergraduate, I had many professors who were open to debate and encouraged students to disagree with them. I had 2 professors (Keith Gallagher and some Jesuit theologian whose name I forget) who responded negatively to disagreement from their students. I received As and Bs in every other class, but Cs in classes from those 2 professors, seriously damaging my GPA.
So, it only takes a small number of such professors, to make the rational decision by a student be to always agree with the professor.
Keep in mind that the problem with contemporary academic philosophy is not that it is insufficiently tolerant of dissent. The field practically self-defines as an unresolvable argument and the archetypal intro to philosophy curriculum involves learning and analyzing the debates between philosophers who disagree with each other about the most fundamental issues one can disagree about. Students are usually graded on 1) how well they learned the philosophies they studies and 2) their ability to put forward interesting thoughts of their own on the subjects discussed. The grading spectrum for a paper looks something like: Incoherent (F) -> Failed to understand source material (D) -> Repeated Source Material without saying anything interesting about it (C) -> Makes an interesting, but derivative or tangential point (B) -> Makes a central or extremely insightful point (A). Whether or not the student flatters the professor's own views is at worst good for half a letter grade in my experience.
Now the situation may be worse in other subjects and that may well affect the strategies the students are using-- but this says more about the situation in high school (where these students learned to write like this) than it does about college. Indeed, in my experience students often do poorly on their first philosophy paper precisely because they've failed to recognize the need to change strategies.
Also, the grading for blog comments is very likely to be only a participation grade and the students are likely to know this.
Keep in mind that the problem with contemporary academic philosophy is not that it is insufficiently tolerant of dissent. The field practically self-defines as an unresolvable argument
I agree with this. Academic philosophy may represent an example of a field not being dogmatic enough, which is a relatively rare failure mode.
No, but it is a closed list and the public materials are, as you noted, apparently sanitized. What is the reasonable inference?
I have no idea. It just looks like bizarre crypticness to me; like there's some inside joke that I'm not in on.
If it is a closed list, then why is it being posted to LW? And especially, why is it being posted without acknowledgment of the fact that the source was a closed list?
Conspicuous secrecy is rude.
My model of typical LWers disagrees. I don't think the student comments there look like tempting targets even to those among us who like to correct people.
What bothers me more at this point is the apparent expectation on the part of at least three people (the anonymous professor, lukeprog, and gwern) that we wouldn't be curious.
Not sure that it was, but there is a limit to how much I'm willing to limit myself to avoid violating social norms that may not even exist.
I can't say I found it surprising, but it's still depressing how many of the commenters referenced a few points from a Less Wrong article to demonstrate that they read it, and rounded it off with interpretations that were simply regurgitations of some cached thoughts they could have output equally well without reading any of Less Wrong at all.
Link.
Given the positive reactions, I think the professor seeded them with a positive impression of the site's content.