Anti-Semitism at Hacker News

EDIT: I wrote a new more detailed article about this.

Paul Graham created the social news website Hacker News (HN), associated it with his company Y Combinator, and ran it until recently. Graham's website contains anti-Israel material. Graham also compares Winston Churchill's speeches to a German "purge". As head HN moderator, Graham banned the user qqq for referring to an inflammatory, off-topic anti-semitic article as "anti-semitism" and suggesting it shouldn't be on a non-political technology news site. The article stayed on HN; anti-semitism, Graham (username pg) believes, is merely legitimate "criticism of Israel".

The article, by Paul Reynolds, applies double standards to Israel, such as calling their public relations "propaganda", when the same public relations by the USA would not be called "propaganda". Reynolds also questions whatever Israel's accountable, democratic government says, while promoting the unsubstantiated claims of a random, unaccountable Palestinian. That is an evidential double standard. Double standards like this are not merely "criticism of Israel", they are anti-semitism.

Reynolds posted updates admitting it was an inflammatory political article that caused outrage. Reynolds acknowledged and commented on the accusation that he was siding with the anti-semitic terrorist organization Hamas. To his slight credit, Reynolds considered it par-for-the-course that his article – which took some similar positions to Hamas – could draw serious complaints, so he spoke to the issue. Graham, on the other hand, has more extreme views than Reynolds and won't admit there's any controversy. Graham banned a user for a criticism that even Reynolds would find understandable, thus trying to silence any defense of Israel on HN.


The new head moderator of HN, Daniel Gackle (username dang), is following in Graham's footsteps. He took moderator action against a recent USA Today article reporting on anti-semitism. Then he applied a double standard by refusing to take action against an anti-Israel article meeting the same criteria which he had said justified burying the other article.

Gackle ignored a prompt email explaining the problem in time to act. At the same time, he replied at great length to some minor comments about downvoting, proving he was available to moderate. When pressed about the issue, Gackle admitted two days later that he had made an intentional decision as HN's head moderator. Gackle told the user who raised the issue to stop sending emails; Gackle is unwilling to consider facts or arguments which contradict him about Israel.

How bad is it? Gackle's best defense was to claim the anti-Israel article was a "fairly substantive historical piece". But we are talking about a site which Gackle had already been informed publishes extreme anti-semitic revisionist history like this:
First, Israel cannot be said to face an existential threat when, in the many Arab-Israeli conflicts that have occurred since World War II, Israel has almost always been the aggressor.
Gackle closed his eyes to his role in spreading this kind of material. HN moderation has a clear bias. It's fair to call it anti-semitism.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (16)

Philosophy - Fill In The Blanks

My answers to some philosophical prompts (try answering the prompts yourself in the comments below!):

Initiative means... It's important because...

Living life. Doing things instead of doing an impersonation of a rock.

Personal, individual responsibility is... It's good because...

Living life. Doing things for yourself instead of doing an impersonation of a rock.

Taking responsibility for your life means recognizing that other people won't solve your problems for you, and taking initiative to solve them yourself.

Taking responsibility also means choosing to control your own life. (You cannot be responsible for things you do not control.) That requires initiative rather than passively letting things happen – you have to actually do stuff to have any control.

Living irresponsibly-passively means letting external stuff control you, like memes, people ("authorities" or not), or even the weather (e.g. a passive person outside could live in the sun and die in the snow, the weather chooses).

One thing a responsible person does is never evade. He deals with things. Evading is irresponsible because it leaves you with no control over the evaded issue.

Criticism is... It has the following benefits...

A criticism is an explanation of a flaw an idea has. Identifying and understanding flaws makes it a lot easier to fix them (to figure out how to change your ideas to no longer have those flaws).

Persuasion is... It is good because...

Persuasion is about suggesting an idea that someone prefers over some idea(s) they already had. It's straightforwardly good if someone changes ideas to ones that they judge to be better.

Persuasion does not require multiple people. It can be self-persuasion. Persuasion, including self- and external, is how rational learning works.

Fallibility is... It is important to understand because...

People commonly make mistakes, so it's important to use methods of doing things which can identify and correct mistakes that occur along the way, rather than relying on everything going perfectly.

Learning and knowledge...

Want something? Prefer anything? What you need is knowledge. (Learning is getting knowledge.)

Learn how to get what you want. Learn how to meet your preference or goal. If you know how, you'll succeed.

The only exception is if you want something impossible or immoral. In those cases, learning is still the best approach. You can learn that it's impossible or immoral (and why), learn what a better preference/goal/want would be (and why), and learn how to change your mind to have that better preference/goal/want instead with zero hesitation or regrets.

Have any doubts about this? Any questions? The answers are all learnable knowledge. You can learn whether your doubts or correct or not and what's best to do about them. You can learn answers to questions (or learn that a question has no answer, perhaps because it's self-contradictory or nonsense, in which case you can learn how to make better questions, what related questions you'd want answers to instead, etc)

All of this is pure awesome with no drawbacks. It's the right way to live.

Reason has to do with correcting errors. What I mean is...

Rationality is commonly confused with being right. Actually, it's about how one takes into account the possibility of being wrong. Rationality is ability to find and correct errors. It's about being able to make changes going forward.

Without rationality, it doesn't matter how great one is today; long term one is screwed without change, because all people are only at the beginning of infinity. There's still unlimited progress, change and greatness ahead. However great you are today, if you don't change, you will be passed. (That you might die before this issue has maximum effect is not exactly comforting.)

Authority is... It is bad because...

Authority is the enemy of all of the above, especially life.

Following authority means not living on your own initiative. Following authority means not taking responsibility for your life and controlling it, but rather letting the authority be the primary responsible party making choices and controlling outcomes. (One would still be responsible for the choice to follow authority, thus allowing for plenty of moral guilt, but not much else.)

Authority isn't rational. It doesn't control things by having the best most persuasive ideas that have been exposed to lots of criticism in order to figure out the best ideas. It's not about learning, it's not designed for each person to control his life using his judgment and knowledge.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

JTB

one meaning of the word “rational” is “has authority, is Right". even “True”, sometimes. this is a bad meaning, but a standard English meaning nonetheless.

basically ppl are justificationists and use “rational” to mean what’s good in that epistemology. and the basic point of justificationism is: if an idea doesn’t have authority, why would anyone (rationally) accept it? the "rationally" excludes reasons like arbitrarily due to taste, or chosen by self-interested bias.

what’s good in their epistemology is authority and being Right and having the Truth.

for this approach to reason, an idea can be rational. saying an idea is rational is claiming it is True, or at least has Authority.

a better approach is to see reason as a process. the point is to think about ideas in a way that can make progress. that means that if a mistake is made, the process can find out and correct it. error correcting approaches are rational, and ones which prevent error correction are irrational.


so, the standard idea most people have is: knowledge = JTB (justified, true belief)

meaning you should Believe ideas which are True, but you only get credit if you believe them due to authority (justification), NOT for any other reason (b/c if they don’t have authority but turn out true, why'd you believe it? that wasn't a rational belief, you didn't know it was true, you just got lucky that it happened to be true)

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Opposite of Authority

i've been trying to figure out a good word that means roughly no-authority, but approaches the issue in a positive way, saying what the concept *is* rather than isn't, and not mentioning any opposing view. i don't think there is such a word! :(((

the word "freedom" isn't specific and clear enough. same for "liberal", "liberty", "reason" or "rational".

the words "humility" and "modesty" are too negative and have mistakes mixed in. their synonyms are worse.

"decentralized" doesn't get the point across well, it's too much of a special case.

"non-justificationist" would not be understood, nor would "fallibilist".

The word "independence", like some of the others, is too connected with politics not philosophy. also, like some of the others, lots of people who are pro-authority would be in favor of it and not see the contradiction

"cooperation" is too specific (not covering all the meaning) and people won't understand the connection

"no-authority" or "anti-authority" are both defining it in terms of what it's not. i want a word which means the right concept, rather than just denying an opposing view

some other potentially useful words are, "self-rule" (which sounds way too much like being your own authority), "self-determination", "autonomous"

btw if you look up the antonyms of "authority", they are terrible. they are words like weakness, powerlessness, inferiority, and disadvantage. that is what people think lack of authority is like. it tells you something about how badly they want authority, and see authority as a major goal and all around desirable thing. http://thesaurus.com/browse/authority

it's really sad, and says something about our culture, that there's no anti-authority word that is on par with the word "authority" for clarity, being well known and understood, applying broadly, and other things one would want from a word which make it easy to use effectively. like you can use "authority" for both political and epistemological discussions and people won't blink, they won't find it at all odd, weird, confusing or objectionable, it's just natural. but with a word like "independence", that's primarily a political word, and people will hesitate if they see it in a philosophy context.


one place I'd like to use this word is a slogan. something kinda like:
initiative, responsibility, criticism, persuasion, humility
the other words there are decent enough but "humility" is bad


another reason i want a no-authority word is for epistemology discussion. i've identified rejection of authority as perhaps the most important theme of the good epistemology, more than fallibilism, criticism, rationalism, objectivity, or existence (Rand considered "Existentialism" before "Objectivism", but it was taken).

i think the top two epistemology concepts are no-authority and error-correction. both are implied by fallibility but no one knows that. (nor do they know much about the relationship between the "critical" in "critical rationalism" and error-correction).

they also both imply each other. the rejection of authority entails needing to worry about error (as opposed to trusting authority to be right). and correcting errors requires considering the merits of ideas, rather than their amount of authority.


another word that would be nice is error-correction as one word. but that's not so important because error-correction is a descriptive phrase that positively identifies the right thing to do, without mentioning any opposing view.


another word I'd like is a positive word for non-TCS-coercion. "common preference finding" doesn't work well, it's too specific and is jargon.


another word I'd like is a positive word for non-force. there's "peace" but that's for groups not an individual level. there's "cooperation" but using that word does not communicate to people "no force allowed". people will consider relationships involving some force to be "cooperative". there's "voluntary" and "consensual" but they don't really capture it.


post suggestions in the comments

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (10)

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Philosophy Puzzle

It is not fitting for humans to take on parochial labor roles. Rather than divide labor, we must abolish it: labor is for machines. When we have universal machines construct according to our mind and thought, then each man will be an island, and there shall be no more division of labor.

I wrote this argument with references to four people. Who are they?

I won't say if guesses are correct unless you get all four exactly, or you explain the reasoning for your guess.

Bonus points if you can figure out what the argument is saying, analyze whether it's a good argument, and explain why I consider this puzzle worthwhile.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (45)

Review: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business-Essentials/dp/006124189X

this book doesn't use critical thinking. it takes some evidence and tells a story to explain it and doesn't tell us how it knows that story is correct and not some other story. it doesn't consider and criticize rival explanations. it just gives selective attention, over and over, to favored explanations. why are those explanations favored? it never says.

each influence tactic it discusses it acknowledged as fallible. but there's no extensive discussion about when and why they fail. the author doesn't seek explanations about what differentiates the successes and failures, instead he simply accepts and ignores the failure rate. the "scientists" involved in the field try to argue that X causes Y by doing an experiment where X happens and Y results, with a control with no X and no Y. they don't consider the Z and W that also differed between the test group and the control. but they also don't consider what A, B or C could be added to stop it from working anymore, or what background factors D, E, and F are required to be present for the X/Y relationship to work.

generally, the book is concerned with selective positive claims and not with error, correcting error, or considering everything.

the book is also sometimes wrong, incompetent or dishonest about technical details. in one case it described a drop from 38% to 10% as impressive. but it was in circumstances where we would have expected a 2/3 drop anyway. a 2/3 drop already gets us down to 12.66% so the observed drop could easily be within the margin of error, but that isn't mentioned. there was also a straightforward reason for a greater than 2/3 drop. yet the 38% to 10% drop was simply presented as a large drop scientifically proving the point – it was treated as evidence of the author's particular story about why there would be a drop in this case.

another issue is the book doesn't try to apply what it claims we're learning. it will raise some point, e.g. that people are biased in a particular way in a particular kind of situation. then it won't go looking for what other situations that applies to. for example it talked about fraternity hazing and how people try to act consistent with their sunk costs, so if they already went through tough hazing then they try to like the group they joined. hazing is an easy target but why not consider whether the same principle can be used to criticize some less well known target? for example people with PhDs is a group with high costs to enter it, so should people with PhDs watch out for bias regarding how much they think their PhD was worth the price and how nice life in the PhD recipient group is? the book consistently doesn't go the extra mile to consider anything controversial, it keeps just discussing psychological factors to make points that are already popular.

the book has other flaws too.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)