Attraction and emotional granularity

This article was written for the Carnival of Aces themed on “Nuance & Complexity“. It is being cross-posted to my other blog, The Asexual Agenda.

Asexuality is chiefly about noticing a distinction between the emotions you perceive in other people, and the emotions you perceive in yourself. We give a name to this distinction, for example by saying some people experience sexual attraction and some people do not. And we discuss appropriate responses to our emotions, for example by saying that some emotions mean we want to have sex, and other emotions do not.

Within ace communities, we often discuss further distinctions in emotions. Again, we give names to these distinctions, for example by talking about romantic attraction, platonic attraction, aesthetic attraction, sensual attraction, and so forth. And we discuss appropriate responses to these emotions, for example by describing what kinds of relationships might satisfy our emotions, or if a particular emotion only makes us want to look at a person.

The ability to distinguish different emotions is a nascent research topic in psychology. And while you shouldn’t let psychology research dictate how you live, looking into the research may give us insight into a common topic.

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FTA part 2: Prediction distributions and inflation

This is the second part of a series discussing the Fine Tuning argument (FTA). The outline is here.

Comparing Hypotheses

Previously, I explained how the Fine-Tuning argument assumes this kind of picture:

A graph showing the probability of life vs the parameters of the universe. The probability is sharply peaked at x_0.

The probability of life is sharply peaked. x0 marks the parameters of the universe that we have in the real world.

Does this graph mean that life is unlikely? No, not necessarily. It depends on the probability distribution of the parameters of the universe. For example, here are three possible probability distributions A, B, and C. Under probability distribution A, or C, life is very unlikely. Under probability distribution B, life is much more likely.

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Authorial intent is magic!

This is a repost of an article I wrote in 2015, although I changed the title.

The author is magic

Death of the Author” is a famous 1967 essay by Roland Barthes regarding the interpretation of literature.  He argues that the intentions and context of the author are irrelevant when interpreting the author’s work.  At most, the author provides a single interpretation, which must compete with all other interpretations.

Intent! It’s fucking magic!” is an influential 2010 essay by Kinsey Hope regarding the moral judgment actions.  There’s a common circumstance wherein a person tries to justify their mistakes by emphasizing their good intentions.  The essay snarkily observes that good intentions have the strange and magical power to erase all harms.  “Intention isn’t magic” has become a common saying among activists.

Though the two essays live in completely different contexts (literary criticism vs moral discourse), I would argue that the sentiments behind each are substantially similar.  Indeed, in the modern age, when we increasingly look at popular works of fiction through moral lenses, and when “actions” often consist of tweets or other comments, it is questionable whether they even live in different contexts.

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The Fine-Tuning Argument: A walkthrough

The Fine-Tuning Argument (FTA) is one of those standard arguments for the existence of God. The argument goes that humans can only arise when the parameters of the universe are tuned exactly right. And while it’s possible that we just got lucky, the argument goes that it’s far more likely that God did the tuning.

The standard way to talk about the FTA is delve into a bunch of math equations.  Not that there’s anything wrong with math, but here I wanted to write an in-depth overview that doesn’t talk about the math.  There will, however, be a lot of physics.  The goal here is not to refute the FTA (although refutations will occur incidentally), but to explore it, and to understand how we test hypotheses about the universe.

Outline

(Links to be added later)

1. The Fine-Tuning Argument: A walkthrough
2. Prediction distributions and inflation
3. Ignorant hypotheses
4. Anthropic reasoning

Perma-link to entire series

The parameters of the universe

The core premise of the FTA is that the universe is fine-tuned. Which is to say, the probability of life looks like this:

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Public ignorance/awareness of science

Have you ever read one of those news stories reporting that Americans are shockingly ignorant of science? For example, here’s an article saying that a quarter of Americans think the Sun orbits the Earth.

And if you found that shocking, brace yourself for the next one. According to this article, a quarter of Americans think the Sun orbits the Earth!

Okay, so both of the news articles are saying the same thing. But one of the articles is from 2014, and the other is from 1988. They’re both reporting on an NSF study, which has been repeated every couple years for three decades. They always ask whether the Sun orbits the Earth or the Earth orbits the Sun, and they consistently find that about a quarter of USians don’t know or get it wrong. They also ask if electrons are smaller than atoms, if lasers focus sound waves, and if antibiotics kill viruses.* News sources like to put the Sun/Earth statistic in their headlines, because it sounds the most shocking to readers.

You might guess from my tone that I’m a bit more apathetic about the whole thing. Yeah, it’s bad that USians are ignorant of elementary astronomy. But science is not a collection of factoids, and factoids are not the most important component of scientific literacy. As far as facts go, there are way too many for anyone to know all of them, and it’s difficult to judge which facts are more or less important for people to know.  If a fact is “basic” and “obvious”, that might make it socially unacceptable to be ignorant of it, but it also might make it less important to know, given how easy it is to look up the answer.  In my opinion, it’s far more important for people to understand scientific reasoning, like how experiments are designed, and how to read graphs.

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Link Roundup: May 2018

Before I get to the link roundup, I’d like to mention an update I’ve made to an old post.  It was about an optical illusion you could make with origami, and now I’ve added nicer diagrams so that you can actually follow along and make it yourself.

IS SONIC 2 ABOUT CAPITALISM??!? (H Bomberguy video) – Ignore the title, this is a retrospective on gaming webcomics, especially the comic Control-Alt-Delete.  Hey, I’ve been into webcomics for a long time, I remember when people loved to hate CAD.  I think part of the reason was that webcomics were a new medium to most people, and we weren’t used to the fact that of course lots of webcomics are bad, and so what?  But the other major reason was that CAD was extremely popular.  I think it was easier to treat the author and his fans as having irrationally bad taste, instead of really examining what CAD said about gamer culture at large.

Sunday Sermon: Buddhism Sucks, Too – The treatment of Buddhism by anglophone atheist communities has always been problematic.  Buddhism is incredibly diverse, and has had a very long history across a very large part of the world, but atheists tend to flatten it into nothing but a philosophical and peace-loving counterpoint to western religions.  Marcus Ranum has the right idea by not even attempting to summarize Buddhism as a whole; instead he discusses how Tibetan Buddhists don’t live up to the image.

I’ve often thought that atheist attitudes towards Buddhism are the consequence of a movement that has systematically left out Asian Americans.  Or maybe it’s the other way around?

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The ethics of educational experiments

Rebecca Watson had an interesting article/video about the ethics of A/B testing. A/B testing is a type of experiment often performed by tech companies on their users. The companies split users into two groups, and show two different versions of their software/website to each group, and measure the results. The problem is that when scientists perform experiments on human subjects, there’s a formal ethical review process. Should tech companies have an ethical review process too?

Of course, this question is being raised as a result of a specific experiment performed by a specific company. Pearson produces educational software, and performed an A/B test where some students were shown motivational messages. They presented results at a conference, and part of their conclusion was that this was a promising methodology for future research. But is it really, if they didn’t comply with the ethical standards in science? They certainly didn’t get consent from all those human test subjects.

Watson also brought up another case from 2014, when Facebook performed an experiment that changed the amount of positive/negative posts people saw in their news feeds. They published a study, and it was called “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks”. Sounds pretty bad, eh?

Watson seems to conclude that A/B tests should get consent, at least in the case of Pearson. But I think this is going too far. The thing is, A/B testing is absolutely ubiquitous. Watson says, “having worked in marketing and seen A/B tests, it’s just a normal thing that companies do,” but I think this understates it. My fiance and I were trying to figure out how many A/B tests Google has running at any time, and we thought it might be one per employee, implying tens of thousands of experiments. And most of them are for boring things like changing fonts or increasing the number of pixels of white space. If we judge A/B tests on the basis of just two tests that appear in the news, “cherry picking” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

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