This is the fifth of n many result posts for the second survey I hosted. (Links: [0], [1], [2], [3], [4], [working file], [raw data]). Today is about the section on Evaluating Arguments. This was the most unusual part of the survey, so let me briefly describe my motivation. I designed this survey to be in what I think is the spirit of Sam Harris’ work. The thing he represents the most, perhaps aside from meditation, is (in my mind) honest intellectual discourse. Hence a section about discussing ideas divorced of any and all identity politics.

That, and as we all know, almost no-one ever changes their mind. As Sam said, this is a gigantic problem; I think he called it the biggest social problem we have. Anything and everything to improve discourse and shift the focus onto ideas is good in my mind.

Anyways, those who didn’t like it at least had an option to express their position.

Question 61: Did you like the previous section, about evaluating arguments?

This is an approval of 46% among those who had an opinion. Some people really hated it (see comments at the end), but almost everyone answered it anyway. (Even though I repeatedly emphasized that everything was optional.)

Others:

I disagreed with all of the arguments, and honestly some frustration affected my feelings towards the section. Good effort, though.

I’m interested in the results

So many words

I’m not sure people will be able to separate their personal views with the validity of the arguments in a vaccuum

I did in theory, just not at all familiar with some of the philosophical concepts making my participation dubious.

No, all arguments were weak because too short and basic

I found it pretty impossible

No, and the results likely won’t even mean a whole lot – a single servey about each question with a lot of detail and further explanation is needed. Most of the respondents to this survey will not bother to really consider, update their thinking, or provide useful answers to most of the questions here that aren’t simple and have known, strong truth values.

It was hard to read, I dont think the arguments were phrased the best way they could have been. But I am not a native speaker.

No, my attention span is too fucking short for that shit

They were a bit long, and makes doing the survey a bit of a burden.

Now the arguments themselves. There were six, and for each, the possible options were “Strong” and “Weak” and “Somewhere in between” and “Nonsensical” and “Unsure”.

(Short disclaimer: I do not endorse all of these. My own responses include three Strongs, one Somewhere in between, and two Nonsensicals. One of them is an original argument; one is something someone used in a disucussion with me on reddit.)

1) In the wild, most animals live until they get eaten by a predator, at which point they usually die a slow and painful death. If humans go extinct but some animals survive, this is likely to continue for several billion years. It is therefore extremely important to prevent human extinction so that we can some day do something about this.

2) The hard problem of consciousness is unsolvable through science, even in principle. It follows that the existence of consciousness is always going to be more surprising if there is no god than if there is a god. Therefore, the existence of consciousness is Bayesian evidence for the existence of a god.

3) Intelligent people tend to be more ethical. Superhuman AI, by definition, is extremely intelligent. Therefore, superhuman AI is guaranteed to be ethical.

4) Whenever a person pays another person to do something, it means that both of them think the transaction is beneficial for them. A minimum wage means fewer such transactions take place. It does therefore, in some sense, destroy utility for the sake of redistribution.

5) In a radically consequentialist view, any external action is evaluated only in terms of what evidence it provides about the person or system that made it, not in terms of its intrinsic morality. In contrast, personal actions are evaluated purely in terms of their intrinsic morality. This fundamental asymmetry is a sign that consequentialism cannot ultimately be correct.

6) “Individual consciousness” is the idea that different people have different subjective streams of experience, and the well-being of another person is in some fundamental sense different from the well-being of yourself. An alternative view is “Singular Consciousness”, which states that there is fundamentally only you: every other person is just a different version of you, and everything they experience is fundamentally something which you experience. Nothing we know about the world privileges Individual Consciousness over Singular Consciousness, and materialism plus the fact that our particle structure undergoes constant change is further evidence against Individual Consciousness. Even Occam’s Razor privileges Singular Consciousness, because it is the strictly simpler concept. Thus, Singular Consciousness should rationally be considered the more probable theory.

Question 52: Did any of the above arguments make you update your position? (Update does not have to mean that you now believe the opposite; any change to what you believe counts.) If no, please select zero. If yes, please select the one that caused the biggest update.

50 people changed their mind, in some way. And they said it was impossible!

Here is another evaluation by a somewhat arbitrary score, where I gave 1 point for each “Weak”, 2 points for each “Somewhere in between”, 3 points for each “Strong” and divided it by the total number of responses that were anything but “Unsure”. So basically I gave points for positive responses, where Strong is best and Nonsensical worst.

Note how the Minimum wage argument was both rated the strongest and caused the fewest people to update their position.

Comments:

This was unnecessary. Is this some kind of dick measuring contest or IQ inquisition (like Ted Cruz is known to do)? WTF

Hhhhhaahajag

Hhhhhaahajag “Nonsensical” should’ve been broken out into more options

Rationalists fundamentally misapply Bayes’ theorem.

(They really don’t.)

Make your arguments more succinctly.

TL;DR

Most of these questions are above my pay grade and I can’t even understand them, so I just selected unsure.

The questions are too long-winded

I’m not good with philosophy.

replace clunky phrase with solipsism (we can handle it, we are big boys)

Most of these questions serve no real purpose, and are just a way to kill your response rate and get downvoted by anyone giving you the time of day.

These questions are too hard

Sorry, I tried real hard to answer more of these but couldn’t.

I dislike this page. Using a survey of a subreddit’s beliefs as a soapbox for poor and inconsistent arguments is a waste of people’s time. Particularly since it necessitated spending extra time parsing the convoluted sentences.

didn’t understand number 5

TL;DR

my god

I wouldn’t mind discussing some of these in more detail

OK, I am officially phoning the rest of this in. FFS.

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