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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Shut Up And Guess - Less Wrong
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Oh my dear lord Cthulhu. Can I ask what level of class this was? If you say it was a postgraduate course at MIT, I may gather the last sane members of the human race and move to Pluto.
Postgraduate course at a university that's not Ivy League caliber but reasonably well-respected. In contrast to ahem some of the comments below, these people are all quite smart, some consistently better able to understand difficult concepts than I and a few having good original published research. This sort of rationality stuff is just a different skill that some smart people just don't have aptitude in.
What discipline was the class in? Did the subject matter itself prime people away from thinking about probabilities? o.O
Heh. When I read: "Anyone with basic math skills should be able to calculate that out, right?" I thought: "yes!" - and waited for the inevitable complication - but it never came.
Perhaps we should come up with some sort of maxim to remind ourselves that not every weird result has a complex possibly-evolutionary explanation - 'sometimes, people really are just stupid'.
People are very frequently stupid, but there is always a causal explanation of their stupidity.
It's just that sometimes there is a very simple explanation that helps predict the direction of stupidity, and that we might share that stupidity.
I'm curious: if instead of moving to Pluto, these people simply bred with each other, what would result?
There might be genes for intelligence, but I'm extremely skeptical that there are genes for LW-style rationality. Teaching each other, on the other hand, might work.
From personal experience, there seems to be a large variance in rationality even after conditioning on intelligence for those that have never had any 'formal' rationality training.
I'm not sure where exactly this comes from, but it would not surprise me if there was a large genetic component.
Given that people can be genetically predisposed to such emergent things as hating homosexuality (how would you make a neural net do that?), it doesn't seem far-fetched that this sort of thing is inheritable. Of course, I don't think homosexuality-hating evolved over mere centuries, nor do I know of statistically significant evidence that LW-style rationality has been inherited.
It seems pretty easy to me. Wire a man up with the following instinctual responses:
It's not too far from there to an outright hatred of homosexuality, if you don't think too hard about it and you don't have the rational defenses to make this a non-issue. This is one of the benefits of rationalism, by the way: defense against miscellaneous harmful bullshit.
How easy is it to make a neural net recognize "woman" and "man"?
I don't know, but since there obviously is a way that our brains distinguish between men and women and assign sexual attraction based on that distinction, I don't know that the mechanism is relevant to this discussion unless you're really into writing image classification algorithms.
What I'm saying here is that I tend to treat a lot of complex brain functions, like image recognition or motor control, as primitives that we get for free from nature. This seems to be the only way to make a cache-lookup-based brain work in practice.