= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Furcas comments on Scott Aaronson's "On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality" - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (48)
I have to say I'm surprised by the amount of praise this story is getting.
The main character seems convinced that the difficulty she experiences in interacting pleasantly with members of the opposite sex and possibly starting a relationship with someone less rational than she is, is due to her inability to delude herself, or even to compartmentalize.
But it's not. It's due to her inability to shut up once in a while. Instead of working on changing her entire psyche, couldn't she have simply made an effort to, you know, control the way she behaves?
Epistemic rationality has nothing to do with extreme honesty towards other individuals, or with showing contempt for irrationalists, or even with feeling contempt for them. The greatest epistemic rationalist on Earth could have a happy relationship with a Young Earth Creationist; all s/he'd have to do is either refrain from criticism, or be very polite and gentle about it.
Also, I wasn't very impressed with the classification of Richard Dawkins (and those like him) as a "a Type-1-and-higher retard". What he is is a good Type-1-and-higher thinker who cares about the truth and therefore to whom avoiding self-deception is advantageous.
I think you're misreading the story. It's not an argument in favor of irrationality, it's a horror story. The catch is that it's a good horror story, directed at the rationalist community. Like most good horror stories, it plays off a specific fear of its audience.
You may be immune to the lingering dread created by looking at all those foolish happy people around you and wondering if maybe you are the one doing something wrong. Or the fear that even if you act as rationally as you can, you could still box yourself into a trap you won't be able to think your way back out of. But quite a few of your peers are not so immune. I know I'm not, and that story managed to scare me pretty effectively.
The protagonist isn't an ideal rationalist, and the story isn't trying to assert that this is what the ideal rationalist does. Instead, the protagonist is an adolescent proto-rationalist, of a type many of us are familiar with, with her social instincts sucking her into a trap that a lot of us can understand well enough to dread.
And so there's a reason she thinks and acts like a Hollywood stereotype of an intelligent person is that, especially when they're just barely at the age of being able to really think at all. Where do you think Hollywood got the idea for the stereotype in the first place?
I submit that the reason so many of the average people think intelligent people act that way is because they lose social contact with the geniuses in high school, which is when they do think and act like that.
For a lot of the smartest people, being socially functional is a learned skill that comes late and not easily.
Agreed. I went in expecting a parable against rationality, and about halfway through I realized I was reading existential horror (the best kind).
The writing isn't great and the points are made hamhandedly, but there is the core of a good story here.
I've upvoted this comment, but I disagree.
What should make this an effective horror story, as you put it, is that it's based on the very real possibility that there are people whose brains are wired in such a way that they can't be happy and rational at the same time. In order to more effectively 'scare' the reader, the author attempts to convince us that this is more than a possibility by making an argument by fictional example, the example being the main character.
My beef with the story is that this example is way too unlikely to be convincing as an argument (and therefore scary as a horror story). If there are people who can't possibly be rational and happy, I'm pretty sure it's not because they're incapable of keeping their tongues under control in order to start a relationship on the right foot.
I dunno. I mean, a lot of horror stories that are famous for being good talk about stuff that can never be and should never be, but that nonetheless (in-story) is. I think it's that sense of a comforting belief about the world being violated that makes a good horror story, even if the prior probability of that belief being wrong is low.
Least convenient possible world for your objection: the protagonist couldn't change her liability to shut up, but could change her rationality.
That's possible, but so unlikely that it strains credulity (haha). Like I said in my reply to Kaj Sotala, this story is trying to make a point about some humans who live in the real world. Have you ever heard of someone for whom changing from a 'hyper-rationalist' to a deluded fool is easier than to learn to keep one's mouth shut every now and then?
Yes.
It is also curious to observe that in humans extroversion is strongly correlated with conformism.
Has a study found such a correlation, wedrifid, or are you going by personal observations here?
Yes, more than one study has found such a correlation. My personal observations agree but not to the extent that I would rule out the fairly obvious potential biasses in my perception even if I had noticed it.
(No, I don't have the reference on hand.)
Thanks! Any idea how the studies you mention measured conformism? I'm guessing they administered questions like "The conventional wisdom is usually right."
Who said that the characters in good stories must never be mistaken?
Sure, but this isn't just a story, it's a story that tries to make a point about the negative consequences of rationality for some humans in the real world. Her belief isn't merely her belief, it's also a step in an argument.
I suspect you may be reading too much into it: I thought the "negative consequences of rationality" were more for the sake of pure comedy than for making any kind of a point.
Of course, you may also be right and I might be the one who's reading too little into it.
false in general, false as a statistical statement too.
The greatest epistemic rationalist on Earth is still made out of meat.
I was making a point about human thought processes, not human desires. I agree that it's unlikely that the greatest epistemic rationalist would want to have a relationship with a YEC, but if s/he did want to, s/he could.
If I were otherwise unattached, I would totally have a relationship with a YEC, if she was from a world which had actually been created 6000 years ago. Otherwise no.
What if she was just from a world where lots of evidence pointed to it having been created 6,000 years ago, but it was really created last Thursday?
Is she hot?
...okay, that was a bit out of character, but I think that at that point in the thread I basically had no choice but to say that.
Unless you have actually tracked down and interviewed the greatest epistemic rationalist on earth, how do you know? Maybe (s)he is very tolerant of such things. (When does intolerance win on a personal scale?)
This sounds like scientism.
Because I have experience with good rationalists, and the kind of people they have relationships with, and I am a bayesian so I can assign degrees of belief to propositions that I haven't tested directly. In this case, it seems reasonable that similar people have similar relationship-behaviors, and so my existing knowledge is relevant.
Rather like "how do you know that the fastest dog in the world can't outrun a formula one car?" - I know this with high certainty because I believe that similar animals behave in similar ways.
If it is false they could not. What would prevent them?