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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Rationality Quotes November 2009 - Less Wrong
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-- Luke Muehlhauser
That's an interesting thing to claim - and one I'm pretty sure they wouldn't agree about back then.
But ... "they thought they were right" isn't an argument. Compare how they derived their bottom lines to how we have. Compare their evidence and reasoning to ours, and compare both to the kinds of evidence and reasoning that works (literally does good work) elsewhere, and the answer will probably be straightaway obvious which is the more reliable.
We have no evidence and reasoning about morality that doesn't depend on morality in the first place, is-ought problem which I won't repeat here.
Empirically, everyone derives their morality from society's norm developed in messy historical processes. Why one messy historical process is better than other by any objective standard is not clear.
By some standards we have less suffering than past times, but we're also vastly wealthier. It's not clear at all to me that wealth-adjusted suffering now is lower than historically - modern moral standards say it's fine to let 1.5 million children a year die of diarrhea because they happen to be born in a wrong country. I can imagine some of the past moral systems would be less happy about it than we are.
One: See above.
Two: The very fact that you can say:
...and expect me to draw your implied conclusion refutes the very claim itself. What do you think makes me appalled that children are dying of diarrhea, aesthetics? That we haven't yet fixed a problem doesn't prove that it meets our approval - after all, people still die everywhere.
In questions of morality, there's nothing but the (really complicated) bottom line.
That's not even empirically true. At best, morality is the (really complicated) function relating "is" and "ought" - which means errors in the "is" can make vast differences to the consequent "ought".
(For example, in the Americas a couple centuries ago, it was widely believed that black people were not capable of being successful and happy without supervision of white people, and it was consequently meet to own such people in the same way as livestock is owned.)
As much as I keep citing this as an example myself, I don't think we're literally talking about sole prior cause and posterior effect here.
A fair point, to be sure.
Edit: To be precise, to a major extent, the causality is probably in the opposite direction - because treating people the way slaves were treated is wrong, those with a stake in the matter had it widely argued that the chattel slaves were not people in the proper sense of the word.
You're right; forgive my imprecision. But I doubt that people from the past could be said to be using the exactly the same function as us, nor even that I'm using the exact same function as you. It would just be too much coincidence.
I think I see the difficulty - my language is phrased in terms of an absolute morality to which all historical systems are approximations of varying accuracy. Do I correctly infer that you reject that concept? If so, I believe it reasonable to assume that the remaining confusion is a matter of phrasing.
Yes.
I don't buy a lot of that, at least if we're referring to the 18th century.
The founders of America knew damn well that there were no such things as gods, at least not ones that actively intervened in any way we could detect.
They were wrong about some details of astronomy, but they had most of the basic outlines right (Lagrange's works describe the celestial mechanics of the solar system in quite some detail).
The theories of classical mechanics were known and well understood. Quantum mechanics and relativity weren't, of course, but I am hesitant to refer to this as people being wrong, as there were very few observations available to them which required these to be explained (the perihelion advance of Mercury, for instance, wasn't discovered until 1859).
The 18th century view of cosmology was essentially ours, except that it lacked knowledge about how it was organized on a larger scale (galaxies within clusters within superclusters and all that) due to the lack of sufficiently powerful telescopes, and many supposed the universe to be infinite instead of beginning with the Big Bang.
The structure of democratic government invented during this period works pretty darn well, by comparison with everything that came before. There have, for instance, been no wars in Western Europe for sixty years, something that has never happened before.
Lavoisier and Lomonosov's theories of chemistry were, in fact, largely correct. The periodic table wasn't known, but there was no widely used wrong system of grouping the elements.
The full theory of evolution was not known (people still believed in spontaneous generation, for instance), but the idea that groups of similar species arose from a common ancestor by descent with modification was widely known and accepted.
The proper extrapolation from this is not "everything you know is wrong", but "there are lots of things you don't know, and lots of non-technical things you 'know' are wrong."
"A few" means at least 3. You would never say "a few" when you meant "two". So the quote refers to the 17th century at the latest.
I routinely use "a couple" and "a few" to indicate vague quantities. A few is bigger than a couple, but they overlap. I know that not everyone does this (my S.O., in particular, thinks I'm wrong) but I also know that I'm not nearly alone in this habit.
Yes, certainly, there are circumstances in which "a couple" means exactly two. If I'm talking about some friends, and refer to them as "a couple" rather than "a couple of people", you'd be justified to think I meant exactly two people with some relationship. But if I say "I'm going to read a couple more pages", I think you'd be making a mistake to be upset as long as it was between 1.5 and 4 pages. When I say "a few" it might range from 1.7 to 5 or 6 depending on whether we're talking about potatoes or french fries.
So, to my ears, it could be the 16th century or the mid-18th century, and giving the benefit of the doubt, it's a reasonable statement.
Upvoted because I do the same thing (tell your SO!). You're not alone.
That has almost nothing to do with democracy, and everything to do with the new world order after WW2. Half of Europe was inside the Soviet Union. The other half was mostly being used as an American front against the Soviets and didn't dare to have internal wars. Later, EU precursor organizations cemented the Western European alliances among the more important countries.
Of course all this hasn't stopped the Western European countries from having wars outside Europe, and there have been plenty of those in the last 60 years.
Today, European politics are such that multinational business & industry organizations, and private international alliances, are vastly more powerful than any hypothetical nationalistic power. So we can't have an internal European war. This is unrelated to democracy, and would work just as well in any other well integrated pan-European system.
"The other half was mostly being used as an American front against the Soviets and didn't dare to have internal wars."
Really? Suppose the German invasion of 1941 was more successful, the Soviet Union was heavily weakened, and the demarcation line between the two was on the Vistula instead of the Elbe. Which European countries would have fought each other?
"Of course all this hasn't stopped the Western European countries from having wars outside Europe, and there have been plenty of those in the last 60 years."
Between two Western European powers? Which ones?
"Today, European politics are such that multinational business & industry organizations, and private international alliances, are vastly more powerful than any hypothetical nationalistic power."
Evidence? Spain, Italy, France, the UK, and Germany have gross revenues of more than $1T each, more than three times those of the largest corporations.
In such a scenario I don't think they'd have fought much because US hegemony would be even stronger than in real history. The US would push the USSR much harder in proxy wars if it thought they could lead up to an economic/military collapse of the USSR or its satellites, and all the European countries would participate more in these proxy wars. Also, decolonization of Asia and Africa might have proceeded more slowly in such a scenario, or not at all in places.
Sorry, I realize now my phrasing was misleading here. I meant that European countries have fought outside Europe against non-European ones.
Yes, but the combined resources of the biggest (say) 1000 companies are far far greater than those of governments, simply because there are so many more corporations. This is true both inside a country and summed across Europe. And most corporations by far would lobby very strongly against war inside Europe.
"The US would push the USSR much harder in proxy wars if it thought they could lead up to an economic/military collapse of the USSR or its satellites, and all the European countries would participate more in these proxy wars."
Agreed, but there's still peace in Europe in this scenario.
"Yes, but the combined resources of the biggest (say) 1000 companies are far far greater than those of governments, simply because there are so many more corporations."
"Corporations" do not act coherently like a national government does. There is no "United Corporate Alliance" or any such thing.
"This is true both inside a country and summed across Europe. And most corporations by far would lobby very strongly against war inside Europe."
Some would, but some would probably push for it (military contracting can be enormously profitable). There were certainly plenty of companies that pushed for a US war in Iraq.
From Schindler's List:
SCHINDLER: There's no way I could have known this before, but there was always something missing. In every business I tried, I see now it wasn't me that was failing, it was this thing, this missing thing. Even if I'd known what it was, there's nothing I could have done about it, because you can't create this sort of thing. And it makes all the difference in the world between success and failure. [He waits for her to guess what the thing is. His looks says, It's so simple, how can you not know?] EMILIE: Luck? SCHINDLER: War.
Incidentally, why do you use quotes instead of quote-markup with '>'? It's a bit harder to read.
Yes, because of US hegemony.
There would be if 90% of all corporations had a common cause that was a life or death matter for them! At the very least all the corporations would be pushing in the same direction, and even without a formal alliance the result would be much the same.
Companies benefit from war - if they expect to be on the (economically) winning side, and if war isn't going to occur on their home turf. If US companies really honestly believed there was a 50-50 chance of Iraq winning the war and conquering New York, none of them would have supported a war.
In Europe, too many big companies are multinational. All of them stand a lot to lose from an internal war. Also, in a war they would have to bet on winner(s) right at the start - because if they want a military contract with Germany, then Germany's going to demand they stop selling weapons to France.
In WW1 the big economical winners were US companies because they sold everything but actual weapons to the Alliance countries for many years without being directly involved in the war.
Yes, in WWI, the european multinationals did badly. But people saw that coming and said that they would never allow a war! How do you know you've quantified it right this time? What would you have predicted in 1914? How do you quantify it? Governments controlled a much smaller percentage of GDP back then. Also, I occasionally hear claims like: globalization only recovered to prewar levels in 1990 (or was it later?)
I'm not saying there'll never be war. I'm saying this is one of the biggest factors that maintain today's stable state of internal European peace. Of course it's possible for affairs to leave this state, but there will need to be a (visible) change pushing in that direction.
In 1914 there were very visible and long-standing forces pushing for war. It was at best an open question which opposing political force would win, and I would certainly predicted war, as did most other observers. The nearly-autocratic ruler of the biggest Continental European country (Germany) had been saying for years he was going to go to war. He had full political and military support for this at home, and based all his foreign policy and diplomacy on this. He constantly made or tried to make alliances with pretty much every single country in the world other than France with the explicitly stated goal of going to war together; not just in Europe, but including e.g. offering alliance to Mexico against the US to keep the US out of a European war. And remember Germany had recently (1870-1) fought France and won.
Even without analyzing the pro-war sentiment in many other countries, it was reasonable to conclude there would be a big war. Wars were pretty much constant - a war in continental Europe once every 20-30 years for centuries. The only difficulty was predicting such a big and long war as WW1 turned out to be, and that only happened because no side managed to win quickly - and the Germans came extremely close to defeating France completely in the first assault of 1914, within a single tactical decision's worth. (Ref: Guns of August, also The Proud Tower, both by Barbara Tuchman.)
The idea that multinationals would prevent war was mostly Woodrow Wilson's vision at the time, and I think even he saw it as an ideal for the future; he recognized that it wasn't achieved yet. Most pro-peace people placed their hopes on the International Socialist movement preventing a war by general strikes in belligerent countries and soldiers refusing to fight. This failed miserably because the Socialists didn't dare anything of the kind; even in countries where they were fairly strong politically (a very recent turn of events at the time), as in France, they declared support of the warring government in the end. A pity.
Why include the quote from Schindler's List? Are we supposed to take it as evidence for what causes wars?
That's a funny thing to say on the quotes thread. Tom McCabe is deploying rhetoric, but this whole thread is about sharing rhetoric (or maybe directly using it).
In my humble opinion, quoting Hollywood movies detracts from any conversation about historical facts or about causal relationships even if the conversation starts with a rationality quote.
Moreover, none of the opinions I have seen as to the purpose of Rationality Quotes entails a rhetorical free-for-all. An example of an opinion that I recall is that a quote is an attempt to communicate some aspect of the art of human rationality in much fewer words than would be required by the standard expository rationalist style. The quote from the Hollywood movie does not have that property because the quoter could have written instead, "it is well documented that many German industrialists profited greatly from the war," which of course is fewer words than the quote from the movie and which of course is standard expository style (no rhetoric).
I have nothing personal against the quoter (Tom) and I believe and I hope that I would have voiced the same objection if anyone here had used that particular rhetorical tactic.
Yeah, they say that, but I don't believe them. At least, I don't believe any version of that that doesn't also cover Tom's quote.
It's supposed to be an example of how war can be profitable for industry (as indeed it was for many in Germany during WWII).
OK, then, do you consider Schindler's List or any other Hollywood film evidence that the war was profitable for industrialists in Germany?
I always thought that Hollywood films were held to high standards for mass appeal and sometime for aesthetics, but not for historical veracity.
I quoted the film merely for rhetorical purposes. The fact that many German industrialists got rich off WWII is very thoroughly documented.
The British and the French fought multiple times in the 1800s, and also in the early 1900s. One would expect further fights...
What stopped de Gaulle from thinking about being a second Napoleon, if not US hegemony?
Said revenues are controlled by political processes, which are staffed by people that can be influenced or outright bought for trivial sums - a few thousands or millions. The returns to investing in lobbying are well known and can be astronomical.
"The British and the French fought multiple times in the 1800s, and also in the early 1900s. One would expect further fights..."
Citation? Britain and France haven't fought since Napoleon's defeat in 1815.
"What stopped de Gaulle from thinking about being a second Napoleon, if not US hegemony?"
The fact that the French population would never stomach it, given that they had just gotten out from under four years of brutal German occupation with American and British support?
"Said revenues are controlled by political processes, which are staffed by people that can be influenced or outright bought for trivial sums - a few thousands or millions."
Ross Perot lost, and Bloomberg never even tried.
"The returns to investing in lobbying are well known and can be astronomical."
Citation?
The Napoleonic wars were at least 4 wars; then there was the Merina Conquest of Madagascar and the Hundred Days. 6 wars in 15 years is pretty impressive. And it's not like France was peaceful after that, there was all sorts of wars all over the place, yes, even in Europe. And then Germany and Russia have kept the 2 busy all through the 1900s. We don't know that their enmity and warring are truly over, any more than we know whether great power conflicts are truly over.
And no country occupied has ever wished for revenge? Italy and Germany were right there, and American and Britain wouldn't've seriously objected to France invading (in this hypothetical nuke-less Communist-less world) - they weren't in any position to stomach stopping France. The American & British support didn't mean a whole lot to de Gaulle and his force de frappe.
Waggish answer: What, the past couple years of American politics haven't made it painfully obvious how valuable lobbying can be?
Serious answer: if the returns weren't high, then why do some companies invest so much in lobbying instead of putting the money into Treasuries?
More serious answer: The Mickey Mouse Protection Act
Most serious answer: http://www.google.com/search?q=return+on+lobbying+investment and specifically http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/11/AR2009041102035.html :
"The Napoleonic wars were at least 4 wars; then there was the Merina Conquest of Madagascar and the Hundred Days. 6 wars in 15 years is pretty impressive. And it's not like France was peaceful after that, there was all sorts of wars all over the place, yes, even in Europe. And then Germany and Russia have kept the 2 busy all through the 1900s."
This is a blatant dodge of my original claim, which was specifically about Britain and France. No one who had ever cracked a history book would ever claim that there were no wars in Europe during the 20th century.
"And no country occupied has ever wished for revenge?"
Germany was destroyed, the government was completely dissolved (and largely imprisoned), all the cities were bombed into rubble, and more than ten percent of the population was killed (including, I believe, a majority of the men of military age). You couldn't get a more thorough revenge if you obliterated Berlin with a 50 megaton H-bomb.
"The American & British support didn't mean a whole lot to de Gaulle and his third way."
Historically, after the war, we know that the French didn't want another war against Germany. Why would it be different this time?
"Serious answer: if the returns weren't high, then why do some companies invest so much in lobbying instead of putting the money into Treasuries?"
Because there are points on the real line between "3%" and "22,000%".
"In a remarkable illustration of the power of lobbying in Washington, a study released last week found that a single tax break in 2004 earned companies $220 for every dollar they spent on the issue -- a 22,000 percent rate of return on their investment. "
OK, that's a legitimate citation, but it ignores the non-monetary costs of lobbying, which far exceed the monetary ones. A company may hire a lobbyist and pay him $100,000, but if both the company and the lobbyist don't have connections with people high up in Washington, they won't get anywhere. And it's much more difficult to acquire those connections than to acquire $100K.
I liked this comment, but as anonym points out far below, the original blog post is really talking about "pre-scientific and scientific ways of investigating and understanding the world." - anonym. So 'just a few centuries ago' might not be very accurate in the context of the post. The author's fault, not yours; but just sayin'.
Well... I find it quite a stretch to call the pre-Shapley–Curtis-debate views of cosmology “essentially ours”. (But http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_cosmology did surprise me. Olber's paradox was first solved by Edgar Allan Poe? I knew he was quite a smart guy, but...)
Linnaeus had a tree of taxonomy, but this claims that the tree of descent was one of the key innovations of Darwin (and of Wallace, who thought it was innovative before he thought of natural selection).
A complete tree of descent (all life from a common ancestor) was Charles Darwin's thinking, but the idea of a tree of descent was not. See, eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Louis_Leclerc,_Comte_de_Buffon for 18th-century thinking on the subject.
Maybe I shouldn't have called it an innovation: the main point was to dispute that the tree of life was "widely known and accepted."
And even today, many smart people outside the USA are still wrong about these pressing moral issues!
As are many smart people within the USA, obviously, or were you being sarcastic and trying to suggest that the original quote somehow implies a belief that the USA is immune from those problems?
I think he was being sarcastic and trying to suggest that the original quote failed to take note that everyone thinks they are immune from those problems, including the person who decided the past was 'wrong' about them. I'm also pretty sure cousin_it is Russian, if that's relevant. The USA thing was just a tasteful addition, the way I see it. I laughed. (His use of an exclamation point and a look at the top contributors list on the right also indicate sarcasm.)
Edit: I agree with Nick below. It was just a joke. Which I enjoyed.
When I read the original quote, I noted the conspicuous absence of any kind of positive assertion that the speaker is immune from those problems, and I read it as cautioning us against thinking that we are not similarly wrong about some of those very problems and other important problems that we are blind to.
Did you read it in the context of the atheist blog post Eliezer linked to? I agree that the quote was possibly meant to be cautionary, but I think it was primarily meant to show that believing in things 200 years old is generally not a good idea. Maybe I misunderstood the point of the post, though; the cautionary value is a more useful interpretation for us aspiring rationalists, and 'don't put faith in ancient wisdom' is rather simple advice by comparison. Because of that, context be damned (even if I did interpret it as was meant), I'm going to switch to your interpretation. :)
I hadn't clicked through to read the original, but having just done so, I note that the very next paragraph after the given quote is:
Which doesn't exactly smack of over-confidence and American arrogance to my ear.
ETA: also, from things he said elsewhere in the essay, it seems likely to me that he had in mind more than "a few centuries" in the essay, despite the words in the quote, since he distinguishes again and again between pre-scientific and scientific ways of investigating and understanding the world.
Oh jeeze, how did I miss that? Thanks for taking the time to enlighten me. About the ETA, I noticed that too, which may be relevant to another discussion I saw nested under the original quotation...
Whoops, instant controversy =) I didn't mean to accuse the original quote of American nationalism; that would be like accusing early Christians of Jewish or Roman nationalism. Every new moral system sees itself as universal. But also every moral system has some geographical origin from where it spreads, by force if necessary. For the moral system that uses the terms "racism" and "sexism", the place of origin is the USA.
So anybody who uses the terms "racism" and "sexism" (and presumably the related words "race" and "sex" when used in the same sense) -- for instance, in arguing against distinguishing on the basis of race or sex or for guaranteeing the equality of rights and liberties regardless of sex, race, nationality ... -- necessarily has one particular moral system, a moral system that originates in the USA, and despite women's suffrage originating in countries other than the USA, somebody who uses the word 'sexism' in the same sentence as 'racism' is almost certainly either from the USA and subject to stereotypical US nationalism or subscribes to the One Unique True Moral System of the USA?
Not sure why this was downvoted. The word 'racism' was coined in pre-WWII Europe, the word 'sexism' was coined in the US during the 1960s. The movements/ moral systems against such things have been widespread, and I'm not sure it makes sense to say they started anywhere besides "Western civilization". Moral systems don't have founding moments anyway, they evolve out of other moral systems and historical conditions. I would say that the term racism probably plays a bigger role in American discourse than elsewhere, if only because the US is more racially diverse than most of the rest of the world.
The extent to which the usage of these terms is indicative of a particular moral system is just a question of high def versus low def. If you look closely you see differences, if you don't, it all looks the same. If your views are in the general vicinity of where cousin-it was aiming you probably see issues involving racism and sexism. If you are far from cousin-it's target you may well not see the differences between moral systems that use the terms racism and sexism. Though don't "reverse racism" and "reverse sexism" count as uses of these terms? The moral system that uses those terms pretty obviously distinct from the moral system that I think cousin_it is referring to.
Not by me. But the readability is abysmal enough that I at least had second thoughts before voting it up to 0..
Amusingly, your holy indignance at hearing such stereotypes isn't a human universal either - it's part of the same particular moral system I was talking about.
PS: I didn't downvote you.
I was trying to point out why part of your post was nonsense, despite making some valid points, and sending your troll back back at you. Words -- with a few exceptions like 'objectivism' -- are not as strongly associated with a single moral system as you suggest. There is no single moral system that originates in the USA, and no single moral system that everybody who uses the terms "racism" and "sexism" in a sentence holds. And unless you think that Russia has adopted the moral system "whose place of origin is the USA", 2.19.2 in the Russian constitution poses a problem for you, unless you assert that using the tokens "racism" and "sexism" is sufficient for your thesis to hold but spelling out that racism and sexism are bad without using those tokens somehow makes your hypothesis not apply.
P.S. Maybe your idea of stereotypical Americans causes you to mistake my response for "holy indignance". For what it's worth, I'm not indignant or angry, just amused. Perhaps I should have added some smileys? And for your information, since I know you're Russian, I wasn't born or raised in America, though I live there now and am a naturalized citizen.
Kind of. The current Russian constitution was written at the extreme high point of Russian popular affection for the American way of life, and the people who wrote it were big fans of the US constitution. Such attitudes have gone way down since then.
Now I'm curious: why does this particular assertion look absurd to you? From where I stand, using marker words like "racism" and "sexism" looks like a pretty clear case of signaling. That's like the difference between saying cheating on your spouse is bad, and saying cheating is "a sin".
I could agree with you that "racism" and "sexism" are often used only for signaling, and even that they are (probably) used more for that purpose in the USA than elsewhere, on average, but I don't agree that they're only used for that purpose, and I don't agree that they're a product of one moral system or that they're only used by people who hold that moral system. Some people use the words because it's easier to say one word than ten words, easier to say "racism" than to speak a whole sentence when you know the listener will understand that you are referring to the systematic differential treatment of people on the basis of skin color.
Many crazy moral systems see themselves as (complete and) universal. It's a trivial enough failure, so one should be able to do better.
Just keep a lid on the nationalism. Sterling moral leadership isn't always something associated with the USA. We don't want to get into a discussion on the topic but I wouldn't leave such implications unchallenged. I might have to make comparisons to Canada and things would go downhill from there! :)
I certainly hope he was being sarcastic. Even the fact that we suspect he may not be is rather telling.
Yes, "about these pressing moral issues!" screams sarcasm, but I don't see how the original quote assumes that people in the USA somehow believe they have a unique claim to being less wrong, which would make the most sense as a target of the sarcasm. The quote isn't saying that unlike our smartest ancestors, we do have all the answers, only that we're less wrong (and should suspect that there's probably much that we're still over-confidently wrong about), and isn't saying that we is any particular nationality (nor is any strongly implied).
Pretty sure he was sarcastically attacking something other than the original comment.
But even those supposed 'conservatives' and 'traditionals' still hold views different from their ancestors - or are there heaps of divine rights of kings theorists floating around South America I am not familiar with?
And this is a great follow up:
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
There are likely things about physics we're still wrong about, things about disease we're still wrong about, things about physics we're still wrong about, and so on, and so forth.
!
?
In November 2009, Luke wasn't affiliated with SIAI. (I don't know if he was even reading LW then; later on, he started re-blogging the Sequences, and started posting on LW in late 2010 or early 2011.)
Which is why it's remarkable that Eliezer had noticed him as a source of rationality.
This quote is mostly true, though the Islamic world was doing ok on the astronomy front before they decided to dive head-first into religious fundamentalism. But... what's the punchline ? Yes, all those people were wrong about all those things, but why is that fact important for us to know ? I could come up with some pretty compelling answers, but the quote itself doesn't say.