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Psychohistorian comments on On the Power of Intelligence and Rationality - Less Wrong
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This is really, really false. People use armed force all the time with their neighbors. Just like at the national level, armed force is very effective as long as no one bigger and badder will smack you down for using it, as they almost always will if you're a corporation operating on a large scale in an industrialized nation. The situation is virtually identical.
On a separate point, while the Nazis had some crazy beliefs, they still excelled in a number of important areas. A superintelligence trying to figure out how to take over a country would probably create a public enemy and invoke as much Nationalism as possible, and publish lots of propaganda, and indoctrinate the youth, and establish a cult of the leader, and so forth. Acting rationally does not mean winning your opponent over with well-reasoned blog posts, unless those are the most effective means you have of getting to him. Acting rationally means using the means that will accomplish your desired ends most effectively.
If the Nazis had had their crazy values but actually been rational and carried out their war differently (less aggression towards Russia, not dragging the US in, delaying the Holocaust until they could actually afford the military resources for it), they could have been a whole lot more successful than they actually were. So let's be glad they underrated rationality.
"People use armed force all the time with their neighbors."
No, they really, really don't. Compared with either a). governments or b). people in the ancient world, violence nowadays is really rare. For governments, consider that, in 1900, it was common for a country to spend 10% of its GDP on its military; how many people do you know who spend 10% of their gross pre-tax income on weapons to fight their neighbors with? For people in the ancient world, consider that the murder rate for males before they reached age 25 in pre-agricultural societies was something like 30%; nowadays it's something like 1%.
"On a separate point, while the Nazis had some crazy beliefs, they still excelled in a number of important areas."
Agreed, but what I was saying was that none of these areas involved general intelligence, science, rationality or deliberative reasoning.
"So let's be glad they underrated rationality."
Agreed. My thesis in this post was that rationality, intelligence, and science are the most important factors on the level of a country, but not on the level of an individual. Hence, the Nazis, who were really irrational, succeeded at taking over Germany, but then failed at taking over the world largely through irrational stupidity.
Hitler was known to go over his speeches in retrospect with Goebbels, and note which bits worked and which didn't, so he could make better speeches in future. I regard this as involving deliberative reasoning and general intelligence; there's even an element of the scientific method in it.
This was not phrased correctly. It should have said, "used," and it should have included the threat. Back when governments were weaker and there was more crime and fewer educated people, courts weren't great at punishing violence, so violence and the threat thereof were widespread - look at the historic power of organized crime. This remains true today, but it's less true because our ability to enforce the law has improved.
People used violence when it was effective and they wouldn't get in trouble with other, more powerful people. Nations used violence when it was effective and they wouldn't get in trouble with other, more powerful nations. Nuclear weapons simply changed how much trouble they'd get into, just as better law enforcement monitoring and a lower general crime rate, and falling cultural acceptance have changed how likely people are to get into trouble when they use force. I really don't think the two examples are as different as you claim they are.
The major change that nuclear weapons have brought to international affairs is not that the weaker party in a conflict gets into more trouble, it's that the stronger party does too. There is not much to be gained from fighting a war when, even if you win, your major cities are destroyed.
Certainly, sufficiently great (superhuman) rationality and intelligence could have taken over the world. But I'm not convinced that a group of sane, rational, intelligent mere humans at the head of Nazi Germany had a high probability of conquering the whole world (which would include the USA). The Nazis already did much better than could be expected on average for humans. How much better than that could you be, if you were in their place? What would you do exactly?
A transhuman might do those things, but you don't think that a freakin superintelligence would do something you wouldn't think of?!?
Maybe, maybe not. Many of the things we do today, we do the same way as we did ten thousand years ago. Geniuses don't do everything differently. Sometimes, the way we mere humans can think of really is the best way to do something.
The invasion of Russia was probably the most important reason for Hitler's downfall, but it was also his overriding goal (putting it in a different category from some other examples of Hitler's meddling with the military). Western Europeans might view the eastern front as a distraction from the obviously more important war with the western allies, but from Hitler's perspective it was the other way around. The U.S came in after Japan attacked. The Axis Powers were never as coordinated as the allies, so that can't really be laid at Hitler's feet.
Regarding the Holocaust, most of the killings took place fairly late. The "functionalist" interpretation is that they were a reaction to setbacks in the east (where people were originally to be deported). On the other hand, it may be argued that their brutal strategy in that front made resistance to the death inevitably and victory impossible.
If he hadn't invaded, then the USSR would certainly have invaded within a year or two. Preempting them was a victory on Hitler's part, and Operation Barbarossa was fantastically successful militarily in its first year.
Only if they know nothing at all about the war. The Eastern Front involved from five to ten times more men, weapons, tanks and artillery, and an order of magnitude more casualties, prisoners, territory and natural resources taken or lost, etc. If you discount aerial bombardments, it also lasted more than twice as long as the Western Front.
To a first approximation, the only effect of the Western Front's existence was to prevent the USSR from conquering the rest of Western Europe beyond Berlin. (By this I mean a scenario where the US gave the USSR and the UK Lend-Lease aid, but did not open the Western Front.)
Are Western Europeans today really taught that the Eastern Front was insignificant?
Americans certainly are, implicitly by not mentioning the Eastern Front (except for the initial treaty and betrayal). In my experience, when people set out to talk about the whole of WWII, as opposed to some piece that comes up in conversation, they make a point of saying that it was about the Eastern Front.
Yes, well, anecdotally average Americans can't even find the Eastern Front on a map of the world... And they're also hung up on the Pacific theater. I really was wondering about Western European school indoctrination though. (Incidentally, does the EU mandate some sort of common requirements for grade school programs in members states?)
They don't explicitly claim that the east front doesn't matter, and probably mention at some point that it was significant. But most of the time is spent on the west front, because the biggest goal of the teaching of WWII is to make students able to discuss how "the West" reacted to the nazis.
There are standards, but they are mostly formalisms. As in, if two programs follow the standards, then you can compare them, but just knowing that they comply with the standards does not tell you anything about the content of the courses.
As an anecdotal probably not average Australian I don't recall hearing the term 'Eastern Front' discussed. I would probably be able to point out some of the places on a world map where significant fighting was concentrated and some of the key events occurred, particularly those most related to Australia. It may be the case that I simply haven't made note of the term 'Eastern Front' because that kind of detail bores me.
I object to the status implications you make (and to the factual assumption that school curriculum translates into knowledge of adults).
I was talking about anecdotal average Americans. That is to say, they may or may not be highly representative, but they're the one we hear anecdotes about. In other words, I didn't mean to impugn Americans as a group, and intended to refer only jokingly to the idea of classing all Americans as a single group with a meaningful (low variance) typical knowledge of history.
I do believe that a large majority of people everywhere never learn any more about most historical subjects than what they are taught in mandatory classes in school. And so they don't revise or correct the school curriculum's claims. If you disagree, can you give examples of historical claims made in school that average adults disbelieve? Particularly descriptions of historical events that happened outside their own country?
Not disbelieve, just don't remember, aren't aware of anymore, 10 or 30 years later.
Certainly, some things are forgotten, but I expect other things are remembered, particularly when people encounter direct questions about the subject. And those that are remembered, are typically there from school.
Egocentrism is a high status trait. Suggesting that Americans are able to get away with neglecting stories that don't focus particularly on their influence is to suggest they are able to claim high status. It also suggests that the speaker rejects the implied presumption of higher status over his own group. This would seem to be the default state of anyone who is not cowed into supplication by the status claimants.
Is the core factual claim accurate? That is, do average Americans have the kind of bias in historical education that Dan suggests? I don't particularly care either way but from my observational perspective if Dan's factoid was accurate then Dan could reasonably object to Vladmir's status implication. That implication being that Dan doesn't have the status required to state facts that make Vladmir's group look bad.
Hell yes. One example: I remember being shocked as a teenager when, going to school outside the US for the first time, I learned that it took the US 100 years longer to free their slaves than Britain. My US education had made it out to be such a big deal that they'd been freed at all, that they neglected to mention that little detail.
This still surprises me when I remember that I did not ever hear about other countries freeing their slaves in school.
Since I started this discussion, it's only fair that I point out that the history classes in public schools here in Israel are very bad, too. (As are all the other subjects...)
We didn't learn much world history that didn't fall under the umbrella of "history as it applied to Jews". We never even mentioned areas where there haven't been many Jews, like all of South and East Asia. We also didn't learn any regional (middle-east) history that wasn't about Israel itself. And we didn't learn any post-WW2 history outside Israel, presumably because all good Jews were supposed to have come to Israel then.
We did, though, predictably spend a lot of time on WW2.
Again, an anecdote. It is a piece of narrative representative to the idea that yes, US education is particularly self-embellishing (and thus evoking this connotation in the human mind, with availability and representativeness heuristics etc.), but it's insignificant evidence towards concluding that. Argument-as-soldier, dark arts.
The problem with the argument remains the same no matter whether the conclusion is correct, and whether the intention is to enlighten or to deceive.
"My group" here must be people with bad memory for things that don't interest them. Objection is not to "stating a fact", but to the way it's stated: it's in the "arguments as soldiers" class, missing the context and as a result giving connotations not following from the stated fact ("dark arts" feel). This discipline applies no matter what object-level connotation is created (of course emotions make some violations more salient to my mind than others).
If true, this seems to support the post, since they got the right answer without being rationalists.
Yes, but (not being unitary agents and all that) even the most sincere rationalist-wannabe human probably won't do so, or even use the most effective humanly-achievable means; and one merely trying probably won't use the most effective means they can. (I know this is blatantly obvious, but I suspect repeating it is valuable.) Also, the valley of bad rationality may extend a damned long way in some domains.
Agreed.
I hadn't recognized the survivorship bias issue here. There are a lot of crazy groups that try to take over countries. Every now and then, one succeeds. This doesn't imply that being crazy will consistently lead to effective coups.
ETA: Arguing, "The Nazis succeeded despite inadequate rationality," is of limited value as evidence. There are a LOT of political groups out there, virtually all of them are fairly irrational in some respect, and a few are bound to succeed. Thus, arguing, "Rationality isn't important to success, because so-and-so succeeded," is only useful if they have been consistently beating out more rational groups.
On an individual level (and I'll put this in more detail in a separate thread) Tom is absolutely right that there are more important factors in individual success than mere rationality. This just fails to come across in his post, at least on my reading of it. The Nazis are, I think, a substantial distraction if this is indeed the point.
I agree. Besides, the rational thing to do might be to steer clear of putsches, coups, and the like. And even if you are the democratically elected head of a state, your chances of being assassinated are pretty good.
See http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ko/on_the_power_of_intelligence_and_rationality/1d5t . If rationality is an important factor in success, you'd expect pretty much all of the successful groups to have above average rationality.
I'd expect them to be above-average within the reference class of "cabals attempting to overthrow the established political order", not the reference class of "people in general" or "organizations in general". And I'd expect the average rationality level of that first category to be pretty low.
So intelligence == winning by definition? What a way to cut the argument short!
Saying "yelling at large crowds" is irrational, without giving any definition of "rational," is quite problematic. The author can't mean "rational argument", because the power of the West is not built on Modus Tolens; it's built on guns, smallpox, and better industry. Thus, he does not seem to be using a consistent definition of rational; furthermore, "You won't conquer the world by reasoning with people" is hardly an insight. Additionally, he makes no claim that the Nazis succeeded because of their irrationality; indeed, if they hadn't been quite so adamant about killing all the Jews and taking back the Caucuses, they likely would have been a whole lot more successful.
In short, he has no clear definition of rationality, nor an explanation of how having less of it was good, or having more of it was bad. In the absence of a consistent definition or an explicit claim about methods and results, it seems entirely appropriate for me to use the conventional (around here) definition of rationality as systematically making good decisions that advance your goals.
Now, if his whole argument were, "You can accomplish a lot without being consistently rational," I wouldn't dispute that. But his point is, "You can accomplish a lot without being consistently rational, therefore, rationality isn't all it's cracked up to be." Given that the Nazis probably could have accomplished more if they'd had slightly fewer crazy ideas, he does not appear to support his own claim.
But there is an interesting question, which is how many fewer crazy ideas would be required. I mean, arguably if the Nazis were completely reasonable, it's unlikely that they'd have been all that successful either. They had to 1) appeal to a certain contingent, while 2) scaring the crap out of everybody else. Arguably, having a certain amount of sheer batshit crazy ideas helped with both... whereas being merely mildly eccentric and power-mongering probably wouldn't have helped.
IOW, it's likely difficult to separate the Nazis' results from their irrationality... even if that just means they were being rationally irrational, so to speak. (Of course, making a commitment to being scary-crazy as a deterrent/threat strategy means you're likely to still be quite crazy when you actually have some power.)
"Saying "yelling at large crowds" is irrational, without giving any definition of "rational," is quite problematic. "
Yelling at large crowds is neither rational nor irrational, as it is not a belief and rationality is about beliefs. What I was saying was, effectively yelling at a large crowd doesn't depend on whether your beliefs are accurate, any more than the ability to roll your tongue does.
"The author can't mean "rational argument", because the power of the West is not built on Modus Tolens; it's built on guns, smallpox, and better industry. "
The power of the West isn't built on rational argument with other people, it's built (in large part) on rational argument internally, Westerners arguing more rationally with other Westerners. This caused the West to become better at science and business, which caused it to become more effective at creating wealth, which in turn generated guns and industry.
"In short, he has no clear definition of rationality, nor an explanation of how having less of it was good, or having more of it was bad."
That, as you said yourself, was never my thesis; my thesis was that, for attaining many goals on the individual level, rationality is not the most important factor.
Their "crazy" ideas included most of their top-level goals. Whatever they achieved or didn't achieve has to be measured in terms of their goals, so you can't just propose to throw away some goals to improve the chances of achieving others.
Take the example of killing Jews. This was a top-level Nazi goal. Yes, if they had achieved complete and lasting world domination, or even domination of Eurasia, they would have been able to kill Jews later. But given a significant chance of military failure, and an even more significant chance of partial failure - holding on to Western Europe, losing the rest of the conquered territories - diverting resources to killing Jews was a rational tradeoff.
Which is part of the reason for calling them irrational. Killing the jews was originally a means to the end of preventing jews from breeding wtih (other) germans, which itself was a means to the end of making Germany stronger. When the killing became a top level goal that was what Eliezer would call subgoal stomp. The means became a supergoal, and their pursuit of that goal was part of what defeated the goal that it originally should help achieve.
From the Nazis' POV, racial contamination was only one way in which the Jews maliciously influenced society. They also directly intervened in politics, the economy, culture, war efforts (like when they caused the German surrender in WW1), etc. The jews and their allies controlled states like the USA and used them to interfere with Germany, and they could not be allowed to threaten Germany directly from the inside.
The jews could not be reformed, their malicious tendencies could not be eradicated, and therefore they had to be killed. Tthat was a legitimate supergoal.
Which was just more reasons for having it as a subgoal to making themselves more powerful. If a subgoal defeats its supergoal you are irrational, no matter how important the subgoal is.
Besides all of that could have been achieved by taking away power from all jews and putting them in ghettos. Which they had already done before even starting on the "final solution".
By your argument, they should never have made any effort that did not lead directly to increasing their power.
But their rule wasn't (just) a goal in itself, but a tool used to achieve other goals. Given that they had a chance of failing to achieve lasting world domination, it made sense to pursue goals like killing Jews which would leave a lasting legacy even if they were ultimately defeated. In other words, the destruction of the Nazi regime is not the absolute possible min-utility.
If the ghetto solution had worked, they would not have needed the Final Solution, and would not have worked on it. The F.S. wasn't just for the fun of it - it was created to handle the problem of large jewish populations in newly-conquered Eastern territories. In some of these territories they never instituted ghettos because killing the jews right away was thought to be economically cheaper or more efficient (e.g. Ukraine). In others (Poland, etc), they thought that ghettos wouldn't work in the long term, and they had or feared local management problems. It's easier to kill a hostile conquered population than to keep it from revolting while it starves. (They also had plans to kill most of the Poles, but they never had the manpower to carry those out.)
Later, towards the end of the war, it acquired an additional (rational) reason: killing all the jews quickly before the relevant territories were lost to the advancing Red Army.
There are at least two 'increasing their power'. One is individuals gaining power in Germany. That was a subgoal. The other is increasing the power of their nation or race in the world. That is the supergoal that, according to their ideology, all nazis should be working for. Beyond that they could have personal selfish goals. Perhaps including survival, reproduction and a legacy of having achieved something constructive. All of which they failed at.
In the values they expressed they took an extremely long perspective. They would extablish a thousand year empire, when they designed a building the first thing they thought of was what it should look like as a ruin and they included Darwinian evolution in their methods and considerations, as though their plans covered at the very least tens of thousands of years. But in their actions they threw away every chance at creating something stable for some futile gestures and a bunch of murders.
And wasting their forces to conquer territories that they knew that they would lose immediately was in itself irrational.
They didn't need the final solution to protect themselves from jews. They "had to" do it because they had used the jew as their outside threat to make the germans fall in line at the start of their rule, and they had internalized their own propaganda to the point that killing jews became a supergoal.
Not every chance. A small reduction in probability. The key word in my argument that you're not addressing is that they made a tradeoff.
if you assume (without evidence) that they didn't believe in their stated anti-Jewish goals at first, and that it was only propaganda, then you're undermining the whole discussion. We started out by considering their success in terms of their own goals and under the assumption they were being rational.
By this subgoal stomp, do you mean that when their subgoal (Killing Jews) became a priority, that it diverted resources away from their supergoal (world domination, or at least the domination of Europe/Asia), and thus they stomped on their own supergoal by irrationally promoting the importance of the subgoal?
If that is what you mean, then I think that a strong case could be made for this, as a lot of manpower was sucked into that particular void.
Yup. Exactly.
No, rationality == winning by definition. Intelligence doesn't seem to be well defined.
Rationality = having accurate beliefs about the world, not winning. If Eliezer Yudkowsky were serving a life sentence in a prison in Pakistan, he would be much more rational than the average person, but much less capable of winning.
Eh, I'd just convince them to let me out.
Hahahaha... How long have you been saving that one?
I suspect that it's easier to talk your way out of an AI-box than a prison cell.
Perhaps, but I'm a bit stunned at the idea that being in a prison cell means you should just give up. Have I taught you all nothing?
Well, come on, the first ideas I thought of wouldn't work in that situation. What do you expect me to do, think about it for five minutes?
The full phrase is "think about it for five minutes by an actual physical clock".
Good point.
Or, if you like, you can take it from Amanda.
Rationality == winning, but you still have to work with what you're given, obviously. Given that you're serving a life sentence in a Pakistani prison, (perfect) rationality will let you make the best of it.
Given that you have to figure out how to win, not just decide to win, it's not that trivial!