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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The Apologist and the Revolutionary - Less Wrong
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It's a fair question, and if you read the article linked to under "posits two different reasoning modules", you know as much as I.
My thought is that there must be some reason this doesn't work, or else Ramachandran would have thought of it - he's famous for coming up with clever ways to test things other people thought were untestable (Google Ramachandran and synaesthesia for an example). Perhaps in normal life, the right hemisphere is as active as it's going to get, and if it hasn't overruled the left hemisphere already, it's not going to.
From the description of the technique, I think it's more complicated than just sticking water in the ear; I think it needs to go up into the vestibular system in the inner ear, which means it should probably only be done by a trained medical professional.
I feel really silly admitting this, but when I read this study I tried just pouring a lot of cold water into my ear and then quickly reviewing my opinions on controversial issues. Nothing unusual happened, so either the procedure requires a more complicated inner ear irrigation technique, or ear irrigation doesn't do anything special to non-anosognostic people, neither of which surprise me at all (guess it could also mean I'm just naturally right about everything :)
I'm off to try it anyway. 'Scuse me.
Report: I used a glass of water mixed with ice, and a medicine dropper for delivery, lying down in bed with my left ear upward. The cold water did seem to immediately flood the ear (it popped/clicked, don't know medical term).
I tried thinking about two topics, my estimate of my own intelligence and a complicated AI issue I'm currently pondering. Neither produced any great revelation or change of heart.
I'll try to remember to test again the next time I'm currently in the middle of feeling torn on some topic, or worried that I might be rationalizing.
If all of this including the journal article is a tremendous prank along the lines of "How do you get a hundred rationalists to squirt cold water into their left ear?" it worked like a charm. You shouldn't feel embarrassed for trying it, though. A plate on a door affords pushing, a hypothesis affords testing.
Actually, the trick worked, but the effects had worn off by the time you wrote this message, which is why you deny having your opinion on the AI issue completely reversed in a shocking aha-erlebnis, for a brief ten minutes at least. Remember to videotape yourself the next time.
Today and yesterday I tried it essentially as Eliezer described: put a glass of water with ice cubes in the freezer to cool, prepared my syringe (bought to feed a dying ferret), laid on my side, and set up my camera across from my face. I turned it on, inserted the syringe, and injected 10ml of ice-water.
The result both times? Substantial vertigo within 5-10s, lasting ~5m. (No feelings of vomiting, although I ride rollercoasters for fun and have gone skydiving, so this may not generalize.) During the first minute, I reviewed my beliefs on the usefulness of modafinil, whether I should accept an O'Reilly ebook offer, and then my general beliefs of atheism/materialism/determinism/utilitarianism/left-libertarianism. I did not find anything to object to that I was not already well aware of (eg. my cost-benefit analysis for modafinil may be off by 3 hours).
I reviewed the recordings 2 hours after the second try; the recordings matched my memories, with nothing worth noting.
Have you had anyone else review the tapes to make sure that you simply denying the differences. They wouldn't necessarily be able to convince you, but it would provide good data for the rest of us.
No; I value my privacy and didn't want to forward the videos to any third party. (I knew someone would say, 'but what if you self-censored even a day later your response to the video?!' and decided the credibility sacrifice was worth making.)
Reasonable, now we need to find someone with no sense of privacy to do it.
Alicorn: Mike, you're being summoned
Me: But I did that -- the water didn't do anything.
If this seems really important to anyone I can do it again with cameras -- I don't have much sense of privacy, but I do have one of moderate inconvenience.
In case you do it, I would advocate that you spend the time after the water in a Skype conversation to let someone else help you to find your own blindspots.
I wouldn't say really important, interesting, but not crucial.
Have you asked yourself while you were under the effect cold water whether your believe in the importance of your privacy is warranted?
To me that seems like a question that's more likely to involve some form of Ugh-field than the question of whether Modafinil is effective.
I have a large public 'weird' commitment to modafinil; simply liking privacy is pretty normal. (And my own personal experience seems to have justified my preference.)
I myself don't have much problem to rationally access public commitments to ideas while I'm in private. It doesn't raise much cognitive dissonance inside myself. It doesn't take much emotional work to deal with the topics. Dealing with akrasia and social relations to other people seems to raise a lot more emotions.
Liking privacy to the extend that there isn't a single person that you would trust to analyse the video is not normal.
I'm not saying "You are wrong to value privacy". I'm just saying that it's a topic that's more likely to bring you towards emotional barriers.
5 years ago I used a nickname and no image on the internet. I had some irrational fears of sharing my identity.
But I suppose you (like most long-time LWers) had already very few rationalizations to start with. Maybe if a person with a median-or-larger amount of beliefs-in-belief and doublethink tried that, they'd be more likely to have a “Whom am I kidding? I know there's no dragon in my garage actually” moment.
It's hard to believe I would have none. It probably just doesn't work if you don't have that very specific type of brain damage.
My understanding is that this only works for specific type of focal brain damage. I.e. if you had gross denial that you have a paralysed limb. I never heard that it e.g. relieves delusions in mental disorders, and i'd think everyday self deception is less similar to focal brain damage than to mental disorder.
Yeah, it'd be shocking on multiple levels if it did anything but induce vertigo. But it was fun trying, and the videotape criticism gave me a reason to do it.
The article made it clear that this would happen, but I never even considered it.
I conclude that possibly I was not as interested in trying the experiment as I thought, but rather wanted to be able to claim I was a good scientist who tests things that are easily testable. Good catch.
Heh. Okay, next time I'll call my girlfriend to witness and have her post the results as well as me.
Did this retest ever happen?
Yes, but Eliezer learned something he doesn't dare share with the rest of us. (I theorize it involves tails.)
Nope.
Sounds like a great late-night-at-minicamp activity to me :)
As it's "caloric vestibular stimulation", ie. a temperature shock to the bits in the middle of the ear that sense movement and balance, I'd expect having your head upright at the time (not lying with your left ear up) to be important. Can anyone confirm?
Maybe it acts as a superstimulus to the "your off-balance, re-align yourself URGENTLY" reaction?
When this test is done to patients in a hospital, the patient is lying in bed on his back facing upward towards the ceiling. Ice cold water, 60 ml total, is introduced into one ear canal using a syringe. This is repeated in the other ear canal. The water runs out into a basin placed outside the ear to keep the bed dry. Severely brain damaged patients do not have any reaction to this test. This is a test used in examining patients undergoing brain death evaluation, so they are already on a ventilator.
Ouch - you lost me my motivation to follow this example at 'syringe'. I guess I'm more of a rationalist than a scientist - my desire to know whether this works (on me, in an unprofessional home-test anyway) is rated a lot lower value than my desire to not have a syringe of ice-cold water injected into my ears.
"Syringe", not "needle". It's just the plastic bit being used to squirt water into your ear, rather than a needle being used to pierce the eardrum.
Why, when I was a kid my mum, a doctor, used to give me and my brother (unused) syringes as water guns and it was great fun.