= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Open Thread: May 2010, Part 2
The Open Thread from the beginning of the month has more than 500 comments – new Open Thread comments may be made here.
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (348)
Craig Venter et al. have succeeded in creating the first functional synthetic bacterial genome.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5981/958 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1190719 http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/05/first-functional-synthetic-bacterial-genome-announced.ars http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell/overview/
General question on UDT/TDT, now that they've come up again: I know Eliezer said that UDT fixes some of the problems with TDT; I know he's also said that TDT also handles logical uncertainty whereas UDT doesn't. I'm aware Eliezer has not published the details of TDT, but did he and Wei Dai ever synthesize these into something that extends both of them? Or try to, and fail? Or what?
No.40 on Yahoo's homepage- "Is aging a disease?"
Is aging a disease? I doubt it. Aging is probably many diseases, prominent ones being accumulation of errors in genetic code, deterioration of muscle, growth of material intrusions into blood vessels ... there's no particular reason to think that a cure for one will cure any other.
That said, I think the medical professionals working on this are aware of the variety of damage mechanisms that need addressing - I just want to make sure that we don't forget them.
It wouldn't surprise me if accumulated errors explain a lot of the symptoms of aging.
On the other hand, aging could be at least partly an independent syndrome--progeria suggests that.
From the article:
I wonder how many appearances of this idea ("making 70-80 year lives healthy would be awesome, but trying to vastly extend lifespans would be weird") are due to public relations expediency, and how many are due to the speakers actually believing it.
Well, in fairness so far we've had a lot of trouble handling general aging. Also, note that what Dillin said is having an 100 year old person live to be 250. Not, someone born today living to 250. That's a very different circumstance. The first is much more difficult than the second since all the aging has already taken place.
So I'm trying to find myself some cryo insurance. I went to a State Farm guy today and he mentioned that they'd want a saliva sample. That's fine; I asked for a list of all the things they'll do with it. He didn't have one on hand and sent me home promising to e-mail me the list.
Apparently the underwriting company will not provide this information except for the explicitly incomplete list I got from the insurance guy in the first place (HIV, liver and kidney function, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and "no genetic or DNA testing").
Is it just me or is it outrageous that I can't get this information? Can anyone tell me an agency that will give me this kind of thing when I ask?
It doesn't seem outrageous to me. You are asking them to bet against your death. There are many ways to die and due to adverse selection potentially fatal conditions are likely to be over-represented in applicants for their policies. It doesn't seem unreasonable for them to try and leave themselves as much leeway as possible in detecting attempted fraud. It's just sound underwriting.
I don't object to their wanting the sample. In fact, I can't think of much I'd reasonably expect them to test for that would cause me not to give it to them. But I want them to tell me what it is for.
If they were explicit about exactly what tests they planned to do they would open themselves up to gaming. Better to be non-specific and reserve the freedom to adapt. For similar reasons bodies trying to prevent and detect doping in sports will generally not want to publicize exactly what tests they perform.
Indeed, that is rather outrageous. It runs afoul of pretty much any current conception of information privacy; I'm pretty sure what they're doing would be illegal in the EU, as long as saliva counts as personal information. It's pretty standard anyway for anyone who's collecting your personal information to tell you what it will and will not be used for.
I've just run into a second alumnus of my undergrad school from Less Wrong, and it has me curious, because... it's a tiny school. So this'd be quite a coincidence, and there might be a correlation to dig up.
Present yourselves, former (or current) students of Simon's Rock. I was there from the fall of '04 until graduating with my BA in spring '08 (I was abroad the spring of my junior year though).
If you lurk and don't want to delurk, feel free to contact me privately. If you don't have an account, e-mail me at alicorn@intelligence.org :)
I was there in the '03-'04 year.
I was at SR from the Fall 2005 semester until halfway through the Fall 2006 semester.
The goat's on a pole. Amen.
I believe the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences" can be explained based on the following idea. Physical systems prohibit logical contradiction, and hence, physical systems form just another kind of axiomatic, logical, and therefore mathematical system. To take a crude example, two different rocks cannot occupy the same point in space, due to logical contradiction. This allows the ability to mathematically talk about the rocks. Note that this example is definitively crude, since there are other things like bosons which actually can occupy the same position, but anyways, hopefully you get the idea.
What is the status of this argument in the philosophy of mathematics? Or general comments/references?
Around the turn of the last century, the logicists, like Frege and Russell, attempted to reduce all of mathematics to logic; to prove that all mathematical truths were logical truths. However, the systems they used (provably) failed, because they were inconsistent.
Furthermore, it seems likely that any attempt at logicism must fail. Firstly, any system of standard mathematics requires the existence of an infinite number of numbers, but modern logic generally has very weak ontological commitments: they only require the existence of a single object. For mathematics to be purely logical, it must be tautological - true in every possible world*, and yet any system of arithmetic will be false in a world with a finite number of elements.
Secondly, both attempts to treat numbers as objects (Frege) or concepts/classes (Russell) have problems. Frege’s awful arguments for numbers being objects notwithstanding, he has trouble with the Julius Caesar Objection; he can’t show that the number four isn’t Julius Caesar, because what this (abstract) object is is quite under-defined. Using classes for numbers might be worse; on both their systems, classes form a strict hierarchy, with a nth level classes falling under (n+1)th classes, and no other. Numbers are defined as being the concept which has all those concept’s whose elements are equinumerous; the class of all pairs, the class of all triples, etc. But because of the stratification, the class of all pairs of objects is different from the class of all pairs of first level classes, which is different from the class of all pairs of second level classes, and so on. As such, you have an infinite number of ‘2’s, with no mathematical relations between them. Worse, you can’t count a set like {blue chair, red chair, truth, justice}, because it contains objects and concepts.
What seems more likely to me is that there are an infinite variety of mathematical structures, purely syntax without any semantic relevance to the physical world, and without ‘existence’ in any real sense, as a matter of induction we’ve realised that some can be interpreted in manners relevant to the external world. As evidence, consider the fact that different, mathematics are applicable in areas: probability theory here, complex integration here, addition here, geometry here...
*strictly speaking, true in every structure.
No, that's not right. Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica is the fullest statement of logicism, and its system was never proved inconsistent.
Here I'm less certain, but I'm pretty sure that that's not right either. You would have relations among two such 2s, but those relations would be of a higher type than either 2. But, again, I'm definitely vaguer on how that would work.
Yes, sorry, I meant that Frege failed his system was inconsistent (though possibly not if you replace Basic Law 5 with Hume's Law). Russell, on the other hand, simply runs into Incompleteness; you can't prove all of mathematics from logic because you can't prove it full stop.
You'd have '2's of all cardinalities, so to have a relation between them, you would need to move into the uncountables - but then there are new pairs to be formed here... Essentially, you can reconstruct Russell's original paradox, comparing the cardinality of the set with the cardinality of certain things that fall under it.
You could mitigate this but cutting short the recursion, and simply allowing the relation to hold between the first n levels of concepts or so., on pain of arbitrariness.
I'm curious as to the downvotes; was I off-topic, too long, or simply wrong? Edit: And (if it's acceptable to ask about other people's downvotes) why was zero call downvoted?
That's not a problem for logicism per se. Logicism isn't really a claim about what it takes to prove mathematical claims. So it doesn't fail if you can't prove some mathematics by a certain means. Rather, logicism is a claim about what mathematical assertions mean. According to logicism, mathematical claims ultimately boil down to assertions about whether certain abstract relationships among predicates entail other abstract relationships among predicates, where this entailment holds completely regardless of the meaning of the predicates. That is, mathematical claims boil down to claims of pure logical entailment.
So, if you discover that your particular mathematical system is incomplete, then what you've really done is discover that you had missed some principles of logic. It's as though you'd known that P ∧ P entails P, but you just hadn't noticed that P ∨ P entails P as well.
(But you were right about why logicism ultimately failed to convince everyone: Mathematics seems to have ontological commitments, where pure logic does not.)
I didn't downvote either comment. Your comment was probably downvoted because some readers considered its arguments to be wrong or unclear. zero call's comment was probably downvoted because it smacks of the mind projection fallacy, especially here:
The organization of facts into axioms, rules of inference, proofs, and theorems doesn't seem to be an ontologically fundamental one. We superimpose this structure when we form mental models of things. That is, the logical structure of things exists in the map, not the territory.
I wish you would have made this last comment on the post directly, so that I could reply to that there. Anyways, the point I was offering was that the logical structure does exist in the territory, not just the map. Our maps are merely reflecting this property of the territory. The fundamental signature of this is the observation that physical systems, when viewed in a map which exists only as a re-representation or translation (as opposed to an interpretation) amenable to logical analysis, are shown to prohibit logical contradiction. (For example, the two statements (if A, then B) and (if A, then not B) cannot both be true, where A and B are statements in some re-representation of the physical system.)
I'll move that part of my comment there, with my apologies.
That's quite alright -- thank you for your discussion.
I appreciate your comments but I'm having trouble seeing your point with regards to the idea. To reiterate, with regards to your last paragraph,
I'm proposing that these interpretations work because the internal physical systems (the territory) obeys the same properties as consistent mathematical systems -- see my comment to TM below.
There is a great deal of difference between it operating, in certain regards, on the same sort of rules (rules isomorphic to) mathematics, and mathematics being applicable because physics isn't logically inconsistent. It's not a logical contradiction to say that two points have the same position, nor to say that 2+2=1 (for the latter, consider arithmetic modulo 3). Nor can maths be deduced purely from logic; partly because logic doesn't require the existence of more than one object.
Russell did try to deduce maths from logic plus some axioms about how the world worked - that there were an infinite number of things, etc., but the applicability of the maths is always going to be an empirical question.
I'm not aware of any strong emphasis on this argument. It seems at first glance to be problematic at multiple levels.
One problem with your approach is that humans have evolved in a single, very well-behaved universe. So we have intuition both from instinct and from internalized experience that makes it very hard for us to tell what is actually a logical contradiction and what is not. Indeed, one of the reasons I suspect that so many people have issues with things like special and general relativity as well as quantum mechanics is that they can't get over that these aspects of the universe don't fit well with their intuitions.
Consider for a moment what a universe would look like where 1 + 1 did not equal 2. What would that look like? It isn't clear to me that this is even a meaningful question. But that may be because these concepts are so ingrained in us that we can't think without them. Thus, it may be that math works well for understanding the universe because humans have no other option. One could imagine us meeting an alien species that has some completely different but very effective way of understanding the universe that isn't isomorphic to math at all.
Logical operation is quite well defined, with or without regards to human perception of that logic. The idea that logic may not be understood does not contradict the idea that an internal logic (may) underlie physical systems. (Note, maybe see my clarification below, here. )
Granted logic is somewhat mysterious and it is hard to imagine what a different kind of logic would look like. However, that is immaterial to my idea. The idea is just that you have signatures of illogic (e.g., both statements (a.) if A, then B, and (b.) if A, then not B, both true at the same time) which seem to be non-present in physical systems.
In this comment, I wrote:
You replied:
Actually, they are both true if A itself is false. This is the import of the logical principle ex falso quodlibet.
But I take your point to be that certain logical statements (such as "A => ~~A") are true of any actual physical system.
It is true that things are a certain way. They are not some other way. So, if a territory satisfies A, it follows that it does not satisfy ~A. And this is a fact about the territory. After all, the point of a map is to be something from which you can extract purported facts about the territory.
However, what is not in the territory is the delineation of its properties into axioms, on the one hand, and theorems, on the other. There are just the properties of the territory, all co-equal, none with logical priority. The territory just is the way it is.
For example, consider the statements "A" and "~~A", where A is the application of some particular predicate to the territory. It is not as though there is one property or feature of the territory according to which it satisfies A, while there is some other property of the territory according to which it satisfies ~~A. That feature of the territory in virtue of which it satisfies A is exactly the same feature in virtue of which it satisfies ~~A.
In the logic, "A" and "~~A" are two distinct well-formed formulas, and it can be proven that one entails the other. But in the territory there are no two distinct features corresponding to these two wffs, so it's not really sensible to speak of an entailment relationship in any nontrivial sense. The territory just is the way that the territory is, and this way, being the way that the territory is, is the way that the territory is. There is nothing more to be said with regard to the territory itself, qua logical system.
What about a tautology such as "A => ~~A"? Tautologies do give us true statements about the territory. But, importantly, such a statement is not true in virtue of any feature of the territory. The tautology would have been true no matter what features the territory had. There is nothing in the territory making "A => ~~A" be true of it. In contrast, there is something in the logical system making "A => ~~A" be a theorem in it — namely, certain axioms and rules of inference such that "A => ~~A" is derivable. (Some systems with different axioms or rules of inference would not have this wff as a theorem). This is another reason why the territory ought not to be thought of as a logical system of which the features are axioms or theorems.
Thank you for comment, and I hope this reply isn't too long for you to read. I think your last sentence sums up your comment somewhat:
In support of this, you mention:
It seems like things are getting confused here. I take "A => ~~A" to be a necessary condition for proposition A to make sense. In order to make things concrete, let me use a real example. Say that proposition A is, "This particular rock weighs 1.5 pounds with uncertainty sigma." This seems like a fairly reasonable, easily imaginable statement. Now clearly, A is simply a rendition or re-representation of the reality that is the physical system. In other words, proposition A only tells you what reality tells you by holding the rock in your hands, or throwing it through the air, or vaporizing it and measuring the amount of output energy. The only difference in this case is that the reality is encoded in human language.
For A to make sense, clearly "A => ~~A" must be true. For the rock to weigh 1.5 plus/minus sigma, it must not - not weigh 1.5 plus/minus sigma. That strikes me more or less a requirement imposed by human language, not so much a requirement of physical reality.
For this reason I think that your example of "A => ~~A" does not get to the heart of my point. My point is slightly different. Consider again the proposition "A true => (if A then B) OR (if A then not B)". Take B as: "This rock is heavier than this pencil." Now, assuming that the pencil does not lie in the weight range 1.5 plus/minus sigma, then this proposition must be true. And now, this statement is significantly more complicated than "A => ~~A", and it implies that (under proper restrictions) you can make longer logical statements, and continuing further, statements which are no longer trivial and just a property of human language.
Side-note: I suppose these particular examples are all tautological so they don't quite show the full richness of a logical system. However, it would be easy to make theorems, such as "if A AND C, then B" (where C could be specified similar to A or B.) Then we would see not only tautologies but also theorems and other propositions which are all encoded as we would expect from a typical logical system.
Now, the fact that this sort of statement works comes straight out of the territory. Our maps to A and B are merely re-representations of reality, and they are what reality is telling us, only encoded in human language. So we are seeing that reality appears to obey the same logical rules that we have come to expect from ordinary kinds of logical systems.
Now, I am not claiming that the physical systems (the territory) is somehow naturally encoding itself into these re-representations. Clearly, the human mind is at work in realizing these re-representations. But once these re-representations are realized, it really is the territory which takes on a logical structure.
So I am not claiming that the physical system is naturally a system of axioms and theorems and so on. My proposition is weaker and more generic, and only says that the physical system has a logical character. My real punchline, I suppose, is to say that this logical character of the re-representation is non-trivial. As you say, "Things are a certain way. They are not some other way." But the way in which they are is logical. They are in a way which is the same way that logical statements are encoded. This is non-trivial because physical systems at the highest level just look like a huge collection of various and vague facts. We have no reason (a priori) to expect physical systems to map about in this way -- but they do! And this I claim allows for math to be so effective in working with reality in general.
I'm a little confused by this example. The proposition
A => (if A then B) OR (if A then not B)
is a logical tautology. It's truth doesn't depend on whether "the pencil does not lie in the weight range 1.5 plus/minus sigma". In fact, just the consequent
(if A then B) OR (if A then not B)
by itself is a logical tautology. So, I have two questions:
(1) Is there a reason why you didn't use just the consequent as your example? Is there a reason why it wouldn't "get to the heart" of your point?
(2) Just to be perfectly clear, are you claiming that the truth of some tautologies, such as A => ~~A , is "trivial and just a property of human language", while the truth of some other tautologies is not?
Sorry, I caught that myself earlier and added a sidenote, but you must have read before I finished:
Edit: Or, sorry, just to complete, in case you had read that -- the tautology does depend on whether the pencil lies in the range of 1.5 plus/minus sigma. If the pencil lies in that range, we can't say B or ~B.
In answer to (1.), I'm not using the consequent because you identified the fact that the consequent can imply anything by logical explosion. I was referring to the "A=>~A" example not getting to the heart of the point because that example is too simple to reveal anything of substance, as I subsequently discuss.
In answer to (2.), I am not claiming that some tautologies are "less true". I am just roughly showing how there is a gradation from obvious tautologies to less obvious tautologies to tautologies which may not even be recognizable as tautologies, to theorems, and so on.
Little note to self:
I guess my original idea (i.e., the idea I had in my very first question in the open thread) was that the physical systems can be phrased in the form of tautologies. Now, I don't know enough about mathematical logic, but I guess my intuition was/is telling me that if you have a system which is completely described by tautologies, than by (hypothetically) fine-graining these tautologies to cover all options and then breaking the tautologies into alternative theorems, we have an entire "mathematical structure" (i.e., propositions and relations between propositions, based on logic) for the reality. And this structure would be consistent, because we had already shown that the tautologies could be formed consistently using the (hypothetically) available data. Then physics would work by seizing on these structures and attempting to figure out which theorems were true, refining the list of theorems down into results, and so on and so forth.
I'm beginning to worry I might lose the reader do to the impression I am "moving the goalpost" or something of that nature... If this appears to be the case, I apologize and just have to admit my ignorance. I wasn't entirely sure what I was thinking about to start out with and that was really why I made my post. This is really helping me understand what I was thinking.
Though the word "tautology" is often used to refer to statements like (A v ~A), in mathematical logic any true statement is a tautology. Are you talking about the distinction between axioms and derived theorems in a formal system?
Tell me whether the following seems to capture the spirit of your observation:
Let C be the collection of all propositional formulas that are provably true in the propositional calculus whenever you assume that each of their atomic propositions are true. In other words, C contains exactly those formulas that get a "T" in the row of their truth-tables where all atomic propositions get a "T".
Note that C contains all tautologies, but it also contains the formula A => B, because A => B is true when both A and B are true. However, C does not contain A => ~B, because this formula is false when both A and B are true.
Now consider some physical system S, and let T be the collection of all true assertions about S.
Note that T depends on the physical system that you are considering, but C does not. The elements of C depend only on the rules of the propositional calculus.
Maybe the observation that you are getting at is the following: For any actual physical system S, we have that T is closed under all of the formulas in C. That is, given f in C, and given A, B, . . . in T, we have that the proposition f(A, B, . . .) is also in T. This is remarkable, because T depends on S, while C does not.
Does that look like what you are trying to say?
First, I, at least, am glad that you're asking these questions. Even on purely selfish grounds, it's giving me an opportunity to clarify my own thoughts to myself.
Now, I'm having a hard time understanding each of your paragraphs above.
B meant "This rock is heavier than this pencil." So, "B or ~B" means "Either this rock is heavier than this pencil, or this rock is not heavier than this pencil." Surely that is something that I can say truthfully regardless of where the pencil's weight lies. So I don't understand why you say that we can't say "B or ~B" if the pencil's weight lies in a certain range.
I didn't say that the consequent can imply anything "by logical explosion". On the contrary, since the consequent is a tautology, it only implies TRUE things. Given any tautology T and false proposition P, the implication T => P is false.
More generally, I don't understand the principle by which you seem to say that A => ~~A is "too simple", while other tautologies are not. Or are you now saying that all tautologies are too simple, and that you want to focus attention on certain non-tautologies, like "if A AND C, then B" ?
But surely this is just a matter of our computational power, just as some arithmetic claims seem "obvious", while others are beyond our power to verify with our most powerful computers in a reasonable amount of time. The collection of "obvious" arithmetic claims grows as our computational power grows. Similarly, the collection of "obvious" tautologies grows as our computational power grows. It doesn't seem right to think of this "obviousness" as having anything to do with the territory. It seems entirely a property of how well we can work with our map.
Except that....that isn't a logical contradiction!
You have inadvertently demonstrated one of the best arguments for the study of mathematics: it stretches the imagination. The ability to imagine wild, exotic, crazy phenomena that seem to defy common sense -- and thus, in particular, not to confuse common sense with logic -- is crucial for anyone who seriously aspires to understand the world or solve unsolved problems.
When Albert Einstein said that imagination was more important than knowledge, this is surely what he meant.
I can see how that phrasing would strike you as being redundant or inaccurate. To try to clarify --
The rocks not occupying the same point in space is a logical contradiction in the following sense: If it wasn't a logical contradiction, there wouldn't be anything preventing it. You might claim this is a "physical" contradiction or a contradiction of "reality", but I am attempting to identify this feature as a signature example of a sort of logic of reality.
I have an idea I'd like to discuss that might perhaps be good enough for my first top-level post once it's developed a bit further, but I'd first like to ask if someone maybe knows of any previous posts in which something similar was discussed. So I'll post a rough outline here as a request for comments.
It's about a potential source of severe and hard to detect biases about all sorts of topics where the following conditions apply:
It's a matter of practical interest to most people, where it's basically impossible not to have an opinion. So people have strong opinions, and you basically can't avoid forming one too.
The available hard scientific evidence doesn't say much about the subject, so one must instead make do with sparse, incomplete, disorganized, and non-obvious pieces of rational evidence. This of course means that even small and subtle biases can wreak havoc.
Factual and normative issues are heavily entangled in this topic. By this I mean that people care deeply about the normative issues involved, and view the related factual issues through the heavily biasing lens of whether they lead to consequentialist arguments for or against their favored normative beliefs. (Of course, lots of folks won't have their logic straight, so it's enough that a particular factual belief is perceived to correlate with a popular or unpopular normative belief to be a subject of widespread bias in one or the other direction.)
Finally, the prevailing opinions on the subject have changed heavily through history, both factually and normatively, and people view the normative beliefs prevailing today as enlightened progress over terrible evils of the past.
These conditions of course apply to lots of stuff related to politics, social issues, etc. Now, the exact bias mechanism I have in mind is as follows.
As per the assumptions (3) and (4), people are aware (more or less) that the opinions on the subject in question were very different in the past, both factually and normatively. Since they support the present norms, they'll of course believe that the past norms were evil and good riddance to them. They'll chalk that one up for "progress" -- in their minds, the same vaguely defined historical process that brought us science and prosperity in place of superstition and squalor, improvements that are impossible to deny, has also brought us good and enlightened normative beliefs on this issue instead of the former unfair, harmful, or just plain disturbing norms. However, since the area in question, as we've assumed under (2), is not amenable to a hard-scientific straightening out of facts from bullshit, it's not at all clear that the presently prevailing factual beliefs are not severely biased. In fact, regardless of what normative beliefs one has about it, there is no rational reason at all to believe that the factual beliefs about the topic did not in fact become more remote from reality compared to some point in the past.
And now we get to the troublesome part where the biases get their ironclad armor: arguing that we've actually been increasingly deluding ourselves factually about some such topic ever since some point in the past, no matter how good the argument and evidence presented, will as per (3) and (4) automatically be perceived as an attack on the cherished contemporary normative beliefs by a reactionary moral monster. This will be true in the sense that updating the modern false factual beliefs will undermine some widely accepted consequentialist arguments for the modern normative beliefs -- but regardless, even if one is still committed to these normative beliefs, they should be defended using logic and truth, not bias and falsity. Moreover, since both the normative and factual historical changes in prevailing beliefs have been chalked up to "progress," the argument will be seen as an attack on progress as such, including its parts that have brought indisputable enrichment and true insight, and is thus seen as sacrilege against all the associated high-status ideas, institutions, and people.
To put it as briefly as possible, the bias is against valid arguments presenting evidence that certain historical changes in factual beliefs have been away from reality and towards greater delusions and biases. It rests on:
a biased moralistic reaction to what is perceived as an attack on the modern cherished normative beliefs, and
a bias in favor of ideas (and the associated institutions and individuals, both contemporary and historical) that enjoy the high status awarded by being a contributor to "progress."
What should be emphasized is that this results in factual beliefs being wrong and biased, and the normative beliefs, whatever one's opinion about their ultimate validity, owing lots of their support to factually flawed consequentialist arguments.
Does this make any sense? It's just a quick dump of some three-quarters-baked ideas, but I'd like to see if it can be refined and expanded into an article.
As written up here, it's a bit abstract for my personal tastes. I can't tell from this description whether in the potential post you're planning on using specific examples to make your points, probably because you're writing carefully due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter. I suspect the post will be received more favorably if you give specific examples of some of these cherished normative beliefs, explain why they result in these biases that you're describing, etc.
On the other hand, given the potentially polarizing nature of the beliefs, there's no guarantee that you won't excite some controversy and downvotes if you do take that path. But given the subject matter of some of your other recent comments, I (and others) can probably guess at least some what of you have in mind and will be thinking about it as we read your submission anyway. And in that case, it's probably better to be explicit than to have people making their own guesses about what you're thinking.
I was planning to introduce the topic through a parable of a fictional world carefully crafted not to be directly analogous to any real-world hot-button issues. The parable would be about a hypothetical world where the following facts hold:
A particular fruit X, growing abundantly in the wild, is nutritious, but causes chronical poisoning in the long run with all sorts of bad health consequences. This effect is however difficult to disentangle statistically (sort of like smoking).
Eating X has traditionally been subject to a severe Old Testament-style religious prohibition with unknown historical origins (the official reason of course was that God had personally decreed it). Impoverished folks who nevertheless picked and ate X out of hunger were often given draconian punishments.
At the same time, there has been a traditional belief that if you eat X, you'll incur not just sin, but eventually also get sick. Now, note that the latter part happens to be true, though given the evidence available at the time, a skeptic couldn't tell if it's true or just a superstition that came as a side-effect of the religious taboo. You'd see that poor folks who eat it do get sick more often, but their disease might be just due to poverty, and you'd need sophisticated statistics and controlled studies to tell reliably which way it is.
At a later time, as science progresses and religion withdraws in front of it, and religious figures lose power and prestige, old superstitions and taboos perish, and now defying them is considered more and more cool and progressive. In particular, believing that eating fruit X is bad is now a mark of bigoted fundamentalism. Cool fashionable people will eat X occasionally just to prove a point, historians decry the horrors of the dark ages when poor people were sadistically persecuted for eating it, and a general consensus has been formed that its supposed unhealthiness has never been more than just another religiously motivated superstition. "X-eater" eventually becomes a metaphor for a smart fashionable free-thinker in these people's culture, and "X-phobe" for a bigoted yokel.
People who eat X in significant quantities still get sick more, but the consensus explanation is that it's because, since it's free but not very tasty food, eating it correlates with poverty and thus all sorts of awful living conditions.
Now, notice that in this world, the prevailing normative belief on this issue has moved from draconian religious taboos to a laissez-faire approach, while at the same time, a closely related factual belief has moved significantly away from reality. For all the cruelty of the religious taboo, and the fact that poor folks may well prefer bad health later to starving now, the traditional belief that eating X is bad for your health was factually true. Yet a contrarian scientist who now suggests that this might be true after all will provoke derision and scorn. What is he, one of those crazed fundamentalists who want to bring back the days when poor folks were whipped and pilloried for picking X to feed their starving kids in years of bad harvest?
I think this example would illustrate quite clearly the sort of bias I have in mind. The questions however are:
Does it sound like too close an analogy to some present hot-button issue?
Does the idea that we might be suffering from some analogous biases sound too outlandish? I do believe that many such biases exist in the world today, and I probably myself suffer from some of them, but as you said, taking concrete examples might sound too controversial and polarizing.
Maybe you could use the parable but put in brackets like you have with (sort of like smoking) but give very different ones for each point. That will keep the parable from seeming outlandish while not really starting a discussion of the bracketed illustrations. Smoking was a good illustration because it isn't that hot a button any more but we can remember went it was.
Actually, maybe I could try a similar parable about a world in which there's a severe, brutally enforced religious taboo against smoking and a widespread belief that it's unhealthy, and then when the enlightened opinion turns against the religious beliefs and norms of old, smoking becomes a symbol of progress and freethinking -- and those who try to present evidence that it is bad for you after all are derided as wanting to bring back the inquisition.
Though this perhaps wouldn't be effective since the modern respectable opinion is compatible with criminalization of recreational drugs, so the image of freethinkers decrying what is basically a case of drug prohibition as characteristic of superstitious dark ages doesn't really click. I'll have to think about this more.
Actually, you might be surprised to learn that Randian Objectivists held a similar view (or at least Rand herself did), that smoking is a symbol of man's[1] harnessing of fire by the power of reason. Here's a video that caricatures the view (when they get to talking about smoking).
I don't think they actually denied its harmful health effects though.
ETA: [1] Rand's gendered language, not mine.
Yes, I'm familiar with this. Though in fairness, I've read conflicting reports about it, with some old-guard Randians claiming that they all stopped smoking once, according to them, scientific evidence for its damaging effects became convincing. I don't know how much (if any) currency denialism on this issue had among them back in the day.
Rothbard's "Mozart was a Red" is a brilliant piece of satire, though! I'm not even that familiar with the details of Rand's life and personality, but just from the behavior and attitudes I've seen from her contemporary followers, every line of it rings with hilarious parody.
It seems like this general topic has already been discussed pretty extensively by e.g. Mencius Moldbug and Steve Sailer.
Personally, I like this approach. Leave out the contemporary hot buttons, at least at first. First keep it abstract, with fanciful examples, so that people don't read it with their "am I forced to believe?" glasses on. Then, once people have internalized your points, we can start to talk about whether this or that sacrosanct belief is really due to this bias.
I would think you could do with some explanation of why people aren't genetically programmed to avoid eating X. Assuming that it has been around for an evolutionarily significant period. Some explanations could be that it interacts with something in the new diet or that humans have lost a gene required to process it.
Some taboos have survived well into the modern times due to innate, noncultural instincts. Take for example avoiding incest and the taboo around that. That is still alive and well. We could probably screen for genetic faults, or have sperm/egg donations for sibling couples nowadays but we don't see many people saying we should relax that taboo.
Edit: The instinct is called the Westermarck Effect and has been show resistant to cultural pressure. The question is why cultural pressure works to break down other taboos, especially with regards to mating/relationships, which we should be good at by now. We have been doing them long enough.
There might be emotional as well as genetic reasons for avoiding incest. We don't really know much about the subject. If anyone's having an emotionally healthy (or at least no worse than average) incestuous relationship, they aren't going to be talking about it.
Reminds me a little of homosexuality, but only a little.
I can think of several hot-button issues that are analogous to this parable — or would be, if the parable were modified as follows:
As science progresses, religious figures lose some power and prestige, but manage to hold on to quite a bit of it. Old superstitions and taboos perish at different rates in different communities, and defying them is considered more cool and progressive in some subcultures and cities. Someone will eat fruit X on television and the live audience will applaud, but a grouchy old X-phobe watching the show will grumble about it.
A conference with the stated goal of exploring possible health detriments of X will attract people interested in thinking rationally about public health, as well as genuine X-phobes. The two kinds of people don't look any different.
The X-phobes pick up science and rationality buzzwords and then start jabbering about the preliminary cherrypicked scientific results impugning X, with their own superstition and illogical arguments mixed in. Twentysomething crypto-X-phobes seeking to revitalize their religion now claim that their religion is really all about protecting people from the harms of X, and feed college students subtle misinterpretations of the scientific evidence. In response to all this, Snopes.com gets to work discrediting any claim of the form "X is bad". The few rational scientists studying the harmfulness of X are shunned by their peers.
What's a rationalist to do? Personally, whenever I hear someone say "I think we should seriously consider the possibility that such-and-such may be true, despite it being politically incorrect", I consider it more likely than not that they are privileging the hypothesis. People have to work hard to convince me of their rationality.
Yes, that would certainly make the parable much closer to some issues that other people have already pointed out! However, you say:
Well, if the intellectual standards in the academic mainstream of the relevant fields are particularly low, and the predominant ideological biases push very strongly in the direction of the established conclusion that the contrarians are attacking, the situation is, at the very least, much less clear. But yes, organized groups of contrarians are often motivated by their own internal biases, which they constantly reinforce within their peculiar venues of echo-chamber discourse. Often they even develop some internal form of strangely inverted political correctness.
Moreover, my parable assumes that there are still non-trivial lingering groups of X-phobe fundamentalists when the first contrarian scientists appear. But what if the situation ends up with complete extirpation of all sorts of anti-X-ism, and virtually nobody is left who supports it any more, long before statisticians in this hypothetical world figure out the procedures necessary to examine the issue correctly? Imagine anti-X-ism as a mere remote historical memory, with no more supporters than, say, monarchism in the U.S. today. The question is -- are there any such issues today, where past beliefs have been replaced by inaccurate ones that it doesn't even occur to anyone any more to question, not because it would be politically incorrect, but simply because alternatives are no longer even conceivable?
The upvotes and interested responses indicate that there's more than enough enthusiasm for a top-level post. Stop cluttering up the open thread! :-)
This bias needs a name, like "moral progress bias".
I ask myself what your case studies might be. The Mencius Moldbug grand unified theory comes to mind: belief in "human neurological uniformity", statist economics, democracy as a force for good, winning wars by winning hearts and minds, etc, is all supposed to be one great error, descending from a prior belief that is simultaneously moral, political, and anthropological, and held in place by the sort of bias you describe.
You might also want to explore a related notion of "intellectual progress bias", whereby a body of pseudo-knowledge is insulated from critical examination, not by moral sentiments, but simply by the belief that it is knowledge and that the history of its growth is one of discovery rather than of illusions piled ever higher.
Mitchell_Porter:
Well, any concrete case studies are by the very nature of the topic potentially inflammatory, so I'd first like to see if the topic can be discussed in the abstract before throwing myself into an all-out dissection of some belief that it's disreputable to question.
One good case study could perhaps be the belief in democracy, where the moral belief in its righteousness is entangled with the factual belief that it results in freedom and prosperity -- and bringing up counterexamples is commonly met with frantic No True Scotsman replies and hostile questioning of one's motives and moral character. It would mean opening an enormous can of worms, of course.
Yes, this is a very useful notion. I think it would be interesting to combine it with some of my earlier speculations about what conditions are apt to cause an area of knowledge to enter such a vicious circle where delusions and bullshit are piled ever higher under a deluded pretense of progress.
It seems a common bias to me and worth exploring.
Have you thought about a tip-of-the-hat to the opposite effect? Some people view the past as some sort of golden age where things were pure and good etc. It makes for a similar but not exactly mirror image source of bias. I think a belief that generally things are progressing for the better is a little more common than the belief that generally the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but not that much more common.
Yes, that's a good point. However, one difference between my idea and the nostalgia biases is that I don't expect that the latter, even if placed under utmost scrutiny, would turn out to be responsible for as many severe and entirely non-obvious false beliefs in practice. My impression is that in our culture, people are much better at detecting biased nostalgia than biased reverence for what are held to be instances of moral and intellectual progress.
I don't think that nostalgia bias would be harder to detect in general - it's easy to detect in our culture because it isn't a general part of a culture (that seems to be pretty much what you're saying).
However, the opposite may have held for, say, imperial China, or medieval Europe.
I suspect that you live in a community where most people are politically more liberal than you. I have the impression that nostalgia is a harder-to-detect bias than progress, probably because I live in a community where most people are politically more conservative than I. For many, many people, change is almost always suspicious, and appealing to the past is rhetorically more effective than appealing to progress. Hence, most of their false beliefs are justified with nostalgia, if only because most beliefs, true or false, are justified with nostalgia.
What determines which bias is more effective? I would guess that the main determinant is whether you identify with the community that brought about the "progress". If you do identify with them, then it must be good, because you and your kind did it. If, instead, you identify with the community that had progress imposed on them, you probably think of it as a foreign influence, and a deviation from the historical norm. This deviation, being unnatural, will either burn itself out or bring the entire community down in ruin.
That's a valid point when it comes to issues that are a matter of ongoing controversies, or where the present consensus was settled within living memory, so that there are still people who remember different times with severe nostalgia. However, I had in mind a much wider class of topics, including those where the present consensus was settled in more remote past so that there isn't anyone left alive to be nostalgic about the former state of affairs. (An exception could be the small number of people who develop romantic fantasies from novels and history books, but I don't think they're numerous enough to be very relevant.)
Moreover, there is also the question of which bias affects what kinds of people more. I am more interested in biases that affect people who are on the whole smarter and more knowledgeable and rational. It seems to me that among such people, the nostalgic biases are less widespread, for a number of reasons. For example, scientists will be more likely than the general population to appreciate the extent of the scientific progress and the crudity of the past superstitions it has displaced in many areas of human knowledge, so I would expect that when it comes to issues outside their area of expertise, they would be -- on average -- biased in favor of contemporary consensus views when someone argues that they've become more remote from reality relative to some point in the past.
Hmm. Maybe it would help to give more concrete examples, because I might have misunderstood the kinds of beliefs that you're talking about. Things like gender relations, race relations, and environmental policy were significantly different within living memory. Now, things like institutionalized slavery or a powerful monarchy are pretty much alien to modern developed countries. But these policies are advocated only by intellectuals—that is, by those who are widely read enough to have developed a nostalgia for a past that they never lived.
Actually, now you've nudged my mind in the right direction! Let's consider an example even more remote in time, and even more outlandish by modern standards than slavery or absolute monarchy: medieval trials by ordeal.
The modern consensus belief is that this was just awful superstition in action, and our modern courts of law are obviously a vast improvement. That's certainly what I had thought until I read a recent paper titled "Ordeals" by one Peter T. Leeson, who argues that these ordeals were in fact, in the given circumstances, a highly accurate way of separating the guilty from the innocent given the prevailing beliefs and customs of the time. I highly recommend reading the paper, or at least the introduction, as an entertaining de-biasing experience. [Update: there is also an informal exposition of the idea by the author, for those who are interested but don't feel like going through the math of the original paper.]
I can't say with absolute confidence if Leeson's arguments are correct or not, but they sound highly plausible to me, and certainly can't be dismissed outright. However, if he is correct, then two interesting propositions are within the realm of the possible: (1) in the given circumstances in which medieval Europeans lived, trials by ordeal were perhaps more effective in making correct verdicts in practice than if they had used something similar to our modern courts of law instead, and (2) the verdict accuracy rate by trials by ordeal could well have been greater than that achieved by our modern courts of law, which can't be realistically considered to be anywhere near perfect. As Leeson says:
Now, let's look at the issue and separate the relevant normative and factual beliefs involved. The prevailing normative belief today is that the only acceptable way to determine criminal guilt is to use evidence-based trials in front of courts, whose job is to judge the evidence as free of bias as possible. It's a purely normative view, which states that anything else would simply be unjust and illegitimate, period. However, underlying this normative belief, and serving as its important consequentialist basis, there is also the factual belief that despite all the unavoidable biases, evidence-based trials necessarily produce more accurate verdicts than other methods, especially ancient methods such as the trial by ordeal that involved superstitions.
Yet, if Leeson is correct -- and we should seriously consider that possibility -- this factual belief, despite having been universally accepted in our civilization for centuries, is false. What follows is that there may actually be a non-obvious way to produce more accurate verdicts even in our day and age, based on different institutions, but nobody is taking the possibility seriously because of the universal (and biased) factual belief about the practical optimality of the modern court system. It also follows that a thousand years ago, Europeans could easily have caused more wrongful punishment by abolishing trials by ordeal and replacing them with evidence-based trials, even though such a change would be judged by the modern consensus view as a vast improvement, both morally and in practical accuracy.
Another interesting remark is that, from what I've seen on legal blogs, Leeson's paper was met with polite and interested skepticism, not derision and hostility. However, it seems to me that this is because the topic is so extremely remote that it has no bearing whatsoever on any modern ideological controversies; I have no doubt that a similar positive reexamination of some negatively judged past belief or institution that still has significant ideological weight would provoke far more hostility. That seems to be another piece of evidence suggesting that severe biases might be found lurking under the modern consensus on a great many issues, operating via the mechanism I'm proposing.
That's interesting. I think you're right that no one reacts too negatively to this news because they don't see any real danger that it would be implemented.
But suppose there were a real movement to bring back trial by ordeal. According to the paper's abstract, trial by ordeal was so effective because the defendants held certain superstitious belief. Therefore, if we wanted it to work again, we would need to change peoples' worldview so that they again held such beliefs.
But there's reason to expect that these beliefs would cause a great deal of harm — enough to outweigh the benefit from more accurate trials. For example, maybe airlines wouldn't perform such careful maintenance on an airplane if a bunch of nuns would be riding it, since God wouldn't allow a plane full of nuns to go down.
Well, look at me — I launched right into rationalizing a counter-argument. As with so many of the biases that Robin Hanson talks about, one has to ask, does my dismissal of the suggestion show that we're right to reject it, or am I just providing another example of the bias in action?
It's the old noble lie in a different package.
I skimmed Leeson's paper, and it looks like it has no quantitative evidence for the true accuracy of trial by ordeal. It has quantitative evidence for one of the other predictions he makes with his theory (the prediction that most people who go through ordeals are exonerated by them, which prediction is supported by the corresponding numbers, though not resoundingly), but Leeson doesn't know what the actual hit rate of trial by orderal is.
This doesn't mean Leeson's a bad guy or anything - I bet no one can get a good estimate of trial by ordeal's accuracy, since we're here too late to get the necessary data. But it does mean he's exaggerating (probably unconsciously) the implications of his paper - ultimately, his model will always fit the data as long as sufficiently many people believed trial by ordeal was accurate, independent of true accuracy. So the fact that his model pretty much fits the data is not strong evidence of true accuracy. Given that Leeson's model fits the data he does have, and the fact that fact-finding methods were relatively poor in medieval times, I think your 'interesting proposition' #1 is quite likely, but we don't gain much new information about #2.
(Edit - it might also be possible to incorporate ordeal-like tests into modern police work! 'Machine is never wrong, son.')
This reminds me of a related bias-- people generally don't have any idea how much of the stuff in their heads was made up on very little evidence, and I will bring up a (hopefully) just moderately warm button issue to discuss it.
What is science fiction? If you're reading this, you probably believe you can recognize science fiction, give a definition, and adjudicate edge cases.
I've read a moderate number of discussions on the subject, and eventually came to the conclusion that people develop very strong intuitions very quickly about human cultural inventions which are actually very blurry around the edges and may be incoherent in the middle. (Why is psi science fiction while magic is fantasy?)
And people generally don't notice that their concepts aren't universally held unless they argue about them with other people, and even then, the typical reaction is to believe that one is right and the other people are wrong.
As for the future and the past, it's easy enough to find historians to tell you, in detail, that your generalizations about the past leave a tremendous amount out. It should be easier to see that futures are estimates at best, but it can be hard to notice even that.
I've noticed a similar thing happen with people trying to define 'literary fiction.' Makes me wonder what other domains might have this bias.
My assumption is that it's all of them.
Reading efforts to define science fiction is why I've never looked at efforts at defining who's a Jew. I have a least a sketchy knowledge of legal definitions for Reform and Orthodox, but that doesn't cover the emotional territory.
What's a poem? What's a real American?
If you can find a area of human creation where there aren't impassioned arguments about what a real whatever is, please let me know.
Good point. I guess physicists don't spend much time arguing what a 'real electron' is, but once you start talking about abstract ideas...
Considerable efforts have been made here to have a stable meaning for rationality. I think it's worked.
It's a stable meaning...so maybe that just forestalls the argument until Less Wrongian rationalists meet other rationalists!
What's a paperclip?
It's an inwardly-thrice-bent metal wire that can non-destructively fasten paper together at an edge.
So those don't count?
Correct.
Why?
Because they're not inwardly-thrice-bent metal wires that can non-destructively fasten paper together at an edge?
Is this classification algorithm really that difficult to learn?
Do you value those hunks of plastic more than other hunks of plastic?
Do you value inwardly-thrice-bent plastic wire that can non-destructively fasten paper together at an edge more than other hunks of plastic?
No.
No.
As to whether I could give a definition of science fiction, Similarity Clusters and similar posts have convinced me that the kind of definition I'd normally make would not capture what I meant by the term.
Yes, it was in fact thinking about that topic that made me try to write these thoughts down systematically. What I would like to do is to present them in a way that would elicit well-argued responses that don't get sidetracked into mind-killer reactions (and the latter would inevitably happen in places where people put less emphasis on rationality than here, so this site seems like a suitable venue). Ultimately, I want to see if I'm making sense, or if I'm just seeking sophisticated rationalizations for some false unconventional opinions I managed to propagandize myself into.
Another type of example you could use in this topic is a real one, that occurred in the past.
This would better than a fictional example, actually, as it brings in evidence from reality much earlier.
Are you referring to my article? I didn't mean to give the impression that either strategy was better.
So if we think about the epistemological issue space in terms of a Venn diagram we can imagine the following circles all of which intersect:
1. Ubiquitous (Outside: non-ubiquitous). Subject areas where prejudgement is ubiquitous are problematic because finding a qualified neutral arbitrator is difficult, nearly everyone is invested in the outcome.
2. Contested, either there is no consensus among authorities, the legitimacy of the authorities is in question or there are no relevant authorities. (Outside: uncontested). Obviously, not being able to appeal to authorities makes rational belief more difficult.
3. Invested (Outside: Non-invested). People have incentives for believing some things rather than others for reasons other than evidence. When people are invested in beliefs motivated skepticism is a common result.
3a. Entangled (untangled) In some cases people can be easily separated from the incentives that lead them to be invested in some belief (for example, when they have financial incentives. But sometime the incentives are so entangled with the agents and the proposition that they is no easy procedure that lets us remove the incentives.
3ai. Progressive (Traditional). Cases of entangled invested beliefs can roughly and vaguely be divided into those aligned with progress and those aligned with tradition.
So we have a diagram of three concentric circles (invested, entangled, progressive) bisected by a two circle diagram (ubiquitous, contested).
Now it seems clear that membership in every one of these sets makes an issue harder to think rationally, with one exception. How do beliefs aligned to progress differ structurally from beliefs aligned to tradition? What do we need to do differently for one over the other? Because we might as well address both at the same time if there is no difference.
That's an excellent way of putting it, which brings a lot of clarity to my clumsy exposition! To answer your question, yes, the same essential mechanism I discussed is at work in both progressive and traditional biases -- the desire that facts should provide convenient support for normative beliefs causes bias in factual beliefs, regardless of whether these normative beliefs are cherished as achievements of progress or revered as sacred tradition. However, I think there are important practical differences that merit some separate consideration.
The problem is that traditionalist vs. progressive biases don't appear randomly. They are correlated with many other relevant human characteristics. In particular, my hypothesis is that people with formidable rational thinking skills -- who, compared to other people, have much less difficulty with overcoming their biases once they're pointed out and critically dissecting all sorts of unpleasant questions -- tend to have a very good detector for biases and false beliefs of the traditionalist sort, but they find it harder to recognize and focus on those of the progressive sort.
What this means is that in practice, when exceptionally rational people see some group feeling good about their beliefs because these beliefs are a revered tradition, they'll immediately smell likely biases and turn their critical eye on it. On the other hand, when they see people feeling good about their beliefs because they are a result of progress over past superstition and barbarism, they are in danger of assuming without justification that the necessary critical work has already been done, so everything is OK as it is. Also, in the latter sort of situation, they will relatively easily assume that the only existing controversy is between the rational progressive view and the remnants of the past superstition, although reality could be much more complex. This could even conceivably translate into support for the mainstream progressive view even if it has strayed into all sorts of biases and falsities.
So, basically, when we consider what biases and false beliefs could be hiding in things that are presently a matter of consensus, things that it just doesn't even occur to anyone reputable to question, it seems to me that there is a greater chance of finding those that are hiding in your (3ai) category than in the rest of (3a). Thus, I would propose a heuristic that, I believe, has the potential to detect a lot of biases we are unaware of: just like you get suspicious as soon as you see people happy and content with their traditional beliefs, you should also get suspicious whenever you see a consensus that progress has been achieved on some issue, both normatively and factually, where however the factual part is not supported by strict hard-scientific evidence and there is a high degree of normative/factual entanglement.
This sounds like an interesting idea to me, and I hope it winds up in whatever fuller exposition of your ideas you end up posting.
Yeah, looks good! I would like to see a top-level article on this, and I think fruit X would be a good example to start with.
If the issue is how to fight back against these problems, I bet you could make a lot of headway by first establishing a bit of credibility as an X-eater, and then making your claims while being clear that you are not nostalgic. E.g. eat an X fruit on TV while you are on a talk show explaining that X fruit isn't healthy in the long run. "I'm not [munch] a religious bigot, [crunch], I just think there might [slurp] be some poisonous chemicals [crunch] in this fruit and that we should run a few studies to [nibble] find out."
Humor helps, as does theater.
My immediate reaction to reading this was that it was obvious that the particular hot-button issue that inspired it was the recent PUA debate... but I notice nobody else seems to have picked up on that, so now I'm wondering... was that what you had in mind, or am I just being self-obsessed?
(don't worry, I'm not itching to restart that issue, I'm just curious about whether or not I'm imagining things)
ETA: Ok, after reading the rest of the comments more thoroughly, I guess I'm not the only person who figured that was your inspiration.
Personally, I would suggest you use the concrete examples, rather than abstract or hypothetical 'poison-fruit' kind of stories - those things never seem to be effective intuition pumps (for me at least). If you want to avoid the mind-killing effect of a hot-button issue, I think a better idea is just to use multiple concrete examples, and to choose them such that any given person is unlikely to have the same opinion on both of them.
Antibiotics. The common wisdom is, that we use them too much. Might be, that the opposite is true. A more massive poisoning of pathogens with antibiotics could push them over the edge, to the oblivion. This way, when we use the antibiotics reluctantly, we give them a chance to adapt and to flourish.
It just might be.
Do you have a citation for that?
As far as I understand it, when giving antibiotics to a specific patient, doctors often follow your advice - they give them in overwhelming force to eradicate the bacteria completely. For example, they'll often give several different antibiotics so that bacteria that develop resistance to one are killed off by the others before they can spread. Side effects and cost limit how many antibiotics you give to one patient, but in principle people aren't deliberately scrimping on the antibiotics in an individual context.
The "give as few antibiotics as possible" rule mostly applies to giving them to as few patients as possible. If there's a patient who seems likely to get better on their own without drugs, then giving the patient antibiotics just gives the bacteria a chance to become resistant to antibiotics, and then you start getting a bunch of patients infected with multiple-drug-resistant bacteria.
The idea of eradicating entire species of bacteria is mostly a pipe dream. Unlike strains of virus that have been successfully eradicated, like smallpox, most pathogenic bacteria have huge bio-reservoirs in water or air or soil or animals or on the skin of healthy humans. So the best we can hope to do is eradicate them in individual patients.
This is one example. Maybe as free as the aspirin antibiotics would do here:
Link
All serious cases of stomach/duodenal ulcer are already tested for h. pylori and treated with several different antibiotics if found positive.
I know. But not long ago, nobody expected that a bacteria is to blame. On the contrary! It was postulated, that no bacteria could possibly survive the stomach environment.
So what are you suggesting with that example? That we should pre-emptively treat all diseases with antibiotics just in case bacteria are to blame?
Since I'm going to be a dad soon, I started a blog on parenting from a rationalist perspective, where I jot down notes on interesting info when I find it.
I'd like to focus on "practical advice backed by deep theories". I'm open to suggestions on resources, recommended articles, etc. Some of the topics could probably make good discussions on LessWrong!
Dale McGowan of Parenting Beyond Belief is one resource that I know of. He has a blog (sample posts i and ii), a book Raising Freethinkers (see also the posts about the book on his blog), and links to other resources including an online discussion forum and various secular parenting groups around the United States.
Thanks; I knew about the blog but didn't know about the forum, which probably has some quite good resources.
I guess I have a different focus than he does : I'm not interested in religion or the lack thereof, but rather in learning about the best way to raise kids, and how to navigate through the conflicting advice of various experts and peers. I'm not interested in "how do I help my kids find meaning in a Universe without God" as much as "how can I best help my kids become well-balanced open minded productive intelligent and well-prepared adults and not spoiled whiny brats".
Also - I live in France, which is already plenty secular. That probably explains why religion isn't a very big issue. My parents (atheists) didn't pay much attention to religion, neither did my wife, religion never was much of a conversation topic at school, and I expect the same will go for my kids.
Wow, you French are open minded :).
Edited :)
Typo notwithstanding, all but one of those "wives" could have been an ex-wife.
It seems as though you think the primary risk is being too permissive, with no significant risk of being too harsh. Is it plausible that all the risk is in one direction?
No -- where did I give that impression?
On re-reading, I think that "well-balanced open minded" implies that you are concerned with being too strict as well as being too permissive, but my attention was caught by the higher emotion level of the last clause.
Also, it was just a one-sentence summary of why religion wasn't my main concern when talking about "rational parenting", you shouldn't read too much into it :)
Maybe the time's ripe for a meetup here? There's at least four of us in or near Paris, and if we announce one others might delurk.
Back on-topic, I'm not sure what-all I can say about parenting, but having 3 I'm pretty sure I've made a bunch of mistakes that others can benefit from. ;)
Seconding Dale's work.
I wrote up a post yesterday, but I found I was unable to post it, except as a draft, since I lack the necessary karma. I thought it might be an interesting thing to discuss, however, since lots of folks here have deeper knowledge than I do about markets and game theory
<snip>
I've been working recently for an auction house that deals in things like fine art, etc. I've noticed, by observing many auctions, that certain behaviors are pretty reliable, and I wonder if the system isn't "game-able" to produce more desirable outcomes for the different parties involved.
I think Less Wrong readers might have some interesting insights into the situation. Hopefully, at the least, it's an interesting thing to think about for a few minutes. Feel free to point out if this is well-worn territory; in fact, any feedback is welcome.
Structure of the game:
We have objects consigned with us. We have our experts evaluate the objects, and provide an estimate of their value, based on previous auction outcomes for similar objects and their own expertise. So, for instance, a piece of furniture may be estimated to bring a value of $400-$800, a particular painting might be estimated to bring $10,000-$20,000, and so forth. While not "arbitrary", they are to some degree simply good guesses.
We publish a catalog before the auction, listing the items up for sale along with their estimated values. A minimum bid is set, usually half of the low estimate.
The auction proceeds following bidding increments, which vary from one price bracket to another. So, for instance, between $100 and $200, the bidding increments are $10 -- so, $100, $110, $120, etc. Between, say, $10,000 and $20,000 however, the bidding increments are $1000 -- $10,000; $11,000; $12,000 and so forth.
Regardless of what bracket the prices fall into, there are several tendencies that happen frequently:
-- Bidders will readily bid on items they want which still have an asking price of below the low estimate. They feel like they're getting a bargain. -- Bidding will slow between the low estimate and the high estimate. Here, they're really relying on the estimate for their idea of whether or not the deal is so good. -- Bidders become much more reticent about continuing to bid once the price reaches or exceeds the high estimate.
-- "Bidding wars" are more likely to the degree to which bidders feel they still have room to get a "good deal"
It seems to me that it is advantageous (in terms of maximizing the final price paid for an item) to have MORE bidding increments between the low and high estimates than it is to have fewer. That is to say --
I would expect more bids on an item which has an estimate between $200-$400, where there are 20 bid increments between the low estimate and the high estimate, than I would expect on an item estimated to sell between $10,000 and $15,000, which only has five bidding increments between the low and the high.
Now, naturally, some of that has to do with the fact that the lower-priced item is affordable to more bidders. It's also worth noting that increasing the bid increments makes sure that the auction itself doesn't take forever to complete (the higher increments cause bidders to drop out faster, regardless of the number of increments.
So, all this in mind, it seems plausible to me that we could marginally improve the prices being paid for our larger value objects in one of two ways:
-- Increase the granularity of the bidding increments at higher values -- Provide low estimates that allow for a larger number of bidding increments (instead of saying, "the estimate is $15,000-$20,000" we could say, "the estimate is $10,000 - $20,000")
It seems tricky to figure out whether the strategy works, though. After all, each of these objects is unique; it's not like shares of stock or pork bellies or something, where you have a whole bunch of the same stuff and the market is setting a price.
My questions for you all then: -- Is my thinking on this subject sound? -- Do you think that the number of bidding increments available to bidders can affect their behavior in the way I've outlined (am I right?) -- Assume we implement one of the two strategies for maximizing the prices paid. Is there any reliable way to measure the outcome to see if it worked?
If we assume that the appraisals are disconnected from the winning bids*, then couldn't one just see whether the ratio of sale:appraisal is increasing? If the appraisals are honest, then any jiggery-pokery should alter the ratio - eg. a successful manipulation will lead to people paying an average 93%, where they used to pay 90%.
Make sure you're asking yourself, "what experiment would disprove my hypothesis?" You have several hypotheses in there which might not be optimal.
Amazing videos, both in presentation and content.
Drive: on how money can be a bad motivator, and what leads to better productivity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Smile or die: on 'positive thinking'
http://www.youtube.com/user/theRSAorg#p/a/u/1/u5um8QWWRvo
Thanks! Voted up.
I'm doing an MSc in Computer Forensics and have stumbled into doing a large project using Bayesian reasoning for guessing at what data is (machine code, ascii, C code, HTML etc). This has caused me to think again about what problems you encounter when trying to actually apply bayesian reasoning to large problems.
I'll probably cover this in my write up; are people interested in it? The math won't be anything special, but a concrete problem might show the problems better than abstract reasoning,
It also could serve as a precursor to some vaguely AI-ish topics I am interested in. More insect and simple creature stuff than full human level though.
I'm interested, and I suspect it relates to a question I'm a little interested in.
If a computer has to sort a big wad of data, how can it identify whether some of it is already sorted?
We developed the solution, in fact we evolved it.
Here is the source code in C++.
Partially or segmentally ordered arrays are not sorted again at all.
I'd be fascinated for both theoretical and practical reasons--I'm a network security guy by day, so I'm frequently looking at incomplete binary data captured between transient ports and wondering what it is.
A little over the top:
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-05/new-software-can-assemble-army-overnight-making-human-bosses-obsolete
"Science Saturday: The Great Singularity Debate"
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Massimo Pigliucci
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/28165
What a strange debate that was! I was very surprised to find Pigliucci arguing, inter alia, that intelligence/consciousness might have to be implemented on carbon atoms in order to work.
And then he came out with the trope whereby the spirit of the AI machine looks, from outside itself, at its goals and spontaneously decides to change them.
He is a very interesting thinker usually, but he seemed very naive in this particular area.
The case for carbon atoms is pretty weak.
However, we can imagine some types of organic molecule have a mini giga-computer on board - their design encoded in the constants of nature, and that their dynamics can be tapped by trapping the vibrating molecule in an organic matrix.
Then carbon-based computers would have access to the giga-computer - while silicon-based ones would not - and would therefore work enormously more slowly.
This is a feeble case - but not a totally ridiculous one. Enthusiasts for non-computable physical processes play up this kind of possibility even further.
Okay, I think I get you. Maybe there could be some substrates that allow much faster processing than others (orders of magnitude); this would make the substrate an important engineering issue. Is that what you're saying?
But we are in the lofty realm of "in principle" here. If I can just imagine a computer - as big as the universe if you like - that simulates Massimo Pigliucci plus inputs and outputs on silicon or germanium or whatever you want, then intelligence/consciousness is not substrate dependent (again in principle). I think this is the case, the alternative being that there is something especially consciousnessy about carbon chemistry, which seems awfully dubious.
Yes, kinda. There are also the possibilities of novel types of computation being involved. We know about quantum computers. They can't do things classical computers can't do - but they can do them faster - in some cases MUCH faster. Maybe there are other types of computation - besides classical computation and quantum computation that we have yet to discover. Quantum computation was only discovered relatively recently - so maybe the future holds other possibilities. Gateways to oracles, etc.
It doesn't look as though the brain is anything other than a classical neural network - which could fairly-obviously be ported onto silicon - if we had fast enough silicon. However, there is at least some room for doubt on this point.
I think Pigliucci is somewhat hung up on the technicality of whether a computer system can instantiate an (a) intelligence or (b) a human intelligence. Clearly he is gravely skeptical that it could be a human intelligence. But he seems to conflate or interchange this skepticism with his skepticism in a general computer intelligence. I don't think anybody really thinks an AI will be exactly like a human, so I'm not that impressed by these distinctions. Whereas it seems like Pigliucci thinks that's one of the main talking points? I wish Pigliucci read these comments so we could talk to him... are you out there Massimo?
Wired has an article 'Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up,' about how scientists and the brain handle unexpected data and anomalies, and our preference to ignore them or explain them away.
From an article about the athletes' brains:
Unsurprisingly, most of the article is about elite athlete's brains being more efficient in using their skills and better at making predictions about playing, but then....
I wonder whether there are similar brain differences between top mathematicians and everyone else, and if such a simple method could make people better at math.
Martin Gardner died today.
So long, and thanks for all the ahas.
So, I just had a strange sort of akrasia problem.
I was doing my evening routine, getting washed up and stuff in preparation for going to bed. Earlier in the evening, I had read P.J. Eby's The Hidden Meaning of "Just Do It", and so I decided I would "just do" this routine, i.e. simply avoid doing anything else, and watch the actions of the routine unfold in front of me. So, I used the toilet, and began washing my hands, when it occurred to me that if I do not interfere, I will never stop rinsing my hands. I did not interfere, however, and sure enough, I ended up just standing there, with my hands resting limply under the running water, doing nothing. My mind went over what I needed to do next, in various levels of detail; after a minute or two of this, I realized that I was leaning on my elbows, forming a triangle shape which prevented me from moving my hands out of the flow of the water. Once I realized this, I was able to stand up straight, freeing my hands to go on to the next task.
(Instead of doing that, however, I came downstairs to write about it on Less Wrong. But that's another story.)
Why did it take me so long to figure out what I needed to do next in order to continue the routine non-forcefully?
Had you recently eaten any brownies of unknown origin?
Possibly because you'd partially knocked out your ability to make choices.
Mercifully, you didn't have the ability to make very deep changes. There are advantages to not being software.
The ability to change all aspects of oneself is not a property of software. Software can easily be made completely unable, partially able, or completely able to modify itself.
Fair enough, though evolved beings (which could include software) are probably less likely to be able to break themselves than designed beings capable of useful self-modification.
You know, you could say that software often has two parts: a crystalline part and a fluid part. Programs usually consist mostly of crystalline aspects: if I took a mathematical proof verifier and tweaked its axioms, even only a tiny bit, it would probably break completely. However, they often contain fluid aspects as well, such as the frequency at which the garbage collector should run, or eagerness to try a particular strategy over its alternative. If you change a fluid aspect of a program by a small amount, the program's behavior might get a bit worse, but it definitely won't end up being clobbered.
I've always thought that we should design Friendly AI like this. Only give it control over the fluid parts of itself, the parts of itself it can modify all it wants without damaging its (self-)honesty. Make the fluid parts powerful enough that if an insight occurs, the insight can be incorporated into the AI's behavior somehow.
WRT some recent posts on consciousness, mostly by Academician, eg "There must be something more":
There are 3 popular stances on consciousness:
Consciousness is spiritual, non-physical.
Consciousness can be explained by materialism.
Consciousness does not exist. (How I characterize the Dennett position.)
Suppose you provide a complete, materialistic account of how a human behaves, that explains every detail of how sensory stimuli are translated into beliefs and actions. A person holding position 2 will say, "Okay, but you still need to explain consciousness." A person holding position 3 denies that there's anything more to be explained.
I've found these posts perplexing, and I think this is why: What's happening is that someone who holds position 3 is arguing against position 2 by characterizing it as position 1.
Do you see the symmetry of this situation? A Dennettian sees people who (by their lights) hold position (1), arguing against (2) (which they take to be their own) by characterising it as (3).
So, is AlephNeil pegging Academician as an advocate of (2) and PhilGoetz pegging A. as an advocate of (3)? But a non-Dennettian like me can admit that Dennett is in camp (2), just not a rich enough variant of (2).
There's an orthogonal distinction, which is whether one believes that it is possible to produce a complete materialistic account of behavior that does not explain consciousness. (IIRC EY has said "no" to this question in the past.) If the answer truly is "no", then (2) and (3) above would collapse into the same position, given enough knowledge.
I think I'm getting sidetracked... The problem with (3) is that it doesn't allow you to /try/ to explain consciousness, and criticizes anyone in camp (2) who tries to explain consciousness as being in camp (1). Camp (3) are people, like Dennett, who think there's no use trying to explain how qualia arise from material causes; we should just ignore them. As long as we can compute the output behavior from the input (they would presumably say), we understand everything material there is to understand; therefore, trying to understand anything else is non-materialism.
Help me here. What is it about qualia that has to be explained before there can be at least an outline theory of what consciousness is? Is it what they are? Is it where they are stored? Is it how they are selected? Is it how they get bound to an object? Is it how real they seem? Is it how they are sometimes inappropriate?
So we can't answer those questions today. But we probably can in the next decade. And it would be a lot easier to find answers if we had a idea of how consciousness worked and more exactly what it does and why. We are closer to answering those questions.
Taboo consciousness before you file Dennett, please.
I find your reading of these posts perplexing. I do not know of anyone who believes that consciousness does not exist and certainly not Dennett. 'Explaining how every detail of how sensory stimuli are translated into beliefs and actions' has very little to due with consciousness. Explaining how we are aware of sensory stimuli and beliefs and actions is what consciousness is about. It is not thought - it is awareness of thought. It is also about how we remember experience.
If you want to understand how someone can hold the positions they do, you will have to understand that they are not confusing cognition, action or perception with consciousness. Consciousness has to do with being aware of some of your cognition, action and perception.
This does not mean that consciousness is unimportant, it is extremely important.
I agree that Dennett does not explain consciousness by explaining cognition, action and perception in "Consciousness Explained". I, too, was a little disappointed in the title but it was written almost 20 years ago. 20 years ago the neuroscience revolution was just starting.
Does inverse of fundamental attribution error have a good name?
I don't think there's a standard name for it. I'd go with "bias towards situational attributions."
Is that a bias that exists? Does it exist in the same people as fundamental attribution error? Can they both function simultaneously?
Let's suppose Church-Turing thesis is true.
Are all mathematical problems solvable?
Are they all solvable to humans?
If there is a proof* for every true theorem, then we need only to enumerate all possible texts and look for one that proves - or disproves - say, Goldbach's conjecture. The procedure will stop every time.
(* Proof not in the sense of "formal proof in a specific system", but "a text understandable by a human as a proof".)
But this can't possibly be right - if the human mind that looks at the proofs is Turing-computable, then we've just solved the Halting Problem - after all, we can pose the halting of any Turing machine as a mathematical problem.
So what does that mean?
You can also extend the question to any human-made AIs/posthuman minds, but this doesn't help much - if the one looking at proofs can reliably self-improve, then the Halting Problem would still be solved.
EDIT: A longer explanation of the problem, by a friend.
Alas, both of those are correct.
Read about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, preferably from Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. As for the specific example of Goldbach's conjecture, I'd bet on it being provable (or if it is false, the procedure would prove that by finding a counterexample), but yes, there are true facts of number theory that cannot be proven.
Next, if I remember correctly, theorem-proving programs have already produced correct proofs that are easily machine-verifiable but intractably long and complicated and apparently meaningless to humans.
I read GEB. Doesn't Gödel's theorem talk about proofs in specific formal systems?
I consider this a question of scale. Besides, the theorem-proving program is written by humans and humans understand (and agree with) its correctness, so in some sense humans understand the correct proofs.
It applies to any formal system capable of proving theorems of number theory.
But then what do you mean by "possible to follow by a human"?
Right. So if humans reasoning follows some specified formal system, they can't prove it. But does it really follow one?
We can't, for example, point to some Turing machine and say "It halts because of (...), but I can't prove it" - because in doing so we're already providing some sort of reasoning.
Maybe "it's possible for a human, given enough time and resources, to verify validity of such proof".
Yes and no. It is likely that the brain, as a physical system, can be modeled by a formal system, but "the human brain is isomorphic to a formal system" does not imply "a human's knowledge of some fact is isomorphic to a formal proof". What human brains do (and, most likely, what an advanced AI would do) is approximate empirical reasoning, i.e. Bayesian reasoning, even in its acquisition of knowledge about mathematical truths. If you have P(X) = 1 then you have X = true, but you can't get to P(X) = 1 through empirical reasoning, including by looking at a proof on a sheet of paper and thinking that it looks right. Even if you check it really really carefully. (All reasoning must have some empirical component.) Most likely, there is no structure in your brain that is isomorphic to a proof that 1 + 1 = 2, but you still know and use that fact.
So we (and AIs) can use intelligent reasoning about formal systems (not reasoning that looks like formal deduction from the inside) to come to very high or very low probability estimates for certain formally undecidable statements, as this does not need to be isomorphic to any impossible proofs in any actual formal system. This just doesn't count as "solving the halting problem" (any more than Gödel's ability to identify certain unprovable statements as true in the first place refutes his own theorem), because a solution to the halting problem must be at the level of formal proof, not of empirical reasoning; the latter is necessarily imprecise and probabilistic. Unless you think that a human "given enough time and resources" could literally always get an answer and always be right, a human cannot be a true halting oracle, even if they can correctly assign a very high or very low probability to some formally undecidable statements.
I'll have to think some more about it, but this looks like a correct answer. Thank you.
I myself will have to recheck this in the morning, as it's 4:30 AM here and I am suspicious of philosophical reasoning I do while tired, but I'll probably still agree with it tomorrow since I mostly copied that (with a bit of elaboration) from something I had already written elsewhere. :)
Comments:
(1) Empirical vs Non-empirical is, I think, a bit of a red herring because insofar as empirical data (e.g. the output of a computer program) bears on mathematical questions, what we glean from it could all, in principle, have been deduced 'a priori' (i.e. entirely in the thinker's mind, without any sensory engagement with the world.)
(2) You ought to read about Chaitin's constant 'Omega', the 'halting probability', which is a number between 0 and 1.
I think we should be able to prove something along these lines: Assume that there is a constant K such that your "mental state" does not contain more than K bits of information (this seems horribly vague, but if we assume that the mind's information is contained in the body's information then we just need to assume that your body never requires more than K bits to 'write down').
Then it is impossible for you to 'compress' the binary expansion of Omega by more than K + L bits, for some constant L (the same L for all possible intelligent beings.)
This puts some very severe limits on how closely your 'subjective probabilities' for the bits of Omega can approach the real thing. For instance, either there must be only finitely many bits b where your subjective probability that b = 0 differs from 1/2, or else, if you guess something other than 1/2 infinitely many times, you must 'guess wrongly' exactly 1/2 of the time (with the pattern of correct and incorrect guesses being itself totally random).
Basically, it sounds like you're saying: "If we're prepared to let go of the demand to have strict, formal proofs, we can still acquire empirical evidence, even very convincing evidence, about the truth or falsity of mathematical statements." This may be true in some cases, but there are others (like the bits of Omega) where we find mathematical facts (expressible as propositions of number theory) that are completely inaccessible by any means. (And in some way that I'm not quite sure yet how to express, I suspect that the 'gap' between the limits of 'formal proof' and 'empirical reasoning' is insignificant compared to the vast 'terra incognita' that lies beyond both.)
Well written— maybe this deserves a full post, even granted that the posts you linked are very near in concept-space.
Perhaps. But would it be controversial or novel enough to warrant one? I'd think that most people here 1) already don't believe that the human mind is more powerful than a universal Turing machine or a formal system, and 2) could correctly refute this type of argument, if they thought about it. Am I wrong about either of those (probably #2 if anything)? Or, perhaps, have sufficiently few people thought about it that bringing it up as a thought exercise (presenting the argument and encouraging people to evaluate it for themselves before looking at anyone else's take) would be worthwhile, even if it doesn't generally result in people changing their minds about anything?
You're probably right about both, but I would still enjoy reading such a post.
It would be to some extent redundant with the posts you linked, but the specific point about the difference between human reasoning and formal reasoning is a new one to this blog. I, too, would be interested in reading it.
I think it could turn out really well if written with the relatively new lurkers in mind, and it does include a new idea that takes a few paragraphs to spell out well. That says "top-level" to me.
I also believe there are true things about the material universe which people are intrinsically unable to comprehend-- aspects so complex that they can't be broken down into few or small enough chunks for people to fit it into their minds.
This isn't the same thing as chaos theory-- I'm suggesting that there are aspects of the universe which are as explicable as Newtonian mechanics-- except that we, even with our best tools and with improved brains, won't be able to understand them.
This is obviously unprovable (and I don't think it can be proved that any particular thing is unmanageably complex*), but considering how much bigger the universe is than human brains, I think it's the way to bet.
*Ever since it was proven that arbitrary digits of pi can be computed (afaik, only in binary) without computing the preceding digits, I don't think I can trust my intuition about what tasks are possible.
Is that really a 'physical' aspect, or a mathematical one? Newtonian mechanics can be (I think) derived from lower level principles.
So do you mean something that is a consequence of possible 'theory of everything', or a part of it?
I'm not dead certain whether "physical" and "mathematical" can be completely disentangled. I'm assuming that gravity following an inverse square law is just a fact which couldn't be deduced from first principles.
I'm not sure what "theory of everything" covers. I thought it represented the hope that a fundamental general theory would be simple enough that at least a few people could understand it.
Theory of everything as I see it (and apparently Wikipedia agrees ) would allow us (in principle - given full information and enough resources) to predict every outcome. So every other aspect of physical universe would be (again, in principle) derivable from it.
I think I'm saying that there will be parts of a theory of everything which just won't compress small enough to fit into human minds, not just that the consequences of a TOE will be too hard to compute.
Do you think a theory of everything is possible?
I think a relatively simple theory of everything is possible. This is however not based on anything solid - I'm a Math/CS student and my knowledge of physics does not (yet!) exceed high school level.
Parts that won't compress? Almost certainly, the expansions of small parts of a system can have much higher Kolmogorov complexity than the entire theory of everything.
The Tegmark IV multiverse is so big that a human brain can't comprehend nearly any of it, but the theory as a whole can be written with four words: "All mathematical structures exist". In terms of Kolmogorov complexity, it doesn't get much simpler than those four words.
For anyone reading this that hasn't read any of Tegmark's writing, you should. http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/crazy.html Tegmark is one of the best popular science writers out there, so the popular versions he has posted aren't dumbed down, they are just missing most of the math.
Tegmark predicts that in 50 years you will be able to buy a t-shirt with the theory of everything printed on it.
To be fair, every one of those words is hiding a substantial amount of complexity. Not as much hidden complexity as "A wizard did it" (even shorter!), but still.
(I do still find the Level IV Multiverse plausible, and it is probably the most parsimonious explanation of why the universe happens to exist; I only mean to say that to convey a real understanding of it still takes a bit more than four words.)
What are the Tegmark multiverses relevant to? Why should I try to understand them?
Actually, I'm quite unclear about what the statement "All mathematical structures exist" could mean, so I have a hard time evaluating its Kolmogorov complexity. I mean, what does it mean to say that a mathematical structure exists, over and above the assertion that the mathematical structure was, in some sense, available for its existence to be considered in the first place?
ETA: When I try to think about how I would fully flesh out the hypothesis that "All mathematical structures exist", all I can imagine is that you would have the source code for program that recursively generates all mathematical structures, together with the source code of a second program that applies the tag "exists" to all the outputs of the first program.
Two immediate problems:
(1) To say that we can recursively generate all mathematical structures is to say that the collection of all mathematical structures is denumerable. Maintaining this position runs into complications, to say the least.
(2) More to the point that I was making above, nothing significant really follows from applying the tag "exists" to things. You would have functionally the same overall program if you applied the tag "is blue" to all the outputs of the first program instead. You aren't really saying anything just by applying arbitrary tags to things. But what else are you going to do?
Really? In which parallel universe? Every one? This one?
This one.
You can deduce it from the fact that that space is three-dimensional (consider an illustrative diagram), but why space should be three-dimensional, I can't say.
That's a plausible argument. A priori, one could have a three-dimensional world with some other inverse law, and it would be mathematically consistent. It would just be weird (and would rule out a lot simple causation mechanisms for the force.)
Well, we do inhabit a three-dimensional world in which the inverse-square law holds only approximately, and when a more accurate theory was arrived upon, it turned out to be weird and anything but simple.
Interestingly, when the perihelion precession of Mercury turned out be an unsolvable problem for Newton's theory, there were serious proposals to reconsider whether the exponent in Newton's law might perhaps be not exactly two, but some other close number:
Of course, in the sort of space that general relativity deals with, our Euclidean intuitive concept of "distance" completely breaks down, and r itself is no longer an automatically clear concept. There are actually several different general-relativistic definitions of "spatial distance" that all make some practical sense and correspond to our intuitive concept in the classical limit, but yield completely different numbers in situations where Euclidean/Newtonian approximations no longer hold.
Also, I don't know if there's any a priori reason for gravity.
It may actually be derivable anthropically: exponents other than 2 or 1 prohibit stable orbits, and an exponent of 1, as Zack says, implies 2-dimensional space, which might be too simple for observers.
Not just in binary.
Picture an enormous polynomial f(x, y, ...) with integer coefficients: something like 3x^2 - 6y + 5 but bigger. Now, if the Diophantine equation f(x, y, ...) = 0 has a solution then this can easily be proved - you just have to plug in the numbers and calculate the result. (Even if you're not told the numbers in advance, you can iterate over all possible arguments and still prove the result in a finite time.)
But now suppose that this particular f doesn't have any solutions. (Think about whether you want to deny that the previous sentence is meaningful - personally I think it is).
Can we necessarily prove it doesn't have any solutions? Well, there's no algorithm that can correctly decide whether f has a solution for all Diophantine equations f. (See "Hilbert's Tenth Problem".) So certainly there exists an f, without any solutions, such that "f has no solutions" is not a theorem of (say) ZFC set theory. (Because for any formal axiomatic system, one can write down an algorithm that will enumerate all of its theorems.)
Perhaps, like Roger Penrose, you think that human mathematicians have some magical non-algorithmic 'truth-seeing' capability. Unfortunately, human thought being non-algorithmic would require that physics itself be uncomputable i.e. an accurate computer simulation of a brain solving a mathematical problem would be impossible even in principle. Otherwise, you must conclude that some theorems of the form "this Diophantine equation has no solutions" are not humanly provable.
I think that Eliezer's post, Complexity and Intelligence, is really germane to your query.
Here's a thought experiment, just for fun:
Let's say, for simplicity's sake, that your mind (and environment) is currently being run on some Turing machine T, which had initial state S. What if you considered the sentence G, which is a Gödel-encoded statement that "if you run T on S, it will never contain an instance of humpolec rationally concluding that G is a theorem"? (Of course, specifying that predicate would be a beastly problem, but in theory it's a finite mathematical specification.)
You would therefore be actually unable to rationally conclude that G is a theorem, and of course it would thereby be a true, finitely specifiable mathematical statement.
It's up to you, of course, which bullets you choose to bite in response to this.
Nope. Not if physics is computable.
Nope. Not if human minds are computable.
It means exactly that your Turing machine enumerating all possible texts may never halt. What does it mean in terms of the validity of the theorem? Nothing. The truth value of that theorem may be forever inaccessible to us without appeal to a more powerful axiomatic system or without access to a hypercomputer.
You seem to be somewhat confused about the basic notions of computability and Goedel's incompleteness results and their mutual connection. Besides the replies you've received in this thread, I'd recommend that you read through this lecture by Scott Aaronson, which is, out of anything I've seen so far, the clearest and most accessible brief exposition of these issues that is still fully accurate and free of nonsense:
http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec3.html
One thing I haven't elaborated on here (and probably more hand-waving/philosophy than mathematics):
If Church-Turing thesis is true, there is no way for a human to prove any mathematical problem. However, does it have to follow that not every theorem has a proof?
What if every true theorem has a proof, not necessarily understandable to humans, yet somehow sound? That is, there exists a (Turing-computable) mind that can understand/verify this proof.
(Of course there is no one 'universal mind' that would understand all proofs, or this would obviously fail. And for the same reason there can be no procedure of finding such a mind/verifying one is right.)
Does the idea of not-universally-comprehensible proofs make sense? Or does it collapse in some way?
Gawande on checklists and medicine
Checklists are literally life-savers in ICUs-- there's just too much crucial which needs to be done, and too many interruptions, to avoid serious mistakes without offloading some of the work of memory onto an system.
However, checklists are low status.
I suggest that the problem starts earlier than rock-starism. Conventional schooling still tests on memory, and I think there's a leftover effect that one ought to be able to remember the basics, or be shown to be an inferior sort of person.
Sidetrack into science fiction: Varley's Eight Worlds stories have it that medicine has become so advanced and routinized that it's a low status occupation for people who want to work with their hands. When I read the stories, I wondered if he was getting a little indirect revenge on doctors. I do wonder what it could take for that to happen to medicine. Anyone have histories of de-professionalization in any field?
There's also a book: The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right:
Journalism, ongoing, according to some. Clay Shirky's book Here comes everybody makes an interesting link between this process and Ronald Coase's theory of the firm.
Surely not intrisically. Think of astronauts' checklists.
Suggestion: instead of "low status" as an explanation for why people do or don't do something, look for something closer to the specific domain. (Is it possible that doctors' practice is much influenced by media portrayal of how doctors behave? By expectations of their "customers"?)
Morendil:
Astronauts are soldiers. Unlike doctors, soldiers have a huge incentive not to let their beliefs depart too far from reality because of status or any other considerations, for the simple reason that it may easily cause them personally, and not just someone else, to get killed or maimed. Thus, military culture is extremely practice-oriented. Due to their universal usefulness, checklist-driven procedures are a large part of it, and having to participate in them is not considered demeaning, even for super-high-status soldiers like fighter pilots. Eventually, strict rule-driven procedures associated with the military often even develop a cool factor of their own (consider launch or takeoff scenes from war action movies).
Of course, soldiers who lack such incentives will, like WW1 generals, quickly develop usual human delusions driven by status dynamics. But astronauts are clearly not in that category.
So your narrative is "checklists fail to take root because they are low-status, except where their being a serious matter for the people who use them (not just bystanders) causes them to be accepted, and in one such case they gain high status for extraneous reasons".
Why, then, isn't the rising cost of malpractice insurance enough to drive acceptance of checklists? What does it take to overcome an initial low-status perception? How do we even explain such perception in the first place?
The people who decide malpractice suits are likely to be more sympathetic to pleas of having used one's judgment and experience but making a mistake, over having used a rigid set of rules from which one did not deviate even as the patient took a turn for the worse.
Morendil:
My understanding is that the present (U.S.) system of malpractice lawsuits and insurance doesn't leave much incentive for extraordinary caution by individual doctors. Once you've paid your malpractice insurance, which you have to do in any case, you're OK as long as your screwups aren't particularly extreme by the usual standards. Moreover, members of the profession hold their ranks together very tightly, and will give up on you only in cases of extremely reckless misbehavior. They know that unlike their public image, they are in fact mere humans, and any one of them might find himself in the same trouble due to some stupid screwup tomorrow. And to establish a malpractice claim, you need not only be smart enough to figure out that they've done something bad to you, but also get expert testimony from distinguished members of the profession to agree with you.
I am not very knowledgeable about this topic, though, so please take this as my impression based on anecdotal data and incomplete exposure to the relevant literature. It would be interesting if someone more knowledgeable is available to comment.
I'd say that in a sense, it's a collective action problem. The pre-flight checks done by fighter pilots (and even to some extent by ordinary pilots) are perceived as cool-looking rituals, and not a status-lowering activity at all, because these procedures have come to be associated with the jobs of high-status individuals. Similarly, if there was a cool-looking checklist procedure done by those doctors on TV shows, presented as something that is only a necessary overture for acts of brilliance and heroism, and automatically associated with doctors in the popular mind, it would come to be perceived as a cool high-status thing. But as it is, in the present state of affairs, it comes off as a status-lowering imposition on people whose jobs are supposed to be one hundred percent about brilliance and heroism.
Also, there is the problem of the doctor-nurse status disparity. Pilots, despite having much higher status, don't look down on their mechanics much; after all, they have to literally trust them with their lives. (And it's similar for other military examples too.) Not so for doctors; it is probably a humiliating experience for them to be effectively supervised and rebuked for errors by nurses. (Again, I'm not an insider in the profession, so this is just my best guess based on the available information.)
The above cited article answers that question almost directly: the idea that typical doctors are doing such a lousy job that they would benefit from a simple checklist to avoid forgetting trivial routine things contradicts the very source of their high status, namely the public perception of them as individuals of extraordinary character and intellectual abilities, completely unlike us ordinary folks who screw things up all the time by stupidly forgetting some simple detail. The author, as I noted earlier, feels the need to disclaim such implications to avoid sounding too radical and offensive. Medicine has been a subject of magical thinking in every human culture, and ours is no exception.
Yes, there is a powerful irrational status-driven reaction against the idea that something so rudimentary as checklists could improve the work of people who are a subject of high status reverence and magical thinking. Note how even in this article, the author feels the need for pious disclaimers, denying emphatically in the part you quoted that this finding presents any evidence against the heroic qualities of character and intellect that the general public ascribes to doctors.
Of course, the fact that this method dramatically inverts the status hierarchy by letting nurses effectively supervise doctors doesn't help either. In our culture, when it comes to immense status differences between people who work closely together, relations between doctors and nurses are probably comparable only to those between commissioned officers and ordinary soldiers. I don't think such a wide chasm separates even household servants from their employers.
This reminds me of the historical case of Ignaz Semmelweis, who figured out in mid-19th century, before Pasteur and the germ theory of disease, that doctors could avoid killing lots of their patients simply by washing their hands in disinfectant before operations. The reaction of the medical establishment was unsurprising by the usual rules of human status dynamics -- his ideas were scornfully rejected as silly and arrogant pseudoscience. What effrontery to suggest that the august medical profession has been massively killing people by failing to implement such a simple measure! Poor Semmelweis, scorned, ostracized, and depressed, turned to alcoholism and eventually died in an insane asylum. Hand-washing yesterday, checklists today.
Would anyone be interested if we were to have more regular LW meetups around the East Bay or San Francisco areas? We probably wouldn't have the benefit of the SIAIfolks' company in that case, but having the meetups at a location easily accessible by BART may help increase the number of people from the surrounding area who can attend. (Also, I hear that preparing for and hosting meetups at Benton can be somewhat taxing on the people who work there, so having them at restaurants will allow us to do it more frequently, if there is demand for such.)
Buddha: The quintessential rational mind
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2010/05/23/stories/2010052350210600.htm
Has anybody else thought that the Inverse Ninja Law is just the Bystander Effect in disguise?
(Yes, I've been reading this.)
The Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) convened a "Presidential Panel on Long-Term AI Futures". Read their August 2009 Interim Report from the Panel Chairs:
Don't know how we missed this when it happened; I learned about this from the Hacker News thread. I've yet to find anything they've put out to justify this position.
Reference
Ooh, speaking of Harry Potter and the Methods, someone totally needs to write an Atlas Shrugged fanfic in which some of the characters are actually good at achieving true beliefs instead of just paying lip service to "rationality." If I had more time, I'd call it ... Dagny Taggart and the Logic of Science.
Eliezer seems to have gone dark lately. Anybody know what he's up to?
Apparently working full-time on his rationality book, while occasionally fighting writer's block by producing chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
Nick Bostrom has posted a PDF of his Anthropic Bias book: http://www.anthropic-principle.com/book/anthropicbias.html
As someone who read it years ago when you had to ILL or buy it, I'm very pleased to see it up and heartily recommend it to everyone on LW who hasn't read it yet. (If you don't want to follow the link and see for yourself, the book focuses on the Doomsday problem and some related issues like Sleeping Beauty, which, incidentally, has come up here recently.)
ETA: This scheme is done. All three donations have been made and matched by me.
I want to give $180 to the Singularity Institute, but I'm looking for three people to match my donation by giving at least $60 each. If this scheme works, the Singularity Institute will get $360.
If you want to become one of the three matchers, I would be very grateful, and here's how I think we should do it:
You donate using this link. Reply to this thread saying how much you are donating. Feel free to give more than $60 if you can spare it, but that won't affect how much I give.
In your donation's "Public Comment" field, include both a link to your reply to this thread and a note asking for a Singularity Institute employee to kindly follow that link and post a response saying that you donated. ETA: Step 2 didn't work for me, so I don't expect it to work for you. For now, I'll just believe you if you say you've donated. If you would be convinced to donate by seeing evidence that I'm not lying, let me know and I'll get you some.
I will do the same. (Or if you're the first matching donor, then I already have -- see directly below.)
To show that I'm serious, I'm donating my first $60 right now. I will donate my second $60 after the second matching donor, and my third $60 after the third matching donor.
If you already donate regularly, please wait until it looks like my scheme is failing before taking up one of the matching-donor slots. But if you have never donated despite always wanting to, then here's a chance to double your help.
I'm also interested in information people might have about whether this scheme is a good idea (compared to, say, quietly making the donation alone).
http://moronail.net/img/902_NATURAL_SELECTION_It_can_be_tampered_animals