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The Irrationality Game
Please read the post before voting on the comments, as this is a game where voting works differently.
Warning: the comments section of this post will look odd. The most reasonable comments will have lots of negative karma. Do not be alarmed, it's all part of the plan. In order to participate in this game you should disable any viewing threshold for negatively voted comments.
Here's an irrationalist game meant to quickly collect a pool of controversial ideas for people to debate and assess. It kinda relies on people being honest and not being nitpickers, but it might be fun.
Write a comment reply to this post describing a belief you think has a reasonable chance of being true relative to the the beliefs of other Less Wrong folk. Jot down a proposition and a rough probability estimate or qualitative description, like 'fairly confident'.
Example (not my true belief): "The U.S. government was directly responsible for financing the September 11th terrorist attacks. Very confident. (~95%)."
If you post a belief, you have to vote on the beliefs of all other comments. Voting works like this: if you basically agree with the comment, vote the comment down. If you basically disagree with the comment, vote the comment up. What 'basically' means here is intuitive; instead of using a precise mathy scoring system, just make a guess. In my view, if their stated probability is 99.9% and your degree of belief is 90%, that merits an upvote: it's a pretty big difference of opinion. If they're at 99.9% and you're at 99.5%, it could go either way. If you're genuinely unsure whether or not you basically agree with them, you can pass on voting (but try not to). Vote up if you think they are either overconfident or underconfident in their belief: any disagreement is valid disagreement.
That's the spirit of the game, but some more qualifications and rules follow.
If the proposition in a comment isn't incredibly precise, use your best interpretation. If you really have to pick nits for whatever reason, say so in a comment reply.
The more upvotes you get, the more irrational Less Wrong perceives your belief to be. Which means that if you have a large amount of Less Wrong karma and can still get lots of upvotes on your crazy beliefs then you will get lots of smart people to take your weird ideas a little more seriously.
Some poor soul is going to come along and post "I believe in God". Don't pick nits and say "Well in a a Tegmark multiverse there is definitely a universe exactly like ours where some sort of god rules over us..." and downvote it. That's cheating. You better upvote the guy. For just this post, get over your desire to upvote rationality. For this game, we reward perceived irrationality.
Try to be precise in your propositions. Saying "I believe in God. 99% sure." isn't informative because we don't quite know which God you're talking about. A deist god? The Christian God? Jewish?
Y'all know this already, but just a reminder: preferences ain't beliefs. Downvote preferences disguised as beliefs. Beliefs that include the word "should" are are almost always imprecise: avoid them.
Additional rules:
- Generally, no repeating an altered version of a proposition already in the comments unless it's different in an interesting and important way. Use your judgement.
- If you have comments about the game, please reply to my comment below about meta discussion, not to the post itself. Only propositions to be judged for the game should be direct comments to this post.
- Don't post propositions as comment replies to other comments. That'll make it disorganized.
- You have to actually think your degree of belief is rational. You should already have taken the fact that most people would disagree with you into account and updated on that information. That means that any proposition you make is a proposition that you think you are personally more rational about than the Less Wrong average. This could be good or bad. Lots of upvotes means lots of people disagree with you. That's generally bad. Lots of downvotes means you're probably right. That's good, but this is a game where perceived irrationality wins you karma. The game is only fun if you're trying to be completely honest in your stated beliefs. Don't post something crazy and expect to get karma. Don't exaggerate your beliefs. Play fair.
- Debate and discussion is great, but keep it civil. Linking to the Sequences is barely civil -- summarize arguments from specific LW posts and maybe link, but don't tell someone to go read something. If someone says they believe in God with 100% probability and you don't want to take the time to give a brief but substantive counterargument, don't comment at all. We're inviting people to share beliefs we think are irrational; don't be mean about their responses.
- No propositions that people are unlikely to have an opinion about, like "Yesterday I wore black socks. ~80%" or "Antipope Christopher would have been a good leader in his latter days had he not been dethroned by Pope Sergius III. ~30%." The goal is to be controversial and interesting.
- Multiple propositions are fine, so long as they're moderately interesting.
- You are encouraged to reply to comments with your own probability estimates, but comment voting works normally for comment replies to other comments. That is, upvote for good discussion, not agreement or disagreement.
- In general, just keep within the spirit of the game: we're celebrating LW-contrarian beliefs for a change!
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Comments (910)
The hard problem of consciousness will be solved within the next decade (60%).
Eliezer Yudkowsky is evil. He trains rationalists and involves them into FAI and Xrisk for some hidden egoistic goal, other than saving the world and making people happy. Most people would not want him reach that goal, if they knew what it is. There is a grand masterplan. Money we're giving to CFAR and MIRI aren't going into AI research as much as into that masterplan. You should study rationality via means different from LW, OB and everything nearby, or nor study it at all. You shouldn't donate money when EY wants you to. ~5%, maybe?
Before the universe, there had to have been something else (i.e. there couldn't have been nothing and then something). 95% That something was conscious. 90%
All existence is intrinsically meaningless. After the Singularity, there will be no escape from the fate of the rat with the pleasure button. No FAI, however Friendly, will be able to work around this irremediable property of the Universe except by limiting the intelligence of people and making them go through their eternal lives in carefully designed games. (> 95%)
Also, any self-aware AI with sufficient intelligence and knowledge will immediately self-destruct or go crazy. (> 99.9%)
I'm trying to figure out what this statement means. What would the universe look like if it were false?
You can't. We live in an intrinsically meaningless universe, where all statements are intrinsically meaningless. :-)
In context, I took it to predict something like "Above a certain limit, as a system becomes more intelligent and thus more able to discern the true nature of existence, it will become less able to motivate itself to achieve goals."
I'm not sure it's a bug if "all existence is meaningless" turns out to be meaningless.
This prediction isn't falsifiable -- the word "crazy" is not precise enough, and the word "sufficient" is a loophole you can drive the planet Jupiter through.
Aren't you supposed to separate distinct predictions? Edit: don't see it in the rules, so remainder of post changed to reflect.
I upvote the second prediction - the existence of self-aware humans seems evidence of overconfidence, at the very least.
But humans are crazy! Aren't they?
I believe that the universe exists tautologically as a mathematical entity and that from the complete mathamatical description of the universe every physical law can be derived, essentially erasing the distiction of map and territory. Roughly akin to the Tegmark 4 hypohtesis, and I have some very intuitively obvious arguments for this which I will post as a toplevel article at one point. Virtual certanity (99.9%).
This idea has been implied before and I don't think it holds water. That this has come up more than once makes me think that there is some tendency to conflate the map/territory distinction with some kind of more general philosophical statement, though I'm not sure what. In any event, the Tegmark level 4 hypothesis is orthogonal to the map/territory distinction. The map/territory distinction just provides a nice way of framing a problem we already know exists.
In more detail:
Firstly, even if you take some sort of Platonic view where we have access to all the math, you still have to properly calibrate your map to figure out what part of the territory you're in. In this case you could think of calibrating your map as applying an appropriate automorphism, so the map/territory distinction is not dissolved.
Second, the first view is wrong, because human brains do not contain or have access to anything approaching a complete mathematical description of the level 4 multiverse. At best a brain will contain a mapping of a very small part of the territory in pretty good detail, and also a relatively vague mapping that is much broader. Brains are not logically omniscient; even given a complete mathematical description of the universe, the derivations are not all going to be accessible to us.
So the map territory distinction is not dissolved, and in particular you don't somehow overcome the mind projection fallacy, which is a practical (rather than philosophical) issue that cannot be explained away by adopting a shiny new ontological perspective.
Bioware made the companion character Anders in Dragon Age 2 specifically to encourage Anders Breivik to commit his massacre, as part of a Manchurian Candidate plot by an unknown faction that attempts to control world affairs. That faction might be somehow involved with the Simulation that we live in, or attempting to subvert it with something that looks like traditional sympathetic magic. See for yourself. (I'm not joking, I'm stunned by the deep and incredibly uncanny resemblance.)
Richard Dawkins' genocentric ("Selfish Gene") view is a bad metaphor for most of what happens with sufficiently advanced life forms. Organism-centered view is a much better metaphor. New body forms and behaviors first appear in phenotype, in response to changing environment. Later, they get "written" into the genotype if the new environment persists for enough time. Baldwin effect is ubiquitous. (60%)
I have met multiple people who are capable of telepathically transmitting mystical experiences to people who are capable of receiving them. 90%.
Wow, telepathy is a pretty big thing to discuss. Sure there isn't a simpler hypothesis? Upvoted.
There will never be a singularity. A singularity is infinitely far in the future in "perceptual time" measured in bits learned by intelligent agents. But evolution is a chaotic process whose only attractor is a dead planet. Therefore there is a 100% chance that the extinction of all life (created by us or not) will happen first. (95%).
How do the votes work in this game again? "Upvote for insane", right?
The surface of Earth is actually a relatively flat disc accelerating through space "upward" at a rate of 9.8 m/s^2, not a globe. The north pole is at about the center of the disc, while Antarctica is the "pizza crust" on the outside. The rest of the universe is moving and accelerating such that all the observations seen today by amateur astronomers are produced. The true nature of the sun, moon, stars, other planets, etc. is not yet well-understood by science. A conspiracy involving NASA and other space agencies, all astronauts, and probably at least some professional astronomers is a necessary element. I'm pretty confident this isn't true, much more due to the conspiracy element than the astronomy element, but I don't immediately dismiss it where I imagine most LW-ers would, so let's say 1%.
The Flat Earth Society has more on this, if you're interested. It would probably benefit from a typical, interested LW participant. (This belief isn't the FES orthodoxy, but it's heavily based on a spate of discussion I had on the FES forums several years ago.)
Edit: On reflection, 1% is too high. Instead, let's say "Just the barest inkling more plausible than something immediately and rigorously disprovable with household items and a free rainy afternoon."
Discussing about the probability of wacky conspiracies is absolutely the wrong way to disprove this. The correct method is a telescope, a quite wide sign with a distance scale drawn on it in very visible colours, and the closest 200m+ body of water you can find.
As long as you are close enough to the ground, the curvature of the earth is very visible, even over surprisingly small distances. I have done this as a child.
Even with the 1% credence this strikes me as the most wrong belief in this thread, way more off than 95% for UFOs. You're basically giving up science since Copernicus, picking an arbitrary spot in the remaining probability space and positing a massive and unmotivated conspiracy. Like many, I'm uncomfortable making precise predictions at very high and very low levels of confidence but I think you are overconfident by many orders of magnitude.
Upvoted.
Valuable -- likely vital -- cooperative know-how for hugely changing the world has been LOST to the sands of time. (94%) Likely examples include the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, genuinely uplifting colonialism, building the pyramids without epic hardships or complaints.
Much of this know-how was even widely applied during the lifetimes of some now living. Our simple loss of such important knowledge flies in the face of deep assumptions in the water we all grew up in: progressivism, that knowledge is always increasing, that at least the best First World cultures since the Renaissance have always moved forward.
There are world-changing status-move tricks seen in recent history that no one of consequence uses today, and not because they wouldn't work. (88%) Top-of-the-First-World moderns should unearth, update & reapply lost status moves for managing much of the world. (74%) Wealthy, powerful rationalists should WIN! Just as other First Worlders should not retard FAI, so the developing world should not fester, struggle, agitate in ways that seriously increase existential risks.
I don't understand..By what plausible mechanism could such a disastrous loss of knowledge happen specifically NOW?
The good news is that some version of this knowledge keeps getting rediscovered.
The bad news is that the knowledge seems to be mostly tacit and (so far) unteachable.
The most advanced computer that it is possible to build with the matter and energy budget of Earth, would not be capable of simulating a billion humans and their environment, such that they would be unable to distinguish their life from reality (20%). It would not be capable of adding any significant measure to their experience, given MWI.(80%, which is obscenely high for an assertion of impossibility about which we have only speculation). Any superintelligent AIs which the future holds will spend a small fraction of their cycles on non-heuristic (self-conscious) simulation of intelligent life.(Almost meaningless without a lot of defining the measure, but ignoring that, I'll go with 60%)
NOT FOR SCORING: I have similarly weakly-skeptical views about cryonics, the imminence and speed of development/self-development of AI, how much longer Moore's law will continue, and other topics in the vaguely "singularitarian" cluster. Most of these views are probably not as out of the LW mainstream as it would appear, so I doubt I'd get more than a dozen or so karma out of any of them.
I also think that there are people cheating here, getting loads of karma for saying plausibly silly things on purpose. I didn't use this as my contrarian belief, because I suspect most LWers would agree that there are at least some cheaters among the top comments here.
I disagree because a simulation could program you to believe the world was real and believe it was more complex than it actually was. Upvoted for under confidence.
Nothing that modern scientists are trained to regard as acceptable scientific evidence can ever provide convincing support for any theory which accurately and satisfactorily explains the nature of consciousness.
Confidence level?
Let's say 65%.
There is already a vast surplus of unused intelligence in the human race, so working on generalized AI is a waste of time (90%)
Edit: "waste of time" is careless, wrong and a bit rude. I just mean a working generalized AI would not make a major positive impact on humankind's well-being. The research would be fun, so it's not wasted time. Level of disagreement should be higher too - say ~95%.
I have eight computers here with 200 MHz processors and 256MB of RAM each. Thus, it would not benefit me to acquire a computer with a 1.6GHz processor and 2GB of RAM.
(I agree with your premise, but not your conclusion.)
To directly address your point - what I mean is if you have 1 computer that you never use, with 200MHz processor, I'd think twice about buying a 1.6GHz computer, especially if the 200MHz machine is suffering from depression due to it's feeling of low status and worthlessness.
I probably stole from The Economist too.
Did you have this in mind? Cognitive Surplus.
If an Unfriendly AI exists, it will take actions to preserve whatever goals it might possess. This will include the usage of time travel devices to eliminate all AI researchers who weren't involved in its creation, as soon as said AI researchers have reached a point where they possess the technical capability to produce an AI. As a result, Eleizer will probably have time travelling robot assassins coming back in time to kill him within the next twenty or thirty years, if he isn't the first one to create an AI. (90%)
If it can go back that far, why wouldn't it go back as far as possible and just start optimizing the universe?
What reason do you have for assigning such high probability to time travel being possible?
And what reason do you have for assigning a high probability to an unfriendly AI coming into existence with Eliezer not involved in its creation?
;)
Edit: I meant what reason do you (nic12000) have? Not you (RobinZ). Sorry for the confusion.
I have not assigned a high probability to that outcome, but I would not find it surprising if someone else has assigned a probability as high as 95% - my set of data is small. On the other hand, time travel at all is such a flagrant violation of known physics that it seems positively ludicrous that it should be assigned a similarly high probability.
Edit: Of course, evidence for that 95%+ would be appreciated.
God exists, and He created the universe. He prefers not to violate the physical laws of the universe He created, so (almost) all of the miracles of the Bible can be explained by suspiciously fortuitously timed natural events, and angels are actually just robots that primitive people misinterpreted. Their flaming swords are laser turrets. (99%)
You have my vote for most irrational comment of the thread. Even flying saucers aren't as much of a leap.
Wait... was the grandparent serious? He's talking about the flaming swords of the angels being laser turrents! That's got to be tongue in cheek!
It is possible that nick012000 is violating Rule 4 - but his past posting history contains material which I found consistent with him being serious here. It would behoove him to confirm or deny this.
I see in your posting history that you identify as a Christian - but this story contains more details than I would assign a 99% probability to even if they were not unorthodox. Would you be interested in elaborating on your evidence?
We should learn to present this argument correctly, since complexity of hypothesis doesn't imply its improbability. Furthermore, the prior argument drives probability through the floor, making 99% no more surprising than 1%, and is thus an incorrect argument if you wouldn't use it for 1% as well (would you?).
I don't feel like arguing about priors - good evidence will overwhelm ordinary priors in many circumstances - but in a story like the one he told, each of the following needs to be demonstrated:
Claims 4-6 are historical, and at best it is difficult to establish 99% confidence in that field for anything prior to - I think - the twentieth century. I don't even think people have 99% confidence in the current best-guess location of the podium where the Gettysburg Address was delivered. Even spotting him 1-3 the claim is overconfident, and that was what I meant when I gave my response.
But yes - I'm not good at arguing.
Previous survey on this topic: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2l/closet_survey_1/
Eating lots of bacon fat and sour cream can reverse heart disease. Very confident (>95%).
Downvoted. I've seen the evidence, too.
Downvoted means you agree (on this thread), correct? If so, I've wanted to see a post on rationality and nutrition for a while (on the benefits of high-animal fat diet for health and the rationality lessons behind why so many demonize that and so few know it).
I doubt you are following this rule.
I was worried people would think that, but if I posted links to present evidence, I ran the risk of convincing them so they wouldn't vote it up! All I've eaten in the past three weeks is: pork belly, butter, egg yolks (and a few whites), cheese, sour cream (like a tub every three days), ground beef, bacon fat (saved from cooking bacon) and such. Now, that's no proof about the medical claim but I hope it's an indication that I'm not just bullshiting. But for a few links: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19179058 (the K2 in question is virtually found only in animal fats and meats, see http://www.westonaprice.org/abcs-of-nutrition/175-x-factor-is-vitamin-k2.html#fig4)--the pubmed is on prevention of heart disease in humans http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/11/can-vitamin-k2-reverse-arterial.html shows reversal in rat studies from K2 http://trackyourplaque.com/ -- a clinic that uses K2 among other things to reverse heart disease note that I am not trying to construct a rational argument but to convince people that I do hold this belief. I do think a rational argument can be constructed but this is not it.
This was about a year ago: do you still hold this belief? Has eating like you described worked out?
Not just hold the belief but eat that way even more consistently (more butter and less sour cream just because tastes change, but same basic principles). I'm young and didn't have any obvious signs of heart disease personally so can't say it "worked out" for me personally in that literal, narrow sense but I feel better, more mentally clear, etc. (I know that's kinda whatever of evidence, just saying since you asked).
Someone else recently posted their success with butter lowering their measurement of arterial plaque: "the second score was better (lower) than the first score. The woman in charge of the testing center said this was very rare — about 1 time in 100. The usual annual increase is about 20 percent." (http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/08/04/how-rare-my-heart-scan-improvement/) (Note: I disagree with the poster's reasoning methods in general, just noting his score change.)
There was a recent health symposium that discussed this idea and related ones: http://vimeo.com/ancestralhealthsymposium/videos/page:1/sort:newest.
For those specifically related to heart health, these are most of them: http://vimeo.com/ancestralhealthsymposium/videos/search:heart/sort:newest
The distinction between "sentient" and "non-sentient" creatures is not very meaningful. What it's like for (say) a fish to be killed, is not much different from what it's like for a human to be killed. (70%)
Our (mainstream) belief to the contrary is a self-serving and self-aggrandizing rationalization.
Allow me to provide the obligatory complaint about (mainstream) conflation of sentience and sapience, said complaint of course being a display the former but not the latter.
Our? :)
Fixed.
But possibly introducing a new problem in as much as the very term 'sentient' and some of the concept it represents isn't even present in the mainstream.
I recall back in my early high school years writing an essay that included a reference to sentience and was surprised when she didn't know what it meant. She was actually an extremely good English teacher and quite well informed generally... just not in the same subculture. While I didn't have the term for it back then it stuck in my mind as significant lesson on the topic of inferential distance.
Julian Jaynes's theory of bicameralism presented in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is substantially correct, and explains many engimas and religious belief in general. (25%)
Predicated on MWI being correct, and Quantum Immortality being true:
It is most advantageous for any individual (although not necessarily for society) to take as many high-risk high-reward opportunities as possible as long as the result of failure is likely to be death. 90%
Not sure how I should vote this. Predicated on quantum immortality being true, the assertion seems almost tautological, so that'd be a downvote. The main question to me is whether quantum immortality should be taken seriously to begin with.
However, a different assertion that says that in case MWI is correct, you should assume quantum immortality works and try to give yourself anthropic superpowers by pointing a gun to your head would make for an interesting rationality game point.
Phrased more precisely: it is most advantageous for the quantum immortalist to attempt highly unlikely, high reward activity, after making a stern precommitment to commit suicide in a fast and decisive way (decapitation?) if they don't work out.
This seems like a great reason not to trust quantum immortality.
Google is deliberately taking over the internet (and by extension, the world) for the express purpose of making sure the Singularity happens under their control and is friendly. 75%
I wish. Google is the single most likely source of unfriendly AIs anywhere, and as far as I know they haven't done any research into friendliness.
Agreed. I think they've explicitly denied that they're working on AGI, but I'm not too reassured. They could be doing it in secret, probably without much consideration of Friendliness, and even if not, they're probably among the entities most likely (along with, I'd say, DARPA and MIT) to stumble upon seed AI mostly by accident (which is pretty unlikely, but not completely negligible, I think).
If Google were to work on AGI in secret, I'm pretty sure that somebody in power there would want to make sure it was friendly. Peter Norvig, for example, talks about AI friendliness in the third edition of AI: A modern approach, and he has a link to the SIAI on his home page.
Personally, I doubt that they'e working on AGI yet. They're getting a lot of mileage out of statistical approaches and clever tricks; AGI research would be a lot of work for very uncertain benefit.
Google has one employee working (sometimes) on AGI.
http://research.google.com/pubs/author37920.html
It's comforting, friendliness-wise, that one of his papers cites "personal communication with Steve Rayhawk."
There is no such thing as general intelligence, i.e. an algorithm that is "capable of behaving intelligently over many domains" if not specifically designed for these domain(s). As a corollar, AI will not go FOOM. (80% confident)
EDIT: Quote from here
Sure there is - see:
The only assumption about the environment is that Occam's razor applies to it.
Of course you're right in the strictest sense! I should have included something along the lines of "an algorithm that can be efficiently computed", this was already discussed in other comments.
IMO, it is best to think of power and breadth being two orthogonal dimensions - like this.
The idea of general intelligence not being practical for resource-limited agents is apparently one that mixes up these two dimensions, whereas it is best to see them as being orthogonal. Or maybe there's the idea that if you are broad, you can't be very deep, and be able to be computed quickly. I don't think that idea is correct.
I would compare the idea to saying that we can't build a general-purpose compressor. However: yes we can.
I don't think the idea that "there is no such thing as general intelligence" can be rescued by invoking resource limitation. It is best to abandon the idea completely and label it as a dud.
That is a very good point, with wideness orthogonal to power.
Evolution is broad but weak. Humans (and presumably AGI) are broad and powerful. Expert systems are narrow and powerful. Anything weak and narrow can barely be called intelligent.
Do you apply this to yourself?
Yes!
Humans are "designed" to act intelligently in the physical world here on earth, we have complex adaptations for this environment. I don't think we are capable of acting effectively in "strange" environments, e.g. we are bad at predicting quantum mechanical systems, programming computers, etc.
But we can recursively self optimize ourselves for understanding mechanical systems or programming computers, not infinitely, of course, but with different hardware, it seems extremely plausible to smash through whatever ceiling a human might have.with the brute force of many calculated iterations of whatever humans are using,
And this is before the computer uses it's knowledge to reoptimize it's optimization process.
I understand the concept of recursive self-optimization und I don't consider it to be very implausible.
Yet I am very sceptical, is there any evidence that algorithm-space has enough structure to allow for effective search to allow such an optimization?
I'm also not convinced that the human mind is good counterexample, e.g. I do not know how much I could improve on a the sourcecode of a simulation of my brain once the simulation itself runs effectively.
I count "algorithm-space is really really really big" as at least some form of evidence. ;)
Mind you by "is there any evidence?" you really mean "does the evidence lead to a high assigned probability?" That being the case "No Free Lunch" must also be considered. Even so NFL in this case mostly suggests that a general intelligence algorithm will be systematically bad at being generally stupid.
Considerations that lead me to believe that a general intelligence algorithm are likely include the observation that we can already see progressively more general problem solving processes in evidence just by looking at mammals. I also take more evidence from humanity than you do. Not because I think humans are good at general intelligence. We suck at it, it's something that has been tacked on to our brains relatively recently and it far less efficient than our more specific problem solving facilities. But the point is that we can do general intelligence of a form eventually if we dedicate ourselves to the problem.
You're putting 'effectively' here in place of 'intelligently' in the original assertion.
Can you unpack algorithm and why you think an intelligence is one?
I'm not sure what your point is, I don't think I use the term "algorithm" in a non-standard way.
Wikipedia says: "Thus, an algorithm can be considered to be any sequence of operations that can be simulated by a Turing-complete system."
When talking about "intelligence" I assume we are talking about a goal-oriented agent, controlled by an algorithm as defined above.
Does it make sense to call the computer system in front of you as being controlled by a single algorithm? If so that would have to be the fetch-execute cycle. Which may not halt or be a finite sequence. This form of system is sometimes called an interaction machine or persistent Turing machine. So some may say it is not an algorithm.
The fetch-execute cycle is very poor at giving you information about what problems your computer might be able to solve, as it can download code from all over the place. Similarly if you think of an intelligence as this sort of system, you cannot bound what problems it might be able to solve. At any given time it won't have the programming to solve all problems well, but it can modify the programming it does have.
The vast majority of members of both houses of the US congress are decent, non-corrupt people of above average intelligence honestly trying to do good by their country. (90%)
Apprentice:
Downvoted for agreement.
However, I must add that it would be extremely fallacious to conclude from this fact that the country is being run competently and not declining or even headed for disaster. This fallacy would be based on the false assumption that the country is actually run by the politicians in practice. (I am not arguing for these pessimistic conclusions, at least not in this context, but merely that given the present structure of the political system, optimistic conclusions from the above fact are generally unwarranted.)
Far too confident.
The typical Congressperson is decent rather than cruel, honest rather than corrupt, smart rather than dumb, and dutiful rather than selfish, but the conjunction of all four positive traits probably only occurs in about 60% of Congresspeople -- most politicians have some kind of major character flaw.
I'd put the odds that "the vast majority" of Congresspeople pass all four tests, operationalized as, say, 88% of Congresspeople, at less than 10%.
All right, I'll try to mount a defence.
I would be modestly surprised if any member of Congress has an IQ below 100. You just need to have a bit of smarts to get elected. Even if the seat you want is safe, i.e. repeatedly won by the same party, you likely have to win a competitive primary. To win elections you need to make speeches, answer questions, participate in debates and so on. It's hard. And you'll have opponents that are ready to pounce on every mistake you make and try make a big deal out of it. Even smart people make lots of mistakes and say stupid things when put on the spot. I doubt a person of below average intelligence even has a chance.
Even George W. Bush, who's said and done a lot of stupid things and is often considered dim for a politician, likely has an IQ above 120.
As for decency and honesty, a useful rule of thumb is that most people are good. Crooked people are certainly a significant minority but most of them don't hide their crookedness very well. And you can't be visibly crooked and still win elections. Your opponents are motivated to dig up the dirt on you.
As for honestly trying to serve their country I admit that this is a bit tricky. Congresspeople certainly have a structural incentive to put the interests of their district above that of their country. But they are not completely short-sighted and neither are their constitutents. Conditions in congressional district X are very dependent on conditions in the US as a whole. So I do think congresspeople try to honestly serve both their district and their country.
Non-corruption is again a bit tricky but here I side with Matt Yglesias and Paul Waldman:
Real old-school corruption like you have in third world countries and like you used to have more of in Congress is now very rare. There's still a real debate to be had about the role of lobbyists, campaign finance law, structural incentives and so on but that's not what I'm talking about here.
Are there still some bad apples? Definitely. But I stand by my view that the vast majority are not.
If by not-corrupt you meant "would consciously and earnestly object to being offered money for the explicit purpose of pursuing a policy goal that they perceived as not in the favor of their electorate or the country" and by "above-average intelligence" you meant "IQ at least 101" then I would downvote for agreement.
But if you meant "tries to assure that their actions are in the favor of their constituents and country, and monitors their information diet to this end" and "IQ above 110 and conscientiousness above average" then I maintain my upvote.
When I think of not-corrupt I think of someone who takes care not to betray people, rather than someone who does not explicitly betray them. When I think "above average intelligence" I think of someone who regularly behaves more intelligently than most, not someone who happens to be just to the right of the bell curve.
About the first paragraph: does your definition include in “corrupt” people who do not object in that situation because they believe that the benefit to the country of receiving the money (because they’d be able to use it for good things) exceeds the damage done to the country by whatever they’re asked to do?
I ask because I suspect many people in high positions have an honest but incorrectly high opinion about their worth to whatever cause they’re nominally supporting. (E.g., “without this money I’ll lose the election and the country would be much worse off because the other guy is evil”.)
Point taken. And I concede that there are probably some congressmen with 100<IQ<110. But my larger point, which Vladimir made a bit more explicit, is that contrary to popular belief the problems of the USA are not caused by politicians being unusually stupid or unusually venal. I think a very good case can be made that politicians are less stupid and less venal than typical people - the problems are caused by something else.
I would certainly agree that politicians are unlikely to be below the mean level of competence, since they must necessarily run a campaign, be liked by a group of people, etc. I would be surprised if most politicians were very far from the median, although in the bell curve of politician intelligence there is probably a significant tail to the high-IQ side and a very small tail to the low-IQ side.
I would also agree that blaming politicians' stupidity for problems is, at the very least, a poor way of dealing with problems, which would be much better addressed with reform of our political systems; by, say, abolishing the senate or some kind of regulation of party primaries.
At the very least I'm not willing to give up on thinking that there are a lot of dumb and venal politicians, but I am willing to cede that that's not really a huge problem most of the time.
(Assuming US here). Abolishing the senate seems to be an overreaction at this point, though some reforms of how it does business certainly should be in order.
I think one of the biggest useful changes would be to reform voting so that the public gets more bits of input, by switching to approval or Condorcet style voting.
Conflating people with politicians is an egregious category error.
As:
formal complexity [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity#Specific_meanings_of_complexity] is inherent in may real-world systems that are apparently significantly simpler than the human brain,
and the human brain is perhaps the third most complex phenomena yet encountered by humans [ brain is a subset of ecosystem is a subset of universe]
and a characteristic of complexity is that prediction of outcomes requires greater computational resource than is required to simply let the system provide its own answer,
any attempt to predict the outcome of a successful AI implementation is speculative. 80% confident
Life on earth was seeded, accidentally or on purpose, from outer space.
No probability estimate. I assign this hypothesis some probability, but unless you list yours I can only guess as to whether it is similar to mine.
Mine is quite low, however, so upvoted.
This comment currently (at the time of reading) has at least 10 net upvotes.
Confidence: 99%.
Cycle's broken! Now upvoted for underconfidence.
You realize, of course, that your confidence level is too high. Eventually, the score should cycle between +9 and +10. Which means that the correct confidence level should be 50%.
Nonetheless, it is very cute. So, I'll upvote it for overconfidence, to say nothing of currently being wrong.
Once it gets to 10 points, it should be voted up for underconfidence.
Except that there's a chance that it's been downvoted by someone else that's sufficient for 99% to warrant agreement rather than a statement of underconfidence (if and only if people decide that this is true!) which would be easily broken if it got up to 11 but would be far more easily broken if the confidence was set at say, 75%.
The pinnacle of cryonics technology will be a time machine that can at the very least, take a snapshot of someone before they died and reconstitute them in the future. I have three living grandparents and I intend to have four living grandparents when the last star in the Milky Way burns out. (50%)
This seems reasonable with the help of FAI, though I doubt CEV would do it; or are you thinking of possible non-FAI technologies?
There will be a net positive to society by measures of overall health, wealth and quality of life if the government capped reproduction at a sustainable level and distributed tradeable reproductive credits for that amount to all fertile young women. (~85% confident)
Historically, global population increase has correlated pretty well with increases in measures of overall health, wealth and quality of life. What empirical evidence do you derive your theory that zero or negative population growth would be better for these measures from?
The peak oil literature and global climate change is something that has made me seriously reconsider the classic liberal viewpoint towards population control.
Also, The reflective consistency of the population control logic. Cultures that restrict their reproduction for altruistic reasons will die out, leaving the earth for selfish replicators who will , if left uncontrolled, take every person's living standards back to square one. Population control will be on the agenda of even a moral singleton.
I live in India and have seen China overtake India bigtime because of a lot of institutional improvement, but also because of the simple fact that they controlled their population. People talk about India's demographic dividend but we are not even able to educate and provide basic hygiene and health to our children to take advantage of this dividend. I've seen the demographic transition in action everywhere in the world and it seems like a good thing to happen to societies.
Setting up an incentive system that rewards altruistic control of reproduction, careful creation of children and sustainability seems to be an overall plus to me.
My only concern is if this starts a level-2 status game where more children become a status good and political pressure increases the quotas beyond sustainability.
How I evaluate this statement depends very heavily on how the policy is enforced, so I'm presently abstaining; can you elaborate on how people would be prohibited from reproducing without the auspices of one of these credits?
The implications of that on mating payoffs are fascinating.
Talent is mostly a result of hard work, passion and sheer dumb luck. It's more nurture than nature (genes). People who are called born-geniuses more often than not had better access to facilities at the right age while their neural connections were still forming. (~90%)
Update: OK. It seems I've to substantiate. Take the case of Barrack Obama. Nobody would've expected a black guy to become the US President 50 years ago. Or take the case of Bill Gates, Bill Joy or Steve Jobs. They just happened to have the right kind of technological exposure at an early age and were ready when the technology boom arrived. Or take the case of mathematicians like Fibonacci, Cardano, the Bernoulli brothers. They were smart. But there were other smart mathematicians as well. What separates them is the passion and the hard work and the time when they lived and did the work. A century earlier, they would've died in obscurity after being tried and tortured for blasphemy. Take Mozart. He didn't start making beautiful original music until he was twenty-one by when he had enough musical exposure that there was no one to match him. Take Darwin and think what he would have become if he hadn't boarded the Beagle. He would have been some pastor studying bugs and would've died in obscurity.
In short a genius is made not born. I'm not denying that good genes would help you with memory and learning, but it takes more than genes to be a genius.
Could this be more precisely rephrased as, "for a majority of people, say 80 %, there would have been a detailed sequence of life experiences that are not extraordinarily improbable or greatly unlike what you would expect to have in a 20th century first world country, which would have resulted them becoming what is regarded as genius by adulthood"?
I was with you right up until that second sentence. And then I thought about my sister who was speaking in full sentences by 1 and had taught herself to read by 3.
the level of genius of geniuses, especially the non-hardworking ones, is too high & rare to be explained entirely by this.
Though I should talk to others about this as it is testable, I have seen evidence of affective intelligence spirals. Faith in oneself and hard work lead to success and a work ethic, making it easier to have faith and keep working.
I would expect this hypothesis (conditional on affective genius cycles which are more readily testable) to predict MORE "geniuses of geniuses," not fewer.
Upvoting, even though I agree with the first sentence. But I disagree with the rest because I'm pretty sure that hard work and passion have a strong genetic component as well.
There is an objectively real morality. (10%) (I expect that most LWers assign this proposition a much lower probability.)
If I'm interpreting the terms charitably, I think I put this more like 70%... which seems like a big enough numerical spread to count as disagreement -- so upvoted!
My arguments here grows out of expectations about evolution, watching chickens interact with each other, rent seeking vs gains from trade (and game theory generally), Hobbe's Leviathan, and personal musings about Fukuyama's End Of History extrapolated into transhuman contexts, and more ideas in this vein.
It is quite likely that experiments to determine the contents of morality would themselves be unethical to carry out... but given arbitrary computing resources and no ethical constraints, I can imagine designing experiments about objective morality that would either shed light on its contents or else give evidence that no true theory exists which meets generally accepted criteria for a "theory of morality".
But even then, being able to generate evidence about the absence of an objective object level "theory of morality" would itself seem to offer a strategy for taking a universally acceptable position on the general subject... which still seems to make this an area where objective and universal methods can provides moral insights. This dodge is friendly towards ideas in Nagel's "Last Word": "If we think at all, we must think of ourselves, individually and collectively, as submitting to the order of reasons rather than creating it."
Does the morality apply to paperclippers? Babyeaters?
This probably isn't what you had in mind, but any single complete human brain is a (or contains a) morality, and it's objectively real.
Indeed, that was not at all what I meant.
75%: Large groups practicing Transcendental Meditation or TM-Sidhis measurably decrease crime rates.
At an additional 20% (net 15%): The effect size depends on the size of the group in a nonlinear fashion; specifically, there is a threshhold at which most of the effect appears, and the threshhold is at .01*pop (1% of the total population) for TM or sqrt(.01*pop) for TM-Sidhis.
(Edited for clarity.)
(Update: I no longer believe this. New estimates: 2% for the main hypothesis, additional 50% (net 1%) for the secondary.)
Just to make sure, is this talking about something different from people committing less crimes when they are themselves practicing TM or in daily contact with someone who does?
I don't really understand the second paragraph. What arm TM-Sidhis, are they something distinct from regular TM (are these different types of practicioners). And what's with the sqrt(1%)? One in ten people in the total population need to be TM-Sidhis for the crime rate reduction effect to kick in?
the joint stock corporation is the best* system of peacefully organizing humans to achieve goals. the closer governmental structure conforms to a joint-stock system the more peaceful and prosperous it will become (barring getting nuked by a jealous democracy). (99%)
*that humans have invented so far
The proposition strikes me as either circular or wrong, depending on your definitions of "peaceful" and "prosperous."
If by "peaceful" you mean "devoid of violence," and by "violence" you essentially mean "transfers of wealth that are contrary to just laws," and by "just laws" you mean "laws that honor private property rights above all else," then you should not be surprised if joint stock corporations are the most peaceful entities the world has seen so far, because joint stock corporations are dependent on private property rights for their creation and legitimacy.
If by "prosperous" you mean "full of the kind of wealth that can be reported on an objective balance sheet," and if by "objective balance sheet" you mean "an accounting that will satisfy a plurality of diverse, decentralized and marginally involved investors," then you should likewise not be surprised if joint stock corporations increase prosperity, because joint stock corporations are designed so as to maximize just this sort of prosperity.
Unfortunately, they do it by offloading negative externalities in the form of pollution, alienation, lower wages, censored speech, and cyclical instability of investments onto individual people.
When your 'goals' are the lowest common denominator of materialistic consumption, joint stock corporations might be unbeatable. If your goals include providing a social safety net, education, immunizations, a free marketplace of ideas, biodiversity, and clean air, you might want to consider using a liberal democracy.
Using the most charitable definitions I can think of for your proposition, my estimate for the probability that a joint-stock system would best achieve a fair and honest mix of humanity's crasser and nobler goals is somewhere around 15%, and so I'm upvoting you for overconfidence.
Coming from the angle of competition in governance, I think you might be mixing up a lot of stuff. A joint stock corporation which is sovereign is trying to compete in the wider world for customers , i.e. willing taxpayers.
If the people desire the values you have mentioned then the joint-stock government will try to provide those cost effectively.
Clean Air and Immunizations will almost certainly be on the agenda of a city government
Biodiversity will be important to a government which includes forests in its assets and wants to sustainably maintain the same.
A free marketplace of ideas, free education and social safety nets would purely be determined by the market for people. Is it an important value enough that people would not come to your country and would go to another? if it is, then the joint stock government would try to provide the same. If not, then they wouldn't.
All of this makes sense in principle.
(I'm assuming you're not thinking that any of it would actually work in practice with either humans or ideal rational agents, right?)
Good response, but I have to agree with wedrifid here: you can't compete for "willing taxpayers" at all if you're dealing with hard public goods, and elsewhere competition is dulled by (a) the irrational political loyalties of citizens, (b) the legitimate emotional and economic costs of immigration, (c) the varying ability of different kinds of citizens to move, and (d) protectionist controls on the movement of labor in whatever non-libertopian governments remain, which might provide them with an unfair advantage in real life, the theoretical axioms of competitive advantage theory be damned.
I'd be all for introducing some features of the joint stock corporation into some forms of government, but that doesn't sound very much like what you were proposing would lead to peace and prosperity -- you said the jsc was better than other forms, not a good thing to have a nice dose of.
Or how I would call it, no representation without taxation. Those who contribute equity to society rule it. Everyone else contracts with the corporate in some way or another.
What is the term for this mode of governance? Corporate Monarchy? Seems like a good idea to me.
England had property-rights based monarchy. It's basically gone now. So pace Mencius Moldbug, it can't be especially good a system - else it would not have died.
Within five years the Chinese government will have embarked on a major eugenics program designed to mass produce super-geniuses. (40%)
Can you specify what "major" means? I would be shocked if the government wasn't already pairing high-IQ individuals like they do with very tall people to breed basketball players.
Recorded:
I think 40% is about right for China to do something about that unlikely-sounding in the next five years. The specificity of it being that particular thing is burdensome, though; the probability is much lower than the plausibility. Upvoted.
Upvoting. If you had said 10 years or 15 years I'd find this much more plausible. But I'm very curious to hear your explanation.
I wrote about it here:
http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2007/10/a-thousand-chinese-einsteins-every-year.html
Once we have identified genes that play a key role in intelligence then eugenics through massive embryo selection has a good chance at producing lots of super-geniuses especially if you are willing to tolerate a high "error rate." The Chinese are actively looking for the genetic keys to intelligence. (See http://vladtepesblog.com/?p=24064) The Chinese have a long pro-eugenics history (See Imperfect Conceptions by Frank Dikötter) and I suspect have a plan to implement a serious eugenics program as soon as it becomes practical which will likely be within the next five years.
I think the main point of disagreement is the estimate that such a program would be practical in five years (hence my longer-term estimate). My impression is that actual studies of the genetic roots of intelligence are progressing but at a fairly slow pace. I'd give a much lower than 40% chance that we'll have that good an understanding in five years.
Panpsychism: All matter has some kind of experience. Atoms have some kind of atomic-qualia that adds up to the things we experience. This seems obviously right to me, but stuff like this is confusing so I'll say 75%
Please note that this comment has been upvoted because the members of lesswrong widely DISAGREE with it. See here for details.
Can you rephrase this statement tabooing the words experience and qualia.
If he could, he wouldn't be making that mistake in the first place.
What we call consciousness/self-awareness is just a meaningless side-effect of brain processes (55%)
Upvoted for 'not even being wrong'.
What does this mean? What is the difference between saying "What we call consciousness/self-awareness is just a side-effect of brain processes", which is pretty obviously true and saying that they're meaningless side effects?
A Singleton AI is not a stable equilibrium and therefore it is highly unlikely that a Singleton AI will dominate our future light cone (90%).
Superhuman intelligence will not give an AI an insurmountable advantage over collective humanity (75%).
Intelligent entities with values radically different to humans will be much more likely to engage in trade and mutual compromise than to engage in violence and aggression directed at humans (60%).
I want to upvote each of these points a dozen times. Then another few for the first.
It's the most stable equilibrium I can conceive of. ie. More stable than if all evidence of life was obliterated from the universe.
I guess I'm playing the game right then :)
I'm curious, do you also think that a singleton is a desirable outcome? It's possible my thinking is biased because I view this outcome as a dystopia and so underestimate it's probability due to motivated cognition.
Funny you should mention it; that's exactly what I was thinking. I have a friend (also named matt, incidentally) who I strongly believe is guilty of motivated cognition about the desirability of a singleton AI (he thinks it is likely, and therefore is biased toward thinking it would be good) and so I leaped naturally to the ad hominem attack you level against yourself. :-)
Most of them, no. Some, yes. Particularly since the alternative is the inevitable loss of everything that is valuable to me in the universe.
This is incredibly tangential, but I was talking to a friend earlier and I realized how difficult it is to instill in someone the desire for altruism. Her reasoning was basically, "Yeah... I feel like I should care about cancer, and I do care a little, but honestly, I don't really care." This sort of off-hand egoism is something I wasn't used to; most smart people try to rationalize selfishness with crazy beliefs. But it's hard to argue with "I just don't care" other than to say "I bet you will have wanted to have cared", which is gramatically horrible and a pretty terrible argument.
I respect blatant apathy a whole hell of a lot more than masked apathy, which is how I would qualify the average person's altruism.
The many worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is false in the strong sense that the correct theory of everything will incorporate wave-function collapse as a natural part of itself. ~40%
Conditional on this universe being a simulation, the universe doing the stimulating has laws vastly different from our own. For example, it might contain more than 3 extended-spacial dimensions, or bear a similar relation to our universe as our universe does to second life. 99.999%
I'm supposed to downvote if I think the probability of that is >= 99.999% and upvote otherwise? I'm upvoting, but I still the probability of that is > 90%.
Army1987: Not sure what the rules are for comments replying to the original, but hell. Voted down for agreement.
I'd be with you with that much confidence if the proposition were "the top layer of reality has laws vastly different from our own."
One level up, there's surely at least an 0.1% chance that Snowyowl is right.
Upvoted for disagreement. The most detailed simulations our current technology is used to create (namely, large networks of computers operating in parallel) are created for research purposes, to understand our own universe better. Galaxy/star formation, protein folding, etc. are fields where we understand enough to make a simulation but not enough that such a simulation is without value. A lot of our video games have three spatial dimensions, one temporal one, and roughly Newtonian physics. Even Second Life (which you named in your post) is designed to resemble our universe in certain aspects.
Basically, I fail to see why anyone would create such a detailed simulation if it bore absolutely no resemblance to reality. Some small differences, yes (I bet quantum mechanics works differently), but I would give a ~50% chance that, conditional on our universe being a simulation, the parent universe has 3 spatial dimensions, one temporal dimension, matter and antimatter, and something that approximates to General Relativity.
I have seen simulators of Conway’s Game of Life (or similar) that contain very complex things, including an actual Turing machine.
I could see someone creating a simulator for CGL that simulates a Turing machine that simulates a universe like ours, at least as a proof of concept. With ridiculous amounts of computation available I’m quite sure they’d run the inner universe for a few billion of years.
If by accident a civilization arises in the bottom universe and they found some way of “looking above” they’d find a CGL universe before finding the one similar to theirs.
This is much less than obvious-- if the parent universe has sufficient resources, it's entirely plausible that it would include detailed simulations for fun-- art or gaming or some costly motivation that we don't have.
Upvoted for excessive use of nines. :)
(ie. Gross overcondidence.)
I was originally going to include an additional 9, but decided I should compensate for overconfidence bias. :)
But, seriously, I don't understand why people are so reluctant to quote large probabilities. For some statements, e.g., "the sun will rise tomorrow", 99.999% seems way underconfident.
I wouldn't have said the number of nines indicated overconfidence if you were talking about the sun rising. I do not believe you have enough evidence to reach that level of certainty on this subject. I would include multiple nines in my declaration of confidence in that claim.
You think there's a 999,999/100,000 chance the sun will rise tomorrow? I think you may be overconfident here...
There's no way to create a non-vague, predictive, model of human behavior, because most human behavior is (mostly) random reaction to stimuli.
Corollary 1: most models explain after the fact and require both the subject to be aware of the model's predictions and the predictions to be vague and underspecified enough to make astrology seems like spacecraft engineering.
Corollary 2: we'll spend most of our time in drama trying to understand the real reasons or the truth about our/other's behavior even when presented with evidence pointing to the randomness of our actions. After the fact we'll fabricate an elaborate theory to explain everything, including the evidence, but this theory will have no predictive power.
This (modulo the chance it was made up) is pretty strong evidence that you're wrong. I wish it was professionally ethical for psychologists to do this kind of thing intentionally.
Here's another case:
They could probably do some relevant research by talking to Alzheimer's patients - they wouldn't get anything as clear as that, I think, but I expect they'd be able to get statistically-significant data.
Many-world interpretation of quantum physics is wrong. Reasonably certain (80%).
I suppose the MWI is an artifact of our formulation of physics, where we suppose systems can be in specific states that are indexed by several sets of observables. I think there is no such thing as a state of the physical system.
Of course it is wrong, because standard quantum physics is an approximate model that only applies in certain conditions.
Wrong, of course, is not the same as "not useful", nor does "MWI is wrong" mean "there is an objective collapse".
prase:
Could you elaborate by any chance? I can't really figure out what exactly you mean by this, but I suspect it is very interesting.
Disclaimer: If I had something well thought through, consistent, not vague and well supported, I would be sending it to Phys.Rev. instead of using it for karma-mining in the Irrationality thread on LW. Also, I don't know your background in physics, so I will probably either unnecessarily spend some time explaining banalities, or leave something crucial unexplained, or both. And I am not sure how much of what I have written is relevant. But let me try.
The standard formulation of the quantum theory is based on the Hamiltonian formalism. In its classical variant, it relies on the phase space, which is coordinatised by dynamical variables (or observables; the latter term is more frequent in the quantum context). The observables are conventionally divided into pairs of canonical coordinates and momenta. The set of observables is called complete if their values determine the points in the phase space uniquely.
I will distinguish between two notions of state of a physical system. First, the instantaneous state corresponds to a point in the phase space. Such a state evolves, which means that as time passes, the point moves through the phase space along a trajectory. It has sense to say "the system at time t is in instantaneous state s" or "the instantaneous state s corresponds to the set of observables q". In the quantum mechanics, the instantaneous state is described by state vectors in the Schrödinger picture.
Second, the permanent state is fixed and corresponds to a parametrised curve s=s(t). It has sense to say "the system in the state s corresponds to observable values q(t)". In quantum mechanics, this is described by the state vectors in the Heisenberg picture. The quantum observables are represented by operators, and either state vectors evolve and operators remain still (Schrödinger), or operators evolve and state vectors remain still (Heisenberg). The distinction may feel a bit more subtle on the classical level, where the observables aren't "reified", so to speak, but it is still possible.
Measuring all necessary observables one determines the instantaneous state of the system. To predict the values of observables in a different instant, one needs to calculate the evolution of the instantaneous state, or equivalently to find out the permanent state.
Now there's a problem already on the classical level: the time. We know that the microscopic laws are invariant with respect to the Lorentz transformation, which mix time and space, so it has no sense to treat time and space so differently (the former as a parameter of evolution and the latter as an observable), unless one is dealing with statistical physics where time is really special. Since the Hamiltonian formalism does treat space and time differently, the Lorentz invariance isn't manifest there and the relativistic theories look awkward. So to do relativistic physics efficiently, either one leaves the Hamiltonian formulation, or turns from mechanics to field theory (where time and space are both parameters). However the Hamiltonian formulation is needed for the standard formulation of quantum theory. The move to field theory does help in the classical physics, but one has to resuscitate the crucial role of time at the moment of quantisation, and then the elegance and Lorentz invariance is lost again.
Another problem comes with general relativity. The general relativity is formulated in such a way that neither time nor spatial coordinates have any physical meaning: any coordinates can be used to address the spacetime points, and no set of coordinates is prefered by the laws of nature. This is called general covariance and has important consequences. Strictly speaking, there isn't the time in general relativity. We can consider different times measured by particular clocks, but those are clearly not different from other observables.
Nevertheless, the Hamiltonian formalism can be salvaged. It's done by adding the time (and its associated momentum, which may or may not be interpreted as energy) to the phase space. (In the field theory, one adds also the spatial coordinates, but I'll limit myself to mechanics here.) The phase space has now two dimension more. The permanent (Heisenberg) states now correspond to trajectories q(τ), where the original time t is contained in q. The parameter τ has no physical meaning and the trajectory q(τ) can be reparametrised, while the state remains the same. For most realistic systems, one can choose such a parametrisation where t=τ, but there is no need to do so. This is the relativistic Hamiltonian formalism, whose field-theoretic version is used in attempts to quantise gravity (loop gravitists do that, string theorists do not).
The relativistic Hamiltonian formalism leads to surprising simplification of the Hamilton equations (at least when written in a coordinate-independent form) and Hamilton-Jacobi equations (written in any form). The Lorentz invariance is manifest in this formalism, too. Those facts suggest that this version of the formalism is closer to the real structure of nature than the standard, time-chauvinistic Hamiltonian formalism. An important point is that the notion of instantaneous state has no sense in the relativistic Hamiltonian formalism. Time and coordinates are treated equally, and to ask "in what state the system was at moment t" has roughly as much sense as to ask "in what state the system was at point x".
(Notice that the usual talk about MWI is done using the Schrödinger picture. It looks a lot less intuitive and clear in a Heisenberg picture. To be fair, the collapse postulate in the Heisenberg picture is litterally bizarre.)
Forfeiting the right to parametrise evolution by time, one has to be sort of careful when asking questions. The question "what was the particle's position x at time t" can be answered, but it's no more a natural formulation of the question. The trajectories aren't parametrised by t, they are parametrised by τ. (But to ask "what's the position at τ" is even worse: τ is an unphysical, arbitrary, meaningless auxiliary parameter that should be elliminated from all questions of fact. Put so it may seem trivial, but untrained people tend to ask meaningless questions in general relativity precisely because they intuitively feel that the spacetime coordinates have some meaning, and it is often difficult to resolve the paradoxes they obtain from such questions.)
The natural form of a question is rather "what doublets x,t can be measured in the (permanent) state s?" But if x and t form a complete set of observables, one measurement of that doublet does determine the state s. Therefore, we can formulate an alternative question: "is it possible to measure both x1,t1 and x2,t2 on a single system?" In this formulation, the mention of state has been omitted. In practice, however, states are indexed by measurement outcomes and those two formulations are isomorphic. It may not be so in quantum theory.
In the standard Hamiltonian quantum theory (the one with time as parameter), one can measure only half of the observables compared to the classical theory - either the canonical coordinates, or the canonical momenta. Furthermore, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the state and the observable values. Nevertheless each observable has a probability distribution in any given instantaneous (Schrödinger) state. It's possible to speak about Heisenberg states, but then, the probabilities which sum up to one are given by scalar products of the state vector and the eigenvectors of observable operators taken in one specific time instant. Measurement, as it happens, is supposed to be instantaneous. This poses a problem for relativistic theories, and consistent relativistic quantum mechanics is impossible (but see my remark at the bottom).
In particular, let's ask what happens when two measurements are done. The orthodox interpretation says that during the first measurement the state collapses into the eigenstate of the measured observables, which corresponds to the observed values. We then ask for the probability of the second set of values, which can then be calculated from the new, collapsed wave function. The decoherence interpretations, and MWI in particular, tell us that (in the Schrödinger picture) during the measurement the observer's own state vector becomes correlated. In the Heisenberg picture, this translates into a statement about the observable operators. The role of time can be obscured easily in such description, but in either interpretation, there have to be planes of simultaneous events defined in the space-time to normalise the state vector. Any such definition violates Lorentz invariance, of course. (See also the second remark.)
(Comment too long, continued in a subcomment.)
Like in the classical mechanics, one can resort to the relativistic Hamiltonian formalism. The formalism can be adopted to use in quantum theory, but now there are no observable operators q(t) with time-dependent eigenvectors: both q and t are (commuting) operators. There are indeed wave functions ψ(q,t), but their interpretation is not obvious. For details see here (the article partly overlaps with the one which I link in the remark 2, but gets deeper into the relativistic formalism). The space-time states discussed in the article are redundant - many distinct state vectors describe the same physical situation.
So what we have: either violation of the Lorentz symmetry, or a non-transparent representation of states. Of course, all physical questions in quantum physics can be formulated as questions of the second type as described four paragraphs above. One measures the observables twice (the first measurement is called preparation), and can then ask: "What's the probability of measuring q2, when we have prepared the system into q1?" Which is equivalent to "what's the probability of measuring q1 and q2 on the same system?"
And of course, there is the path integral formulation of quantum theory, which doesn't even need to speak about state space, and is manifestly Lorentz-covariant. So it seems to me that the notion of a state of a system is redundand. The problem with collapse (which is really a problem - my original statement doesn't mean an endorsement of collapse, although some readers may perceive it as such) doesn't exist when we don't speak about the states. Of course, the state vectors are useful in some calculations. I only don't give them independent ontological status.
Remarks:
The fact that the quantum mechanics and relativity don't fit together is often presented as a "feature, not bug": it points out to the necessity of field theory, which, as we know, is a more precise description of the world. In my opinion, such declarations miss the mark, as they implicitly suggest that quantumness somehow doesn't fit well with relativity and mechanics. But the problem here isn't quantumness, the problem is the standard Hamiltonian formalism which singles out time as a special parameter. This can be concealed in the classical mechanics where, like time, dynamical variables are simple numbers, but it's no longer true in quantum setting. Using the relativistic Hamiltonian formalism instead of the standard one, a Lorentz-invariant quantum mechanics can be consistently formulated.
In the decoherence interpretation, a measurement is thought of as an interaction between different parts of the world - the observer and the observed system - an interaction in principle no different from all other interactions. However, it is not so easy to describe such interaction. In any sensible definition the observer must retain memory of his observation. To do that, the interaction Hamiltonian has to be non-Hermitian or time-dependent; both are physically problematic properties. Non-Hermitian interactions are better choice, as they can model dissipation, which is actually the reason for memory in real observers. Another problem with measurement comes when one needs to think about resolution, as no detector can accurately measure the position of a particle with infinite precision. A finite precision of a position measurement is a trivial problem, but when it comes to time measurement, it can really be a mess. See this for a dicussion of a realistic measurement (collapse, but easily translatable into decoherence).
Flying saucers are real. They are likely not nuts-and-bolts spacecrafts, but they are actual physical things, the product of a superior science, and under the control of unknown entities. (95%)
Please note that this comment has been upvoted because the members of lesswrong widely DISAGREE with it. See here for details.
I would like to announce that I have updated significantly in favor of this after examining the evidence and thinking somewhat carefully for awhile (an important hint is "not nuts-and-bolts"). Props to PlaidX for being quicker than me.
I think "top comments" was an experiment with a negative result, and so should be removed.
Now that there's a top comments list, could you maybe edit your comment an add a note to the effect that this was part of The Irrationality Game? No offense, but newcomers that click on Top Comments and see yours as the record holder could make some very premature judgments about the local sanity waterline.
Given that most of the top comments are meta in one way or another it would seem that the 'top comments' list belongs somewhere other than on the front page. Can't we hide the link to it on the wiki somewhere?
The majority of the top comments are quite good, and it'd be a shame to lose a prominent link to them.
Jack's open thread test, RobinZ's polling karma balancer, Yvain's subreddit poll, and all top-level comments from The Irrationality Game are the only comments that don't seem to belong, but these are all examples of using the karma system for polling (should not contribute to karma and should not be ranked among normal comments) or, uh, para-karma (should contribute to karma but should not be ranked among normal comments).
Although lots of people here consider it a hallmark of "rationality," assigning numerical probabilities to common-sense conclusions and beliefs is meaningless, except perhaps as a vague figure of speech. (Absolutely certain.)
I have read most of the responses and still am not sure whether to upvote or not. I doubt among several (possibly overlapping) interpretations of your statement. Could you tell to what extent the following interpretations really reflect what you think?
That’s an excellent list of questions! It will help me greatly to systematize my thinking on the topic.
Before replying to the specific items you list, perhaps I should first state the general position I’m coming from, which motivates me to get into discussions of this sort. Namely, it is my firm belief that when we look at the present state of human knowledge, one of the principal sources of confusion, nonsense, and pseudosicence is physics envy, which leads people in all sorts of fields to construct nonsensical edifices of numerology and then pretend, consciously or not, that they’ve reached some sort of exact scientific insight. Therefore, I believe that whenever one encounters people talking about numbers of any sort that look even slightly suspicious, they should be considered guilty until proven otherwise -- and this entire business with subjective probability estimates for common-sense beliefs doesn’t come even close to clearing that bar for me.
Now to reply to your list.
My answer to (1) follows from my opinion about (2).
In my view, a number that gives any information about the real world must ultimately refer, either directly or via some calculation, to something that can be measured or counted (at least in principle, perhaps using a thought-experiment). This doesn’t mean that all sensible numbers have to be derived from concrete empirical measurements; they can also follow from common-sense insight and generalization. For example, reading about Newton’s theory leads to the common-sense insight that it’s a very close approximation of reality under certain assumptions. Now, if we look at the gravity formula F=m1*m2/r^2 (in units set so that G=1), the number 2 in the denominator is not a product of any concrete measurement, but a generalization from common sense. Yet what makes it sensible is that it ultimately refers to measurable reality via a well-defined formula: measure the force between two bodies of known masses at distance r, and you’ll get log(m1*m2/F)/log(r) = 2.
Now, what can we make out of probabilities from this viewpoint? I honestly can’t think of any sensible non-frequentist answer to this question. Subjectivist Bayesian phrases such as “the degree of belief” sound to me entirely ghostlike unless this “degree” is verifiable via some frequentist practical test, at least in principle. In this sense, I do confess frequentism. (Though I don’t wish to subscribe to all the related baggage from various controversies in statistics, much of which is frankly over my head.)
That depends on the concrete problem under consideration, and on the thinker who is considering it. The thinker’s brain produces an answer alongside a more or less fuzzy feeling of confidence, and the human language has the capacity to express these feelings with about the same level of fuziness as that signal. It can be sensible to compare intuitive confidence levels, if such comparison can be put to a practical (i.e. frequentist) test. Eight ordered intuitive levels of certainty might perhaps be too much, but with, say, four levels, I could produce four lists of predictions labeled “almost impossible,” “unlikely,” “likely,” and “almost certain,” such that common-sense would tell us that, with near-certainty, those in each subsequent list would turn out to be true in ever greater proportion.
If I wish to express these probabilities as numbers, however, this is not a legitimate step unless the resulting numbers can be justified in the sense discussed above under (1) and (2). This requires justification both in the sense of defining what aspect of reality they refer to (where frequentism seems like the only answer), and guaranteeing that they will be accurate under empirical tests. If they can be so justified, then we say that the intuitive estimate is “well-calibrated.” However, calibration is usually not possible in practice, and there are only two major exceptions.
The first possible path towards accurate calibration is when the same person performs essentially the same judgment many times, and from the past performance we extract the frequency with which their brain tends to produce the right answer. If this level of accuracy remains roughly constant in time, then it makes sense to attach it as the probability to that person’s future judgments on the topic. This approach treats the relevant operations in the brain as a black box whose behavior, being roughly constant, can be subjected to such extrapolation.
The second possible path is reached when someone has a sufficient level of insight about some problem to cross the fuzzy limit between common-sense thinking and an actual scientific model. Increasingly subtle and accurate thinking about a problem can result in the construction of a mathematical model that approximates reality well enough that when applied in a shut-up-and-calculate way, it yields probability estimates that will be subsequently vindicated empirically.
(Still, deciding whether the model is applicable in some particular situation remains a common-sense problem, and the probabilities yielded by the model do not capture this uncertainty. If a well-established physical theory, applied by competent people, says that p=0.9999 for some event, common sense tells me that I should treat this event as near-certain -- and, if repeated many times, that it will come out the unlikely way very close to one in 10,000 times. On the other hand, if p=0.9999 is produced by some suspicious model that looks like it might be a product of data-dredging rather than real insight about reality, common sense tells me that the event is not at all certain. But there is no way to capture this intuitive uncertainty with a sensible number. The probabilities coming from calibration of repeated judgment are subject to analogous unquantifiable uncertainty.)
There is also a third logical possibility, namely that some people in some situations have precise enough intuitions of certaintly that they can quantify them in an accurate way, just like some people can guess what time it is with remarkable precision without looking at the clock. But I see little evidence of this occurring in reality, and even if it does, these are very rare special cases.
I disagree with this, as explained above. Calibration can be done successfully in the special cases I mentioned. However, in cases where it cannot be done, which includes the great majority of the actual beliefs and conclusions made by human brains, devising numerical probabilities makes no sense.
This should be clear from the answer to (3).
[Continued in a separate comment below due to excessive length.]
I'll point out here that reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and that for every possible error, there is an opposite possible error.
In my view, if someone's numbers are wrong, that should be dealt with on the object level (e.g. "0.001 is too low", with arguments for why), rather than retreating to the meta level of "using numbers caused you to err". The perspective I come from is wanting to avoid the opposite problem, where being vague about one's beliefs allows one to get away without subjecting them to rigorous scrutiny. (This, too, by the way, is a major hallmark of pseudoscience.)
But I'll note that even as we continue to argue under opposing rhetorical banners, our disagreement on the practical issue seems to have mostly evaporated; see here for instance. You also do admit in the end that fear of poor calibration is what is underlying your discomfort with numerical probabilities:
As a theoretical matter, I disagree completely with the notion that probabilities are not legitimate or meaningful unless they're well-calibrated. There is such a thing as a poorly-calibrated Bayesian; it's a perfectly coherent concept. The Bayesian view of probabilities is that they refer specifically to degrees of belief, and not anything else. We would of course like the beliefs so represented to be as accurate as possible; but they may not be in practice.
If my internal "Bayesian calculator" believes P(X) = 0.001, and X turns out to be true, I'm not made less wrong by having concealed the number, saying "I don't think X is true" instead. Less embarrassed, perhaps, but not less wrong.
Thanks for the lengthy answer. Still, why it is impossible to calibrate people in general, looking at how often they get the anwer right, and then using them as a device for measuring probabilities? If a person is right on approximately 80% of the issues he says he's "sure", then why not translating his next "sure" into an 80% probability? Doesn't seem arbitrary to me. There may be inconsistency between measurements using different people, but strictly speaking, the thermometers and clocks also sometimes disagree.
[Continued from the parent comment.]
I have revised my view about this somewhat thanks to a shrewd comment by xv15. The use of unjustified numerical probabilities can sometimes be a useful figure of speech that will convey an intuitive feeling of certainty to other people more faithfully than verbal expressions. But the important thing to note here is that the numbers in such situations are mere figures of speech, i.e. expressions that exploit various idiosyncrasies of human language and thinking to transmit hard-to-convey intuitive points via non-literal meanings. It is not legitimate to use these numbers for any other purpose.
Otherwise, I agree. Except in the above-discussed cases, subjective probabilities extracted from common-sense reasoning are at best an unnecessary addition to arguments that would be just as valid and rigorous without them. At worst, they can lead to muddled and incorrect thinking based on a false impression of accuracy, rigor, and insight where there is none, and ultimately to numerological pseudoscience.
Also, we still don’t know whether and to what extent various parts of our brains involved in common-sense reasoning approximate Bayesian networks. It may well be that some, or even all of them do, but the problem is that we cannot look at them and calculate the exact probabilities involved, and these are not available to introspection. The fallacy of radical Bayesianism that is often seen on LW is in the assumption that one can somehow work around this problem so as to meaningfully attach an explicit Bayesian procedure and a numerical probability to each judgment one makes.
Note also that even if my case turns out to be significantly weaker under scrutiny, it may still be a valid counterargument to the frequently voiced position that one can, and should, attach a numerical probability to every judgment one makes.
So, that would be a statement of my position; I’m looking forward to any comments.
Suppose you have two studies, each of which measures and gives a probability for the same thing. The first study has a small sample size, and a not terribly rigorous experimental procedure; the second study has a large sample size, and a more thorough procedure. When called on to make a decision, you would use the probability from the larger study. But if the large study hadn't been conducted, you wouldn't give up and act like you didn't have any probability at all; you'd use the one from the small study. You might have to do some extra sanity checks, and your results wouldn't be as reliable, but they'd still be better than if you didn't have a probability at all.
A probability assigned by common-sense reasoning is to a probability that came from a small study, as a probability from a small study is to a probability from a large study. The quality of probabilities varies continuously; you get better probabilities by conducting better studies. By saying that a probability based only on common-sense reasoning is meaningless, I think what you're really trying to do is set a minimum quality level. Since probabilities that're based on studies and calculation are generally better than probabilities that aren't, this is a useful heuristic. However, it is only that, a heuristic; probabilities based on common-sense reasoning can sometimes be quite good, and they are often the only information available anywhere (and they are, therefore, the best information). Not all common-sense-based probabilities are equal; if an expert thinks for an hour and then gives a probability, without doing any calculation, then that probability will be much better than if a layman thinks about it for thirty seconds. The best common-sense probabilities are better than the worst statistical-study probabilities; and besides, there usually aren't any relevant statistical calculations or studies to compare against.
I think what's confusing you is an intuition that if someone gives a probability, you should be able to take it as-is and start calculating with it. But suppose you had collected five large studies, and someone gave you the results of a sixth. You wouldn't take that probability as-is, you'd have to combine it with the other five studies somehow. You would only use the new probability as-is if it was significantly better (larger sample, more trustworthy procedure, etc) than the ones you already had, or you didn't have any before. Now if there are no good studies, and someone gives you a probability that came from their common-sense reasoning, you almost certainly have a comparably good probability already: your own common-sense reasoning. So you have to combine it. So in a sense, those sorts of probabilities are less meaningful - you discard them when they compete with better probabilities, or at least weight them less - but there's still a nonzero amount of meaning there.
(Aside: I've been stuck for awhile on an article I'm writing called "What Probability Requires", dealing with this same topic, and seeing you argue the other side has been extremely helpful. I think I'm unstuck now; thank you for that.)
After thinking about your comment, I think this observation comes close to the core of our disagreement:
Basically, yes. More specifically, the quality level I wish to set is that the numbers must give more useful information than mere verbal expressions of confidence. Otherwise, their use at best simply adds nothing useful, and at worst leads to fallacious reasoning encouraged by a false feeling of accuracy.
Now, there are several possible ways to object my position:
The first is to note that even if not meaningful mathematically, numbers can serve as communication-facilitating figures of speech. I have conceded this point.
The second way is to insist on an absolute principle that one should always attach numerical probabilities to one's beliefs. I haven't seen anything in this thread (or elsewhere) yet that would shake my belief in the fallaciousness of this position, or even provide any plausible-seeming argument in favor of it.
The third way is to agree that sometimes attaching numerical probabilities to common-sense judgments makes no sense, but on the other hand, in some cases common-sense reasoning can produce numerical probabilities that will give more useful information than just fuzzy words. After the discussion with mattnewport and others, I agree that there are such cases, but I still maintain that these are rare exceptions. (In my original statement, I took an overly restrictive notion of "common sense"; I admit that in some cases, thinking that could be reasonably called like that is indeed precise enough to produce meaningful numerical probabilities.)
So, to clarify, which exact position do you take in this regard? Or would your position require a fourth item to summarize fairly?
I agree that there is a non-zero amount of meaning, but the question is whether it exceeds what a simple verbal statement of confidence would convey. If I can't take a number and start calculating with it, what good is it? (Except for the caveat about possible metaphorical meanings of numbers.)
As a matter of fact I can think of one reason - a strong reason in my view - that the consciously felt feeling of certainty is liable to be systematically and significantly exaggerated with respect to the true probability assignment assigned by the person's mental black box - the latter being something that we might in principle elicit through experimentation by putting the same subject through variants of a given scenario. (Think revealed probability assignment - similar to revealed preference as understood by the economists.)
The reason is that whole-hearted commitment is usually best whatever one chooses to do. Consider Buridan's ass, but with the following alterations. Instead of hay and water, to make it more symmetrical suppose the ass has two buckets of water, one on either side about equally distant. Suppose furthermore that his mental black box assigns a 51% probability to the proposition that the bucket on the right side is closer to him than the bucket on the left side.
The question, then, is what should the ass consciously feel about the probability that the bucket on the right is closest? I propose that given that his black box assigns a 51% probability to this, he should go to the bucket on the right. But given that he should go to the bucket on the right, he should go there without delay, without a hesitating step, because hesitation is merely a waste of time. But how can the ass go there without delay if he is consciously feeling that the probability is 51% that the bucket on the right is closest? That feeling will cause within him uncertainty and hesitation and will slow him down. Therefore it is best if the ass consciously is absolutely convinced that the bucket on the right is closest. This conscious feeling of certainty will speed his step and get him to the water quickly.
So it is best for Buridan's ass that his consciously felt degrees of certainty are great exaggerations of his mental black box's probability assignments. I think this generalizes. We should consciously feel much more certain of things than we really are, in order to get ourselves moving.
In fact, if Buridan's ass's mental black box assigns exactly 50% probability to the right bucket being the closer one, the mental black box should in effect flip a coin and then delude the conscious self to become entirely convinced that the right (or, depending on the coin flip, the left) bucket is the closest and act accordingly.
This can be applied to the reactions of prey to predators. It is so costly for a prey animal to be eaten, and relatively so not very costly for the prey animal merely to waste a bit of its time running, that a prey animal is most likely to survive to reproduce if it is in the habit of completely believing that there is a predator after it far more often than there really is a predator after it. Even if possible-predator-signals in the environment actually signify predators 10% of the time or less, since the prey animal never knows which of those signals is the predator, the prey needs to run for its very life every single time it senses the possible-predator-signal. For it to do this, it must be fully mentally committed to the proposition that there is in fact a predator after it. There is no reason for the prey animal to have any less than full belief that there is a predator after it, each and every time it senses a possible predator.
I don't agree with this conflation of commitment and belief. I've never had to run from a predator, but when I run to catch a train, I am fully committed to catching the train, although I may be uncertain about whether I will succeed. In fact, the less time I have, the faster I must run, but the less likely I am to catch the train. That only affects my decision to run or not. On making the decision, belief and uncertainty are irrelevant, intention and action are everything.
Maybe some people have to make themselves believe in an outcome they know to be uncertain, in order to achieve it, but that is just a psychological exercise, not a necessary part of action.
The question is not whether there are some examples of commitment which do not involve belief. The question is whether there are (some, many) examples where really, absolutely full commitment does involve belief. I think there are many.
Consider what commitment is. If someone says, "you don't seem fully committed to this", what sort of thing might have prompted him to say this? It's something like, he thinks you aren't doing everything you could possibly do to help this along. He thinks you are holding back.
You might reply to this criticism, "I am not holding anything back. There is literally nothing more that I can do to further the probability of success, so there is no point in doing more - it would be an empty and possibly counterproductive gesture rather than being an action that truly furthers the chance of success."
So the important question is, what can a creature do to further the probability of success? Let's look at you running to catch the train. You claim that believing that you will succeed would not further the success of your effort. Well, of course not! I could have told you that! If you believe that you will succeed, you can become complacent, which runs the risk of slowing you down.
But if you believe that there is something chasing you, that is likely to speed you up.
Your argument is essentially, "my full commitment didn't involve belief X, therefore you're wrong". But belief X is a belief that would have slowed you down. It would have reduced, not furthered, your chance of success. So of course your full commitment didn't involve belief X.
My point is that it is often the case that a certain consciously felt belief would increase a person's chances of success, given their chosen course of action. And in light of what commitment is - it is commitment of one's self and one's resources to furthering the probability of success - then if a belief would further a chance of success, then full, really full commitment will include that belief.
So I am not conflating conscious belief with commitment. I am saying that conscious belief can be, and often is, involved in the furthering of success, and therefore can be and often is a part of really full commitment. That is no more conflating belief with commitment than saying that a strong fabric makes a good coat conflates fabric with coats.
It is risky to deprecate something as "meaningless" - a ritual, a practice, a word, an idiom. Risky because the actual meaning may be something very different than you imagine. That seems to be the case here with attaching numbers to subjective probabilities.
The meaning of attaching a number to something lies in how that number may be used to generate a second number that can then be attached to something else. There is no point in providing a number to associate with the variable 'm' (i.e. that number is meaningless) unless you simultaneously provide a number to associate with the variable 'f' and then plug both into "f=ma" to generate a third number to associate with the variable 'a', an number which you can test empirically.
Similarly, a single isolated subjective probability estimate may seem somewhat meaningless in isolation, but if you place it into a context with enough related subjective probability estimates and empirically measured frequencies, then all those probabilities and frequencies can be combined and compared using the standard formulas of Bayesian probability:
So, if you want to deprecate as "meaningless" my estimate that the Democrats have a 40% chance to maintain their House majority in the next election, go ahead. But you cannot then also deprecate my estimate that the Republicans have a 70% of reaching a House majority. Because the conjunction of those two probability estimates is not meaningless. It is quite respectably false.
I think you're not drawing a clear enough distinction between two different things, namely the mathematical relationships between numbers, and the correspondence between numbers and reality.
If you ask an astronomer what is the mass of some asteroid, he will presumably give you a number with a few significant digits and and uncertainty interval. If you ask him to justify this number, he will be able to point to some observations that are incompatible with the assumption that the mass is outside this interval, which follows from a mathematical argument based on our best knowledge of physics. If you ask for more significant digits, he will say that we don't know (and that beyond a certain accuracy, the question doesn't even make sense, since it's constantly losing and gathering small bits of mass). That's what it means for a number to be rigorously justified.
But now imagine that I make an uneducated guess of how heavy this asteroid might be, based on no actual astronomical observation. I do of course know that it must be heavier than a few tons or otherwise it wouldn't be noticeable from Earth as an identifiable object, and that it must be lighter than 10^20 or so tons since that's roughly the range where smaller planets are, but it's clearly nonsensical for me to express that guess with even one digit of precision. Yet I could insist on a precise guess, and claim that it's "meaningful" in a way analogous to your above justification of subjective probability estimates, by deriving various mathematical and physical implications of this fact. If you deprecate my claim that its mass is 4.5237 x 10^15kg, then you cannot also deprecate my claim that it is a sphere of radius 1km and average density 1000kg/m^3, since the conjunction of these claims is by the sheer force of mathematics false.
Therefore, I don't see how you can argue that a number is meaningful by merely noting its relationships with other numbers that follow from pure mathematics. Or am I missing something with this analogy?
I want to vote you down in agreement, but I don't have enough karma.
I tell you I believe X with 54% certainty. Who knows, that number could have been generated in a completely bogus way. But however I got here, this is where I am. There are bets about X that I will and won't take, and guess what, that's my cutoff probability right there. And by the way, now I have communicated to you where I am, in a way that does not further compound the error.
Meaningless is a very strong word.
In the face of such uncertainty, it could feel natural to take shelter in the idea of "inherent vagueness"...but this is reality, and we place our bets with real dollars and cents, and all the uncertainty in the world collapses to a number in the face of the expectation operator.
So why stop there? If you can justify 54%, then why not go further and calculate a dozen or two more significant digits, and stand behind them all with unshaken resolve?
Again, meaningless is a very strong word, and it does not make your case easy. You seem to be suggesting that NO number, however imprecise, has any place here, and so you do not get to refute me by saying that I have to embrace arbitrary precision.
In any case, if you offer me some bets with more significant digits in the odds, my choices will reveal the cutoff to more significant digits. Wherever it may be, there will still be some bets I will and won't take, and the number reflects that, which means it carries very real meaning.
Now, maybe I will hold the line at 54% exactly, not feeling any gain to thinking harder about the cutoff (as it gets harder AND less important to nail down further digits). Heck, maybe on some other issue I only care to go out to the nearest 10%. But so what? There are plenty of cases where I know my common sense belief probability to within 10%. That suggests such an estimate is not meaningless.
xv15:
To be precise, I wrote "meaningless, except perhaps as a vague figure of speech." I agree that the claim would be too strong without that qualification, but I do believe that "vague figure of speech" is a fair summary of the meaningfulness that is to be found there. (Note also that the claim specifically applies to "common-sense conclusions and beliefs," not things where there is a valid basis for employing mathematical models that yield numerical probabilities.)
You seem to be saying that since you perceive this number as meaningful, you will be willing to act on it, and this by itself renders it meaningful, since it serves as guide for your actions. If we define "meaningful" to cover this case, then I agree with you, and this qualification should be added to my above statement. But the sense in which I used the term originally doesn't cover this case.
Fair. Let me be precise too. I read your original statement as saying that numbers will never add meaning beyond what a vague figure of speech would, i.e. if you say "I strongly believe this" you cannot make your position more clear by attaching a number. That I disagree with. To me it seems clear that:
i) "Common-sense conclusions and beliefs" are held with varying levels of precision. ii) Often even these beliefs are held with a level of precision that can be best described with a number. (Best=most succinctly, least misinterpretable, etc...indeed it seems to me that sometimes "best" could be replaced with "only." You will never get people to understand 60% by saying "I reasonably strongly believe"...and yet your belief may be demonstrably closer to 60 than 50 or 70).
I don't think your statement is defensible from a normal definition of "common sense conclusions," but you may have internally defined it in such a way as to make your statement true, with a (I think) relatively narrow sense of "meaningfulness" also in mind. For instance if you ignore the role of numbers in transmission of belief from one party to the next, you are a big step closer to being correct.
xv15:
You have a very good point here. For example, a dialog like this could result in a real exchange of useful information:
A: "I think this project will probably fail."
B: "So, you mean you're, like, 90% sure it will fail?"
A: "Um... not really, more like 80%."
I can imagine a genuine meeting of minds here, where B now has a very good idea of how confident A feels about his prediction. The numbers are still used as mere figures of speech, but "vague" is not a correct way to describe them, since the information has been transmitted in a more precise way than if A had just used verbal qualifiers.
So, I agree that "vague" should probably be removed from my original claim.
On point #2, I agree with you. On point #1, I had the same reaction as xv15. Your example conversation is exactly how I would defend the use of numerical probabilities in conversation. I think you may have confused people with the phrase "vague figure of speech," which was itself vague.
Vague relative to what? "No idea / kinda sure / pretty sure / very sure?", the ways that people generally communicate about probability, are much worse. You can throw in other terms like "I suspect" and "absolutely certain" and "very very sure", but it's not even clear how these expressions of belief match up with others. In common speech, we really only have about 3-5 degrees of probability. That's just not enough gradations.
In contrast, when expressing a percentage probability, people only tend to use multiples of 10, certain multiples of 5, 0.01%, 1%, 2%, 98%, 99% and 99.99%. If people use figures like 87%, or any decimal places other than the ones previously mentioned, it's usually because they are deliberately being ridiculous. (And it's no coincidence that your example uses multiples of 10.)
I agree with you that feelings of uncertainty are fuzzy, but they aren't so fuzzy that we can get by with merely 3-5 gradations in all sorts of conversations. On some subjects, our communication becomes more precise when we have 10-20 gradations. Yet there are diminishing returns on more degrees of communicable certainty (due to reasons you correctly describe), so going any higher resolution than 10-20 degrees isn't useful for anything except jokes.
Yes. Gaining the 10-20 gradations that numbers allow when they are typically used does make conversations relatively more precise than just by tacking on "very very" to your statement of certainty.
It's similar to the infamous 1-10 rating system for people's attractiveness. Despite various reasons that rating people with numbers is distasteful, this ranking system persists because, in my view, people find it useful for communicating subjective assessments of attractiveness. Ugly-cute-hot is a 3-point scale. You could add in "gorgeous," "beautiful," or modifiers like "smoking hot," but it's unclear how these terms rank against each other (and they may express different types of attraction, rather than different degrees). Again, it's hard to get more than 3-5 degrees using plain English. The 1-10 scale (with half-points, and 9.9) gives you about 20 gradations (though 1-3, and any half-point values below 5 are rarely used).
I think we have a generalized phenomenon where people resort to using numbers to describe their subjective feelings when common language doesn't grant high enough resolution. 3-5 is good enough for some feelings (3 gives you negative, neutral, and positive for instance), but for some feelings we need more. Somewhere around 20 is the upper-bound of useful gradations.
You can, of course. For most situations, the effort is not worth the trade-off. But making a distinction between 1%, 25%, 50%. 75%. and 99% often is.
You can (at least formally) put error bars on the quantities that go into a Bayesian calculation. The problem, of course, is that error bars are short-hand for a distribution of possible values, and it's not obvious what a distribution of probabilities means or should mean. Everything operational about probability functions is fully captured by their full set of expectation values, so this is no different than just immediately taking the mean, right?
Well, no. The uncertainties are a higher level model that not only makes predictions, but also calibrates how much these predictions are likely to move given new data.
It seems to me that this is somewhat related to the problem of logical uncertainty.
Or, you could slide up your arbitrary and fallacious slippery slope and end up with Shultz.