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komponisto comments on Science: Do It Yourself - Less Wrong
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Wei_Dai writes "I wonder if I'm missing something important by not playing chess."
I am a somewhat decent chess player[*] and a reasonable Go player (3 dan, barely, at last rated tournament a few years ago). If you're inclined to thinking about cognition itself, and about questions like the value of heuristics and approximations that only work sometimes, such games are great sources of examples. In some cases, the strong players have already thinking along those lines for more than a century, though using a different vocabulary. E.g., Go concepts like aji and thickness seem strongly related to Less Wrong discussions of the relative value of conjunctive and disjunctive plans.
There might also be some rationalist value in learning at the gut level that we're not on the primordial savannah any more by putting a thousand or so hours or more into at least one discipline where you can be utterly unmistakably crushed by someone who scores a zero on the usual societal/hindbrain tags for seriousness (like a bored 9 year old Ukrainian who obliterates you in the first round of the tournament on the way to finishing the tournament undefeated with a rating provisionally revised to 5 dan:-).
That said, I think you will probably get much more bang for your rationalist-wins-the-world buck from studying other things. In particular, I'd nominate (1) math along the usual engineering-ish main sequence (calculus, linear algebra, Fourier analysis, probability, statistics) and (2) computer programming. History and microeconomics-writ-large are also strong candidates. So it's not particularly worth studying chess or go beyond the point where you just find it fun for its own sake.
[*] highwater mark approximately 60 seconds before I abandoned my experiment with playing chess somewhat seriously: forced threefold repetition against a 2050ish-rated player who happened to be tournament director of the local chess club minitournament, who had told me earlier that I could stop recording when my clock fell below 5 minutes, and who ruled upon my 3-fold repetition that it didn't count as a draw because the game was not being recorded
Empirically, we have more impressive instrumental rationalists, such as Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowen and Demis Hassabis coming from the much smaller field of chess than from the much larger field of math (where I think there's only James Simmons). There's also Watizkin, who seems very interesting. It seems to me that math emphasizes excess rigor and a number of other elements which constitute the instrumental rationality equivalent of anti-epistemology, and possibly also that the way in which it is taught emphasizes learning concepts prior to the questions that motivated their creation, which never happens in games. Fischer was probably more insane than any famous insane mathematician I can think of though, and Kasparov does claim the following http://www.new-tradition.org/view-garry-kasparov.php though given his Soviet education, e.g. education in a system which actually did teach a blatantly false version of history, this is more understandable.
At the elite PhD level, the mathematical community encourages a level of rigor, and the analytical philosophy community a level of pseudo-rigor that may even qualify as epistemic anti-epistemology for the typical student, (hence the anomalous number of theists in those fields relative to other high-IQ fields) but the people who are recognized as the best in those fields are probably matched only by the best physicists (as a group) in epistemic rationality. Certainly those fields reward epistemic rationality like no others.
Poker, MtG, Go, etc have good instrumental track records compared to math but bad ones compared to chess IMHO.
BTW, I feel instrumental rationality guilt at writing a blog comment that few people are likely to read. I'd love it if someone were to incorporate this and their thoughts about it into a top level post.
Am I missing something? Is Tyler Cowen famous for something other than being a moderately high-status academic economist with a blog? Otherwise, why are you more impressed with him than with leading academic mathematicians, such as Terence Tao?
Tyler has a regular New York Times column and is part of society in a way that no mathematician I know of is. He can influence influential people in a way that Terry can't. He also very clearly has a life that is optimized to meet his values. Terry does what lots of other people do, he just does a hundred times more of it moderately better than they would.
Once again, apparent disagreement on this point seems to me to be an instance of academics and those with academic aspirations simply not seeing status other than academic status. Not doing so is part of their training of course, but it leads to a very confused picture of the world.
That is every bit as true of Terry as Tyler, and probably more so: Tyler would probably like to be Larry Summers, Milton Friedman, or Paul Krugman, while Terry Tao is pretty much exactly who Terry Tao wants to be.
My interpretation of the disagreement is different: an unwarranted assumption on the part of some that those with academic high status would really prefer something else, but are willing to "settle" for academia; as opposed to academia simply being the best place society currently offers for their values to be pursued. (And yes, academia is "part of society".) I would argue that any picture of the world on which "instrumental rationality" is synonymous with "financial/political success" is more confused than mine.
As for influence, see the USQ affair. Terry Tao can influence when he wants. I'm sure he could get a NY Times column (or certainly a LA Times column) if he wanted one.
I just doubt that you are correct, about the Times column or anything else above.
Academia, and especially math, seems to me to exist to not be part of society, to be literally descended from monastic orders, etc. It indoctrinates people to claim what you are saying, and even believe it, but people's values are pretty objective and not so measurable by such claims.
How impactful was his involvement in the USQ affair?
Terry may have more fun than Tyler, since he's smarter and can access more fun, but I think it's VERY unlikely that after spending a year like Tyler does he'd go back to his life.
Financial/political success isn't 'instrumental rationality'. Maslow's 'self-actualization' is. Tyler and Terry both do pretty well in that respect, but in my assessment, not comparably well.
Even if that was true (and I think komponisto is more likely to be correct here), I'm not sure it would support your conclusion, since Terry might also not want to go back to his life after being wireheaded for a year but that doesn't mean not wanting to be wireheaded is a miscalculation.
Overall I'm surprised that you are so confident about what goals/values other people would have if they didn't miscalculate, when I'm not even sure what goals/values I should have. If you think you have some real insights that others are missing, you probably need to give a systematic explanation to bridge the inferential gaps, instead of arguing via these comments.
The short version is that I can observe the gradient of change in people's values and I see what look like clear attractors.
Also, if learning is central to fun, the activities that maximize rate of learning have a good prior on being most fun. Hyperspecialization pulls away from such activities, while cultivating basic competence in and awareness of domains with evolutionary support maximizes speed of learning. Cross-disciplinary insight can even make this the best way to maximize effectiveness in a specialized discipline, simply by developing new neural regions which offer hardware support for concrete metaphors.
The long version is that I think I have a very detailed and basically correct model of human psychology. By basically correct, I largely mean wrong, e.g. good enough that it can and does make wrong predictions and be partially falsified and incrementally refined through the creation of high generality mechanisms to correct specific errors. This is, as opposed to most psychological theories, which aren't even wrong.
I don't get it. Putting one's entire life into abstract pursuits like math is also an attractor. Why do you think that one is a miscalculation, while other attractors represent true values?
What is this model? Is it your own invention, and if so, have you written it down somewhere, or are you expecting people to take you at your word?
Attractors which lead to people being unable or afraid to attempt other activities are much less credible as values than those which leave one with many options.
This is strictly analogous to Aristotle's claim that intellectual pursuits were best, as is clear because they are chosen by almost everyone who appreciates them and other sorts of activity. He's right, but its broad personal development with a strong focus on intellectual pursuits of a polymathic nature which seems to actually be chosen by those who can choose it, reliably.
I expect people who are used to interacting with me to take it at my word that it is periodically falsified on details and revised. The closest that's been written down is in Lakoff, but his model isn't that far off.
I you have this you have a near-obligation to publish it outside of forum comments section :)
What are those attractors?
Likewise, I doubt that you are correct when you write:
Think about what this entails: you're essentially saying that the fact that Terry Tao spends his time solving math problems rather than hobnobbing with east-coast social and policy elites is the result of a miscalculation on his part with regard to his own values. As opposed to a selection effect where Tao happens to be in the small group of people who actually do prefer math to schmoozing and affecting government policy.
Now I do find it plausible that there exists a class of people for whom what you say is true -- that there are successful mathematicians who in their heart of hearts would rather be the Jim Simons of today than the Jim Simons of the 1970s, or even today's Terry Tao. But for your claim to be true as stated, there would essentially have to exist nobody in the entire human population with the opposite preference (because if there were, Tao, Wiles, etc. would surely be among them), and given the psychological diversity of our species this strikes me as absurd.
As for monastic orders, that's exactly where I would want to be if I had to live in the Middle Ages. You may say that they were "outside of society", but the fact is that most of the people we remember today from that period were monks. (The others being kings and popes.)
You're positing a very strong selection mechanism connecting math interest with math jobs. I'm sure Terry likes solving math problems, but miscalculations like that are the norm, not the exception, in human affairs.
I'd rather be a monk than a peasant too, but I'd much rather be Chaucer, and I think that most monks would too. The difference between monks and professors is that one works a LOT harder to become a professor. If you are going to work that hard, you may as well make something of yourself.
MichaelVassar:
Undoubtedly so, but based on your comments, I'd say you might be suffering from a too narrow and perhaps also somewhat biased view of the different modes of self-actualization. By this I mean that you're not taking into account the full scope of the potential modes, and you're also underestimating the differences in the optimal modes for people of different personalities.
In my opinion, you're also underestimating some downsides of being a senior member of the modern-day academic nomenklatura (and especially one who is not at its top tier), particularly those that are more pronounced the further a field is from the exactness and meritocracy that is least imperfectly embodied by math. Though you've probably met more concrete people from this social class than me, so your judgment may in fact be more accurate than mine.
I think I account for varied personalities well, but treat supposed personality differences which are basically the fear of doing things not in accordance with an established identity as bad motivations and see those as accounting for a significant fraction of supposed personality differences though not for the majority.
I'm confused about "In my opinion, you're also underestimating some downsides of being a senior member of the modern-day academic nomenklatura ". What makes you say that?
MichaelVassar:
Basically, I have in mind the required level of conformity with the respectable opinion. This is admittedly somewhat speculative on my part since I have neither personal experience nor close friends in such positions, but it seems to me that the standards of conformity expected from a public intellectual with prestigious academic and media affiliations have nowadays reached a level where it's doubtful whether a genuinely curious and open mind can satisfy them without a great deal of self-censorship and possibly also dishonesty about one's true beliefs. This seems to me like a significant barrier to true self-actualization by any reasonable definition of the term. Clearly, assuming the problem exists, it will be worse the further one's interests are from strictly technical and non-ideological topics.
Perhaps it will be clearer if I illustrate it with a more extreme example. Imaging you were an elite member of some intellectual profession in the former U.S.S.R. -- would you rather be a mathematician or an economist? As a mathematician, you could do all the mathematics you liked, with only some rare and minimal lip-service to the system; as an economist, on the other hand, you would have to constantly mold your views according to a reigning ideology clearly remote from reality. Now of course, the modern-day Western world is far from even late-period U.S.S.R., but the difference is in my opinion one of degree, not essence. The position of a high-status intellectual still comes with very severe restrictions on your intellectual freedom.
I'm not sure that the situation of graduate students today in most academic fields is better than that of late period USSR academics. Tenured academics have it much better, but by that far into one's career most real interest has already been squeezed out.
Is this akin to Paul Graham's
He has also formulated your other ideas (i.e. polymathism) as I interpret it of planning life in a bottom-up manner of improving flexibility and options, rather than top-down from a precise end goal (which extreme specialization would suggest).
That might be part of it, but I am pretty sure Vassar also refers to the fact that a lot of young men with the ambition and curiosity to do better spend the vast majority of their time getting more skilled at their strongest skill because that is what they perceive as the optimal path to economic security and status and the fact that academics are encouraged in this severely non-optimal path (in part because it is convenient for academic institutions and advantageous for ambitious academic bureaucrats to divide human knowledge into specialties and subspecialties).
If these young men could relax more and not worry so much about their own status and economic security, they would tend to heed more their natural human sense of curiosity or their more playful social impulses (including perhaps altruism), which are probably all better guides to what to learn next than the desire to advance in the academic status hierarchy. In other words, a burning desire for status, particularly status that comes from a reputation for having some refined skill or expertise, is not as reliable a guide to self-actualization as it was in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Well, that might not always be true: for example, not working towards the right kind of status can prevent one from having access to the kind of friends and mentors who can best help one to learn. But it is certainly true that a lot of young men (and perhaps women, too, but I tend to think that the fear of social disapproval is a bigger problem there) do not take advantage of the social opportunities for learning that they already have (and limit their educations in other ways) out of a fear of not having enough status or income out of not having a good enough reputation for skill or expertise.
Yes.