billswift comments on Rationality Quotes: February 2011 - Less Wrong

13 Post author: gwern 01 February 2011 05:46PM

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Comment author: billswift 01 February 2011 07:29:20PM 13 points [-]

How emotionally entangled are you with your point of view? Test yourself - defend an opposing view, believing your life depends upon it.

-- Marc Stiegler, David's Sling

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 02 February 2011 11:38:24AM 4 points [-]

I keep seeing insightful bits from this book (for instance, here and somewhere else that I forget). Am I correct when I say it seems worth reading as rationalist fiction?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 February 2011 07:08:47PM 1 point [-]

It's very nearly one of the only pieces of rationalist fiction out there.

Comment author: XiXiDu 10 February 2011 09:43:11AM 0 points [-]

Marc Stiegler is a science fiction author and software developer. He co-authored Valentina: Soul in Sapphire with Joseph H. Delaney. This is the one of the earliest examples of sentient computer software in fiction — as opposed to mainframe AI's such as HAL and Colossus. He also wrote the short story, "The Gentle Seduction" based on Vinge's ideas about a technological "singularity," the exponential growth of future technology --- that will drastically affect the nature and experience of being a human being.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Stiegler

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 10 February 2011 12:03:39PM 0 points [-]

I'm quite fond of "The Gentle Seduction", but I eventually noticed how he simplified his problem-- he wrote about a relatively isolated person.

Comment author: kpreid 02 February 2011 08:02:47PM *  0 points [-]

I haven't read David's Sling; but I read his Earthweb and found it to be not-particularly-deep futurism (primarily presenting the idea of prediction markets).

Comment author: Desrtopa 01 February 2011 08:40:59PM 6 points [-]

There seem to be separate failure conditions here though. You could fail because you're too emotionally invested in your view, or you could fail because you can spot the flaws in all the arguments for the opposing view. If your original view was actually right, then you're not at fault.

Since this can be hard to distinguish from motivated cognition, I think the exercise is questionably useful.

Comment author: Nornagest 01 February 2011 09:11:50PM *  5 points [-]

I don't think the point of the exercise is to successfully defend the opposing point of view but to make a good-faith attempt to come up with an argument for it without getting your original emotions involved. If you can conjure up a coherent argument for the opposing side (allowing for a slightly different set of priors), that's some evidence that you're looking at consequences rather than being strung along by motivated cognition. If you can't -- and this is pretty common -- that's good evidence that the opposing view has been reduced to a caricature in your mind.

It's a litmus test for color politics, in other words. Not a perfect one, but it doesn't have to be.

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