Rationality Quotes September 2011
Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
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-Richard Feynman
-- Lewis Carrol, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
Hard to believe that it hasn't show up here before...
-Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
In other words, politics is the mind killer.
I think it may be wiser to say "policy is the mind killer"; it emphasizes the cross-institutional cross-scale pervasive nature of political thinking.
Gary Marcus, Kluge
Relevant to deathism and many other things
Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
-Steve Jobs, [Wired, February 1996]
It's still an open question how well the networks succeed at giving people what they want. We still see, for instance, Hollywood routinely spending $100 million on a science fiction film written and directed by people who know nothing about science or science fiction, over 40 years after the success of Star Trek proved that the key to a successful science fiction show is hiring professional science fiction writers to write the scripts.
I don't think knowing about science had much to do with the success of Star Trek. You're probably right about the professional science fiction writers, though. Did they stop using professional sf writers for the third season?
In general, does having professional science fiction writers reliably contribute to the success of movies?
A data point which may not point in any particular direction: I was delighted by Gattaca and The Truman Show-- even if I had specific nitpicks with them [1] because they seemed like Golden Age [2] science fiction. When composing this reply, I found that they were both written by Andrew Niccol, and I don't think a professional science fiction writer could have done better. Gattaca did badly (though it got critical acclaim), The Truman Show did well.
[1] It was actually at least as irresponsible as it was heroic for the main character in Gattaca to sneak into a space project he was medically unfit for.
I don't think Truman's fans would have dropped him so easily. And I would rather have seen a movie with Truman's story compressed into the first 15 minutes, and the main part of the movie being about his learning to live in the larger world.
[2] I think the specific Golden Age quality I was seeing was using stories to explore single clear ideas.
I disagree. As I see it, The Truman Show is, at its core, a Gnostic parable similar to The Matrix, but better executed. It follows the protagonist's journey of discovery, as he begins to get hints about the true nature of reality; namely, that the world he thought of as "real" is, in fact, a prison of illusion. In the end, he is able to break through the illusion, confront its creator, and reject his offer of a comfortable life inside the illusory world, in favor of the much less comfortable yet fully real world outside.
In this parable, the Truman Show dome stands for our current world (which, according to Gnostics, is a corrupt illusion); Christoff stands for the Demiurge; and the real world outside stands for the true world of perfect forms / pure Gnosis / whatever which can only be reached by attaining enlightenment (for lack of a better term). Thus, it makes perfect sense that we don't get to see Truman's adventures in the real world -- they remain hidden from the viewer, just as the true Gnostic world is hidden from us. In order to overcome the illusion, Truman must led go of some of his most cherished beliefs, and with them discard his limitations.
IMO, the interesting thing about The Truman Show is not Truman's adventures, but his journey of discovery and self-discovery. Sure, we know that his world is a TV set, but he doesn't (at first, that is). I think the movie does a very good job of presenting the intellectual and emotional challenges involved in that kind of discovery. Truman isn't some sort of a cliched uber-hero like Neo; instead, he's just an ordinary guy. Letting go of his biases, and his attachments to people who were close to him (or so he thought) involves a great personal cost for Truman -- which, surprisingly, Jim Carrey is actually able to portray quite well.
Sure, it might be fun to watch Truman run around in the real world, blundering into things and having adventures, but IMO it wouldn't be as interesting or thought-provoking -- even accounting for the fact that Gnosticism is, in fact, not very likely to be true.
Your essay fails to account for the deep philosophical metaphors of guns, leather, gratuitous exaggerated action and nerds doing kung fu because of their non-comformist magic.
Megan McArdle
Related SMBC.
reminds me of:
"I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant." --Robert McCloskey
-- Chinese proverb
Ian Stewart invented the game of tautoverbs. Take a proverb and manipulate it so that it's tautological. i.e. "Look after the pennies and the pennies will be looked after" or "No news is no news". There's a kind of Zen joy in forming them.
This proverb however, is already there.
--Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 2006, p. 255
Laplace
--Steve Sailer
--Scott Aaronson
-- Paul Graham
There is actually a pre-split thread about this essay on Overcoming Bias, and the notion of "Keep Your Identity Small" has come up repeatedly since then.
And of course "Cached Selves", and especially this comment on that post.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
-Hippocrates
Considering the beast that some hope to kill by sharpening people's mind-sticks on LW, this sounds applicable wouldn't you agree?
Upvote for "mind-sticks".
Here's the ancient greek version, to appease NihilCredo:
No puns, upvoted.
Why is a quote by a Greek, about whom our main sources are also Greek, being posted in Latin?
The saying "Ars longa, vita brevis" is a well known saying in my lanugage in its latin form. Seems to be the most common renderng in English as well.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur.
(At the risk of ruining the joke: "Anything said in Latin sounds profound")
-- Russian proverb
I'm Russian, and I don't think I've heard this proverb before. What does it sound like in Russian ? Just curious.
It's a rather lousy translation of the proverb, the more close variant of which than that above is mentioned in Vladimir Dahl's famous collection of russian proverbs: Церковь близко, да ходить склизко, а кабак далеконько, да хожу потихоньку.
Ahh, yes, thank you ! I didn't even recognize the proverb in English, but I doubt that I myself could translate it any better...
Can you provide a better translation?
http://masterrussian.net/f13/old-russian-proverb-10675/
— John Derbyshire
--Mencius Moldbug
-- Aleister Crowley
I recently contemplated learning to play chess better (not to make an attempt at mastery, but to improve enough so I wasn't so embarassed about how bad I was).
Most of my motivation for this was an odd signalling mechanism: People think of me as a smart person, and they think of smart people as people who are good at chess, and they are thus disappointed with me when it turns out I am not.
But in the process of learning, I realized something else: I dislike chess, as compared to say, Magic the Gathering, because chess is PURE strategy, whereas Magic or StarCraft have splashy images and/or luck that provides periodic dopamine rushes. Chess only is mentally rewarding for me at two moments: when I capture an enemy piece, or when I win. I'm not good enough to win against anyone who plays chess remotely seriously, so when I get frustrated, I just go capturing enemy pieces even though it's a bad play, so I can at least feel good about knocking over an enemy bishop.
What I found most significant, though, was the realization that this fundamental not enjoying the process of thinking out chess strategies gave me some level of empathy for people who, in general, don't like to think. (This is most non-nerds, as far as I can tell). Thinking about chess is physically stressful for me, whereas thinking about other kinds of abstract problems is fun and rewarding purely for its own sake.
My issue with chess is that the skills are non-transferable. As far as I can tell the main difference between good and bad players is memorisation of moves and strategies, which I don't find very interesting and can't be transferred to other more important areas of life. Whereas other games where tactics and reaction to situation is more important can have benefits in other areas.
I think the literature disagrees. E.g. good players are less prone to confirmation bias and I think that this is transferable. (Google Scholar would know better.) Introspectively I feel like playing chess makes me a better thinker. Chess is memorization of moves and strategies only in the sense that guitar is memorization of scales and chords. You need them to play well but they're not sufficient.
True; see 2004 "Chess Masters' Hypothesis Testing" Cowley & Bryne:
Well... The chess literature and general literature on learning rarely finds transfer. From the Nature coverage of that study:
Checking Google Scholar, I see only one apparent followup, the 2005 paper by the same authors, "When falsification is the only path to truth":
While interesting and very relevant to some things (like programmers' practice of 'rubber ducking' - explaining their problem to an imaginary creature), it doesn't directly address chess transfer.
Wow - I have a similar response to chess, but never drew that analogy. Thanks.
LW has put a lot of thought into the problem of akrasia, but nothing I can think of on how to induce more pleasure from thinking.
I think rationality helps to avoid making mistakes, and avoiding feeling unnecessarily bad, but not too much to the positive side of things.
I agree-- pleasure in thinking might not be part of the study of rationality, but it could very much be part of raising sanity waterline.
This is an awesome quote that captures an important truth, the opposite of which is also an important truth :-) If I were choosing a vocation by the way its practicioners look and dress, I would never take up math or programming! And given how many people on LW are non-neurotypical, I probably wouldn't join LW either. The desire to look cool is a legitimate desire that can help you a lot in life, so by all means go join clubs whose members look cool so it rubs off on you, but also don't neglect clubs that can help you in other ways.
--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872); cf. "Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism"
-- Henry David Thoreau
-- Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
~ William Johnson Cory
-- Turkish proverb
Only if the road goes exactly the wrong way, which is unlikely. But I must admit "No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn down whatever road is the best road now" doesn't sound quite as catchy. ;)
— Horatio__Caine on reddit
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, via The Lichtenberg Reader: selected writings, trans. and ed. Franz H. Mautner and Henry Hatfield.
Captain Tagon: Lt. Commander Shodan, years ago when you enlisted you asked for a job as a martial arts trainer.
Captain Tagon: And here you are, trying to solve our current problem with martial arts training.
Captain Tagon: How's that saying go? "When you're armed with a hammer, all your enemies become nails?"
Shodan: Sir,.. you're right. I'm being narrow-minded.
Captain Tagon: No, no. Please continue. I bet martial arts training is a really, really useful hammer.
David Hull, Science and Selection: Essays on Biological Evolution and the Philosophy of Science
This is the idea behind duel-N back, that the only strategy your lazy brain can implement to do better at the game is to increase the brain's working memory.
--Nicholas Epley, "Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making"
Google tells me Dennett referred to this, in arguing that there is nothing mysterious about consciousness, because it is just a set of many tricks.
It’s a shame that the niceness of the story of the tuned deck makes Dennett’s bad argument about consciousness more appealing.
Dennett’s argument that there is no hard problem of consciousness can be summarized thus:
Take the hard problem of consciousness.
Add in all the other things anybody has ever called “consciousness”.
Solve all those other issues one by one.
Conveniently forget about the hard problem of consciousness.
Would this count as doing something deliberately complicated to throw off anyone with an Occam prior?
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
-Richard Feynman
taken from wiki quotes which took it from Stephen Hawking's book Universe in a Nutshell which took it from Feynman's blackboard at the time of this death (1988)
its simple but it gets right at the heart of why the mountains of philosophy are the foothills of AI (as Eliezer put it) .
Douglas Kenrick
-- C.S. Peirce
Plato, Philebus
G.K. Chesterton
If I were a jelly fish,
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.
All day long I'd biddy biddy bum.
If I were a jelly fish.
I wouldn't have to work hard.
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.
I prefer if I were a deep one.
(If you aren't familiar with this song I strongly recommend one looks at all of Shoggoth on the Roof.)
A gentle introduction to the mythos.
-- Scott Aaronson, Quantum Computing Since Democritus (http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec14.html)
It's even more useful to you when they turn out to be right. (As happened to me with sailing upwind faster than the wind, and with Peter deBlanc's 2007 theorem about unbounded utility functions.)
Will Newsome on facebook ;)
"Our present study is not, like other studies, purely theoretical in intention; for the object of our inquiry is not to know what virtue is but how to become good, and that is the sole benefit of it." —Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics (translated by James E. C. Weldon; emphasis added)
-Seth Klarman, Margin of Safety, p.90
Julian Huxley, Darwinism To-Day
A nod to Molière's satirical line which coined the 'dormitive fallacy':
(Le Malade Imaginere (1673), Act III, sc. iii)
-- Oliver Cromwell
This has been mentioned in a few places on LW before (e.g. here) although I don't know if it has been in a quotes thread.
Cromwell's rule is neatly tied to that phrase.
Sheldon Ross
-HL Menken
From an evolutionary perspective, I would have to disagree. Believing that one's children are supremely cute; that one's spouse is one's soulmate; or even that an Almighty Being wants you to be fruitful and multiply -- these are all beliefs which are a bit shaky on rationalist grounds but which arguably increase the reproductive fitness in the individuals and groups who hold them.
-- Robert H. Thouless
Is that the case?
The majority dreams about a "just society", the minority dreams about a better one through technological advances. No matter there was 20th century when "socialism" brought us nothing and the technology brought us everything.
Echoing a utopian meme is analogous to stamping an instance of an invention, not to inventing something anew. It is inventors of utopian dreams that I doubt to be more numerous than inventors of technology.
And let's not forget how many millions of patents there are; I don't think there are that many millions of utopias, even if we let them differ as little as patents can differ.
You may be right here. Utopias are usually also quite uninnovative. "All people will be brothers and sisters with enough to eat and Bible (or something else stupid) reading in a community house every night".
Variations are not that great.
Be fair. We tried socialism once (in several places, but with minor variations). We tried a lot of technology, including long before the 20th century.
I think socialism must fail because humans once freed from material want will compete for status. Status inequality will activate much the same sentiments as material inequality did. To level status one needs to embark on a massive value engineering campaign. These have so far always created alternative status inequalities, thus creating internal contradictions which combined with increasing material costs eventually bring the dissolution of the system and a partial undoing of the engineering efforts.
If technology advances to the point where such massive social engineering becomes practical and is indeed used for such a purpose on the whim of experts in academia/a democratic consensus/revolutionary vanguard... the implications are simply horrifying.
I feel obliged to point out that Socialdemocracy is working quite well in Europe and elsewhere and we owe it, among other stuff, free universal health care and paid vacations. Those count as "hidden potentiality of the real." Which brings us to the following point: what's , a priori, the difference between "hidden potentiality of the real" and "unreal"? Because if it's "stuff that's actually been made", then I could tell you, as an engineer, of the absolutely staggering amount of bullshit patents we get to prove are bullshit everyday. You'd be amazed how many idiots are still trying to build Perpetual Motion Machines. But you've got one thing right: we do owe technology everything, the same way everyone ows their parents everything. Doesn't mean they get all the merit.
Comfortable, well maintained social democracies where the result of a very peculiar set of circumstances and forces which seem very unlikely to return to Europe in the foreseeable future.
Would you care to expand on that?
Sure, though I hope you don't mind me giving the cliff note version.
Demographic dividend is spent. (The rate of dependency falls after the introduction of modernity (together with legalised contraception) because of lower birth rates. It later rises again as the population ages a few decades after the drop in birthrates)
Related, precisely because the society on average is old and seems incapable of embracing any kind of new ideas or a change in what its stated ideals and values are. Not only are young people few but they extremely conformist outside of a few designated symbolic kinds of "rebelling" compared to young people in other parts of the world. Oversocialized indeed.
Free higher education and healthcare produced a sort of "social uplift dividend", suddenly the cycle of poverty was broken for a whole bunch of people who where capable of doing all kinds of work, but simply didn't have the opportunity to get the necessary education to do so. After two generations of great results not only has this obviously hit diminishing returns, there are also some indications that we are actually getting less bang for buck on the policies as time continues. Though its hard to say since European society has also shifted away from meritocracy.
Massive destruction of infrastructure and means of production that enabled high demand for rebuilding much of the infrastructure (left half of the bell curve had more stuff to do than otherwise, since the price of the kinds of labour they are capable of was high).
The burden of technological unemployment was not as great as it is today (gwern's arguments regarding its existence where part of what changed my opinion away from the default view most economists seem to take. After some additional independent research I found myself not only considering it very likley but looking at 20th century history from an entirely fresh perspective ).
Event though there are some indications youth in several European countries is more trusting, the general trend seem to still be a strong move away from high trust societies.
It's not fair to say we 'owe' Socialdemocracy for free universal health care and paid vacations, because they aren't so much effects of the system as they are fundamental tenets of the system. It's much like saying we owe FreeMarketCapitalism for free markets - without these things we wouldn't recognize it as socialism. Rather, the question is whether the marginal gain in things like quality of living are worth the marginal losses in things like autonomy. Universal health care is not an end in itself.
--The Lion King opening song
Do you consider this a promotion of fun theory? Or a justification for living forever?
Can also be an indication that everything is more than one person/mind can handle. By stepping into the sun, we enjoy the warmth and may be overwhelmed by the world as we see it. The song's lyrics seem cautionary, indicating that despite the warmth of being in the world do not attempt to see everything, do not attempt to do everything? This is rational, there are things we may not enjoy as much as others. To reduce our overall enjoyment by not placing parameters on our activities would be irrational in my opinion.
Both.
Matthew (slightly paraphrased...)
What does this mean?
If you have good judgement about what things imply, you'll be good at gathering evidence.
If you have poor judgement about what things imply, you'll lose track of the meaning of the evidence you've got.
Let me see if I've cottoned on by coming up with an example.
Say you work with someone for years, and often on Mondays they come in late & with a headache. Other days, their hands are shaking, or they say socially inappropriate things in meetings.
"Good inductive bias" appears to mean you update in the correct direction (alcoholism/drug addiction) on each of these separate occasions, whereas "bad inductive bias" means you shrug each occurrence off and then get presented with each new occurrence, as it were, de novo. So this could be glossed as basically "update incrementally." Have I got the gist?
I think what's mildly confusing is the normatively positive use of the word "bias," which typically suggests deviation from ideal reasoning. But I suppose it is a bias in the sense that one could go too far and update on every little piece of random noise...
"Inductive bias" is a technical term, where the word bias isn't meant negatively.
I think that's it, though there are at least two sorts of bad bias. The one you describe (nothing is important enough to notice or remember) is one, but there's also having a bad theory ("that annoying person is aiming it all at me", for example, which would lead to not noticing evidence of things going wrong which have nothing to do with malice).
This is reminding me of one of my favorite bits from Illuminatus!. There's a man with filing cabinets [1] full of information about the first Kennedy assassination. He's convinced that someday, he'll find the one fact which will make it all make sense. He doesn't realize that half of what's he's got is lies people made up to cover their asses.
In the novel, there were five conspiracies to kill JFK-- but that character isn't going to find out about them.
[1] The story was written before the internet.
-Sam Harris
What about, I dunno, the protestant reformation, where people were persecuted for wanting, among other things, to read the bible themselves rather than have it interpreted for them by the priesthood?
What does it mean for a society to suffer?
Francis Bacon, The advancement of Learning and New Atlantis
-- Sergey Dovlatov
(translation is mine; can you propose a better translation from Russian?)
Keith Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss
Better memory and processing power would mean that probabilistically more businessmen would realize there are good business opportunities where they saw none before. Creating more jobs and a more efficient economy, not the same economy more quickly.
ER doctors can now spend more processing power on each patient that comes in. Out of their existing repertoire they would choose better treatments for the problem at hand then they would have otherwise. A better memory means that they would be more likely to remember every step on their checklist when prepping for surgery.
It is not uncommon for people to make stupid decisions with mild to dire consequences because they are pressed for time. Everyone now thinks faster and has more time to think. Few people are pressed for time. Fewer accidents happen. Better decisions are made on average.
There are problems which are not human vs human but are human vs reality. With increased memory and processing power humanity gains an advantage over reality.
By no means is increasing memory and processing power a sliver bullet but it seems considerably more then everything only moving "much more quickly!"
Edit: spelling
But naturally doing everything faster would be pretty freaking awesome in itself.
But I'm having way to much fun nitpicking so I'll just stop here. :)
Yes, especially this one.
Put differently, imagine a pill that made North Americans cognitively slower. Wouldn't that be an obvious step down (for reasons symmetric to the ones you've highlighted)?
I think it would take more than a day for people to get possible good effects of the change.
A better memory might enable people to realize that they have made the same mistake several times. More processing power might enable them to realize that they have better strategies in some parts of their lives than others, and explore bringing the better strategies into more areas.
It's a nice list, but I think the core point strikes me as liable to be simply false. I forget who it was presenting this evidence - it might even have been James Miller, it was someone at the Winter Intelligence conference at FHI - but they looked at (1) the economic gains to countries with higher average IQ, (2) the average gains to individuals with higher IQ, and concluded that (3) people with high IQ create vast amounts of positive externality, much more than they capture as individuals, probably mostly in the form of countries with less stupid economic policies.
Maybe if we're literally talking about a pure speed and LTM pill that doesn't affect at all, say, capacity to keep things in short-term memory or the ability to maintain complex abstractions in working memory, i.e., a literal speed and disk space pill rather than an IQ pill.
Absolutely - IQ is very important, especially in aggregate. And yet, I'd still bet that the next day people will just be moving faster.
I think its worth making the distinction between having hardware which can support complex abstractions and actually having good decision making software in there. Although it'd be foolish to ignore the former because it tends to lead to the latter, it seems to be the latter that is more directly important.
That, and the fact that people can generally support better software than they pick up on their own is what makes our goal here doable.
If this is true, it would affect my decisions about whether and how to have children. So I'd really like to see the source if you can figure out what it was.
James Miller says:
Sounds plausible. If anybody finds the citation for this, please post it.
How about http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/are-the-wealthiest-countries-the-smartest-countries.html ?
Citing "Cognitive Capitalism: The impact of ability, mediated through science and economic freedom, on wealth". (PDF not immediately available in Google.)
EDIT: efm found the PDF: http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/hsw/psychologie/professuren/entwpsy/team/rindermann/publikationen/11PsychScience.pdf
Or http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/converging.pdf :
EDITEDIT: high IQ predicts superior stock market investing even after the obvious controls. High IQ types are also more likely to trust the stock market enough to participate more in it
"Do you have to be smart to be rich? The impact of IQ on wealth, income and financial distress", Zagorsky 2007:
One could also phrase this as: "if we control for factors which we know to because by intelligence, such as highest level of education, then mirabile dictu! intelligence no longer increases income or wealth very much!"; or, "regressions are hard, let's go shopping."
Apropos of http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2012/07/18/why-we-make-up-jobs-out-of-thin-air/
Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences, Lynn & Vanhanen 2012 (excerpts)
"IQ in the Ramsey Model: A Naïve Calibration", Jones 2006:
That quote does not appear to come from the linked paper, and I'm confused as to how a paper from 2006 was supposed to have a citation from 2009.
Only the first paragraph is wrong (mixed it up with a paper on the Swiss iodization experience I'm using in a big writeup on iodide self-experimentation). Fixed.
"Economic gains resulting from the reduction in children's exposure to lead in the United States", Grosse et al 2002 (fulltext)
Their summary estimate from pg5/567 is a lower-middle-upperbound of each IQ point is worth, in net present value 2000 dollars: 12,700-14,500-17,200.
(Note that these figures, as usual, are net estimates of the value to an individual: so they are including zero-sum games and positional benefits. They aren't giving estimates of the positive externalities or marginal benefits.)
"Quality of Institutions : Does Intelligence Matter?", Kalonda-Kanyama & Kodila-Tedika 2012:
"IQ and Permanent Income: Sizing Up the “IQ Paradox”":
"Costs and benefits of iodine supplementation for pregnant women in a mildly to moderately iodine-deficient population: a modelling analysis" (mirror; appendices), Monahan et al 2015
IQ estimates:
All the details are in the Monahan et al 2015 appendices
The 8 studies are listed on pg8 of the appendix, Table 1:
(Note that by including covariates that are obviously caused by IQ rather than independent, and excluding any attempt at measuring the many positive externalities of greater intelligence, these numbers can usually be considered substantial underestimates of country-wide benefits.)
"Are Smarter Groups More Cooperative? Evidence from Prisoner's Dilemma Experiments, 1959-2003", Jones 2008:
Later: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/group_iq_one_so.html
"IQ in the Production Function: Evidence from Immigrant Earnings", Jones & Schneider 2008:
Here's another one: "National IQ and National Productivity: The Hive Mind Across Asia", Jones 2011
"Salt Iodization and the Enfranchisement of the American Worker", Adhvaryu et al 2013:
If, in the 1920s, 10 IQ points could increase your labor participation rate by 1%, then what on earth does the multiplier look like now? The 1920s weren't really known for their demands on intelligence, after all.
And note the relevance to discussions of technological unemployment: since the gains are concentrated in the low end (think 80s, 90s) due to the threshold nature of iodine & IQ, this employment increase means that already, a century ago, people in the low-end range were having trouble being employed.
"Exponential correlation of IQ and the wealth of nations", Dickerson 2006:
It peeves me when scatterplots of GDP per capita versus something else use a linear scale -- do they actually think the difference between $30k and $20k is anywhere near as important as that between $11k and $1k? And yet hardly anybody uses logarithmic scales.
Likewise, the fit looks a lot less scary if you write it as ln(GDP) = A + B*IQ.
Above link is dead. Here is a new one
http://mason.gmu.edu/~gjonesb/JonesADR
This is related, but not the research talked about. The Terman Project apparently found that the very highest IQ cohort had many more patents than the lower cohorts, but this did not show up as massively increased lifetime income.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/04/earnings-effects-of-personality.html
Unless we want to assume those 4x extra patents were extremely worthless, or that the less smart groups were generating positive externalities in some other mechanism, this would seem to imply that the smartest were not capturing anywhere near the value they were creating - and hence were generating significant positive externalities.
EDIT: Jones 2011 argues much the same thing - economic returns to IQ are so low because so much of it is being lost to positive externalities.
3 more links:
I'm not convinced. One very simple gain from
is the ability to consider more alternatives. These may be alternative explanations, designs, or courses of action. If I consider three alternatives where before I could only consider two, if the third one happens to be better than the other two, it is a real gain. This applies directly to the case of
Don't confuse time-to-solution with correctness. Speed and the amount of facts at hand will not give you a good result if your fundamental assumptions (aka your algorithm) is wrong.
You cannot make up in quantity what you lose on each transaction, as the dot-com folks proved repeatedly.
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, part VI
-- Nick Tarleton
The original goes:
-- T. S. Eliot
The Onion (it's sort of a rationality and anti-rationality quote at multiple levels)
Yitz Herstein
Banach, in a 1957 letter to Ulam.
-- Dr. Dre, "The Watcher"
-- Richard P. Feynman
And oldy but goody.
Friedrich Nietzsche
-- C.S. Peirce
I will submit (separately) three quotations from my favorite philosopher, C.S. Peirce:
-- C.S. Peirce
-- Ari Rahikkala
Is this really a rationality quote, is it just pro-Yudkowsky?
It does set a standard for the clarity of any writing you do, but I've seen substantially better quotes on that topic before.
I say yes. This is the difference between learning the 'Philosophy' how to quote deep stuff with names like Wittgenstein and Nietzsche and just learning stuff about reality that is just obvious. Once the knowledge is there is shouldn't seem remarkable at all.
For me at least this is one of the most important factors when evaluating a learning source. Is the information I'm learning simple in retrospect or is it a bunch of complicated rote learning. If the latter, is there a good reason related to complexity in the actual world that requires me to be learning complex arbitrary things?
Related to hindsight bias and inferential distances. I'd sort of noticed this happening before, but if I hadn't realized other people had the same experience I probably would have underestimated the degree to which rationality had changed my worldview and so underestimated the positive effect of spreading it to others.
-- Mary Everest Boole
Richard P. Feynman
-Anon.
-- Robert Nozick (The Nature of Rationality)
Locke
I disagree. A lot of human conducts that I find virtuous, such as compassion or tolerance, have no immediate connection with the truth, and sometimes they are best served with white lies.
For example, all the LGBTQ propaganda spoken at doubting conservatives, about how people are either born gay or they aren't, and how modern culture totally doesn't make young people bisexual, no sir. We're quite innocent, human sexuality is set in stone, you see. Do you really wish to hurt your child for what they always were? What is this "queer agenda" you're speaking about?
Tee-hee :D
You may want to carefully consider this comment.
-- George Bernard Shaw
(Thanks to gwern for this one.)
Quite literally, in fact.
Whoops. I found it on gwern's website. Guess I should've done the next (in retrospect) most obvious thing. Sorry about that!
ETA: Feel free to vote me back down if you wish.
-- Upton Sinclair
Dupe
-- HL Mencken
This is quoted already on this page albeit with "no matter" substituted for "however".
-- Planet Sheen
“When anyone asks me how I can describe my experience of nearly forty years at sea, I merely say uneventful. Of course there have been winter gales and storms and fog and the like, but in all my experience, I have never been in an accident of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea… I never saw a wreck and have never been wrecked, nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort.”
E.J. Smith, 1907, later captain of the RMS Titanic
Note: This is one of those comments that has been repeated, without citation, on the internet so many times that I can no longer find a citation.
-- Raymond Terrific
-- Cliff Pervocracy
-- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
(I know it's old and famous and classic, but this doesn't make it any less precious, does it?)
If I were an intelligent creature from space visiting Earth, I'd probably start by asking, "do they have anything that can shoot us out of orbit ?" That's just me though.
I would actually think evolution a particularly poor choice.
If you want to pick one question to ask (and if we leave aside the obvious criterion of easy detectability from space) then you would want to pick one strongly connected in the dependency graph. Heavier than air flight, digital computers, nuclear energy, the expansion of the universe, the genetic code, are all good candidates. You can't discover those without discovering a lot of other things first.
But Aristotle could in principle have figured out evolution. The prior probability of doing so at that early stage may be small, but I'll still bet evolution has a much larger variance in its discovery time than a lot of other things.
Genetic code might likely vary. While it isn't implausible that other life would use DNA for its genetic storage it doesn't seem to be that likely. It seems extremely unlikely that DNA would be organized in the same triplet codon system that life on Earth uses.
Heavier than air flight is also a function of what sort of planet you are on. If Earth had slightly weaker or stronger gravity the difficulty of this achievement would change a lot. Also if intelligent life had arose from winged species one could see this as impacting how much they study aerodynamics and the like. One could conceive of that going either way (say having a very intuitive understanding of how to fly but considering it to be incredibly difficult to make an Artificial Flyer, or the opposite, using that intuition to easily understand what would need to be done in some form.)
Other than that, your argument seems to be a good one.
I wouldn't say it has much preciousness to begin with. It is is nearly nonsensical cheering. The sort of thing I don't like to associate myself with at all.
Sometimes I suspect that wouldn't even occur to them as a question. That evolution might turn out to be one of those things that it's just assumed any race that had mastered agriculture MUST understand.
Because, well, how could a race use selective breeding, and NOT realise that evolution by natural selection occurs?
Easily.
Realizing far-reaching consequences of an idea is only easy in hindsight, otherwise I think it's a matter of exceptional intelligence and/or luck. There's an enormous difference between, on the one hand, noticing some limited selection and utilising it for practical benefits - despite only having a limited, if any, understanding of what you're doing - and on the other hand realizing how life evolved into complexity from its simple beginnings, in the course of a difficult to grasp period of time. Especially if the idea has to go up against well-entrenched, hostile memes.
I don't know if this has a name, but there seems to exit a trope where (speaking broadly) superior beings are unable to understand the thinking and errors of less advanced beings. I first noticed it when reading H. Fast's The First Men, where this exchange between a "Man Plus" child and a normal human occurs:
"Can you do something you disapprove of?" "I am afraid I can. And do." "I don't understand. Then why do you do it?"
It's supposed to be about how the child is so advanced and undivided in her thinking, but to me it just means "well then you don't understand how the human mind works".
In short, I find this trope to be a fallacy. I'd expect an advanced civilisation to have a greater, not lesser, understanding of how intelligence works, its limitations, and failure modes in general.
Yeah. This was put very well by Fyodor Urnov, in an MCB140 lecture:
"What is blindingly obvious to us was not obvious to geniuses of ages past."
I think the lecture series is available on iTunes.
While I think you're right to point out that the uncomprehending-superior-beings trope is unrealistic, I don't think Dawkins was generalizing from fictional evidence; his quote reads more to me like plain old anthropomorphism, along with a good slice of self-serving bias relating to the importance of his own work.
A point similar to your first one shows up occasionally in fiction too, incidentally; there's a semi-common sci-fi trope that has alien species achieving interstellar travel or some other advanced technology by way of a very simple and obvious-in-retrospect process that just happened never to occur to any human scientist. So culture's not completely blind to the idea. Both tropes basically exist to serve narrative purposes, though, and usually obviously polemic ones; Dawkins isn't any kind of extra-rational superhuman, but I wouldn't expect him to unwittingly parrot a device that transparent out of its original context.
But what reason do we have to expect them to pick evolution, as opposed to the concept of money, or of extensive governments (governments governing more than 10,000 people at once), or of written language, or of the internet, or of radio communication, or of fillangerisation, as their obvious sign of advancement?
Just because humans picked up on evolution far later than we should have, doesn't mean that evolution is what they'll expect to be the late discovery. They might equally expect that the internet wouldn't be invented until the equivalent tech level of 2150. Or they might consider moveable type to be the symbol of a masterful race.
Just because they'll likely be able to understand why we were late to it, doesn't mean it would occur to them before looking at us. It's easy to explain why we came to it when we did, once you know that that's what happened, but if you were from a society that realised evolution [not necessarily common descent] existed as they were domesticating animals; would you really think of understanding evolution as a sign of advancement?
EDIT: IOW: I've upvoted your disagreement with the "advanced people can't understand the simpler ways" trope; but I stand by my original point: they wouldn't EXPECT evolution to be undiscovered.
I suspect that the intent of the original quote is that they'll assess us by our curiosity towards, and effectiveness in discovering, our origins. As Dawkins is a biologist, he is implying that evolution by natural selection is an important part of it, which of course is true. An astronomer or cosmologist might consider a theory on the origins of the universe itself to be more important, a biochemist might consider abiogenesis to be the key, and so on.
Personally, I can see where he's coming from, though I can't say I feel like I know enough about the evolution of intelligence to come up with a valid argument as to whether an alien species would consider this to be a good metric to evaluate us with. One could argue that interest in oneself is an important aspect of intelligence, and scientific enquiry important to the development of space travel, and so a species capable of travelling to us would have those qualities and look for them in the creatures they found.
This is my time posting here, so I'm probably not quite up to the standards of the rest of you just yet. Sorry if I said something stupid.
Welcome to lesswrong.
I wouldn't consider anything you've said here stupid, in fact I would agree with it.
I, personally, see it as a failure of imagination on the part of Dawkin's, that he considers the issue he personally finds most important to be that which alien intelligences will find most important, but you are right to point out what his likely reasoning is.
Another chain of reasoning I have seen people use to reach similar conclusions is that the aliens are looking for species that have outgrown their sense of their own special importance to the universe. Aliens checking for that would be likely to ask about evolution, or possibly about cosmologies that don't have the home planet at the center of the universe. However, I don't think a sense of specialness is one of the main things aliens will care about.
I think you're interpreting the quote too literally, it's not a statement about some alien intelligences but an allegory to communicate just how important the science of evolution is.
Have you never looked at something someone does and asked yourself, "How can they be so stupid?"
It's not as though you literally cannot conceive of such limitations; just that you cannot empathize with them.
The British agricultural revolution involved animal breeding starting in about 1750. Darwin didn't publish Origin of Species until 1859, so in reality it took about 100 years for the other shoe to drop.
Selective breeding had been around much longer than that.
100 years is nothing in the evolution of a civilization though. The time between agricultural revolution and the discovery of evolution is not a typical period in the history of humanity.
I wonder if there's any way to estimate how hard it is for an intelligent species to think of evolution. It's a very abstract theory, and I think it's plausible that intelligent species could be significantly better or worse than we are at abstract thought. I have no idea where the middle of the bell curve (if it's a bell curve at all) would be.