Rationality Quotes September 2011

7 Post author: dvasya 02 September 2011 07:38AM

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  • Do not quote yourself.
  • Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.

Comments (482)

Comment author: Grognor 28 September 2011 03:51:15AM *  12 points [-]

Kant was proud of having discovered in man the faculty for synthetic judgements a priori. But "How are synthetic judgements a priori possible?" How did Kant answer? By saying "By virtue of a faculty" (though unfortunately not in five words). But is that an answer? Or rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? "by virtue of a faculty, namely the virtus dormitiva", replies the doctor in Molière. Such replies belong in comedy. It is high time to replace the Kantian question by another question, "Why is belief in such judgements necessary?"

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Comment author: ata 28 September 2011 03:07:16AM 7 points [-]

"No. You have just fallen prey to the meta-Dunning Kruger effect, where you talk about how awesome you are for recognizing how bad you are."

Horatio__Caine on reddit

Comment author: JoshuaZ 28 September 2011 03:10:45AM *  -1 points [-]

You could say that... puts on sunglasses ... his competence killed him.

Cue music. yeahhh

Comment author: RobinZ 27 September 2011 08:44:52PM *  7 points [-]

It is certain, it seems, that we can judge some matters correctly and wisely and yet, as soon as we are required to specify our reasons, can specify only those which any beginner in that sort of fencing can refute. Often the wisest and best men know as little how to do this as they know the muscles with which they grip or play the piano.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, via The Lichtenberg Reader: selected writings, trans. and ed. Franz H. Mautner and Henry Hatfield.

Comment author: engineeredaway 27 September 2011 06:06:11PM *  6 points [-]

"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) .

Comment author: AlexSchell 27 September 2011 02:38:34AM 5 points [-]

At this point one must expect to meet with an objection. ‘Well then, if even obdurate sceptics admit that the assertions of religion cannot be refuted by reason, why should I not believe in them, since they have so much on their side tradition, the agreement of mankind, and all the consolations they offer?’ Why not, indeed? Just as no one can be forced to believe, so no one can be forced to disbelieve. But do not let us be satisfied with deceiving ourselves that arguments like these take us along the road of correct thinking. If ever there was a case of a lame excuse we have it here. Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything can be derived from it. In other matters no sensible person will behave so irresponsibly or rest content with such feeble grounds for his opinions and for the line he takes. It is only in the highest and most sacred things that he allows himself to do so.

Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, part VI

Comment author: lukeprog 26 September 2011 09:10:35AM 6 points [-]

Let us then take in our hands the staff of experience, paying no heed to the accounts of all the idle theories of the philosophers. To be blind and to think one can do without this staff if the worst kind of blindness.

Comment author: CronoDAS 24 September 2011 10:56:02PM 17 points [-]

If we don't change our direction, we're likely to end up where we're headed.

-- Chinese proverb

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 25 September 2011 12:27:29AM 14 points [-]

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.

Comment author: CronoDAS 24 September 2011 10:55:38PM *  21 points [-]

No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back.

-- Turkish proverb

Comment author: wedrifid 25 September 2011 08:43:28AM 3 points [-]

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. ;)

Comment author: [deleted] 24 September 2011 03:35:50PM 10 points [-]

The key is that it's adaptive. It's not that it succeeds despite the bad results of its good intentions. It succeeds because of the bad results of its good intentions.

--Mencius Moldbug

Comment author: wedrifid 23 September 2011 03:55:27PM 4 points [-]

The human condition is mass mutual Stockholm syndrome.

Will Newsome on facebook ;)

Comment author: CaveJohnson 23 September 2011 09:50:22AM 13 points [-]

One of my favorite genres in the prestige press is the Self-Refuting Article. These are articles that contain all the facts necessary to undermine the premise of the piece, but reporters, editors, and readers all conspire together in an act of collective stupidity to Not Get the Joke

--Steve Sailer

Comment author: lessdazed 23 September 2011 08:31:45PM 1 point [-]
Comment author: RobinZ 23 September 2011 08:12:42PM 0 points [-]

I don't quite see how this is a Rationality Quote.

Comment author: CharlieSheen 24 September 2011 03:40:08PM 3 points [-]

Tribal attire by another name.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 September 2011 07:16:24PM 3 points [-]

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

-- Upton Sinclair

Comment author: gwern 19 September 2011 07:23:41PM 3 points [-]
Comment author: [deleted] 19 September 2011 07:38:59PM *  1 point [-]

Forgot to google it. Sorry.

Comment author: Yvain 19 September 2011 06:22:15PM 11 points [-]

I think there's a few posts by Yudkowsky that I think deserve the highest praise one can give to a philosopher's writing: That, on rereading them, I have no idea what I found so mindblowing about them the first time. Everything they say seems patently obvious now!

-- Ari Rahikkala

Comment author: MinibearRex 20 September 2011 09:04:41PM 7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Yvain 21 September 2011 10:02:15AM *  2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: wedrifid 20 September 2011 11:08:36PM 5 points [-]

Is this really a rationality quote

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?

Comment author: [deleted] 18 September 2011 11:21:13PM 4 points [-]

"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)

Comment author: lukeprog 16 September 2011 12:54:43AM 13 points [-]

The enlightened individual has learned to ask not "Is it so?" but rather "What is the probability that it is so?"

Sheldon Ross

Comment author: lukeprog 16 September 2011 12:53:43AM 14 points [-]

It is remarkable that [probability theory], which originated in the consideration of games of chance, should have become the most important object of human knowledge... The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability.

Laplace

Comment author: engineeredaway 15 September 2011 02:11:55AM *  7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 September 2011 10:21:34PM *  11 points [-]

Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

-Hippocrates

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 23 September 2011 08:39:26PM 5 points [-]

Here's the ancient greek version, to appease NihilCredo:

Ὁ μὲν βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή, ὁ δὲ καιρὸς ὀξύς, ἡ δὲ πεῖρα σφαλερή, ἡ δὲ κρίσις χαλεπή

Comment author: lessdazed 24 September 2011 09:27:33PM 2 points [-]

No puns, upvoted.

Comment author: NihilCredo 17 September 2011 03:25:30AM 6 points [-]

Why is a quote by a Greek, about whom our main sources are also Greek, being posted in Latin?

Comment author: [deleted] 17 September 2011 11:32:19AM *  6 points [-]

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.

Comment author: lessdazed 17 September 2011 05:01:41AM 3 points [-]

Quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur.

Comment author: MBlume 17 September 2011 05:04:25AM *  4 points [-]

(At the risk of ruining the joke: "Anything said in Latin sounds profound")

Comment author: [deleted] 13 September 2011 10:27:34PM *  15 points [-]
[The] art is long,
life is short,
opportunity fleeting,
experiment dangerous,
judgment difficult.

Considering the beast that some hope to kill by sharpening people's mind-sticks on LW, this sounds applicable wouldn't you agree?

Comment author: Nisan 17 September 2011 06:49:37AM 2 points [-]

Upvote for "mind-sticks".

Comment author: PhilGoetz 11 September 2011 07:06:33PM *  2 points [-]

“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.

Comment author: gwern 11 September 2011 02:53:32PM 36 points [-]

Again and again, I’ve undergone the humbling experience of first lamenting how badly something sucks, then only much later having the crucial insight that its not sucking wouldn’t have been a Nash equilibrium.

--Scott Aaronson

Comment author: PhilGoetz 11 September 2011 07:07:13PM 1 point [-]

Interesting! Examples?

Comment author: gwern 11 September 2011 07:28:40PM *  3 points [-]

The whole link is basically a tissue of suggested examples by Aaronson and commenters.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 15 September 2011 10:20:49PM 0 points [-]

I like that quote, but the rest of the article seems to be just restating obvious collective action problems. Not sure where he gets the "Whole ideaologies have been built around ignoring these" bit.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 12 March 2012 10:36:22PM 3 points [-]

Most of the relevant ideologies in question are ideologies that try to avoid this problem in economic contexts.

Comment author: shokwave 25 September 2011 08:38:41AM 6 points [-]

Everyone doing nothing in a collective action problem is a Nash equilibrium, I believe.

Comment author: MichaelGR 11 September 2011 04:37:20AM 4 points [-]

Not only may questions remain unanswered; all the right questions may not even have been asked.

-Seth Klarman, Margin of Safety, p.90

Comment author: MichaelGR 11 September 2011 04:37:05AM 21 points [-]

“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”

-Steve Jobs, [Wired, February 1996]

Comment author: Juno_Watt 31 August 2013 08:07:57AM 0 points [-]

Isn't that disproved by paid-for networks, like HBO? And what about non-US broadcasters like the BBC?

Comment author: somervta 31 August 2013 10:18:13AM 0 points [-]

The reason companies like HBO can do a different sort of tv is that they don't have to worry about ratings - they're less bound by how many watch each show.

Comment author: private_messaging 28 August 2013 06:54:59PM *  1 point [-]

He was the guy who thought that people were too dumb to operate a two-button mouse. It's not that the networks conspired to dumb us down, and it's not that people want something exactly this dumb, but it's that those folks in control at the networks, much like Jobs himself, tend to make systematic errors such as believing themselves to be higher above the masses than is actually the case. Sometimes that helps to counter the invalid belief that people will really want to waste a lot of effort on your creation.

Comment author: mare-of-night 30 August 2013 09:08:36PM 1 point [-]

He was the guy who thought that people were too dumb to operate a two-button mouse.

Did he say this, or are you inferring it from his having designed a one-button mouse?

Having two incorrect beliefs that counter each other (thinking that people want to spend time on your creation but are less intelligent than they actually are) could result in good designs, but so could making neither mistake. I'd expect any decent UI designer to understand that the user shouldn't need to pay attention to the design, and/or that users will sometimes be tired, impatient or distracted even if they're not stupid.

Comment author: private_messaging 30 August 2013 10:08:23PM *  0 points [-]

Did he say this, or are you inferring it from his having designed a one-button mouse?

I recall reading that he tried 3 button mouse, didn't like it, said it was too complicated, and gone for an one button one. Further down the road they need the difficult-to-teach alternate-click functionality and implemented it with option-click rather than an extra button. Apple stuck with one button mouse until 2005 or so, when it jumped to 4 programmable buttons and a scrollball.

The inventor of the mouse and of many aspects of the user interface, Douglas Engelbart, gone for 3 buttons and is reported on wikipedia as stating he'd put 5 if he had enough space for the switches.

Comment author: arundelo 30 August 2013 10:20:53PM 1 point [-]

I can't find a citation, but the rationale I've heard is to make it easier to learn how to use a Macintosh (or a Lisa) by watching someone else use one.

Comment author: David_Gerard 31 August 2013 10:13:38AM *  3 points [-]

I did dial-up tech support in 1999-2000. Lots of general consumers who'd just got on this "internet" thing and had no idea what they were doing. It was SO HARD to explain right-clicking to them. Steve Jobs was right: more than one mouse button confuses people.

What happened, however, is that Mosaic and Netscape were written for X11 and then for Windows. So the Web pretty much required a second mouse button. Eventually Apple gave up and went with it.

(The important thing about computers is that they are still stupid, too hard to use and don't work. I speak as a professional here.)

Comment author: wedrifid 02 September 2013 01:22:26AM 4 points [-]

What happened, however, is that Mosaic and Netscape were written for X11 and then for Windows. So the Web pretty much required a second mouse button. Eventually Apple gave up and went with it.

And for this we can be eternally grateful. While one button may be simple, two buttons is a whole heap more efficient. Or five buttons and some wheels.

I don't object to Steve Jobs (or rather those like him) making feature sparse products targeted to a lowest common denominator audience. I'm just glad there are alternatives to go with that are less rigidly condescending.

Comment author: private_messaging 31 August 2013 04:47:24PM *  0 points [-]

But did you deal with explaining option-clicking? The problem is that you get to see the customers who didn't get the press the right button on the mouse rather than the left. Its sort of like dealing with customer responses, you have, say, 1% failure rate but by feedback it looks like you have 50%..90% failure rate.

Then, of course, Apple also came up with these miracles of design such as double click (launch) vs slow double click (rename). And while the right-click is a matter of explanation - put your hand there so and so, press with your middle finger - the double clicking behaviour is a matter of learning a fine motor skill, i.e. older people have a lot of trouble.

edit: what percentage of people do you think could not get right clicking? And did you have to deal with one-button users who must option-click?

Comment author: David_Gerard 31 August 2013 08:41:09PM *  0 points [-]

This was 1999, Mac OS9 as it was didn't really have option-clicking then.

I wouldn't estimate a percentage, but basically we had 10% Mac users and 2% of our calls came from said Mac users.

It is possible that in 2013 people have been beaten into understanding right-clicking ... but it strikes me as more likely those people are using phones and iPads instead. The kids may get taught right-clicking at school.

Comment author: private_messaging 31 August 2013 10:41:13PM *  0 points [-]

I remember classic Mac OS . One application could make everything fail due to lack of real process boundaries. It literally relied on how people are amazingly able to adapt to things like this and avoid doing what causes a crash (something which I notice a lot when I start using a new application), albeit not by deliberate design.

edit: ahh, it had ctrl-click back then: http://www.macwrite.com/beyond-basics/contextual-menus-mac-os-x (describes how ones in OS X differ from ones they had since OS 8)

Key quote:

Most people have never even heard of these menus, and unless you have a two-button mouse (as opposed to the standard single-button mouse), you probably wouldn't figure it out otherwise.

What I like about 2 buttons is that it is discoverable. I.e. you go like, ohh, there's two buttons here, what will happen if I press the other one?

Comment author: David_Gerard 31 August 2013 11:58:55PM 1 point [-]

Now that you mention it, I remember discovering command-click menus in OS 9 and being surprised. (In some apps, particularly web browsers, they would also appear if you held the mouse button down.)

Comment author: FeepingCreature 30 August 2013 05:42:04PM 4 points [-]

My parents are incapable of using the context menu in any way.

Jobs may have been on to something.

Comment author: shminux 30 August 2013 05:44:15PM -2 points [-]

Forcing everyone to the lowest common denominator hardly counts as "onto something".

Comment author: gwern 30 August 2013 05:54:35PM *  1 point [-]

Fictional polemical evidence is not an argument; see my reply to private_messaging.

Comment author: Decius 30 August 2013 03:42:32AM 1 point [-]

Most people didn't (and don't) understand the contextual difference and themes of interface to design a two-button mouse interface.

The current system is to throw design patterns against the wall and copy those that stick.

Comment author: gwern 30 August 2013 02:13:39AM 6 points [-]

He was the guy who thought that people were too dumb to operate a two-button mouse.

And many of his other simplifications were complete successes and why he died a universally-beloved & beatified billionaire.

Comment author: shminux 30 August 2013 05:28:44AM *  4 points [-]

universally-beloved

Seems like a bit of an exaggeration. Almost universally respected, sure.

Comment author: Lumifer 30 August 2013 02:42:18PM 4 points [-]

Yep. Respected and admired at a distance, certainly. But a lot of people who knew him personally tend to describe him as a manipulative jerk.

Comment author: gwern 30 August 2013 03:55:58PM 2 points [-]

Which has little to do with how he & his simplifications were remembered by scores of millions of Americans. Don't you remember when he died, all the news coverage and blog posts and comments? It made me sick.

Comment author: shminux 30 August 2013 05:58:47PM 2 points [-]

Meh, I thought of him as a brilliant but heavy-handed and condescending jerk long before I heard of his health problems. I refused to help my family and friends with iTunes (bad for my blood pressure) and anything Mac. My line was: if it "just works" for you, great, if not, you are SOL. Your iPod does not sync? Sorry, I don't want to hear about any device that does not allow straight file copying.

Comment author: Lumifer 30 August 2013 06:11:40PM 4 points [-]

Heh. I have been known to engage in "What do you mean you are having problems? <blink> That's impossible, there's the Apple guarantee It Just Works (tm) (r) <blink> <blink>" :-D

Comment author: Lumifer 30 August 2013 04:14:54PM 3 points [-]

Actually, no, I don't remember because I didn't read them. I'm particular about the the kind of pollution I allow to contaminate my mind :-)

Anyway, we seem to agree. One of the interesting things about Jobs was the distance between his private self and his public mask and public image.

Comment author: gwern 30 August 2013 06:22:03PM 2 points [-]

Actually, no, I don't remember because I didn't read them. I'm particular about the the kind of pollution I allow to contaminate my mind :-)

I am too, but I pay attention to media coverage to understand what the general population thinks so I don't get too trapped in my high-tech high-IQ bubble and wind up saying deeply wrong things like private_messaging's claim that "Jobs's one-button mice failed so ordinary people really are smart!"

Comment author: private_messaging 30 August 2013 06:46:10PM -2 points [-]

Yeah, that's so totally what I claimed. Not. My point is that a lot of people overestimate how much smarter they are than ordinary people, and so they think ordinary people a lot dumber than ordinary people really are.

Also, the networks operate under the assumption that less intelligent people are more influenced by advertising, and therefore, the content is not even geared at the average joe, but at the below-average joe.

Comment author: gwern 30 August 2013 07:49:39PM 0 points [-]

Yeah, that's so totally what I claimed. Not. My point is that a lot of people overestimate how much smarter they are than ordinary people, and so they think ordinary people a lot dumber than ordinary people really are.

Free free to elaborate how your one-button mouse example and all Jobs's other successes match what you are claiming here about Jobs being a person who underestimated ordinary people's intelligence. (If Jobs went broke underestimating ordinary people's intelligence, then may heaven send me a comparable bankruptcy as soon as possible.)

Comment author: PhilGoetz 11 September 2011 07:11:51PM *  3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 September 2011 01:08:28PM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Bugmaster 20 September 2011 10:11:31PM 6 points [-]

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.

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.

Comment author: wedrifid 20 September 2011 10:52:10PM 2 points [-]

As I see it, The Truman Show is, at its core, a Gnostic parable similar to The Matrix, but better executed.

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.

Comment author: Bugmaster 20 September 2011 11:16:40PM 3 points [-]

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.

With apologies to Freud, sometimes a leather-clad femme fatale doing kung fu is just a leather-clad femme fatale doing kung fu :-)

Comment author: wedrifid 21 September 2011 04:52:56AM *  5 points [-]

With apologies to Freud, sometimes a leather-clad femme fatale doing kung fu is just a leather-clad femme fatale doing kung fu :-)

That's kind of the point. A leather-clad femme fatale doing kung fu probably isn't a costar in an 'inferior execution of a Gnostic parable'. She's probably a costar in a entertaining nerd targeted action flick.

In general it is a mistake to ascribe motives or purpose (Gnostic parable) to something and judge it according to how well it achieves that purpose (inferior execution) when it could be considered more successful by other plausible purposes.

Another thing the Matrix wouldn't be a good execution of, if that is what it were, is a vaguely internally coherent counterfactual reality even at the scene level. FFS Trinity, if you pointed a gun at my head and said 'Dodge This!' then I'd be able to dodge it without any Agent powers. Yes, this paragraph is a rather loosely related tangent but damn. The 'batteries' thing gets a bad rap but I can suspend my disbelief on that if I try. Two second head start on your 'surprise attack' to people who can already dodge bullets is inexcusable.

Comment author: FeepingCreature 30 August 2013 05:40:23PM 0 points [-]

Two second head start on your 'surprise attack' to people who can already dodge bullets is inexcusable.

Inexcusable? :cracks knuckles:

Try to see it from the perspective of the agent. With how close that gun was to his head, and assuming that Trinity was not in fact completely stupid and had the training and hacker-enhanced reflexes to fire as soon as she saw the merest twitch of movement, there was really no realistic scenario where that agent could survive. A human might try to dodge anyway, and die, but for an agent, two seconds spent taunting him was two seconds delay. A miniscule difference in outcome, but still - U(let trinity taunt) > U(try to dodge and die immediately).

Comment author: wedrifid 01 September 2013 05:38:17AM 1 point [-]

Inexcusable? :cracks knuckles:

Yes, where the meaning of 'inexcusable' is not 'someone can say words attempting to get out of it' but instead 'no excuse can be presented that the speaker or, by insinuation, any informed and reasonable person would accept'.

With how close that gun was to his head, and assuming that Trinity was not in fact completely stupid and had the training and hacker-enhanced reflexes to fire as soon as she saw the merest twitch of movement, there was really no realistic scenario where that agent could survive.

No, no realistic scenario. But in the scenario that assumes the particular science fiction question premises that define 'agent' in this context all reasonable scenarios result in trinity dead if she attempts that showmanship. The speed and reaction time demonstrated by the agents is such that they dodge, easily. Trinity still operates on human hardware.

Comment author: hairyfigment 01 September 2013 06:11:32AM -1 points [-]

I remind you that these agents were designed to let the One win, else they should have gone gnome-with-a-wand-of-death on all these people.

Comment author: Bugmaster 21 September 2011 05:07:52AM 2 points [-]

In general it is a mistake to ascribed motives or purpose (Gnostic parable) to something and judge it according to how well it achieves that purpose (inferior execution) when it could be considered more successful by other plausible purposes.

I did not mean to give the impression that I judged The Truman Show or The Matrix solely based on how well they managed to convey the key principles of Gnosticism. I don't even know if their respective creators intended to convey anything about Gnosticism at all (not that it matters, really).

Still, Gnostic themes (as well Christian ones, obviously) do feature strongly in these movies; more so in The Truman Show than The Matrix. What I find interesting about The Truman Show is not merely the fact that it has some religious theme or other, but the fact that it portrays a person's intellectual and emotional journey of discovery and self-discovery, and does so (IMO) well. Sure, you could achieve this using some other setting, but the whole Gnostic set up works well because it maximizes Truman's cognitive dissonance. There's almost nothing that he can rely on -- not his senses, not his friends, and not even his own mind in some cases -- and he doesn't even have any convenient superpowers to fall back on. He isn't some Chosen One foretold in prophecy, he's just an ordinary guy. This creates a very real struggle which The Matrix lacks, especially toward the end.

The 'batteries' thing gets a bad rap but I can suspend my disbelief on that if I try.

AFAIK, in the original script the AIs were exploiting humans not for energy, but for the computing capacity in their brains. This was changed by the producers because viewers are morons .

Comment author: Desrtopa 21 September 2011 06:47:01AM 2 points [-]

I don't even know if their respective creators intended to convey anything about Gnosticism at all (not that it matters, really).

I'm pretty sure that one of the Wachowski brothers talked about the deliberate Gnostic themes of The Matrix in an interview, but as for The Truman Show I have no idea.

Comment author: wnoise 21 September 2011 06:05:30AM 3 points [-]

AFAIK, in the original script the AIs were exploiting humans not for energy, but for the computing capacity in their brains.

I have many times heard fans say this. Not once have any produced any evidence. Can you do so?

Comment author: RichardKennaway 21 September 2011 07:53:32AM *  4 points [-]

The only evidence I have is that it's so obviously the way the story should be. That's good enough for me. It does not matter precisely what fallen demiurge corrupted the parable away from its original perfection.

ETA: Just to clarify, I mean that as far as I'm concerned, brains used as computing substrate is the real story, even if it never crossed the Wachowskis' minds. Just like some people say there was never a sequel (although personally I didn't have a problem with it).

Comment author: Bugmaster 21 September 2011 06:46:10AM 3 points [-]

According to IMDB,

An alternative is provided in the novelization and the spin-off short story "Goliath": the machines use human brains as computer components, to run "sentient programs" (the Agents and various characters in the sequels) and to solve scientific problems. Fans continue to debate the discrepancy, but there is no official explanation.

So, I guess the answer is "probably not". Sorry.

Comment author: DSimon 21 September 2011 06:45:27AM 1 point [-]

But... but... TVTropes says it!

Damnit, I've been saying that too, and now I realize I'm not sure why I believe it. Ah well, updating is good.

Comment author: wedrifid 21 September 2011 05:13:11AM *  9 points [-]

This creates a very real struggle which The Matrix lacks, especially toward the end.

This is why I'm so glad the creators realized they had pushed their premise as far as they were capable and quit while they were ahead, never making a sequel.

Comment author: MichaelGR 11 September 2011 04:36:28AM 4 points [-]

"Using the bible to prove the existence of god is like using The Lord Of The Rings to prove the existence of Hobbits."

-Anon.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 10 September 2011 10:12:14PM *  10 points [-]

To say that life evolves because of an elan vital is on a par with saying that a locomotive runs because of an elan locomotif.

Julian Huxley, Darwinism To-Day

Comment author: gwern 10 September 2011 11:06:34PM *  3 points [-]

A nod to Molière's satirical line which coined the 'dormitive fallacy':

Why Opium produces sleep: ... Because there is in it a dormitive power.

(Le Malade Imaginere (1673), Act III, sc. iii)

Comment author: Will_Newsome 10 September 2011 05:07:10PM 5 points [-]

This is the use of metaness: for liberation - not less of love but expanding of love beyond local optima.

-- Nick Tarleton

The original goes:

This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past.

-- T. S. Eliot

Comment author: Nisan 17 September 2011 04:29:54PM 1 point [-]

Local optima of what function?

Comment author: Will_Newsome 10 September 2011 01:31:18PM 4 points [-]

One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Comment author: Will_Newsome 10 September 2011 01:06:25PM 7 points [-]

For whosoever hath good inductive biases, to him more evidence shall be given, and he shall have an abundance: but whosoever hath not good inductive biases, from him shall be taken away even what little evidence that he hath.

Matthew (slightly paraphrased...)

Comment author: wedrifid 11 September 2011 04:18:27AM 1 point [-]

It's been far too long since I've heard this underlying point acknowledged! Thankyou!

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 10 September 2011 02:10:21PM 3 points [-]

What does this mean?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 11 September 2011 07:10:24PM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: simplicio 13 September 2011 01:16:46PM *  2 points [-]

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...

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 September 2011 02:24:13PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 13 September 2011 01:48:37PM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 10 September 2011 10:49:04AM *  5 points [-]

Why should the government get to decide how to destroy our money? We should let the free market find more efficient ways to destroy money.

The Onion (it's sort of a rationality and anti-rationality quote at multiple levels)

Comment author: CSalmon 09 September 2011 06:28:01AM 8 points [-]

My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

-- Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

Comment author: brilee 08 September 2011 10:39:33PM 1 point [-]

"Communication usually fails, except by accident" - Osmo Wiio

"Communication" here has a different definition from the usual one. I interpreted it as meaning the richness of your internal experiences and the intricate web of associations are conjured in your mind when you say even a single word.

Comment author: AlexSchell 08 September 2011 08:13:09PM *  26 points [-]

It's one thing to make lemonade out of lemons, another to proclaim that lemons are what you'd hope for in the first place.

Gary Marcus, Kluge

Relevant to deathism and many other things

Comment author: lukeprog 08 September 2011 01:58:27AM 12 points [-]

If you cannot calculate you cannot speculate on future pleasure and your life will not be that of a human, but that of an oyster or a jellyfish.

Plato, Philebus

Comment author: [deleted] 08 September 2011 02:07:44AM *  8 points [-]

I wish I were a jelly fish
That cannot fall downstairs:
Of all the things I wish to wish
I wish I were a jelly fish
That hasn't any cares,
And doesn't even have to wish
'I wish I were a jelly fish
That cannot fall downstairs.'

G.K. Chesterton

Comment author: lessdazed 08 September 2011 02:23:18AM *  2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 08 September 2011 02:29:59AM 3 points [-]

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.)

Comment author: lessdazed 08 September 2011 02:31:15AM 3 points [-]

A gentle introduction to the mythos.

Comment author: Patrick 07 September 2011 10:07:26AM 2 points [-]

Leonard, if you were about to burn or drown or starve I would panic. It would be the least I could do. That's what's happening to people now, and I don't think my duty to panic disappears just because they're not in the room!

-- Raymond Terrific

Comment author: MixedNuts 08 February 2013 05:22:26PM 3 points [-]

I think it comes down to this:

If you live in a small community, and your friend or neighbor or family member contacts you and says “someone just committed a horrible act of violence here!” you have to drop everything and listen. Your discomfort is so insignificant compared to the magnitude of the event, you can’t ignore something like that.

You certainly can’t answer “sorry, I need you to stop right there, I’m trying to do some self-care right now and I’m avoiding triggers until I feel ready to engage with difficult subjects.” They’d crown you King Butthead.

But on the Internet, the “community” is 2.4 billion people. Something horrible will be happening to thousands of them every day. You can’t apply the same ethics. It’s emotionally impossible, and not terribly helpful to the world, to even try.

So hand me my Butt Crown.

-- Cliff Pervocracy

Comment author: Dr_Manhattan 06 September 2011 12:33:43PM 7 points [-]

Michael: I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex. Sam Weber: Ah, come on. Nothing's more important than sex. Michael: Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization?

  • The Big Chill
Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 06 September 2011 05:40:32AM 9 points [-]

But I had hardly entered the room where the masters were playing when I was seized with what may justly be described as a mystical experience. I seemed to be looking on at the tournament from outside myself. I saw the masters—one, shabby, snuffy and blear-eyed; another, in badly fitting would-be respectable shoddy; a third, a mere parody of humanity, and so on for the rest. These were the people to whose ranks I was seeking admission. "There, but for the grace of God, goes Aleister Crowley," I exclaimed to myself with disgust, and there and then I registered a vow never to play another serious game of chess. I perceived with praeternatural lucidity that I had not alighted on this planet with the object of playing chess.

-- Aleister Crowley

Comment author: cousin_it 06 September 2011 08:34:05PM *  11 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Raemon 06 September 2011 05:49:15PM 27 points [-]

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.

Comment author: lessdazed 10 September 2011 09:37:48PM *  1 point [-]

Learn to play Go, then even if your chess ability is lower, people won't be able to judge your Go ability.

Go is roughly a game based on encircling the other's army before his or her army encircles yours. A bit of thought about the meaning of the word 'encircle" should hint to how awesome that can be.

If your gaming heart has been more oriented towards WWII operational and strategic-level games, Go is the game for you. If chess incorporates the essence of WWI, Go is incorporates the essence of mobile warfare in WWII, if the part of the essence represented by Poker is removed.

Go=an abstraction of mobile warfare - Poker

Comment author: Will_Newsome 12 September 2011 01:31:56AM 2 points [-]

Chess is battle, Go is war. I don't see how it's very much about mobility rather than scale.

Comment author: lessdazed 12 September 2011 06:14:25AM 1 point [-]

What real scale and era, if any, is even roughly modeled?

Comment author: gwern 12 September 2011 06:40:25AM 3 points [-]

Scott Boorman in The Protracted Game tried to model Mao with Go, and in particular, the anti-Japanese campaign in Manchuria. It was an interesting book. I'm not convinced that Go is a real analogy beyond beginner-level tactics, but he did convince me that Go modeled insurgencies much better than, say, Chess.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 12 September 2011 06:22:34AM *  0 points [-]

Chess: Battle of Chi Bi is exemplary. (I am not sure if that is at all informative to people who don't already know a ridiculous amount about three kingdoms era China.) I don't feel qualified to say anything about Go.

Comment author: lessdazed 12 September 2011 07:16:33AM 1 point [-]

Why did you choose that battle? Subterfuge was prominent in it.

Chess may resemble some other pitched battles from before the twentieth century, but it doesn't resemble modern war at all.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 12 September 2011 07:43:51AM *  2 points [-]

By subterfuge do you mean Huang Gai's fire ships? I think of it more as a subtle pawn sacrifice which gets greedily accepted which allows for the invasion of Zhou Yu's forces which starts a king hunt that forces Cao Cao to give up lots of material in the form of ships and would have resulted in his getting mated if he hadn't a land to retreat to (and if he hadn't gotten kinda lucky). I thought I remembered Pang Tong doing something interesting and symbolic somewhere in there (a counterattack on the opposite wing to draw away some of Cao Cao's defending pieces) but I don't remember if that was fictional or not.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 10 September 2011 09:05:18PM 4 points [-]

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.

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.

Comment author: lessdazed 10 September 2011 09:39:50PM 2 points [-]

I think rationality helps to avoid making mistakes, and avoiding feeling unnecessarily bad, but not too much to the positive side of things.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 10 September 2011 10:08:13PM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 10 September 2011 03:25:45PM 5 points [-]

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.

Wow - I have a similar response to chess, but never drew that analogy. Thanks.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 07 September 2011 11:03:50PM 6 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 10 September 2011 01:39:33PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: gwern 10 September 2011 08:49:39PM 5 points [-]

E.g. good players are less prone to confirmation bias

True; see 2004 "Chess Masters' Hypothesis Testing" Cowley & Bryne:

But experimental evidence from studies of reasoning shows that people often find falsification difficult. We suggest that domain expertise may facilitate falsification. We consider new experimental data about chess experts’ hypothesis testing. The results show that chess masters were readily able to falsify their plans. They generated move sequences that falsified their plans more readily than novice players, who tended to confirm their plans. The finding that experts in a domain are more likely to falsify their hypotheses has important implications for the debate about human rationality.

I think that this is transferable

Well... The chess literature and general literature on learning rarely finds transfer. From the Nature coverage of that study:

Byrne and Cowley now hope to study developing chess players to find out how and when they develop falsification strategies. They also want to test chess masters in other activities that involve testing hypotheses - such as logic problems - to discover if their falsification skill is transferable. On this point Orr is more sceptical: "I've never felt that chess skills cross over like that, it's a very specific skill."

Checking Google Scholar, I see only one apparent followup, the 2005 paper by the same authors, "When falsification is the only path to truth":

Can people consistently attempt to falsify, that is, search for refuting evidence, when testing the truth of hypotheses? Experimental evidence indicates that people tend to search for confirming evidence. We report two novel experiments that show that people can consistently falsify when it is the only helpful strategy. Experiment 1 showed that participants readily falsified somebody else’s hypothesis. Their task was to test a hypothesis belonging to an ‘imaginary participant’ and they knew it was a low quality hypothesis. Experiment 2 showed that participants were able to falsify a low quality hypothesis belonging to an imaginary participant more readily than their own low quality hypothesis. The results have important implications for theories of hypothesis testing and human rationality.

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.

Comment author: gwern 05 September 2011 07:44:47PM 9 points [-]

"Lessing, the most honest of theoretical men, dared to say that he took greater delight in the quest for truth than in the truth itself."

--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872); cf. "Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism"

Comment author: Thomas 05 September 2011 01:25:02PM 14 points [-]

The investor who finds a way to make soap from peanuts has more genuine imagination than the revolutionary with a bayonet, because he has cultivated the faculty of imagining the hidden potentiality of the real. This is much harder than imagining the unreal, which may be why there are so many more utopians than inventors

  • Joe Sobran
Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 05 September 2011 01:31:19PM *  8 points [-]

which may be why there are so many more utopians than inventors

Is that the case?

Comment author: Thomas 05 September 2011 01:48:46PM *  9 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Raw_Power 06 September 2011 12:31:59AM 6 points [-]

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.

Comment author: CG_Morton 13 September 2011 02:49:31PM 3 points [-]

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.

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.

Comment author: Raw_Power 16 September 2011 01:23:41PM 2 points [-]

I dunno man, maybe it's a confusion on my part, but universal health coverage for one thing seems like a good enough goal in and of tiself. Not specifically in the form of a State-sponsored organziation, but the fuction of everyone having the right to health treatments, of no-one being left to die just because they happen not to have a given amount of money at a given time, I think that, from a humanistic point of view, it's sort of obvious that we should have it if we can pay for it.

Comment author: Jack 19 September 2011 12:11:10AM *  2 points [-]

This conversation appears to not have incorporated the very strong evidence that higher health care spending does lead to improved health outcomes.

Personally I'd reform the American system in one of two ways- either privatize health care completely so that cost of using a health care provider is directly connected to the decision to use health care OR turn the whole thing over to the state and ration care (alternatively you could do the latter for basic health care and than let individuals purchase anything above that). What we have now leaves health care consumption decisions up to individuals but collectivizes costs-- which is obviously a recipe for inflating an industry well above its utility.

Comment author: gwern 19 September 2011 01:53:12PM 3 points [-]

This conversation appears to not have incorporated the very strong evidence that higher health care spending does lead to improved health outcomes.

At what margin? Using randomized procedures?

Comment author: Jack 19 September 2011 04:51:33PM 0 points [-]

This instance of that conversation.

Comment author: lessdazed 16 September 2011 11:00:29PM 2 points [-]

universal

What does this mean?

of no-one being left to die just because they happen not to have a given amount of money at a given time

What does this mean?

we should have it if we can pay for it

What does this mean?

Comment author: Raw_Power 18 September 2011 12:54:02AM 1 point [-]

I have left it ambiguous on purpose. What this means specifically depends on the means available at any given time.

IDEALLY: Universal means everyone should have a right to as much health service as is necessary for their bodies and minds functioning as well as it can, if they ask for it. That would include education, coaching, and sports, among many others. And nobody should ever be allowed to die if they don't want to and there's any way of preventing it.

Between "leaving anyone to die because they don't have the money or assets to pay for their treatment"[your question puzzles me, what part of this scenario don't you understand] and "spending all our country's budget on progressively changing the organs of seventy-year-.olds", there's a lot of intermediate points. The touchy problem is deciding how much we want to pay for, and how, and who pays it for whom, No matter how you cut the cake, given our current state of development, at some point you have to say X person dies in spite of their will because either they can't afford to live or because *his can't". So, are you going to deny that seventy-year-old their new organs?

Comment author: lessdazed 18 September 2011 06:31:01AM *  4 points [-]

what part of this scenario don't you understand

Resources are limited and medical demand is not. The medical response time if the President of the United States gets shot is less for than if anyone else gets shot. It's not possible to give everyone as much health protection as the president. So it's not a scenario. I can imagine each person as being the only person on earth with such care, and I can imagine imagining a single hypothetical world has each person with that level of care, but I can't actually imagine it.

there's a lot of intermediate points

That indicates that no argument about the type of thing to be done will be based on a difference in kind. It won't resemble saying that we should switch from what happens at present to "no-one being left to die just because they happen not to have a given amount of money". We currently allow some people to die based on rationing, and you are literally proposing the impossible to connote that you would prefer a different rationing system, but then you get tripped up when sometimes speaking as if the proposal is literally possible.

deciding how much we want to pay for

Declaring that someone has a right is declaring one's willingness to help that person get something from others over their protests. We currently allow multimillionaires, and we allow them to spend all their money trying to discover a cure for their child's rare or unique disease, and we allow people to drive in populated areas.

We allow people to spend money in sub-optimal ways. Resources being limited means that not every disease gets the same attention. Allowing people to drive in populated areas is implicitly valuing the fun and convenience of some people driving over the actuarially inevitable death and carnage to un-consenting pedestrians.

What this means specifically depends on the means available at any given time.

I don't understand how you want to ration or limit people, in an ideal world, because you have proposed the literally impossible as a way of gesturing towards a different rationing system (infinitely) short of that ideal and (as far as I can see) not different in kind than any other system.

By analogy, you don't describe what you mean when you declare "infinity" a number preferable to 1206. Do you mean that any number higher than 1206 is equally good? Do you mean that every number is better than its predecessor, no matter what? Since you probably don't, then...what number do you mean? Approximately?

I can perhaps get an idea of the function if you tell me some points of x (resources) and y (what you are proposing).

Comment author: wedrifid 18 September 2011 07:28:43PM 4 points [-]

The medical response time if the President of the United States gets shot is less for than if anyone else gets shot.

Not quite. ER doctor.

Comment author: Raw_Power 18 September 2011 03:29:48PM *  0 points [-]

Your post confuses me a lot: I am being entirely honest about this, there seem to be illusions of transparency and (un)common priors. The only part I feel capable of responding to is the first: I can perfectly imagine every human being having as much medical care as the chief of the wealthiest most powerful organization in the world, in an FAI-regimented society. For a given value of "imagining", of course: I have a vague idea of nanomachines in the bloodstream, implants, etc. I basically expect human bodies to be self-sufficient in taking care of themsleves, and able to acquire and use the necessary raw materials with ease, including being able to medically operate on themselves. The rare cases will be left to the rare specialist, and I expect everyone to be able to take care of the more common problems their bodies and minds may encounter.

As for the rest of your post:

What are people's rationing optimixation functions? Is it possible to get an entire society to agree to a single one, for a given value of "agree"? Or is it that people don't have a consistent optimization function, and that it's not so much a matter of some things being valued over others as a matter of tradition and sheer thoughtless inertia? Yes, I know I am answering questions with questions, but that's all I got right now.

Comment author: wedrifid 18 September 2011 04:39:47AM 5 points [-]

So, are you going to deny that seventy-year-old their new organs?

Yes, unless there is nobody else that can use them. If my watching of House tells me anything it is standard practice to prioritize by this kind of criteria.

Comment author: Raw_Power 18 September 2011 03:49:08PM 0 points [-]

I like this answer, if only for emotional reasons :). I also think the vast majority of seventy-years-old would be compelled by this argument.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 September 2011 04:35:33AM 11 points [-]

So, are you going to deny that seventy-year-old their new organs?

Yes, it's amazing how many bad decisions are made because it's heartbreaking to just say no.

Comment author: Raw_Power 18 September 2011 03:50:53PM 0 points [-]

More like it's potentially corrupting, but yeah, that too.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 16 September 2011 09:59:29PM 3 points [-]

Free universal health care is a good thing in itself; the question is whether or not that's worth the costs of higher taxes and any bureaucratic inefficiencies that may exist.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 September 2011 04:26:49AM 2 points [-]

Free universal health care is a good thing in itself

The healthcare isn't actually "free". It's either paid for individually, collectively on a national level, or some intermediate level, e.g., insurance companies. The question is what the most efficient way to deliver it is?

Comment author: [deleted] 12 September 2011 09:02:40PM *  3 points [-]

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.

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.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 September 2011 12:53:22PM 2 points [-]

Would you care to expand on that?

Comment author: [deleted] 13 September 2011 05:27:48PM *  8 points [-]

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.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 September 2011 05:56:56PM 1 point [-]

Thank you. Cliff notes is fine. What do you expect social democracies to turn into?

Comment author: [deleted] 13 September 2011 06:44:44PM *  3 points [-]

I put significantly lower confidence in these predictions than those of the previous post.

Generally speaking I expect comfortable, well maintained social democracies to first become uncomfortable, run down social democracies. Stagnation and sclerosis. Lower trust will mean lower investment which together with the rigidity and unadaptability will strengthen the oligarchic aspect of the central European technocratic way of doing things. Nepotism will become more prevalent in such an environment.

Overall violent crime will still drop, because of better surveillance and other crime fighting technology, but surprising outbursts of semi organized coordinated violence will be seen for a decade or two more (think London). These may become targeted at prosperous urban minorities. Perhaps some politically motivated terrorist attacks, which however won't spiral out into civil wars, but will produce very damaging backlash (don't just think radical Islam here, think Red Army fraction spiced with a nationalist group or two).

Comment author: Raw_Power 16 September 2011 02:42:44PM 3 points [-]

What, you mean like in Gangs of New York?

Could you please give more links to the stuff that helped you form these opinions? I'm very interested in this, especialy in explaining the peculiar behaviour of this generation's youth as opposed to that of the Baby Boomers when they were the same age. After all, it's irrational to apply the same tactics to a socipoloitical lanscape that's wildly different from the one in which these tactics got their most spectacular successes. Exiting the mind-killing narratives developed in bipartidist systems and finding the way to rethink the problems of this age from scratch is a worthy goal for the rationalist project, especially in a "hold off on proposing solutions", analyze-the-full-problem-and-introduce-it-from-a-novel-angle sense. Publications such as, say, Le Monde Diplomatique, are pretty good at presenting well-researched, competently presented alternative opinions, but they still suffer a lot from "political leanings".

I know we avoid talking politics here because of precisely its mind-killing properties, able to turn the most thoughtful of agents into a stubborn blind fool, but I think it's also a good way of putting our skills to the test, and refine them.

Comment author: MixedNuts 05 September 2011 03:27:16PM 7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 September 2011 09:13:03PM *  4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 05 September 2011 02:35:21PM *  13 points [-]

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.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 10 September 2011 03:31:26PM *  1 point [-]

Can you invent a utopia? A utopia is an incoherent concept about a society that contains too many internal contradictions or impracticalities to ever exist. Thus, it cannot be invented any more than a perpetual motion machine can be.

If you do consider utopias inventable, what's the difference between "inventing a new utopia" and "having a new preference"? You want X; you dream of a world where you get X, inventing Utopia X.

Comment author: gwern 05 September 2011 07:36:06PM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Thomas 05 September 2011 03:19:44PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: cwillu 05 September 2011 01:43:36AM *  11 points [-]

[...] Often I find that the best way to come up with new results is to find someone who's saying something that seems clearly, manifestly wrong to me, and then try to think of counterarguments. Wrong people provide a fertile source of research ideas.

-- Scott Aaronson, Quantum Computing Since Democritus (http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec14.html)

Comment author: PhilGoetz 10 September 2011 03:37:36PM 2 points [-]

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.)

Comment author: Raw_Power 05 September 2011 02:07:13AM 0 points [-]

Reversed Stupidity?

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 10 September 2011 08:06:04AM *  10 points [-]

In writing, I often notice that it's easier to let someone else come up with a bad draft and then improve it - even if "improving" means "rewrite entirely". Seeing a bad draft provides a basic starting point for your thoughts - "what's wrong here, and how could it be done better". Contrast this to the feeling of "there's an infinite amount of ways by which I could try to communicate this, which one of them should be promoted to attention" that a blank paper easily causes if you don't already have a starting point in mind.

You could explain the phenomenon either as a contraining of the search space to a more tractable one, or as one of the ev-psych theories saying we have specialized modules for finding flaws in the arguments of others. Or both.

Over in the other thread, Morendil mentioned that a lot of folks who have difficulty with math problems don't have any good model of what to do and end up essentially just trying stuff out at random. I wonder if such folks could be helped by presenting them with an incorrect attempt to answer a problem, and then asking them to figure out what's wrong with it.

Comment author: Raw_Power 16 September 2011 03:23:25PM *  1 point [-]

Here are two excellent examples of what you just explained, as per the Fiction Identity Postulate:

*Doom, Consequences of Evil as the "bad draft", and this as the done-right version.

*Same for this infuriating Chick Tract and this revisiting of it (it's a Tear Jerker)

*And everyone is familiar with the original My Little Pony works VS the Friendship Is Magic continuity.

Comment author: Desrtopa 05 September 2011 09:52:40PM 5 points [-]

People come up with ideas that are clearly and manifestly wrong when they're confused about the reality. In some cases, this is just personal ignorance, and if you ask the right people they will be able to give you a solid, complete explanation that isn't confused at all (evolution being a highly available example.)

On the other hand, they may be confused because nobody's map reflects that part of the territory clearly enough to set them straight, so their confusion points out a place where we have more to learn.

Comment author: Raw_Power 06 September 2011 03:28:45AM 1 point [-]

It points to where the ripe bananas are, huh? Thanks, that was clarifying.

Comment author: shokwave 05 September 2011 12:33:16PM 1 point [-]

Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence, but it's not a bad place to start.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 05 September 2011 12:56:41PM 4 points [-]

It is a bad place to start. The intended sense of "reversed" in "reversed stupidity" is that you pick the opposite, as opposed to retracting the decisions that led to privileging the stupid choice. The opposite of what is stupid is as arbitrary as the stupid thing itself, if you have considerably more than two options.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 10 September 2011 03:41:19PM 1 point [-]

Vladimir is talking about reversed stupidity in the LW sense; but I don't think it applies to cwillu's quote. Asserting that a false statement is false is not "reversed stupidity".

Comment author: Tomthefolksinger 09 September 2011 12:07:20AM 1 point [-]

Not so, I can get very inventive trying to counter what I perceive as wrong or offensive. Disproving sources to offering countering and contradictory postulations; all are better when flung back. One of my great joys is when my snotty, off-hand comment makes someone go after real data to prove me wrong. If this is applied to some theoretical position, who knows where it could lead you. I'm pretty sure there is at least one Edison joke about this.

Comment author: lessdazed 05 September 2011 02:33:53AM 4 points [-]

Seems more like harnessing motivated cognition, so long as opposite arguments aren't privileged as counterarguments.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 05 September 2011 02:32:26AM 10 points [-]

I don't think so. In this context, it seems that Scott is talking about in this context making his mathematical intuitions more precise by trying to state explicitly what is wrong with the idea. He seems to generally be doing this in response to comments by other people sort of in his field (comp sci) or connected to his field (physics and math ) so he isn't really trying to reverse stupidity.

Comment author: Patrick 05 September 2011 12:37:46AM 5 points [-]

On some other subjects people do wish to be deceived. They dislike the operation of correcting the hypothetical data which they have taken as basis. Therefore, when they begin to see looming ahead some such ridiculous result as 2 + 3 = 7, they shrink into themselves and try to find some process of twisting the logic, and tinkering the equation, which will make the answer come out a truism instead of an absurdity; and then they say, “Our hypothetical premiss is most likely true because the conclusion to which it brings us is obviously and indisputably true.” If anyone points out that there seems to be a flaw in the argument, they say, “You cannot expect to get mathematical certainty in this world,” or “You must not push logic too far,” or “Everything is more or less compromise,” and so on.

-- Mary Everest Boole

Comment author: anonym 04 September 2011 06:11:38PM *  -1 points [-]

Every truth is a path traced through reality: but among these paths there are some to which we could have given an entirely different turn if our attention had been orientated in a different direction or if we had aimed at another kind of utility; there are some, on the contrary, whose direction is marked out by reality itself: there are some, one might say, which correspond to currents of reality. Doubtless these also depend upon us to a certain extent, for we are free to go against the current or to follow it, and even if we follow it, we can variously divert it, being at the same time associated with and submitted to the force manifest within it. Nevertheless these currents are not created by us; they are part and parcel of reality.

Henri L. Bergson -- The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 218

ETA: retracted. I posted this on the basis of my interpretation of the first sentence, but the rest of the quote makes clear that my interpretation of the first sentence was incorrect, and I don't believe it belongs in a rationality quotes page anymore.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 10 September 2011 03:42:36PM 0 points [-]

What?

Comment author: RichardKennaway 10 September 2011 06:55:15PM *  1 point [-]

Quite. Bergson might not reach the same level of awfulness as the examples David Stove pillories, but I couldn't penetrate the fog of this paragraph, not even with the context. I think Wikipedia nails the jelly to the wall, though: Bergson argued that "immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality". In which case, -1 to Bergson. I learn from the article that Bergson also coined the expression élan vital.

Comment author: anonym 04 September 2011 06:06:58PM 5 points [-]

Very often in mathematics the crucial problem is to recognize and discover what are the relevant concepts; once this is accomplished the job may be more than half done.

Yitz Herstein

Comment author: p4wnc6 05 September 2011 09:28:16PM *  9 points [-]

Good mathematicians see analogies between theorems. Great mathematicians see analogies between analogies.

Banach, in a 1957 letter to Ulam.

Comment author: anonym 04 September 2011 05:58:03PM 5 points [-]

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Richard P. Feynman

Comment author: anonym 04 September 2011 05:57:54PM 0 points [-]

The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

James Clerk Maxwell

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 04 September 2011 07:06:44PM 2 points [-]

I am having difficulty parsing this. The easiest interpretation to make of the first part seems to be "There are no laws of matter except the ones we make up," and the second part is saying either "minds are subject to physics" or something I don't follow at all.

Comment author: anonym 04 September 2011 07:34:13PM 2 points [-]

I interpret the first part as saying that there are no laws of matter other than ones our minds are forced to posit (forced over many generations of constantly improving our models). And the second part is something like "minds are subject [only] to physics", as you said. The second part explains how and why the first part works.

Together, I interpret them as suggesting a reductive physicalist interpretation of mind (in the 19th century!) according to which our law-making is not only about the universe but is itself the universe (or a small piece thereof) operating according to those same laws (or other, deeper laws we have yet to discover).

Comment author: Patrick 04 September 2011 01:37:22PM *  3 points [-]

I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.

-- HL Mencken