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Open Thread: September 2011
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
If continuing the discussion becomes impractical, that means you win at open threads; a celebratory top-level post on the topic is traditional.
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Comments (441)
Testing nofollow on a link that contains 'lesswrong' somewhere but doesn't point to lesswrong.com.
LessWrong does in fact fail to properly nofollow the link. I've reported it to Trike.
I've been debating the validity of reductionism with a friend for a while, and today he presented me with an article (won't link it, it's a waste of your time) arguing that the consciousness-causes-collapse interpretation of QM proves that consciousness is ontologically fundamental/epiphenomenal/ect..
To which I responded: "Yeah, but consciousness-causes-collapse is wrong."
And then realized that the reasons I have rejected it are all reductionist in nature. So he pointed out, fairly, that I was begging the question. And unfortunately, I'm not sufficiently familiar with the literature on QM to point him to an explanation. Does anyone know an explanation of reasons to reject consciousness-causes-collapse that isn't explicitly predicated on reductionism?
You don't need to reject CCC without reductionism to defeat his argument. His argument is "If CCC is true, reductionism is false"
That's not a reason to reject reductionism, unless you have better reason to hold to CCC than to reductionism.
From the perspective of the Copenhagen interpretation, this is like a debate about whether 'consciousness updates the prior', in which 'the prior' is treated as a physical entity which exists independently of observers and their ignorance.
In the Copenhagen interpretation - at least as originally intended! - a wavefunction is not a physical state. It is instead like a probability distribution.
From this perspective, the mystery of quantum mechanics is not, why do wavefunctions collapse? It is, why do wavefunctions work, and what is the physical reality behind them?
The reification of wavefunctions has apparently become an invisible background assumption to a lot of people. But in the Copenhagen interpretation, wavefunctions do not exist, only "observables" exist: the quantities whose behavior the wavefunction helps you to predict.
Examples of observables are: the position of an electron; the rate of change of a field; the spin of a photon. In the Copenhagen interpretation, these are what exists.
Some examples of things which are not observables and which do not exist: An electron wavefunction with a peak here and a peak there; a photon in a superposition of spin states; in fact, any superposition.
Because quantum mechanics does not offer a nonprobabilistic deeper level of description, it is very easy for people to speak and think as if the wavefunctions are the physical realities, but that is not how Copenhagen is supposed to work.
To reiterate: "consciousness collapses the wavefunction" in exactly the same sense that "consciousness updates the prior". You are free to invent subquantum physical theories in which wavefunctions are real, in an attempt to explain why quantum mechanics works, and maybe in those theories you want to have something "collapsing" wavefunctions, but you probably wouldn't want that to be "consciousness".
I wouldn't call occam's razor an explicit part of reductionism. It's basically equivalent to saying you can't just make up information.
I don't think so. This may be the case when your hypotheses are something like "A" and "A v B" but if your hypotheses you are comparing are "A" and "C ^ D ^ E" this sort of summary of Occam's razor seems to be insufficient.
If both hypotheses explain some set of data, I've usually been able to make a direct comparison even in what look like tough cases by following the information in the data - what sort of process generates it, etc. Keeping things in terms of the "language" of the data is in fact also justified by the idea that pulling information from nowhere is bad.
This sort of reliance on our observations is certainly an empiricist assumption, but I don't think a reductionist one.
Consider the following problem. You know that there is some some property that some integers have and others don't and you are trying to figure out what the property is. After testing every integer under 10^4, you find that there are 1229 integers under 10^4 that work. You have two hypotheses that describe these. One is that they are every prime number. The other is a given by a 1228 degree polynomial where P(n) gives the nth number in your set. One of these is clearly simpler. This isn't just a language issue- if I tried to right these out in any reasonable equivalent of a Turing machine or programming language one of them will be a much shorter program. The distinction here however is not just one of one of them making up information. One is genuinely shorter.
If one wants we can give similar historical examples. In 1620 you could make a Copernican model of the solar system that would rival Kepler's model in accuracy. But you would need a massive number of epicycles. The problem here doesn't seem to be pulling information from nowhere. The problem seems to be that one of the hypotheses is simpler in a different way.
Both of these examples do have something in common which is that in both of the complicated examples there are a lot of parameters that are observationally dependent whereas the other has many fewer of those. But that seems to be a distinct issue (although it is possibly a good very rough way of measuring complexity of hypotheses).
This quite possibly can't be done. If you handicap yourself by refusing to use an idea while examining its merits, you may well draw inferior conclusions about it, and modify it in a way that makes it worse. You should use your whole mind to reflect on itself (unless you conclude some of its parts are not to be trusted). See these posts in particular:
Perhaps that extremely simple systems, that no one would consider conscious, can also "cause collapse"? It doesn't take much: just entangle the superposed state with another particle - then when you measure, canceling can't occur and you perceive a randomly collapsed wavefunction. The important thing is the entangling, not the fact that you're conscious: measuring a superposed state (i.e. entangling your mind with it) will do the trick, but it's entirely unnecessary.
I used to believe the consciousness-causes-collapse idea, and it was quite a relief when I realized it doesn't work like that.
Some of the consciousness causes collapse people would claim that you intended to cause that entanglement. (If you are thinking this sounds like an attempt to make their claims not falsifiable, I'd be inclined to agree.)
I can intentionally do lots of things, some of which cause entanglement and "collapse", and some of which don't. I'd say to them that it still seems like the conscious intent isn't what's important.
If you'd like to substitute a better picture for the layperson, I'd go with "disturbing the system causes collapse". (Where "disturb" is really just a nontechnical way of saying "entangle with the environment.") Then it's clear that conscious observation (which involves disturbing the system somehow to get your measurement) will cause (apparent) collapse, but doesn't do so in a special depends-on-consciousness way. And if they want a precise definition of "disturb", you can get into the not-too-difficult math of superposition and entanglement.
I'm a math grad student and I consider the math of entanglement and the like to be not easy. There are two types of consciousness-causes-collapse proponents. The first type who doesn't know much physics will find entanglement to be pretty difficult (they need to already understand complex numbers and basic linear algebra to get the structure of what is going on). Even a genuinely curious individual will likely have trouble following that unless they are a mathematically inclined individual. The second, much smaller group of people, are people who already understand entanglement but still buy into consciousness-causes collapse.They seem to have developed very complicated and sometimes subtle notions of what it means for things to be conscious or to have intent (almost akin to theologians). So in either case this avenue of attack seems unlikely to be successful.
If one is more concerned with convincing bystanders (as is often more relevant on the internet. People might not change their minds often. But people reading might), then this could actually do a good job when encountering the first category by making it clear that one knows a lot more about the subject than they do. This seems to empirically work in real life also as one can see in various discussions. See for example the cases Deepak Chopra has try to invoke a connection between QM and consciousness and he gets shot down pretty bluntly when there's anyone with a bit of math or physics background.
You're right; maybe I'm overestimating my ability to explain things so that laypeople will understand. But there are some concessions you can make to get the idea across without the full background of complex linear algebra - often I use polarizers as an example, because most people have some experience with them (from sunglasses or 3D movies), and from there it's only a hop, skip, and a jump to entangled photons.
I do try to explain so that people feel like the explanation is totally natural, but then I often run into the problem of people trying to reason about quantum mechanics "in English", so to speak, instead of going to the underlying math to learn more. Any suggestions?
It seems to me that it is easier to get people to realize just that they can't use their regular language to understand what is going on than to actually explain it. People seem to have issues with understanding this primarily because of Dunning-Kruger and because of the large number of popularizations of difficult science that just uses vague analogies.
I'd ask "ok. This is going to take some math. Did you ever take linear algebra?" If yes, then I just explain things. When they answer no (vast majority of the time)I then say "ok do you remember how matrix multiplication works?" They will generally not or have only a vague memory. At that point I then tell them that I could spending a few hours or so developing the necessary tools but that they really don't have the background without a lot of work. This generally results in annoyance and blustering on their part. At this point one tells them the story of Oresme and how he came up with the idea of gravity in the 1300s but since he didn't have a mathematical framework it was absolutely useless. This gets the point across sometimes.
Edit: Your idea of using polarization as an example is an interesting one and I may try that in the future.
Upvoted; thanks for providing the name "Dunning-Kruger" and the Oresme example!
There are a variety of different issues.
First, it assumes that consciousness exists as an ontological unit. This isn't just a problem with reductionism but is a problem with Occam's razor. What precisely one means by reductionism can be complicated and subtle with some versions more definite or plausible than others. But regardless, there's no good evidence that consciousness is an irreducible.
Second, it raises serious questions about what things were like before there were conscious entities. If no collapse occurred prior to conscious entities what does that say about the early universe and how it functioned? Note that this actually raises potentially testable claims if one can use telescopes to look back before the dawn of life. Unfortunately, I've never seen any consciousness causes collapse proponent either explain why this doesn't lead to any observable difference or make any plausible claim about what differences one would observe.
Third, it violates a general metapattern of history. As things have progressed the pattern has consistently been that minds don't interact with the laws of physics in any fundamental way and that more and more ideas about how minds might interact have been thrown out (ETA: There are a few notable exceptions such as some of the stuff involving the placebo effect.). We've spent much of the last few hundred years establishing stronger and stronger versions of this claim. Thus, as a simple matter of induction, one would expect that trend if anything to continue. (I don't know how much inducting on the pattern of discoveries is justified.)
Fourth, it is ill-defined. What constitutes a conscious mind? Presumably people are conscious. Are severely mentally challenged people conscious? Are the non-human great apes conscious? Are ravens and other corvids conscious? Are dogs or cats conscious? Are mice conscious? Etc. down to single celled organisms and viruses.
Fifth, consciousness causes collapse is a hypothesis that is easily supported by standard human biases. This raises two issues one of which is not that relevant but is worth mentioning and the other which is very relevant. The first, less relevant issue, is that this means we should probably assume that we are likely to overestimate our chance that the hypothesis is correct. This is not however an argument against the hypothesis. But there's a similar claim that is a sort of meta-argument against the hypothesis. Since this hypothesis is one which is supported by human biases one would expect a lot of motivated cognition for evidence and arguments for the hypothesis. So if there are any really good arguments one should consider it more likely that they would have been hit on. The fact that they have not suggests that there really aren't any good arguments for it.
I tried writing an essay arguing that popular distaste for politicians is due largely to base rate neglect leading people to think they are worse than they are: http://www.gwern.net/Notes#politicians-are-not-unethical (I don't think it works, though.)
Heart -> Hearst.
Also, the Edwards example you gives suggests that one story may not be sufficient (I don't know how many times the Enquirer reported on it before other media picked it up, but I know the rest did only months later).
Thanks; I've incorporated both.
I can't find that content on that page.
Caching. (This has been enough of a problem with linking to new content - people having the old page cached - that I've been thinking of turning it off, even with the speed/bandwidth hit.)
Thanks.
European Philosophers Become Magical Anime Girls
Author Junji Hotta has blessed the world with “Tsundere, Heidegger, and Me”, a tour de force of European philosophy… in a world where all the philosophers are self-conscious anime girls. The books went on sale September 14.
http://aya.shii.org/2011/09/17/european-philosophers-become-magical-anime-girls/
I... that's... I don't...
...
I'll be in my bunk.
At first I thought "Oh, nice, I'll finally know what Christians felt when that horrible Manga Gospel got published", but then I clicked the link and I just couldn't help having a good laugh. It seems I can only simulate the more chill Christians.
On further reflection, I got my start on literature through multiple shelves full of comic book adaptations of the classics, so I really shouldn't feel superior. Although to be fair those were a little more faithful to the source material - except for Taras Bulba, which quite shocked me later when I got my hands on the non-bowdlerised version.
Please please please someone translate it into English ! Or Russian, I'm not picky... I must read this manga, if only to see whether the text... disturbs... me as much as the art does.
That picture of Spinoza displeases me on so many levels.
"Desire is the essence of a man." - Baruch Spinoza
They have gone too far.
I noticed a bias about purchasing organic milk this morning, that is perhaps a combination of the sunk cost fallacy, ugh fields and compartmentalization.
My mother is sending me information this morning that I should be giving my children organic milk (to avoid hormones, etc). I don't disagree with her, but I'm probably not going to start buying organic milk. This makes me feel a little sorry for my mother, that she is going to some effort to convince me I ought to take this precaution, and I'm going to nod and agree, and then finally not change my behavior.
The twinge of guilt makes me examine the 'why', and I believe the reason I won't buy organic is because my children already drink much less milk than they used to. If there was one year I should have bought organic, it should have been during their first year of drinking cow milk when they drank several bottles a day and it was a major source of their nutrition. Now they only drink a couple glasses a day, and this milk is mixed with many other food sources.
I'm sure the logic is still opaque... Even if they don't drink as much milk as they used to, the milk drinking continues over the rest of their lives and switching to organic now would make a difference. If one of the main objections is the cost of organic milk (and at first I would claim that it was) then this fact means that by switching to organic milk now, I can pay less per day to completely free them of any contaminants normal milk would expose them to. For a few extra dollars a week, my children could be rBGH-free the rest of their lives.
What is my true objection? My true objection, perhaps, is that some part of my brain is already computing what it would feel like to purchase organic milk next time in the store. I'm paying a significant amount more, so I should be feeling good about the purchase, that I am making such-and-such good choices for my family. However, I know I will only feel badly! If the marginal price of organic milk is justified now, I should have been buying it before -- when my kids were small -- and so every single time that I purchase organic milk I will feel a dissonance that I wasn't purchasing it before. Either organic milk is important or it isn't, and in deciding to ignore my mother and continue to buy regular milk, I am making a choice to behave consistently with past choices.
Some compartmentalization is at work here, because I realize all this quite consciously, and it doesn't matter. I still feel like going to the milk aisle and glibly throwing in the carton that costs $3.49 rather than $5.50 is a viable option that I choose. I can even resolve to look at the label and chant "I am buying this rather than something else that I know is better because I don't want to have to renounce past decisions", and it doesn't matter.
A factor in this locus of irrationality is that I don't feel strongly that organic milk is better, and the extra cost is a weighing factor. Thus, the desire to avoid negative feelings is operating in a landscape that is nearly even. I trust that if I deemed it was more important to go with organic milk, I would do so. On the other hand, this is a reminder that such psychological tensions can affect more important decisions, if the need to avoid negative feelings is stronger, and I should continue to be honest with myself and be aware of them.
Past-you, using the evidence that past-you had, came to a particular conclusion. Present-you, using more evidence, may come to a different conclusion. Future-you, using still more evidence, may come to yet another conclusion. This is as it should be; that's what evidence is for.
Paul Graham's essay "Why Nerds are Unpopular" has been mentioned a few times on LW, in a very positive way.
My initial reaction upon reading that essay a couple years ago was also very positive. However, upon rereading it, I realized it doesn't really fit with my observations or what I know from social science research at all. I want to write a top level post about why I disagree with Graham, but I'm not really sure if that would be on-topic enough for a top-level.
So I guess I'll just put this to a vote. Please upvote this if you think I should write a top-level post.
Please Upvote this if you think I should write a discussion level post.
Why not just do a draft in discussion? It's a top level subject, but how could we judge well at this point without knowing what the post would look like?
If you think I shouldn't post about it at all, please upvote this. Be sure to downvote below.
Has anyone been able to play Mafia using bayesian methods? I have tried and failed due to encountering situations that eluded my attempts to model them mathematically. But since I am not strong at math, I'm hoping others have had success?
And the related question: any mafiascum.net players here?
Edit: I mean specifically using bayesian methods for online forum-based Mafia games. These seem to me to give the player enough time to do conscious calculations.
I play online Mafia but haven't attempted to use explicit Bayesian reasoning to do so.
Please attempt and see if you have better results than I did. And if you succeed come back and tell us all about it!
:-)
I'm not sure that doing so would be useful. It seems like normal Mafia techniques already approximate Bayesian reasoning, and formalizing it would be very challenging and IMO unlikely to offer unusual insights. That said, I'm fairly good at online Mafia and I suspect such techniques would better benefit less advanced players.
There are such things as Mafia techniques? I've never seen anyone do better than chance. Care to explain?
Certainly. A basic Mafia technique is examining the past play of the person you're suspicious of, then looking at whether their current play is more similar to their play as scum or their play as town. There is also wide knowledge (at least online) of moves that are generally "scummy," such as congratulating the doctor after he or she successfully protects, as these moves have been determined to be commonly used by scum. Of course, all of this is constantly evolving, since once something is generally known as a scumtell, advanced scum players avoid it. Further, different things are tells at different levels of play, which tends to make the game much more complicated than my above description might indicate.
That said, I think it's certainly possible to do better than chance-- my own record, at least of games that I can remember, is 4 wins to 1 loss, all as town (I have yet to be scum in my recent games).
Further, there are some situations where certain tactics have been determined, over wide periods of play, to be dominant, and applying these strategies gives you a very high chance to win. For instance, if the town has a doctor and a cop (and knows this) and also knows the scumgroup has no roleblocker, the best strategy is to stop voting to lynch, have the cop claim, and have the cop constantly investigate while protected by the doctor. The scum must then start hitting other targets in hopes of getting the doc. A truly advanced doctor will then, knowing the scum is doing this, not actually protect the cop but instead protect other members of the town in the hopes of blocking the scum's pseudorandom flailing, but a truly advanced scum player might anticipate this and try to kill the cop instead-- so there are mindgames all over the place, but dominant strategies are still known.
Generally, I feel like Mafia-- at least online Mafia-- is a rather good rationality exercise. I could expand this to a top-level post if there's interest.
Do make the top-level post please. I think there is use in the making Mafia more well-known in demographics such as the one we have here.
In my experience the outcome of face-to-face mafia can be even more dependent on the players' skill, once you get past the newbie phase. Not just because newbies can't read others well, but I think they are also less readable due to undeveloped meta and making vastly suboptimal plays that regular scumhunting techniques do not read well. Once there is some standard in the players' moves and some meta is available, one can read much more accurately in face-to-face games than online due to factors such as tone, moments of hesitation, and body language.
And thus for a given single game, I would rather play mafia face-to-face with groups of regular players than online, though I would prefer playing online to face-to-face with a whole group of newbies.
Face-to-face Mafia is certainly easier to read people in, but this actually (IMO) makes it a worse game. There are other issues as well, such as the inability of the Mafia to communicate articulately at night, but if you're a good lie detector (or the scum are bad liars) the game becomes almost trivial, and introducing the difficulties of online communication IMO adds an appealing element of challenge. That said, I agree that face-to-face Mafia with a regular group can certainly be fun and even educational in itself.
It sounds like online Mafia is a totally different and much better game than what I've played at various icebreaker functions, camps, and times when there's a substitute teacher. I'll check it out if I ever have a clear enough schedule. Also, I'd definitely enjoy a top-level post if you made one.
I don't know how well it works in games with only 1 scum player, but with at least two just the fact that there are two players who know they each have a partner changes their behavior enough that the game isn't random. There's also some change in what people say just because each side has a different win condition, although again this is less true with just one scum player.
As just a simple example, when you're playing as the scum it can be really hard (at least for me) to make a good argument that someone I know is a normal villager isn't, which can be enough for another player to deduce my role.
That's interesting; I haven't played enough mafia to really study it. And in all the games I have played, the town always lynches the first player someone bothers to accuse--there aren't any actual arguments.
I just had 4 games with the same 5 players (setup is 4 town 1 scum) that all ended in scum victory. Random lynching should yield only 53% chance of scum victory. 0.53^4 seems low enough that this is likely a case of better than random.
The players in this case were new to the game with the exception of myself (and after the first couple games I was constantly night killed). I was going to say that this seems to suggest that scum is stronger in newbie games, but then I realized I have no data to draw this comparison with. :-(
Were you the scum in any of the games?
I was scum in none of the games.
I want to read some games of mafia players who browse this site. Do you mind pointing me to some of your games?
Unfortunately I play mostly as a diversion on a private site, not on mafiascum or epicmafia, so they aren't as out in the open as you'd like. If you want I can link you to a recent newbie game that I was in on mafiascum, but the number of replacements makes it a little hard to follow and it's not exactly anyone's best play either.
Sure, link to it.
Here it is. I'm "Fetterkey."
I wonder if there aren't any group rationality games that don't seriously undermined group moral and cohesion. The last time I played Mafia people ended up crying and my relationship with my brother and cousin went through traumatic upheaval. Diplomacy is not a better option.
This seems like an unusual experience to have. I have played Mafia with 3+ non-overlapping groups in person and 4+ non-overlapping groups online, and have yet to encounter any trouble; in fact, in two of the cases we were explicitly playing as a bonding exercise to improve group morale and cohesion, and it seems to have worked both times.
And what about the times before that?
Playing mafia has never undermined real social relationships in my experience, and I've introduced this game to perhaps 20 people in real life, with at least 2 completely non-overlapping groups.
Also, I doubt face-to-face mafia should be considered a game that especially exercises rationality. It seems to me that you get thrown a huge fuckton of cognitive biases with no time to combat them.
(again, my original question should specify "forum based mafia games"...let me edit that now...)
On reflection, I think the problems came from the people in the group being too close. I have certainly had fun before. We may have also taken the game too seriously.
It's more like it teaches a sort of mini-rationality: "You're swimming in cognitive biases, but your intuitions can also be helpful. Empirically develop a few techniques to separate good intuitions from bad with decent error probability."
In my experience playing with a rationality crowd (at a meet-up), it was excellent for learning the visceral feeling of motivated cognition.
I can report that playing Mafia at a meetup markedly improved group interaction. What impact this has on your position is unknown.
Balderdash/Fictionary?
Trying to update even on just the well-defined data looks impossible for humans, trying to update on what other people are saying would be difficult, even with a computer. Also, it seems like there might be certain disadvantages if you turn out to be Mafia.
Allow me to specify: I am referring to online forum mafia games.
These games are slow enough that one can do some calculations, if one can find the numbers (and that seems to be the hard part, along with deciding how they should be calculated).
I've thought and am still thinking that the fact that I've never heard of bayesian methods being used in mafia is simply an observation about the failures of players, not that it inherently cannot be done using available tools.
Frankly I'm surprised mafia does not seem to attract more attention from the demographic concerned with rationality. If some set of methods were developed that consistently worked and cut through the jungle of biases that is the nature of the game, then that would be an achievement for the progress of rationality, would it not? I think many methods that may develop would easily transfer to other uses as well.
I have been wondering recently about how to rationally approach topics that are naturally subjective. Specifically, this came up in conversation about history and historiography. Historic events are objective of course, but a lot of historical scholarship concerns itself with not just describing events, but speculating as to their causes and results. This is naturally going to be influenced by the historian's own cultural context and existing biases.
How can rationalists engage with this inherently subjective topic, and apply rationality techniques? We can try to take account of the historian's biases, but in many cases that will require us to do some historical research - it is probably not possible to get an accurate, objective account.
This applies to a certain extent to other fields I am sure, but history and historiography are perhaps the most scholarly ones I can bring to mind.
Hmm. I was a little tired and rushed when I wrote this. There are a few thoughts I'd like to add concerning historiography.
As I said above, history, because of its subjective nature, is always influenced by the historian's bias. Historiography could maybe be called the study of these biases, but is in itself subject to the same flaws.
No historian's viewpoint on a historical event will be fully objective. But just because no approach can be perfect, does not mean that all approaches can be equally imperfect. My question isn't so much about how to be a rational historian, but more: is there a rational way to evaluate the relative worths of different historical viewpoints?
Would it be really stupid to use Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres as the fictional character that had an impact on me for my CommonApp essay? On one hand it seems right since he introduced me to lesswrong which has certainly had a big effect but on the other hand... it's... you know... fanfiction.
You can do it. It's good countersignaling. But you have to be absurdly careful about writing quality. It's your job to convey to a skeptical audience that fanfiction can be transformative. You have to be absolutely brutal in avoiding language that signals immaturity -- or, better, find an editor who can be absolutely brutal to you.
My M.O., back in my college-essay days, was to read a New Yorker before sitting down to write. Inhale the style. Better yet, find some essays by Gene Weingarten, the modern master of long-form narrative journalism. Imagine what Gene Weingarten could do with HP:MOR. Then try to do it.
Well, he already did! ---> Here you can help him with his actual text.
Hmm... I'm not sure. I'd take the word of someone with experience on an admissions committee, if you can get it.
If you do it, I think you'd be better off talking just a little about the character and much more about the community you found. Writing to the prompt is not really important for this sort of thing. (Usually one of the prompts is pretty much "Other," confirming that.)
In general, honesty is the best policy. If you really were influenced to great things by HJPEV, explain it well and it should go over well. If the admissions folks are going to say "This well-written and inspiring essay is about fanfiction" and thus throw it in the garbage, it could just as well have been thrown away for the room's lighting or what they had for breakfast.
This is important. Deliberately choosing to write about fanfiction is a high-risk move, and so is high-status if you pull it off well! But you might just face-plant. (You don't try out unpracticed tricks in front of a girl you want to impress.)
Or to put it another way:
All else equal, 3<4.
Has anyone done a thorough social psychological game theoretic analysis of college admissions? Seems right up your alley, gwern.
I only play a deep thinker online, I don't think I could write such a thing in a way that isn't merely extensive plagiarism of, say, Steve Sailer.
(That said, reading over my comment, I missed an opportunity: I should have pointed out that the reason why 4>3 is because it is an expensive signal in the sense that attempting to do #4 but only achieving a #2 exposes one to considerable punishment whereas one doesn't run such a risk with#1 and #3, and expensive signals are, of course, the most credible signals.)
I stand by my statement.
If the essay asked about "the fictional character that had the greatest impact on you" or something to that effect and that person is HJPEV, then that's what you should write about. Otherwise, you'd be lying, and apart from the general wrongness of lying, you're going to write better about something that's true.
I didn't disagree.
Thank you by the way. Your post convinced me to write about him and illuminated the best way to handle it.
If it's not too personal, I would be curious to see the final product.
If I like how it turns out and decide to stick with it I'll message it to you. I may not start for a while though.
Also, recognising a low-status character as a low-status character is an important part of 4. Trying to pretend it's high status ("the author is an AI researcher, it is the most reviewed fanfiction ever, it's better than Rowling's Harry Potter", etc) will usually backfire.
Honestly, I'd start by baldly and confidently acknowledging that characters from fanfiction about popular books are low-status, and that you are going to do your piece on him anyway.
As someone currently going through this process (I just wrote the same essay about Terry Pratchett's character Tiffany Aching), the impression I get is that it's very important to be unique: if your essay is the same as 200 others, it will be penalized as much as if it is poorly written. Using a rationalist fanfiction character, if you can write it well and have the guts to write it sincerely (but not too sincerely, or you'll signal naivete), is a good idea. If you don't want to deal with a fanfiction character, write about some other rationalist. Either way, don't mention lesswrong. And please don't write about Howard Roark. I enjoyed The Fountainhead, but it's worse signaling than fanfiction. You'll look like a shallow thinker who falls for propaganda, and most universities lean to the liberal end of the spectrum.
Important note: I'm applying to highly selective colleges with student bodies that think of themselves as contrarian or meta-contrarian. If you aren't, this advice may not apply.
The other way to look at the situation is that the admissions folks are looking for a very specific essay. That essay requires you to identify yourself with a character from some postmodern South American novel (or possibly Elie Wiesel in "Night") and certainly has no place in it for fan fiction.
Nope. Admissions folks are looking to be entertained.
I think if you were to choose a character from a conventionally literary work, it should be something generally well-regarded in English departments, but which is very rarely assigned reading in high school. Maybe Middlemarch?
What's your second choice?
I can't think of any other fictional characters with a significant impact so if I don't use him I would write about one of the other prompts. Only I can't think of anything for the other choices and when I saw the fictional character option he immediately jumped to mind.
A kind of uncomfortably funny video about turning yourself bisexual, a topic that's come up a few times here on LW. http://youtu.be/zqv-y5Ys3fg
Wondering vaguely if I'm the only person here who has attempted to sign up for cryonics coverage and been summarily rejected for a basic life insurance plan (I'm transgendered, which automatically makes it very difficult, and have a history of depression, which apparently makes it impossible to get insurance according to the broker I spoke with).
I see a lot of people make arguments (some of them suggesting a hidden true rejection) about why they don't want it, or why it would be bad. I see a lot of people here make arguments for its widespread adoption, and befuddlement at its rejection (the "Life sucks, but at least you die" post) and the difficulties this poses for spreading the message. And I see a few people argue (somewhat mendaciously in my opinion) for its exclusivity or scarcity, arguing that it's otherwise of little to no value if just anyone can get signed up.
What I don't see is a lot of people who'd like to and can't, particularly for reasons of discrimination. For me, my biggest rejection for a long time was the perception that it was just out of reach of anyone who wasn't very wealthy, and once I learned otherwise, that obstacle dissipated. Now I'm kind of back to feeling like it's that way in practice -- if you're not one of the comparatively small number of people who can pay for it out of hand, or a member of any group who's already statistically screwed by the status quo, then it may as well be out of reach for you.
I doubt the average person who has heard of, and rejected cryonics has gone through this specifically, but it certainly suggests some reasons why it might be a tough sell outside the "core communities" who're already well-represented in cryonics. Even if we want it, we can't get it, and the more widely-known that is, the more difficult PR's going to be among people who've already had their opportunities and futures scuppered by the system as it stands.
I'm not saying it's rational, but from where I stand it's very hard to blame someone for cynically dismissing the prospect out of hand, or actively opposing it. IMO, the cryonics boosters either need to acknowledge the role that stuff like this plays in people's relationship to Shiny New Ideas Proposed By Well Educated Financially-Comfortable White Guys From The Bay Area, or just concede that, barring massive systematic reforms in other sectors of society, this will not be an egalitarian technology.
I hope you don't mind, I've copied your message to the New Cryonet mailing list. This is an important issue for the cryonics community to discuss. I think there needs to be a system in place for collecting donations and/or interest to pay for equal access for those who can't get life insurance. There are a couple of cases I'm aware of where the community raised enough donations to cover uninsurable individuals for CI suspensions.
I don't mind.
While my personal case is obviously important to me (it is my life after all), it's important to me in a more general sense -- a lot of people are talking on this site about various ways to fix the world or make it better, yet they're often not members of the groups who've had to pay the costs (through exploitation, marginalization or just by being subject to some society-wide bias against them) to get it to where it is now.
I'm both transgendered and diagnosed with depression, and I've had good luck getting insured via Rudi Hoffman. I don't recall what the name of the insurance company was, and I haven't heard the final OK since the medical examination, but I don't foresee any difficulties. I was warned they'll most likely put me down on male rates (feh) despite being legally female, but I can deal with that even if I don't like it.
Same broker. Did you mention the depression to him explicitly?
Yes. I'm not taking any medication for it, which might have affected it.
That question never came up in my conversation with him, oddly. So I'm left wondering what the decisive difference is. shrug
If you don't mind me asking - how old are you and how much money do you typically save a year?
Bad assumption, but I'll answer.
I am 28. long-term unemployed, cannot get a bank account due to issues years ago, living on disability payments and now with support of my domestic partner (which is the main reason my situation isn't actually desperate any longer). We have to keep our finances pretty separate or my income (~7k a year, wholly inadequate to live on by myself anyplace where I could actually do so) goes away.
I keep a budget, I'm pragmatic and savvy enough to make sure our separate finances on paper don't unduly restrict us from living our lives as necessary, but I can't remember the last time I made it to the end of the month with money left over from my benefits check. Sometimes if I'm having a very good month, I'll not need to use my food stamps balance for that cycle, meaning it's there when I need extra later.
And to stave off questions about how I could afford cryonics on this level of income: Life insurance can fall within a nice little window of 50 dollars or less, which could plausibly be taken out of my leisure and clothing budgets (it doesn't consume all of them, but those are the only places in the budget with much wiggle room). Maintaining a membership with the Cryonics institute that depends on a beneficiary payout of that insurance is something like 120 dollars a year - even I can find a way to set that aside.
I think they don't have any deep understanding of it at all -- the statistics tell the story the insurance adjusters need to decide on an investment (well, sort of -- there actually is no really good data about our long-term heatlh outcomes apart from our rates of violent murder, and it's hard to tell what would even constitute a reasonable null hypothesis to default to when so many complicated variables are churned up by the medical procedures we often seek), but that decision and those statistics are not truly value-neuitral.
Show me a trans person who hasn't dealt with depression. I'm sure they exist, but it does not appear to be common. Depression is such a common symptom for us because we're a mostly-despised minority in the wider world, and just being coerced into our birth-assigned gender roles is often painful and stressful for us (and it only gets worse as we grow up).
Transgendered people in the US face one-in-eight to one-in-twelve murder rates depending on race and geographic location [edit: this claim is unsourced and should be considered retracted; investigation recorded further downthread attempts to pin down the rate more precisely-Jandila]; we're also something like four times more likely than the national average to be unemployed. From an actuarial perspective, this is clear-cut: bad investment prospect, and that is the purpose of insurance after all.
It's not neutral to the person affected by it though, because those conditions stem from discrimination against trans people -- we aren't murdered at such high rates because of some evopsychological predisposition in cis people to murder us, or because we're inherently less capable of fitting into society and/or being value-creating agents in some hypothetical free market. We aren't unemployed at such vastly high rates because we tend not to have skills or education as a population -- and for many of us that don't, it's not because we couldn't cut it in school or the work we were doing before we transitioned.
But instead of, say, considering me on the basis of my actual health (which according to my practicing physician is excellent), it's a look at the tables. Context is irrelevant in the decision.
Because I'm trans and have a medical history of depression, I am rendered me unable to acquire the otherwise-affordable means of obtaining at least some chance of ensuring my future existence, past the limits of my body as it stands.
It may be legal, it may be justifiable with recourse to a profit motive, it may not be willfully directed at my person in order to cause me ill -- but it is discrimination. Our heightened rates of murder and unemployment aren't typically personally-directed either (we're targeted for being what we are, not who we are).
It's also still legal to fire me from a job in most jurisdictions for being transgendered, without even having to hide the fact. Does that tacit authorization in any way cast doubt on whether or not such behavior is discriminatory?
I want to live as much as anybody does. I even want to live an arbitrarily long time, and see the world grow into a better place, as much as any other cryonics booster on this site. I don't take comfort in beliefs of a spiritual afterlife when faced with the seeming inevitability of death, I don't consider the fact that dying would hardly make me unique or rarely-disadvantaged among humanity to be any negative influence on seeking to avoid it by whatever plausible means. I don't think immortality will inherently lead to stagnation or regression in society.
And I don't get the choice. There is a choice available, but not to me, because the only available means (like most people in the world, I am not arbitrarily able to afford setting aside 30k or so) is denied out of hand, no further fact-finding necessary. That shiny future we cryo-types are hoping to see, but that will likely take longer than our natural lifespans to reach? Is closed off to me.
There's a whole lot of people like me in the world, who either don't have financial and social access to the kinds of things that make one rationally able to choose cryo in the first place for whatever reason. I daresay most of them would also reject cryonics because they don't have a rationalist's understanding of death, its implications and what they could do about it -- but rationality training will only solve one of those problems.
I've seen this claim before but I've never seen it attached to a reliable source. Do you have a citation for it? The HCR estimates that there are about 15-30 murders of transgendered people each year. If we underestimate the percentage of the American population that is trans using the HCR's data and use the lower bound estimate that 1 in every 3000 people are transgendered (here I'm using the cited Conway study that says lower bound of 1 in 2500 and underestimating a bit more both to make the math easier and to make sure we're very definitely not overcounting, note that Conway's upper bound is in 1 in 500) then we get with a US population of around three hundred million, a total of about 100,000 trans people in the US. Now if we assume that all those trans murders are evenly distributed (which seems to be really unlikely), we get assuming that they have around 60 years of time to get murdered, with a 30/100,000 chance each year, we get a chance of 1-(1-(30/100,000))^60 chance of getting murdered in their lifetimes (60 comes from assuming that they know they are transgendered around age 12 and then have 60 years of time to get murdered). That's around a 2.8% chance. That's really high, but nowhere near 1 in 12 which is more than twice that (8.3%) . In this context, this occurs with 1/12 being the claimed lower bound, and with us assuming a generously large number of murders yearly and a generously small transgender population, and are still off by a factor of 2.
Note if one uses for example a population estimate based on the middle of Conway's range (1 in a 1000 being transgendered) then one gets a result of around .006%, which is about 50% percent more likely than the entire US pop but is even farther from the claimed numbers.
Edit: Ok. Th HRC also on the same webpage but with minimal arithmetic claim that 1 in every 1000 murders might be a transgendered person. If we use this estimate and assume that there are then around 140 transgendered murders yearly, and use the reasonable estimate of 1 in every 1000 people being transgendered so a total pop of around 300,000 then one gets (1-(1-140/300,000)^60) which is around a 3% chance.
Edit: If you use the most generous estimate for the murder total (140), and the smallest population estimate for the transgendered population then you can get 8% which is a little under 1/12. Here I'm using my underestimate of Conway's estimate. If one uses Conway's actual lower bound one gets around 7%. I don't think I need to discuss in detail why this estimate is unlikely to be accurate. It seems clear from these estimates that the murder rate of transgendered individuals is much higher than that of the general population (especially when considered as a relative rate), but it is not likely to be anywhere near 1/12th.
You know, I can't find a good source for it now, and it appears to be an apocryphal claim. Wouldn't be the first time I've picked up an oft-quoted but exaggerated statistic about this issue. I'm a bit of a newb, but I'll try to strikethrough that claim. ETA: The Help guide doesn't list that particular markup. Someone throw me a bone?
A look at Carsten Balzer's 2009 study claims that a recent attempt to monitor the rate of reported murders worldwide (their criteria were basically "can be accessed by a newspaper website or some other online source during a google search, after filtering for duplicates") gave a rate of about one reported murder every three days. Source is here:
http://www.liminalis.de/2009_03/TMM/tmm-englisch/Liminalis-2009-TMM-report2008-2009-en.pdf
As far as I'm aware, strikethrough is not available through markdown as it is implemented on this site; to get the strikethrough effect you have to retract your entire post.
Thank you for the clarification.
I think the current norm on LessWrong is putting "edit to add: I no longer believe this claim to be true" in parentheses after the claim. I think your idea of strikethrough is really good, though.
EDIT: this comment was made when I was in a not-too-reasonable frame of mind, and I'm over it.
Is teaching, learning, studying rationality valuable?
Not as a bridge to other disciplines, or a way to meet cool people. I mean, is the subject matter itself valuable as a discipline in your opinion? Is there enough to this? Is there anything here worth proselytizing?
I'm starting to doubt that. "Here, let me show you how to think more clearly" seems like an insult to anyone's intelligence. I don't think there's any sense teaching a competent adult how to change his or her habits of thought. Can you imagine a perfectly competent person -- say, a science student -- who hasn't heard of "rationalism" in our sense of the world, finding such instruction appealing? I really can't.
Of course I'm starting to doubt the value (to myself) of thinking clearly at all.
I was recently around some old friends who are lacking in rationality, and kept finding myself at a complete loss. I wanted to just grab them and say exactly that.
In other news, I've learned that some lessons in how to politely and subtly teach rationality would be quite welcome >.>
A little bit but it varies wildly based on who you are.
Not really.
At some point I was that person. Weren't you?
Yesterday I spoke with my doctor about skirting around the FDA's not having approved of a drug that may be approved in Europe first (it may be approved in the US first). I explained that one first-world safety organization's imprimatur is good enough for me until the FDA gives a verdict, and that harm from taking a medicine is not qualitatively different than harm from not taking a medicine.
We also discussed a clinical trial of a new drug, and I had to beat him with a stick until he abandoned "I have absolutely no idea at all if it will be better for you or not". I explained that abstractly, a 50% chance of being on a placebo and a 50% chance of being on a medicine with a 50% chance of working was better than assuredly taking a medicine with a 20% chance of working, and that he was able to give a best guess about the chances of it working.
In practice, there are other factors involved, in this case it's better to try the established medicine first and just see if it works or not, as part of exploration before exploitation.
This is serious stuff.
You're confuting two things here: whether rationality is valuable to study, and whether rationality is easy to proselytize.
My own experience is that it's been very valuable for me to study the material on Less Wrong- I've been improving my life lately in ways I'd given up on before, I'm allocating my altruistic impulses more efficiently (even the small fraction I give to VillageReach is doing more good than all of the charity I practiced before last year), and I now have a genuine understanding (from several perspectives) of why atheism isn't the end of truth/meaning/morals. These are all incredibly valuable, IMO.
As for proselytizing 'rationality' in real life, I haven't found a great way yet, so I don't do it directly. Instead, I tell people who might find Less Wrong interesting that they might find Less Wrong interesting, and let them ponder the rationality material on their own without having to face a more-rational-than-thou competition.
This phrase jumped out in my mind as "shiny awesome suggestion!" I guess in a way it's what I've been trying to do for awhile, since I found out early, when learning how to make friends, that most people and especially most girls don't seem to like being instructed on living their life. ("Girls don't want solutions to their problems," my dad quotes from a book about the male versus the female brain, "they want empathy, and they'll get pissed off if you try to give them solutions instead.")
The main problem is that most of my social circle wouldn't find LW interesting, at least not in its current format. Including a lot of people who I thought would benefit hugely from some parts, especially Alicorn's posts on luminosity. (I know, for example, that my younger sister is absolutely fascinated by people, and loves it when I talk neuroscience with her. I would never tell her to go read a neuroscience textbook, and probably not a pop science book either. Book learning just isn't her thing.)
Depending on what you mean by 'format', you might be able to direct those people to the specific articles you think they'd benefit from, or even pick out particular snippets to talk to them about (in a 'hey, isn't this a neat thing' sense, not a 'you should learn this' sense).
"Pick out particular snippets" seems to work quite well. If something in the topic of conversation tags, in my mind, to something I read on LessWrong, I usually bring it up and add it to the conversation, and my friends usually find it neat. But except with a few select people (and I know exactly who they are) posting an article on their facebook wall and writing "this is really cool!" doesn't lead to the article actually being read. Or at least they don't tell me about reading it.
If facebook is like twitter in that regard, I mostly wouldn't expect you to get feedback about an article having been read - but I'd also not expect an especially high probability that the intended person actually read it, either. What I meant was more along the lines of emailing/IMing them individually with the relevant link. (Obviously this doesn't work too well if you know a whole lot of people who you think should read a particular article. I can't advise about that situation - my social circle is too small for me to run into it.)
Sorry for the delayed reply...
I don't know what Twitter is like, but the function on Facebook that I prefer to use (private messages) is almost like email and seems to be replacing email among much of my social circle. I will preferentially send my friends FB messages instead of emails, since I usually get a reply faster.
Writing on someone's wall is public, and might result in a slower reply because it seems less urgent. But it's still directed at a particular person, and it would be considered rude not to reply at all. But when I post an article or link, the reply I often get is "thanks, looks neat, I'll read that later."
I, uh, just did that, and received this reply half an hour later:
I think that counts as a success.
Upvotes to you for trying something instead of defaulting to doing nothing.
It wasn't actually on account of this discussion that I introduced my friend to LW (since I didn't read Swimmer and Adelene's comments till afterward)- I just posted the reaction here because it was funny and relevant.
I don't recall any discussion on LW -- and couldn't find any with a quick search -- about the "Great Rationality Debate", which Stanovich summarizes as:
Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2003). Evolutionary versus instrumental goals: How evolutionary psychology misconceives human rationality. In D. E. Over (Ed.), Evolution and the psychology of thinking: The debate, Psychological Press. [Series on Current Issues in Thinking and Reasoning]
The lack of discussion seems like a curious gap given the strong support to both the schools of thought that Cosmides/Tooby/etc. represent on the one hand, and Kahneman/Tversky/etc. on the other, and that they are in radical opposition on the question of the nature of human rationality and purported deviations from it, both of which are central subjects of this site.
I don't expect to find much support here for the Tooby/Cosmides position on the issue, but I'm surprised that there doesn't seem to have been any discussion of the issue. Maybe I've missed discussions or posts though.
Typically, the "optimal thinking" argument gets brought up here in the context of evolutionary psychology. Loss aversion makes sound reproductive sense when you're a hunter-gatherer, and performing a Bayesian update carefully doesn't help all that much. But times have changed, and humans have not changed as much.
I don't understand the basis for the Cosmides and Tooby claim. In their first study, Cosmides and Tooby (1996) solved the difficult part of a Bayesian problem so that the solution could be found by a "cut and paste" approach. The second study was about the same with some unnecessary percentages deleted (they were not needed for the cut and paste solution--yet the authors were surprised when performance improved). Study 3 = Study 2. Study 4 has the respondents literally fill in the blanks of a diagram based on the numbers written in the question. 92% of the students answered that one correctly. Studies 5 & 6 returned the percentages and the students made many errors.
Instead of showing innate, perfect reasoning, the study tells me that students at Yale have trouble with Bayesian reasoning when the question is framed in terms of percentages. The easy versions do not seem to demonstrate the type of complex reasoning that is needed to see the problem and frame it without somebody framing it for you. Perhaps Cosmides and Tooby are correct when they show that there is some evidence that people use a "calculus of probability" but their study showed that people cannot frame the problems without overwhelming amounts of help from somebody who knows the correct answer.
Reference
Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1996). Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all? Rethinking some conclusions from the literature on judgment under uncertainty. Cognition 58, 1–73, DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(95)00664-8
I agree. I was hoping somebody could make a coherent and plausible sounding argument for their position, which seems ridiculous to me. The paper you referenced shows that if you present an extremely simple problem of probability and ask for the answer in terms of a frequency (and not as a single event), AND you present the data in terms of frequencies, AND you also help subjects to construct concrete, visual representations of the frequencies involved by essentially spoon-feeding them the answers with leading questions, THEN most of them will get the correct answer. From this they conclude that people are good intuitive statisticians after all, and they cast doubt on the entire heuristics and biases literature because experimenters like Kahneman and Tversky don't go to equally absurd lengths to present every experimental problem in ways that would be most intuitive to our paleolithic ancestors. The implication seems to be that rationality cannot (or should not) mean anything other than what the human brain actually does, and the only valid questions and problems for testing rationality are those that would make sense to our ancestors in the EEA.
I'm not sure I'm up to the challenge, but here goes anyway ...
I think you are being ungenerous to the position Tooby and Cosmides mean to defend. As I read them (see especially Section 22 of their paper), they are trying to do two things. First, they want to open up the question of how exactly people reason about probabilities -- i.e., what mechanisms are at work, not just what answers people give. Second, they want to argue that humans are slightly more rational than Kahneman and Tversky give them credit for being.
First point. Tooby and Cosmides do not actually commit to the position that humans use a probability calculus in their probabilistic reasoning. What they do argue is that Kahneman and Tversky were too quick to dismiss the possibility that humans do use a probability calculus -- not just heuristics -- in their probabilistic reasoning. If humans never gave the output demanded by Bayes' theorem, then K&T would have to be right. But T&C show that in more ecologically valid cases, (most) humans do give the output demanded by Bayes. So, the question is re-opened as to what brain mechanism takes frequency inputs and gives frequency outputs in accordance with Bayes' theorem. That mechanism might or might not instantiate a rule in a calculus.
Second point. If you are tempted (by K&T's research) to say that humans are just dreadfully bad at statistical reasoning, then maybe you should hold off for a second. The question is a little bit under-specified. Do you mean "bad at statistical reasoning in general, in an abstract setting" or do you mean "bad at statistical reasoning in whatever form it might take"? If the former, then T&C are going to agree. If you frame a statistics problem with percentages, you get all kinds of errors. But if you mean the latter, then T&C are going to say that humans do pretty well on problems that have a particular form, and not surprisingly, that form is more ecologically valid.
General rule of charity: If someone appears to be defending a claim that you think is obviously ridiculous, make sure they are actually defending what you think they are defending and not something else. Alternatively (or maybe additionally), look for the strongest way to state their claim, rather than the weakest way.
I'm confused about Kolmogorov complexity. From what I understand, it is usually expressed in terms of Universal Turing Machines, but can be expressed in any Turing-complete language, with no difference in the resulting ordering of programs. Why is this? Surely a language that had, say, natural language parsing as a primitive operation would have a very different complexity ordering than a Universal Turing Machine?
The Kolmogorov complexity changes by an amount bounded by a constant when you change languages, but the order of the programs is very much allowed to change. Where did you get that it wasn't?
(this is because all Turing-complete languages can simulate each other)
I'm getting increasingly pessimistic about technology.
If we don't get an AI wiping us out or some form of unpleasant brain upload evolution, we'll get hooked by superstimuli and stuff. We don't optimize for well-being, we optimize for what we (think we) want, which are two very different things. (And often, even calling it "optimization" is a stretch.)
Natural selection does not cease operation. Say, for example, that someone invents a box that fully reproduces in every respect the subjective experience of eating and of having eaten by directly stimulating the brain. Dieters would love this device. Here's a device that implements in extreme form the very danger that you fear. In this case, the specific danger is that you will stop eating and die.
So the question is, will the device wipe out the human race? Almost certainly it will not wipe out the entire human race, simply because there are enough people around who would nevertheless choose to eat despite the availability of the device, possibly because they make a conscious decision to do so. These people will be the survivors, and they will reproduce, and their children will have both their values (transmitted culturally) and their genes, and so will probably be particularly resistant to the device.
That's an extreme case. In the actual case, there are doubtless many people who are not adapting well to technological change. They will tend to die out disproportionately, will tend to reproduce disproportionately less.
We have a model of this future in today's addictive drugs. Some people are more resistant to the lure of addictive drugs than others. Some people's lives are destroyed as they pursue the unnatural bliss of drugs, but many people manage to avoid their fate.
Many people have so far managed the trick of pursuing super stimuli without destroying their lives in the process.
What struck me about the example in this post that its basically genetically equivalent to reliable easy to use contraception.
And now that I think about it humanity basically is like a giant petri dish where someone dumped some antibiotics. The demographic transition is a temporary affair, a die off of maladapted genotypes and memeplexes.
Keep in mind, it's possible to evolve to extinction.
I wish I could upvote that more than once.
The post or the comment? If the former then you just prompted me to vote it up for you. :)
Me too. smk, your wish has been granted.
It is not at all clear that the people resistant to addictive drugs are reproducing at a higher rate than those who aren't.
Are you suggesting to leave everything to natural selection? Doesn't strike me as the rationalists' way.
Sure, I don't think humanity is in any danger of being destroyed by conventional technologies, and I'm pretty sure the Singularity will be happen - in one form or another - way before then. But there may very well be a lot of suffering on the way.
Have you checked out CFAI? It's like CEV but with less of an emphasis on humans. I really don't like humans and would rather only deal with them via implicit meta-level 'get information about morality from your environment' means, which is more explicit in CFAI than CEV.
I've read part of it, though not all. (I'm a bit confused as to how your comment relates to mine.)
CEV takes more of an economic perspective where agent-extrapolations make deals with each other. The "good" agent-extrapolations might win out in the end (due to having a more-timeless discount rate, say), but there might be a lot of suffering along the way. CFAI on the other hand takes a less deal-centric perspective where the AI's more directly supposed to reason everything through from first principles, which can avoid predictably-stupid-in-retrospect agents getting much of the future's pie, so to speak. So I'm more afraid of CEV-like thinking than CFAI-like thinking, even though both are scary, because I am more afraid of humans being evil than I'm afraid of me not getting what I want. This may or may not overlap at all with your concerns.
(The difference isn't necessarily whether or not they converge on the same policy, it might also be how quickly they converge on that policy. CFAI seems like it'd converge on justifiedness more quickly, but maybe not.)
Are there particular technologies (or uses of) that have especially earned your pessimism?
Lots of things, but some off the top of my head:
Communication technologies probably top the list. Sure, the Internet has given birth to lots of great communities, like the one where I'm typing this comment. But it has also created a hugely polarized environment. (See the picture on page 4 of this study.) It's ever easier to follow your biases and only read the opinions of people who agree with you, and to think that anyone who disagrees is stupid or evil or both. On one hand, it's great that people can withdraw to their own subcultures where they feel comfortable, but the groupthink that this allows...
"Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want." -- Clive Barnes. That's even more true for the Internet.
Also, it's getting easier and easier to work, study and live for weeks without talking to anyone else than the grocery store clerk. I don't think that's a particularly good thing from a mental health perspective.
I gain great confidence from the principle that rational people win, on average. It is rational people that make the world, and if it gets to be something we don't want, we change it. The only real threat is rationalists with different utility functions (e.g. Quirrelmort).
(Disclaimer: please don't take this as a promotion of an "us/them" dichotomy.)
Talking with your mouth, or talking? Because it's not clear to me that talking online is significantly worse than talking in person at sustaining mental health. I suspect getting a girlfriend/boyfriend will do more for your mental health and social satisfaction than interacting with people face-to-face more.
If you mean a face-to-face bf/gf, you're not actually disagreeing with Kaj. Also, I concur with his points about social deprivation leading to lethargy, based on personal experience.
Personally I find that if I don't hang out with people in real life every 2-4 days I will get increasingly lethargic and incapable of getting anything done. To what degree this generalizes is another matter.
I find the same thing as Kaj. I've started literally percieving myself as having that set of "needs" bars in the Sims. Bladder bar gets empty, and I need to use the toilet or I'll be uncomfortable. Sleep bar gets low, and I'll be tired until I get enough. Social bar (face to face time) gets low, and I'll feel bleah until I get some face to face time.
The good news is that I've noticed this, become able to distinguish between "not enough facetime Bleah" and other types of Bleah, and then make sure to get face-to-face time when I need it.
It's spooky how similar I am in this regard.
What's the bad news?
That up until recently the internet (and a wide array of other neural-reward-generating things) made it very easy to NOT notice this and distinguish between various types of mental lethargy.
Very much the same way. The internet has been a mixed blessing -- it allowed me to have the life I have at all, way back when, but now it's also a massive hook for akrasia and encourages sub-optimal use of free time. I'm still trying to get that under control.
I've been working from home for a year now. I don't get out and see people often, my family live far away, so I don't have many opportunities to see people in person. The exception is, my brother is staying with me while he studies at University. There have been a few periods however where he's been away up with our parents, or off at a different university in a different state. I have a few friends I talk with regularly online through IM, and it helps, but the periods when my brother was away were still very difficult and I was getting very stressed towards the end, even though we don't interact all that much on a day to day basis, and even though I've always been much more tolerant and even thriving on loneliness than most people I know.
Maybe video chatting with people would be an adequate substitute? I haven't tried that, but my anecdote is that IM / talking online alleviates some of the stress, but goes nowhere near to mitigating it.
Sorry, but isn't this the criticism of inappropriate use of technologies rather than technologies itself?
What would be the point of criticizing technology on the basis of its appropriate use?
Technologies do not exist in a vacuum, and even if they did, there'd be nobody around to use them. Thus restricting to only the "technology itself" is bound to miss the point of the criticism of technology. When considering the potential effects of future technology we need to take into account how the technologies will be used, and it is certainly reasonable to believe that some technologies have been and will be used to cause more harm than good. That a critical argument takes into account the relevant features of the society that uses the technology is not a flaw of the argument, but rather the opposite.
No, I'm not talking about the basis to criticize technology, but more about of actual target of criticism. Disclaimer: there sure are technologies that can do more harm than good. Here I will concentrate on communications, as you picked it as being one of the top problematic technologies.
For me, it all boils down to constructive side of criticism: should we change the technologies of the way we use them? Because I think in first case, new technologies will be used with the same drawbacks for humans as old ones. In the second case, successful usage patterns can be applied to new technologies as well.
For example, rather than limit the usage of communication technologies or change the comm technology itself, maybe we should focus on how the people use them. Make television more social. Or make going out with other people more easy and fun. Promote social interaction and activities using existing technologies, not relying on some magic future technology that will solve the existing problems. I think building the solution around existing technologies is a faster way than waiting for new ones.
Surely, there are technology side and social/culture side of the problem. But we cannot change any of these fast. We can only expand one to help the other. For example, on one programming site, around two years after its creation, people started to organize meetups in local places, much like LW meetups. Then, year later, other group on the site organized soccer games between different site users. The people liked it. And it doesn't take much time because they were building around existing stuff.
Also, sorry for my english. It's not my main language.
Maybe I misinterpreted your first comment. I agree almost completely with this one, especially the part
You think we optimize for what we think we want? That's a stretch in itself. ;)
(Totally agree with what you are saying!)
I keep running into problems with various versions of what I internally refer to as the "placebo paradox", and can't find a solution that doesn't lead to Regret Of Rationality. Simple example follows:
You have an illness from wich you'll either get better, or die. The probability of recovering is exactly half of what you estimate it to be due to the placebo effect/positive thinking. Before learning this you have 80% confidence in your recovery. Since you estimate 80%, your actual chance is 40% so you update to this. Since the estimate is now 40%, the actual chance is 20%, so you update to this. Then it's 10%, so you update to that. etc. Until both your estimated and actual chance of recovery are 0. then you die.
An irrational agent, on the other hand, upon learning this could self delude to 100% certainty of recovery, and have a 50% chance of actually recovering.
This is actually causing me real world problems, such as inability to use techniques based on positive thinking, and a lot of cognitive dissonance.
Another version of this problem features in HP:MoR, in the scene where harry is trying to influence the behaviour of dementors.
And to show this isn't JUST a quirk of human mind design, one can envision Omega setting up an isomorphic problem for any kind of AI.
To fully solve this problem requires answering the question of how the placebo effect physically works, which requires answering the question of what a belief physically is, to have that physical effect.
However, no-one yet knows the answers to those questions, which renders all of these logical arguments about as useful as Zeno's proof that arrows cannot move. The problem of how to knowingly induce a placebo response is a physical one, not a logical one. Nature has no paradoxes.
The first part is wrong, the second is obvious and I never said anything to contradict it. We don't need to know exactly how beliefs are implemented just approximately how they behave.
Of coarse this is a physical problem and of coarse we don't know every detail enough to give an exact answer, the math can still be useful for solving the problem.
The point of your post was that the mathematics you are doing is creating the problem, not solving it. I haven't seen any other mathematics in this thread that is solving the problem either.
Honestly, this discussion was to long ago for me to really remember what it was about well enough to discus it properly.
I have a couple of suggestions more constructive than my earlier comments.
One is that according to a paper recently cited here, placebos can work even if you know they're placebos.
The other is that if belief doesn't work for you, how about visualisation? Instead of trying to believe it will work, just imagine it working. Vividly imagine, not just imagining that it will work. This doesn't raise decision-theoretic paradoxes, and people claim results for it, although I don't know about proper studies. We don't know how placebos work, and "belief" isn't necessarily the key state of mind.
That article was probably what caused me to notice the problem in the first place and write the OP.
Visualization is probably the most promising solution, and even if it's not as strong as placebo might b worth exploring. My main problems with it is that there's still some kind of psychological resistance to it, and that I have no clear idea of what exact concrete image I'm supposed to visualize given some abstract goal description.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/22/placebo-effect-patients-sham-drug It is also well worth noting that the Placebo Effect works just fine even if you know it's just a Placebo Effect. I hadn't realized it worked for others, but I've been abusing this one for a lot of my life, thanks to a neurological quirk that makes placebos especially potent for me.
Yes, but you have to BELIEVE the placebos will help. In fact, the paradox ONLY appears in the case you know it's a placebo because that's when the feedback loop can happen.
I'm not aware of any research that says a placebo won't help a "non-believer" - can you cite a study? Given the study I linked where they were deliberately handed inert pills and told that they were an inert placebo, and they still worked, I actually strongly doubt your claim.
And given the research I linked, why in the world wouldn't you believe in them? They do rationally work.
A placebo will help if you think the pill you're taking will help. This may be because you think it's a non-placebo pill that'd help even if you didn't know you were taking it, or because you know it's a placebo but think placebos work. If you were given a placebo pill, told it was just a candy and given no indication it might help anything, it wouldn't do anything because it's just sugar. Likewise if you're given a placebo, know it's a placebo, and are convince on al levels that there is no chance of it working.
Right. So find someone who will tell you it's a placebo, and read up on the research that says it does work. It'd be irrational to believe that they don't work, given the volume of research out there.
A single study is not sufficient grounds to believe in something, especially a proposition as complicated as "placebos work" (it may not sound complicated expressed in this way, but if you taboo the words 'placebo' and 'work' you'll see that there is a lot of machinery in there).
See previous discussion here and note my remarks, I recommend reading the linked articles.
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/07/dangerous_placebo_medicine_in_asthma.php for a second study, and one that explicitly addresses your concern of psychological vs health benefits (summary: placebos have no actual health benefits, they just manage the psychological side)
Given Armok is looking for a psychological solution, this still seems relevant. There have been a number of interesting studies on placebo effects; whether it's the actual pill or just priming, it does have a well document and noted beneficial effect, and it seemed relevant to Armok's situation.
Speaking of Omega setting up an isomorphic situation, the Newcomb's Box problems do a good job of expressing this.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/nc/newcombs_problem_and_regret_of_rationality/
However, I also though of a side question. Is the person who is caught in a cycle of negative thinking like the placebo effect that you mention, engaging in confirmation bias?
I mean, if that person thinks "I am caught in a loop of updates that will inexorably lead to my certain death." And they are attempting to establish that that is true, they can't simply say "I went from 80%/40% to 40%/20% to 20%/10%, and this will continue. I'm screwed!" as evidence of it's truth, because that's like saying "4,6,8" "6,8,10" "8,10,12" as the guesses for the rule that you know "2,4,6" follows. and then saying "The rule is even numbers, right? Look at all this evidence!"
If a person has a hypothesis that their thoughts are leading them to an inexorable and depressing conclusion, then to test the hypothesis, the rational thing to do is for that person to try proving themselves wrong. By trying "10,8,6" and then getting "No, that is not the case." (Because the real rule is numbers in increasing order.)
I actually haven't confirmed that this idea myself yet. I just thought of it now. But casting it in this light makes me feel a lot better about all the times I perform what appear at the time to be self delusions on my brain when I'm caught in depressive thinking cycles, so I'll throw it out here and see if anyone can contradict it.
Thanks for restating parts of the problem in a much clearer manner!
And yea, that article is why this problem is wreaking such havock on me, and I were thinking of it as I wrote the OP. I'm not sure why I didn't link it.
However, I still can't resolve the paradox. Although I'm finally starting to see how one might start on doing so: formalizing an entire decision theory that solves the entire class of problems, and them swapping half my mindware out in a single operation. Doesn't seem like a very^good solution thou so I'd rather keep looking for third options.
I don't think I understand the middle paragraph with all the examples. Probably because the way I actually think of it is not the way I used in the OP, but rather an equation where expectation must be equal to actual probability to call my belief consistent, and jumping straight there. Like so: P=E/2, E=P, thus E=0.
Hmm, I just got a vague intuition saying roughly "Hey, but wait a moment, probability is in the mind. The multiverse is timeless and in each Everett branch you either do recover or you don't! ", but I'm not sure how to proceed from there.
atucker wrote a Discussion post about this.
Can you see what an absurdly implausible scenario you must use as a ladder to demonstrate rationality as a liability? Rather than being a strike against strict adherence to reality. The fact that we have to stretch so hard to paint it this way, further legitimizes the pursuit of rationality.
Actually, you can solve this problem just by snapping your fingers, and this will give you all the same benefits as the placebo effect! Try it - it's guaranteed to work!
I've been doing this for years, and it really does work!
(No, really, I actually have; it actually does. The placebo effect is awesome ^_^)
Relevant and amusing (to me at least) story: A few months ago when I had a cold, I grabbed a box of zinc cough drops from my closet and started taking them to help with the throat pain. They worked as well or better than any other brand of cough drops I've tried, and tasted better too. Later I read the box, and it turned out they were homeopathic. I kept on taking them, and kept on enjoying the pain relief.
Probably not. Try throwing a coin in a wishing well or lighting a dollar bill on fire for more effect.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/299/9/1016.full
Updating on the evidence of yourself updating is almost as much as a problem as is updating on the evidence of "I updated on the evidence of myself updating". Tongue-in-cheek!
That is to say, the decision theory you are currently running is not equipped to handle the class of problems where your response to a problem is evidence that changes the nature of the very problem you are responding to - in the same way that arithmetic is not equipped to handle problems requiring calculus or CDT is not equipped to handle Omega's two-box problem.
(If it helps your current situation, placebo effects are almost always static modifiers on your scientific/medical chances of recovery)
Your model assumes a constant effect in each iteration. Is this justified?
I would envisage a constant chance of recovery and an asymptotically declining estimate of recovery. It seems more realistic, but maybe it's just me?
For actual humans, I'd look into ways of possibly activating the placebo effect without explicit degrees of belief, such as intense visualization of the desired outcome.
Another method to try is affirmations.
This is an interesting idea but I'm skeptical that this would actually work. There are studies which I don't have the citations for (they are cited in Richard Wiseman's "59 Seconds") which strongly suggest that positive thinking in many forms doesn't actually work. In particular, having people visualize extreme possibilities of success (e.g. how strong they'll be after they've worked out, or how much better looking they will be when they lose weight, etc.) make people less likely to actually succeed (possibly because they spend more time simply thinking about it rather than actually doing it.). This is not strong evidence but it is suggestive evidence that visualization is not sufficient to do that much. These studies didn't look at medical issues where placebos are more relevant.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/22/health/la-he-placebo-effect-20101223
The human brain is a weird thing. Also, see the entire body of self-hypnosis literature.
any data on if this is actually possible, and if so how to do it? Does it work for other things such as social confidence, positive thinking, etc.?
It certainly SEEMS like it's the declarative belief itself, not visualizations of outcomes, that cause effects. And the fact so many attempts at perfect deception have failed seems to indicate it's not possible to disentangle [your best rational belifs] from what your "brain thinks" you believe.
(... I really need some better notation for talking about these kind of things unambiguously.)
An AI can presumably self-modify. For a sufficient reward from Omega, it is worth degrading the accuracy of one's beliefs, especially if the reward will immediately allow one to make up for the degradation by acquiring new information/engaging in additional processing.
(A hypothetical: Omega offers me 1000 doses of modafinil, if I will lie on one PredictionBook.com entry and say -10% what I truly believe. I take the deal and chuckle every few minutes the first night, when I register a few hundred predictions to make up for the falsified one.)
Hello. I just signed up. I don't understand exactly the architecture of the site. Where can I post an idea, which is also a request for help, in developing a "revolutionary" computer program, for instance?
The current Open Thread would be a good place to do that. If you want to wait a day, there will be a new weekly Open Thread and you will see it at the top of the Discussion section.
EDIT: Also, feel free to introduce yourself in the current Welcome Thread.
What is this "new weekly Open Thread"; and how will it be called?
Ah, well, if you follow the link to the Discussion section, you'll see a list of the most recent posts, with the newest posts first. Currently, about halfway down the page, you can see "Open Thread, November 8 - 14, 2013". This is a link to what I called the current Open Thread. I expect that in the next 24 hours or so, a new post called "Open Thread, November 15 - 21, 2013" or something similar will appear at the top of the list.
OK, thanks.
I got in a discussion with a philosophy grad student today, who told me that the question of whether thoughts were "just" patterns of neural flashes, or if there was something epiphenomenal going on, was still a serious open question. I'm really hoping that this is just a description of the current state of affairs in the philosophy world, and not the neuroscience world, but she seemed rather insistent on this point. This isn't actually considered an open question in neurobiology, right?
It isn't a question in neurobiology at all. If consciousness is epiphenomenal, then by definition you can't perform any experiment to detect its existence. And insofar as neurology is the attempt to discover the material composition of the brain and the causal structure of brain events, and epiphenomenalism holds that consciousness is immaterial and causally silent, well...
I made that mistake once too.
Uh huh.
No. It's crazy talk.
I think the question here is not "is this an open question" but "are there people who disbelieve this?". I can imagine neurobiologists who cannot rule out epiphenomena about thoughts.
True, I can imagine that as well. I guess my question was really more about prevalence. How common are these people?
I came across this in an unrelated discussion:
Searching for something similar in Google Scholar might give you lots of sources to suggest to the grad student that most neuroscientists are reductionists.
This is vague enough to not be at all inconsistent with epiphenomenalism.
Is it just me or is Aleister Crowley a pretty cool sanity memeplex?
Yvain posted on this at length here.
His link there is broken; he is referencing the introduction to Book 4.
It ain't just you. Go to your local Barnes and Noble and they will inevitably have a dozen Crowley titles. I still have his books but I don't meet up with his fans any more.