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xv15 comments on 2011 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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Exactly, it IS the tragedy of the commons, but that supports my point, not yours. It may be good for society if people are more informed about global warming, but society isn't what makes decisions. Individuals make decisions, and it's not in the average individual's interest to expend valuable resources learning more about global warming if it's going to have no real effect on the quality of their own life.
Whether you think it's an individual's "job" or not to do what's socially optimal, is completely besides the point here. The fact is they don't. I happen to think that's pretty reasonable, but it doesn't matter how we wish people would behave, in order to predict how they will behave.
Let me try to be clear, since you might be wondering why someone (not me) downvoted you: You started by noting your shock that people aren't that informed about global warming. I said we shouldn't necessarily be surprised that they aren't that informed about global warming. You responded that we're suffering from the tragedy of the commons, or the tragedy of the rationalists versus the barbarians. I respond that I agree with what you say but not with what you seem to think it means. When we unearth a tragedy of the commons, we don't go, "Aha! These people have fallen into a trap and if they saw the light, they would know to avoid it!" Casting light on the tragedy of the commons does not make it optimal for individuals to avoid it.
Casting light on the commons is a way of explaining why people would be behaving in such a socially suboptimal way, not a way of bolstering our shock over their behavior.
In a tragedy of the commons, it's in everybody's best interests for everybody to conserve resources. If you're running TDT in a population with similar agents, you want to conserve, and if you're in a population of insufficiently similar agents, you want an enforced policy of conservation. The rationalist in a war with the barbarians might not want to fight, but because they don't want to lose even more, they will fight if they think that enough other people are running a similar decision algorithm, and they will support a social policy that forces them and everyone else to fight. If they think that their side can beat the barbarians with a minimal commitment of their forces, they won't choose either of these things.
And this is why xv15 is right and Desrtopa is wrong. Orther people do not run TDT or anything similar. Individuals who cooperate with such a population are fools.
TDT is NOT a magic excuse for cooperation. It calls for cooperation in cases when CDT does not only when highly specific criteria are met.
At the Paris meetup Yvain proposed that voting might be rational for TDT-ish reasons, to which I replied that if you have voted for losing candidates at past elections, that means not enough voters are correlated with you. Though now that I think of it, maybe the increased TDT-ish impact of your decision could outweigh the usual arguments against voting, because they weren't very strong to begin with.
I agree. Desrtopa is taking Eliezer's barbarians post too far for a number of reasons.
1) Eliezer's decision theory is at the least controversial which means many people here may not agree with it.
2) Even if they agree with it, it doesn't mean they have attained rationality in Eliezer's sense.
3) Even if they have attained this sort of rationality, we are but a small community, and the rest of the world is still not going to cooperate with us. Our attempts to cooperate with them will be impotent.
Desrtopa: Just because it upholds an ideal of rationality that supports cooperation, does not mean we have attained that ideal. Again, the question is not what you'd like to be true, but about what's actually true. If you're still shocked by people's low confidence in global warming, it's time to consider the possibility that your model of the world -- one in which people are running around executing TDT -- is wrong.
Those are all good reasons but as far as I can tell Desrtopa would probably give the right answer if questioned about any of those. He seems to be aware of how people actually behave (not remotely TDTish) but this gets overridden by a flashing neon light saying "Rah Cooperation!".
There are plenty of ways in which I personally avoid cooperation for my own benefit. But in general I think that a personal policy of not informing oneself at even a basic level about tragedies of commons where the information is readily available is not beneficial, because humans have a sufficiently developed propensity for resolving tragedies of commons to give at least the most basic information marginal benefit.
To me, this comment basically concedes that you're wrong but attempts to disguise it in a face-saving way. If you could have said that people should be informing themselves at the socially optimal level, as you've been implying with your TDT arguments above, you would have. Instead, you backed off and said that people ought to be informing themselves at least a little.
Just to be sure, let me rewrite your claim precisely, in the sense you must mean it given your supposed continued disagreement:
Assuming that's what you're saying, it's easy to see that even this is an overreach. The question on the table is whether people should be informing themselves about global warming. Whether the first epsilon of information one gets from "informing oneself" (as opposed to hearing the background noise) is beneficial to the individual relative to the cost of attaining it, is a question of derivatives of cost and benefit functions at zero, and it could go either way. You simply can't make a general statement about how these derivatives relate for the class of Commons Problems. But more importantly, even if you could, SO WHAT? The question is not whether people should be informing themselves a bit, the question is whether they should be informing themselves at anywhere close to the socially optimal level. And by admitting it's a tragedy of the commons, we are already ANSWERING that question.
Does that make sense? Am I misunderstanding your position? Has your position changed?
It seems that you are trying to score points for winning the debate. If your interlocutor indeed condedes something in a face-saving way, forcing him to admit it is useless from the truth-seeking point of view.
prase, I really sympathize with that comment. I will be the first to admit that forcing people to concede their incorrectness is typically not the best way of getting them to agree on the truth. See for example this comment.
BUT! On this site we sort of have TWO goals when we argue, truth-seeking and meta-truth-seeking. Yes, we are trying to get closer to the truth on particular topics. But we're also trying to make ourselves better at arguing and reasoning in general. We are trying to step back and notice what we're doing, and correct flaws when they are exposed to our scrutiny.
If you look back over this debate, you will see me at several points deliberately stepping back and trying to be extremely clear about what I think is transpiring in the debate itself. I think that's worth doing, on lesswrong.
To defend the particular sentence you quote: I know that when I was younger, it was entirely possible for me to "escape" from a debate in a face-saving way without realizing I had actually been wrong. I'm sure this still happens from time to time...and I want to know if it's happening! I hope that LWers will point it out. On LW I think we ought to prioritize killing biases over saving faces.
The key question is: would you believe it if it were your opponent in a heated debate who told you?
There's a big difference between:
* "it's best if we notice and acknowledge when we're wrong, and therefore I will do my best to notice and acknowledge when I'm wrong"
* "it's best if we notice and acknowledge when we're wrong, and therefore I will upvote, praise, and otherwise reinforce such acknowledgements when I notice them"
and
* "it's best if we notice and acknowledge when we're wrong, and therefore I will downvote, criticize, and otherwise punish failure to do so."
True in the immediate sense, but I disagree in the global sense that we should encourage face-saving on LW, since doing so will IMO penalize truth-seeking in general. Scoring points for winning the debate is a valid and important mechanism for reinforcing behaviors that lead to debate-winning, and should be allowed in situations where debate-winning correlates to truth-establishment in general, not just for the arguing parties.
This is also true in the immediate sense, but somehow implies that the debate-winning behaviours are a net positive with respect to truth seeking at least in some possible (non-negligibly frequent) circumstances. I find the claim dubious. Can you specify in what circumstances is the debate winning argumentation style superior to leaving a line of retreat?
Yes, you are misunderstanding my position. I don't think that it's optimal for most individuals to inform themselves about global warming to a "socially optimal" level where everyone takes the issue sufficiently seriously to take grassroots action to resolve it. Human decisionmaking is only isomorphic to TDT in a limited domain and you can only expect so much association between your decisions and others; if you go that far, you're putting in too much buck for not enough bang, unless you're getting utility from the information in other ways. But at the point where you don't have even basic knowledge of global warming, anticipating a negative marginal utility on informing yourself corresponds to a general policy of ignorance that will serve one poorly with respect to a large class of problems.
If there were no correlation between one person's decisions and another's, it would probably not be worth anyone's time to learn about any sort of societal problems at all, but then, we wouldn't have gotten to the point of being able to have societal problems in the first place.
Unfortunately that response did not convince me that I'm misunderstanding your position.
If people are not using a TDT decision rule, then your original explicit use of TDT reasoning was irrelevant and I don't know why you would have invoked it at all unless you thought it was actually relevant. And you continue to imply at least a weaker form of that reasoning.
No one is disputing that there is correlation between people's decisions. The problem is that correlation does not imply that TDT reasoning works! A little bit of correlation does not imply that TDT works a little bit. Unless people are similar to you AND using TDT, you don't get to magically drag them along with you by choosing to cooperate.
This is a standard textbook tragedy of the commons problem, plain and simple. From where I'm standing I don't see the relevance of anything else. If you want to continue disagreeing, can you directly tell me whether you think TDT is still relevant and why?
People don't use a generalized form of TDT, but human decisionmaking is isomorphic to TDT in some domains. Other people don't have to consciously be using TDT to sometimes make decisions based on a judgment of how likely it is that other people will behave similarly.
Tragedies of commons are not universally unresolvable. It's to everyone's advantage for everyone to pool their resources for some projects for the public good, but it's also advantageous for each individual to opt out of contributing their resources. But under the institution of governments, we have sufficient incentives to prevent most people from opting out. Simply saying "It's a tragedy of the commons problem" doesn't mean there's no chance of resolving it and therefore no use in knowing about it.
He may be mistaken about how high trust the society he lives in is. This is something it is actually surprisingly easy to be wrong about, since our intuitions aren't built for a society of hundreds of millions living across an entire continent, our minds don't understand that our friends, family and co-workers are not a representative sample of the actual "tribe" we are living in.
Even if that is the case he is still mistaken about game theory. While the 'high trust society' you describe would encourage cooperation to the extent that hypocrisy does not serve as a substitute the justifications Desrtopa is given are in terms of game theory and TDT. It relies on acting as if other agents are TDT agents when they are not - an entirely different issue to dealing with punishment norms by 'high trust' agents.
Sure.
We are in agreement on that. But this might better explain why, on second thought, I think it dosen't matter, at least not in this sense, on the issue of whether educating people about global warming matters.
I think we may have been arguing against a less than most charitable interpretation of his argument, which I think isn't that topical a discussion (even if it serves to clear up a few misconceptions). If the less than charitable argument is the interpretation he now thinks or even actually did intend, dosen't seem that relevant to me.
"rah cooperation" I think in practice translates into "I think I live in a high trust enough society that its useful to use this signal to get people to ameliorate this tragedy of the commons situation I'm concerned about."
But sometimes it works out anyway. Lots of people can be fools. And lots of people can dislike those who aren't fools.
People often think "well if everyone did X sufficiently unpleasant thing would happen, therefore I won't do it". They also implicitly believe, though they may not state "most people are like me in this regard". They will also say with their facial expressions and actions though not words "people who argue against this are mean and selfish".
In other words I just described a high trust society. I'm actually pretty sure if you live in Switzerland you could successfully cooperate with the Swiss on global warming for example. Too bad global warming isn't just a Swiss problem.
Compliance with norms so as to avoid punishment is a whole different issue. And obviously if you willfully defy the will of the tribe when you know that the punishment exceeds the benefit to yourself then you are the fool and the compliant guy is not.
Of course they will. That's why we invented lying! I'm in agreement with all you've been saying about hypocrisy in the surrounding context.
In which case you want an enforced policy conforming to the norm. A rational shepherd in a communal grazing field may not believe that if he doesn't let his flock overgraze, other shepherds won't either, but he'll want a policy punishing or otherwise preventing overgrazers.
Yes, and this means that individuals with the ability to influence or enforce policy about global warming can potentially benefit somewhat from knowing about global warming. For the rest of the people (nearly everyone) knowledge about global warming is of no practical benefit.