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lukeprog comments on What Curiosity Looks Like - Less Wrong
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I agree in part, though this excuse was stronger before Google. Now people can Google "how to think better" or "how to figure out what's true" and start looking around. One thing leads to another. Almost all the stuff I mention above is discussed in many of the textbooks on thinking and deciding — like, say, Thinking and Deciding.
I tried typing those queries (and related ones) into google, to see if someone could easily find some sort of starting point for rationality. "How to think better" yields many lists of tips that are mediocre at best (things like: exercise, become more curious, etc). About halfway down the page, interestingly, is a post on CSA, but it's not a great one. It seems to mostly say that to get better at thinking you first have to realize that you are not naturally a fantastic thinker. This is true, but it's not something that points the way forward towards bayesian rationality. (by the way, "how to figure out what's true" provides essentially nothing of value, at least on the first page).
In order for someone to go down the path you've identified on their own, as a curious individual, they would have to have a substantial amount of luck to get started. Either they would have to have somehow stumbled upon enough of an explanation of heuristics and biases that they realized the importance of them (which is a combination of two fairly unlikely events), or they would have to be studying those subjects for some reason other than their instrumental value. Someone who started off curiously studying AI would have a much better chance at finding this path, for this reason. AI researchers in this instance, have a tremendous advantage when it comes to rationality over researchers in the hard sciences, engineers, etc.
I'm not an expert, but with this in mind it should be a rather simple matter to apply a few strategies so that LW shows up near the top of relevant search results. At the very least we could create wiki pages with titles like "How to Think Better" and "How to Figure Out What's True" with links to relevant articles or sequences. The fact that rationality has little obvious commercial value should work in our favor by keeping competing content rather sparse.
When I search for keyword: rationality, I get HPMoR for #2, yudkowsky.net for #5, and What Do We Mean By "Rationality"? for #7. Not sure how much my search history is affecting this.
Is rationality a common enough word that people would naturally jump to it when trying to figure out how to think better? I'm not sure how often I used it before Less Wrong, but I know that it is substantially more commonplace after reading the sequences.
You probably get this result because google has figured out it's a better search-result for you.... because you've already gone to those pages before.
Not sure how many people outside of the web world realise this, but google does personalise search results based on your own personal search-habits.
People who have not yet been to any of these pages are much less likely to get the same set of search results as this.
Edit: lukeprog's response (about two below here) below is how to see google for what it actually is like for a newbie.
I get exactly the same result.
Yes, sign out of Google or use a different browser where you're not signed in, and you'll see that Eliezer successfully took over the word 'rationality'. Let this be a lesson about what is possible.
That's a really good idea. Upvoted.
Thanks MinibearRex.
I've added ads on Google AdWords that will start coming up for this in a couple days when the new ads get approved so that anyone searching for something even vaguely like "How to think better" or "How to figure out what's true" will get pointed at Less Wrong. Not as good as owning the top 3 spots in the organic results, but some folks click on ads, especially when it's in the top spot. And we do need to make landing on the path towards rationality less of a stroke of luck and more a matter of certainty for those who are looking.
Do you have any data from this campaign?
It's been almost three months. How's the data on this campaign going?
That sounds great. Thanks for taking the time to do that.
"Exercise" is really not a mediocre tip at all.
You're right; mediocre is not the best word for what I meant there. Humans generally function better when they exercise. But it doesn't fundamentally change the way people think. If we use a car metaphor, exercise is things like changing the oil and keeping it well tuned. It can make a big difference. But not as big of a difference as upgrading the engine.
Upvoted for actually trying it out.
So, someone would google "how to think better", find a $38.90 book by an author they've never heard of before, and buy it without suspecting it to be self-help nonsense?
If their default response to seeing a book they might want to read is 'I'm gonna buy it!!', they're doing something wrong.
(OK, maybe they don't know about that site, but searching mediafire or demonoid or something is still an option.)
Edit: (17.01.2012) Following this discussion, I conclude that 'they're very probably not optimising their reading habits for existential risk reduction' is a better choice of words here than 'they're doing something wrong.'
Is it supposed to be obvious that there's something wrong with preferring to obey the law even when doing so costs money?
Is it supposed to be obvious that there's something wrong with preferring to own physical books rather than electronic ones even when that costs money?
(It is not the purpose of this comment to make any claim about the merits of either idea beyond this: It seems to me that neither is, in fact, obvious. But, for the benefit of anyone who thinks it relevant, I happen to have both preferences; I buy a lot of books and fail to see that this indicates anything wrong with me. Of course I don't have either absolutely; I'm pretty sure that there are circumstances in which I would break the law for financial gain, and there are some books that I'm content to use in electronic form rather than paying extra for physical copies. But my default response to seeing a book I might want to read isn't exactly "I'm gonna buy it!"; if it were then my house would be physically filled with books and I would have no money left.)
I do contend that the first claim is obvious, if not in general, at least when the expected loss of utility for breaking the law is effectively zero. (As it is in this case.)
The second one is not obvious, nor is it true in many cases.
The last sentence of your post sums up what I was trying to say.
I don't know on what basis you say that the expected utility loss is "effectively zero". There's a utility gain to the person who takes an illegal copy of the book instead of buying it, because they have more money that way. There's a utility loss (which I'd have thought is obviously approximately equal in general) to the people who'd have profited directly from the sale of the book: author, publisher, distributor. And then there are second-order effects, less localized and therefore harder to see and harder to assess, from (e.g.) the slightly reduced incentives for others to write, publish and sell books, the increased social acceptability of getting books in this way, etc.
It looks to me as if what we have here is: first-order effects that cancel out exactly when expressed in terms of money, and therefore probably cancel out approximately when expressed in terms of utility, and second-order effects that are hard to get a handle on but look clearly negative to me.
Could you justify your position further on this point?
As for the second claim, note that this also needs to be true to make your "doing something wrong" assertion correct -- and ought to be obvious to justify your having made it so baldly. I'm glad you agree that it isn't.
No one was claiming or suggesting that anyone should go straight from "I'd find it interesting to read that" to buying the book, without any consideration or weighing of consequences in between. So if my last sentence is equivalent to your main point, it seems to me that you were attacking a straw man.
You forget about the diminishing returns, though. An extra $20 would give much more utility to me than to a publishing house.
I think that's simply wrong. It would be right if the only difference between you and a publishing house were that the publishing house has more money, but of course that's not so. To a rough approximation, a publishing house is made up of lots of individuals. Much of your $20 will be distributed amongst them, and if they're on average about as well off as you are then this is roughly utility-neutral. Some of the rest will go into whatever larger-scale projects the publishing house is engaged in, which make use of economies of scale to get increasing returns in utility per dollar. (That's why there are corporations.)
And, of course, some of it will go to line the pockets of already-wealthy investors and executives. I agree that that bit is likely to show diminishing returns. But I see no reason to think that a transfer of $20 from you to the publishing house is a net utility loss, and just saying "diminishing returns" certainly doesn't suffice.
Surely the externalities of cutting down trees to make paper/burning fuel to power the printer/etc. are first-order effects which aren't cancelled out by anything obvious. Or am I missing something?
I'd consider them second-order effects. (Note: by "second-order" here I mean something like "less direct, more diffuse, and harder to evaluate", not "smaller". I appreciate that this is a bit woolly; perhaps the distinction isn't a helpful one.)
If I buy a car, I do not factor in the utility loss to the manufacturers of buggy whips.
The latter effect is by far net positive, as a much larger number of people can now gain access to much greater amounts of knowledge.
Books were being written long before IPR, they will continue to be written long after IPR. Culture will not stop being produced if stripped of legal protection.
Note the comment I was replying to:
Note the entirety of my reply that you replied to:
Note the last sentence of your reply to that:
There was absolutely no disagreement between us on that particular point; you seem to have generalised my statement far beyond what it actually said.
Also... we have wandered dangerously far into politics. (I am, ideologically at least, a supporter of the Pirate Parties.)
So much the worse for you. (Though of course you should also factor in the utility gain to everyone who benefits from advancing technology, etc. And of course in practice one often ignores everything but the first-order effects.)
However, I was not talking about anything remotely resembling the loss to buggy whip manufacturers when you buy a car. I was referring to the elementary fact that when you pay for something, the money you lose by paying for it goes to other people; what you lose, they gain.
For sure, and of course I neither claimed nor implied otherwise. I claimed only that if writing and selling books becomes less profitable, that will tend to reduce the incentive to do it.
But what you quoted here was not the entirety of your reply, in an important respect: "doing something wrong" was a hyperlink to library.nu. The existence and destination of a hyperlink are an important part of the content of the sentence that contains the link, no?
The fact that an issue has been taken up by a single-issue political party doesn't mean that discussing it constitutes wandering into politics. In any case, let me elaborate something I already said: I am not arguing here (1) that existing laws about "intellectual property" are any good, or (2) that it is always (or even usually) a Bad Thing to copy things illegally. I am saying only that there are not-obviously-crazy reasons why someone might prefer to pay for a physical book rather than copying an illicit electronic copy. They aren't all legal reasons, either.
Broken window fallacy. If they don't gain, someone else does.
Touche, I hadn't thought of that. So the entirety of my reply is:
But I still don't see how you can interpret that to mean: "There's something wrong with buying books, you should exclusively pirate them," which is what you seem to be arguing against.
Semantical dispute. Whether you call it 'politics' or not, my mind recognises it as an exclusively political issue, and, as such, is already beginning to die. For instance, if I hadn't jumped directly (although without consciously intending to) to the 'put down this political opponent' mode, I might've said 'the benefits of free knowledge to millions far surpass the monetary losses to a few thousand; if you think otherwise, it's probably scope insensitivity.' Instead I said....
... I guess I need to work on that.
I don't know why you keep repeating that, since both of us agree perfectly about it.
Huh? What does the broken window fallacy have to do with the fact that if I pay you $10 for a book, then my loss of $10 (and gain of a book) is exactly balanced by your gain of $10 (and loss of a book)?
I didn't. I took it to mean "A person's default way of getting a book they want to read should be piracy rather than purchase". And it seems to me that if you're going to make that claim then either you should be offering some sort of comparison of the two options, or else it should be obvious that piracy is the better option. Which I don't think it is, for (at least) the two reasons I gave: some people might value keeping the law in this respect, and some people might value having a physical book rather than an electronic copy.
OK, fair enough. I don't want to keep you arguing about something that impairs your reasoning.
(I'm sure "the benefits of free knowledge to millions far surpass the monetary losses to a few thousand" is a good argument for something but it's far from clear to me how it can be a good argument for, e.g., "when you see a book you're interested in you should generally make an electronic copy rather than buying it, even if that happens to be illegal". The latter isn't a matter of millions versus thousands, and it can only be made so by turning it into some claim about what everyone should do, and if really-truly-everyone follows that advice then it seems likely that the impact on people who write books will be large, at which point you can't negate the ensuing higher-order effects.)
Because most of what you've said seems to presuppose that it's false. I suppose I must be misunderstanding somewhere since you say you agree and haven't retracted anything, but I'm not sure what I'm misunderstanding. So let me ask a more specific question. Suppose I am a person who likes physical books much much better than electronic ones, prefers to stay within the law when possible, and wants authors and publishers and booksellers to get paid. And suppose that when I see a book I'm interested in, what I contemplate doing is buying it rather than getting a copy from library.nu or wherever. Am I, in that case, necessarily doing something wrong? If so, what? If not, are you going to retract your original statement or have I grotesquely misunderstood what it was meant to mean?
How do I get an account on library.nu?
To you and everyone else reading this: PM me and I'll let you use my account.
library.nu isn't much better than other free book sites like freebookspot.com. The main good thing about it is that it hosts files on ifile.it, which means that you can download as much as you want for free, and it has some books not on other ebook sites (which you can still easily get via google). On the other hand, it has no rating system (so if you search "calculus" you have 100 pages to look through), books aren't categorized well, and it has no system for book recommendations (unlike freebookspot, for instance).
In general, if you want a specific book, just google it. If you want a book but not a specific one, use an ebook site like freebookspot or library.nu.
...... Good question.
A month or so ago, they just had an ordinary "register" link, IIRC.
EDIT: Apparently they're shutting down or trying to go legit or something, as per this.
Oh well, new sites will pop up to fill the void.
No. Obviously, I'm not proposing anything so simple and direct.