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lukeprog comments on Get Curious - Less Wrong
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I worry that fear may paralyze. Curiosity seems more likely to spring someone into action. These effects probably vary between persons.
If fear paralyzes, maybe it's best used in bursts at times when you don't immediately need anything done and can spend some time on reevaluating basic assumptions. I wonder if there should be a genre of fiction that's analogous to horror except aimed at promoting epistemic paranoia. I've heard the RPG Mage: the Ascension cited in that context. I guess there's also movies like the Matrix series, the Truman Show, Inception. One could have an epistemic counterpart to Halloween.
I just watched The Truman Show a few days ago. I interpreted it as a story about a schizophrenic who keeps getting crazier, eventually experiencing a full out break and dying of exposure. The scenes with the production crew and audience are actually from the perspective of the schizophrenic's imagination as he tries to rationalize why so many apparently weird things keep happening. The scenes with Truman in them are Truman's retrospective exaggerations and distortions of events that were in reality relatively innocuous. All this allows you to see how real some schizophrenics think their delusions are.
I've never heard that one before, but there is a psychiatric illness in which people believe themselves to be watched at all times and that the world around them was created specifically for them, et cetera. It's called Truman Syndrome.
All I know about schizophrenia I know from the copious number of psychiatric volumes and memoirs I've read. I have an older cousin with paranoid schizophrenia, but I don't even remember the last time I spoke to him.
I had never heard anybody interpreting it that way before.
I'm now imaginging children wearing signs with cognitive biases written on them running around door to door, and people answering the door, uttering brief arguments, and rewarding each kid with paperback science fiction if the kid can correctly identify the fallacy.
What we need is a rationalist hell-house.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_house
We have one. It's called Everyday Life.
What I had in mind was replacing rituals involving the fear of being hurt with rituals involving the fear of being mistaken. So in a more direct analogy, kids would go around with signs saying "you have devoted your whole existence to a lie", and threaten (emptily) to go into details unless they were given candy.
But that's the fear of learning that one is mistaken, not the fear of being mistaken...
You're right, of course. I don't think a fully direct analogy is possible here. You can't really threaten to make someone have been wrong.
"You always thought I wasn't the kind of person who would TP your house on Halloween, but if you don't give me candy I'll make you have been wrong all along!"
"Hah, got you - I actually thought all along that you were the kind of person who would TP my house if and only if denied candy on Errorwe'en!"
"Okay, and given your beliefs, are you gonna give me candy?"
"...Have a Snickers."
I can easily imagine a sci-fi horror story in which someone is powerful enough to do that. You'd have to demonstrate it first, of course, and the story would have to take some time to carefully explore what changes when someone is made to have been wrong, but it seems plausibly doable.
Emptily? Just how sure of that are you?
(I like skittles.)
Upvoted for making me laugh until it hurt.
You could probably get sufficiently-twisted kids to do this on the usual Halloween. Dress them up as professors of philosophy or something; it'd be far scarier than zombie costumes. (This would actually be fantastic.)
Alternately, dress up as a "philosopher" (Large fake beard and pipe, maybe?), set up something like a fake retiring room on your front porch, tell small children that their daily lives are based on subtly but critically broken premises, and give them candy. (Don't actually do this, unless your neighbors love or hate you unconditionally. Or you're moving away soon.)
Oh, great. Now I have half a mind to go out this Halloween for the first time since junior high school dressed as a philosophy professor to scare middle aged housewives with rationalist arguments.
And I would carry out my threat of giving details as to how they have devoted their whole existences to a lie. I do that a lot, actually, just not in a costume and generally not by coming up to stranger's houses for candy.
And tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, don't forget.
Ah, yes. That would satisfy nicely.
Alternately, dress up as a zombie philosopher and shamble around moaning "quaaaalia" instead of "braaaains".
Last Halloween i dressed as a P-zombie. I explained to anybody who would listen that i had the same physical composition as a conscious human being, but was not in fact conscious. I'm not sure that any of them were convinced that i really was in costume.
For this to be really convincing and spoooky, you could stay in character:
Halloween party attendant: Hi radical_negative_one, what are you dressed as?
confederate: radical_negative_one is a p-zombie, who acts just like a real person but is not actually conscious!
radical_negative_one: That's not true, I am conscious! I have qualia and an inner life and everything!
radical_negative_one: (To confederate:) No, you're the p-zombie, not me! (To Halloween party attendant:) They're getting everywhere, you know. They look and act just like you and me, physically you can't tell, but they have no soul! They're just dead things!! They sound like us, but nothing they say means anything, it's just noises coming out of a machine!!! Your best friend could be a p-zombie!!!! All your friends could be p-zombies!!!!!
confederate It's all true! And he's one of them! Say, how do I know you're not a zombie?
confederate: No, radical_negative_one. You are the demons
And then radical_negative_one was a zombie.
Looking back it seems I use curiosity more for hours or days-long knowledge-gaining quests, e.g. immersing myself in a new academic field, whereas I use fear more when philosophizing on my own, especially about AI/FAI. Introspectively it seems that fear is more suited to examining my own thoughts or thoughts I identify with whereas curiosity is more suited to examining ideas that I don't already identify with or things in my environment. I suspect this is because people generally overestimate the worth of their own ideas while underestimating the worth of others' -- negative motivations reliably act as critical inductive biases to counterbalance systematic overconfidence in oneself, whereas positive motivations reliably act as charitable inductive biases to counterbalance systematic underconfidence in others. As you say, it's probable that others would have different cognitive quirks to balance and counterbalance.