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Bugmaster comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012) - Less Wrong
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The existence of television technology isn't, in my opinion, a problem. Nor is the fact that some shows are low quality. Even if all of them were low quality, I wouldn't necessarily see that as a problem - it would still be a way of relaxing. The problem I see with television is that the average person spends 4 hours a day watching it. (Can't remember where I got that study, sorry.) My problem with that is not that they aren't exercising (they'd still have an hour a day which is plenty of exercise, if they want it) or that they aren't being productive (you can only be so productive before you run out of mental stamina anyway, and the 40 hour work week was designed to use the entirety of the average person's stamina) but that they aren't living.
It could be argued that people need to spend hours every day imagining a fantasy. I was told by an elderly person once that before television, people would sit on a hill and daydream. I've also read that imagining doing a task correctly is more effective at making you better at it than practice. If that's true, daydreaming might be a necessity for maximum effectiveness and television might provide some kind of similar benefit. So it's possible that putting one's brain into fantasy mode for a few hours of day really is that beneficial.
Spending four hours a day in fantasy mode is not possible for me (I'm too motivated to DO something) and I don't seem to need anywhere near that much daydreaming. I would find it very hard to deal with if I had spent that much of my free time in fantasy. I imagine that if asked whether they would have preferred to watch x number of shows, or spent all of that free time on getting out there and living, most people would probably choose the latter - and that's sad.
I think that people would also have to have read the seven lessons speech for the problems he sees to be solved. Maybe eventually things would evolve to the point where schools would not behave this way anymore without them reading it, because it's probably not the most effective way of teaching, but I don't see that change happening quickly without people pressuring schools to make those specific changes.
However, I'm surprised that you say "In practice, such scenarios tend to work out... poorly." Do you mean that the free market doesn't do much to improve quality, or do you just mean that when people want specific changes and expect the free market to implement them, the free market doesn't tend to implement those specific changes?
I'm also very interested in where you got the information to support the idea, either way.
After reading Ayn Rand's the Fountainhead, my feeling was that even though much of the writing was brilliant and enjoyable, I could have gotten the key ideas much faster if she had only published a few lines from one of the last chapters. I'm having the same reaction to the sequences and HPMOR. I enjoy them and recognize the brilliance in the writing abilities, but I find myself doing things like reading lists of biases over and over in order to improve my familiarity and eventually memorize them. I still want to finish the sequences because they're so important to this culture, but what I have prioritized appears to be getting the most important information in as quickly as possible. So, although entertainment is a way of transmitting ideas, I question how efficient it is, and whether it provides enough other learning benefits to outweigh the cost of wrapping all those ideas in so much text. I could walk all the way to Florida, but flying would be faster. People realize this so if they want to take vacations, they fly. Why, then, do they use entertainment to learn instead of seeking out the most efficient method?
It makes sense from the writer's point of view. I have said before that I was very glad that Eliezer decided to popularize rationality as much as possible, as I had been thinking that somebody needed to do that for a very long time. His writing is interesting and his style is brilliant and his method has worked to attract almost twelve million hits to his site. I think that's great. But the fact that people probably would not have flocked to the site if he had posted an efficient dissemination of cognitive biases and whatnot is curious. Maybe the way I learn is different.
I think it depends on whether you use "waste of time" to mean "absolutely no benefit whatsoever" or "nowhere near the most efficient way of getting the benefit".
The statement "entertainment is an inefficient way to get ideas compared with other methods" seems true to me.
What does "living" mean, exactly ? I understand that you find your personal creative projects highly enjoyable, and that's great. But you aren't merely saying, "I enjoy X", you're saying, "enjoying Y instead of X is objectively wrong" (if I understand you correctly).
I address this point below, but I'd like to also point out that some people people's goals are different from yours. They consume entertainment because it is enjoyable, or because it facilitates social contact (which they in turn find enjoyable), not because they believe it will make them more efficient (though see below).
Many people -- yourself not among them, admittedly -- find that they are able to internalize new ideas much more thoroughly if these ideas are tied into a narrative. Similarly, other people find it easier to communicate their ideas in the form of narratives; this is why Eliezer writes things like Three Worlds Collide and HPMOR instead of simply writing out the equations. This is also why he employs several tropes from fiction even in his non-fiction writing.
I'm not saying that this is the "right" way to learn, or anything; I am merely describing the situation that, as I believe, exists.
I am just not convinced that this statement applies to anything like a majority of "person+idea" combinations.
"Living" the way I used it means "living to the fullest" or, a little more specifically "feeling really engaged in life" or "feeling fulfilled".
I used "living" to refer to a subjective state. There's nothing objective about it, and IMO, there's nothing objectively right or wrong about having a subjective state that is (even in your own opinion) not as good as the ideal.
I feel like your real challenge here is more similar to Kawoomba's concern. Am I right?
Do you find it more enjoyable to passively watch entertainment than to do your own projects? Do you think most people do? If so, might that be because the fun was taken out of learning, or people's creativity was reduced to the point where doing your own project is too challenging, or people's self-confidence was made too dependent on others such that they don't feel comfortable pursuing that fulfilling sense of having done something on their own?
I puzzle at how you classify watching something together as "social contact". To me, being in the same room is not a social life. Watching the same entertainment is not quality time. The social contact I yearn for involves emotional intimacy - contact with the actual person inside, not just a sense of being in the same room watching the same thing. I don't understand how that can be called social contact.
I've been thinking about this and I think what might be happening is that I make my own narratives.
This, I can believe about Eliezer. There are places where he could have been more incisive but is instead gets wordy to compensate. That's an interesting point.
Okay, so to clarify, your position is that entertainment is a more efficient way to learn?
I understand that you do not feel fulfilled when watching TV, but other people might. I would agree with your reply on Kawoomba's sub-thread:
For better or for worse, passive entertainment such as movies, books, TV shows, music, etc., is a large part of our popular culture. You say:
Strictly speaking this is true, but people usually discuss the things they watch (or read, or listen to, etc.), with their friends or, with the advent of the Internet, even with random strangers. The shared narratives thus facilitate the "emotional intimacy" you speak about. Furthermore, some specific works of passive entertainment, as well as generalized common tropes, make up a huge chunk of the cultural context without which it would be difficult to communicate with anyone in our culture on an emotional level (as opposed to, say, presenting mathematical proofs or engineering schematics to each other).
For example, if you take a close look at various posts on this very site, you will find references to the genres of science fiction and fantasy, as well as media such as movies or anime, which the posters simply take for granted (sometimes too much so, IMO; f.ex., not everyone knows what "tsuyoku naritai" means right off the bat). A person who did not share this common social context would find it difficult to communicate with anyone here.
Note, though, that once again I am describing a situation that exists, not prescribing a behavior. In terms of raw productivity per unit of time, I cannot justify any kind of entertainment at all. While it is true that entertainment has been with us since the dawn of civilization, so has cancer; just because something is old, doesn't mean that it's good.
No, this phrasing is too strong. I meant what I said before: many people find it easier to internalize new ideas when they are presented as part of a narrative. This doesn not mean that entertainment is a more efficient way to learn all things for all people, or that it is objectively the best technique for learning things, or anything of the sort.
Why try to justify entertainment in terms of productivity per time? Is there any reason this makes more sense than, say, justifying productivity in terms of how much entertainment it allows for?
Presumably, if your goal is to optimize the world, or to affect any part of it besides yourself in a non-trivial way, you should strive to do so as efficiently as possible. This means that spending time on any activities that do not contribute to this goal is irrational. A paperclip maximizer, for example, wouldn't spend any time on watching soap operas or reading romance novels -- unless doing so would lead to more paperclips (which is unlikely).
Of course, one could argue that consumption of passive entertainment does contribute to the average human's goals, since humans are unable to function properly without some downtime. But I don't know if I'd go so far as to claim that this is a feature, and not a bug, just like cancer or aging or whatever else evolution had saddled us with.
A decision theory that leads to the conclusion that we should all work like slaves for a future paradise, the slightest lapse incurring a cost equivalent to untold numbers of dead babies, and the enormity of the task meaning that we shall never experience it ourselves, is prima facie a broken decision theory. I'd even call it the sort of toxic mindwaste that RationalWiki loves to mock.
Once you've built that optimised world, who gets to slack off and just live in it, and how will they spend their time?
Why exactly? I mean, my intuition also tells me it's wrong... but my intuition has a few assumptions that disagree with the proposed scenario. Let's make sure the intuition does not react to a strawman.
For example, when in real life people "work like slaves for a future paradise", the paradise often does not happen. Typically, the people have a wrong model of the world. (The wrong model is often provided by their leader, and their work in fact results in building their leader's personal paradise, nothing more.) And even if their model is right, their actions are more optimized for signalling effort than for real efficiency. (Working very hard signals more virtue than thinking and coming up with a smart plan to make a lot of money and pay someone else to do more work than we could.) Even with smart and honest people, there will typically be something they ignored or could not influence, such as someone powerful coming and taking the results of their work, or a conflict starting and destroying their seeds of the paradise. Or simply their internal conflicts, or lack of willpower to finish what they started.
The lesson we should take from this is that even if we have a plan to work like a slaves for a future paradise, there is very high prior probability that we missed something important. Which means that in fact we do not work for a future paradise, we only mistakenly think so. I agree that the prior probability is so high that even the most convincing reasoning and plans are unlikely to overweight it.
However, for the sake of experiment, imagine that Omega comes and tells you that if you will work like a slave for the next 20 or 50 years, the future paradise will happen with probability almost 1. You don't have to worry about mistakes in your plans, because either Omega verified their correctness, or is going to provide you corrections when needed and predicts that you will be able to follow those corrections successfully. Omega also predicts that it you commit to the task, you will have enough willpower, health, and other necessary resources to complete it successfully. In this scenario, is committing for the slave work a bad decision?
In other words, is your objection "in situation X the decision D is wrong", or is it "the situation X is so unlikely that any decision D based on assumption of X will in real life be wrong"?
When Omega enters a discussion, my interest in it leaves.
To that extent that someone is unable to use established tools of thought to focus attention on the important aspects of the problem their contribution to a conversation is likely to be negative. This is particularly the case when it comes to decision theory where it correlates strongly with pointless fighting of the counterfactual and muddled thinking.
It is counterintuitive that you should slave for people you don't know, perhaps because you can't be sure you are serving their needs effectively. Even if that objection is removed by bringing in an omniscient oracle,there still seems to be a problem because the prospect of one generation slaving to create paradise for another isn't fair. the simple version of utilitiarianism being addressed here only sums individual utilities, and us blind to things that can only be defined at the group level like justice and equaliy.
For the sake of experiment, imagine that air has zero viscosity. In this scenario, would a feather and a cannon ball fall in the same time?
I believe the answer is "yes", but I had to think about that for a moment. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the current discussion, though.
I think your real point might be closer to something like, "thought experiments are useless at best, and should thus be avoided", but I don't want to put words into anyone's mouth.
"Decision theory" doesn't mean the same thing as "value system" and we shouldn't conflate them.
Yep. A morality that leads to the conclusion that we should all work like slaves for a future paradise, the slightest lapse incurring a cost equivalent to untold numbers of dead babies, and the enormity of the task meaning that we shall never experience it ourselves, is prima facie a broken morality.
Why ? I mean, I do agree with you personally, but I don't see why such a decision theory is objectively bad. You ask,
But the answer depends entirely on your goals. These can be as relatively modest as, "the world will be just like it is today, but everyone wears a party hat". Or it could be as ambitious as, "the world contains as many paperclips as physically possible". In the latter case, if you asked the paperclip maximizer "who gets to slack off ?", it wouldn't find the question relevant in the least. It doesn't matter who gets to do what, all that matters are the paperclips.
You might argue that a paperclip-filled world would be a terrible place, and I agree, but that's just because you and I don't value paperclips as much as Clippy does. Clippy thinks your ideal world is terrible too, because it contains a bunch of useless things like "happy people in party hats", and not nearly enough paperclips.
However, imagine if we ran two copies of Clippy in a grand paperclipping race: one that consumed entertainment by preference, and one that did not. The non-entertainment version would win every time. Similarly, if you want to make the world a better place (whatever that means for you), every minute you spend on doing other things is a minute wasted (unless they are explicitly included in your goals). This includes watching TV, eating, sleeping, and being dead. Some (if not all) of such activities are unavoidable, but as I said, I'm not sure whether it's a bug or a feature.
This is proving the conclusion by assuming it.
The words make a perfectly logical pattern, but I find that the picture they make is absurd. The ontology has gone wrong.
Some businessman wrote a book of advice called "Never Eat Alone", the title of which means that every meal is an opportunity to have a meal with someone to network with. That is what the saying "he who would be Pope must think of nothing else" looks like in practice. Not wearing oneself out like Superman in the SMBC cartoon, driven into self-imposed slavery by memetic immune disorder.
BTW, for what it's worth, I do not watch TV. And now I am imagining a chapter of that book entitled "Never Sleep Alone".
Actually, I think that the world described in that SMBC cartoon is far preferable to the standard DC comics world with Superman. I do not think that doing what Superman did there is a memetic immune disorder, but rather a (successful) attempt to make the world a better place.
How so ? Imagine that you have two identical paperclip maximizers; for simplicity's sake, let's assume that they are not capable of radical self-modification (though the results would be similar if they were). Each agent is capable of converting raw titanium to paperclips at the same rate. Agent A spends 100% of its time on making paperclips. Agent B spends 80% of its time on paperclips, and 20% of its time on watching TV. If we gave A and B two identical blocks of titanium, which agent would finish converting all of it to paperclips first ?
FeepingCreature addressed this better than I could in this comment . I understand that you find the idea of making paperclips (or political movements, or software, or whatever) all day every day with no breaks abhorrent, and so do I. But then, some people find polyamory abhorrent as well, and then they "polyhack" themselves and grow to enjoy it. Is entertainment your terminal value, or a mental bias ? And if it is a terminal value, is it the best terminal value that you could possibly have ?
This decision theory is bad because it fails the "Scientology test."
That's hardly objective. The challenge is to formalize that test.
Btw: the problem you're having is not due to any decision theory but due to the goal system. You want there to be entertainment and fun and the like. However, the postulated agent had a primary goal that did not include entertainment and fun. This seems alien to us, but for the mindset of such an agent "eschew entertainment and fun" is the correct and sane behavior.
Optimize it for what?
That is kind of up to you. That's the problem with terminal goals...
<nitpick>Music is only passive entertainment if you just listen at it, not if you sing it, play it, or dance at it.</nitpick>
I agree that people spend lots of time talking about these kind of things, and that the more shared topics of conversation you have with someone the easier it is to socialize with them, but I disagree that there are few non-technical things one can talk about other than what you get from passive entertainment. I seldom watch TV/films/sports, but I have plenty of non-technical things I can talk about with people -- parties we've been to, people we know, places we've visited, our tastes in food and drinks, unusual stuff that happened to us, what we've been doing lately, our plans for the near future, ranting about politics, conspiracy theories, the freakin' weather, whatever -- and I'd consider talking about some of these topic to build more ‘emotional intimacy’ than talking about some Hollywood movie or the Champions League or similar. (Also, I take exception to the apparent implication of the parenthetical at the end of the paragraph -- it is possible to entertain people by talking about STEM topics, if you're sufficiently Feynman-esque about that.)
I have read very little of that kind of fiction, and still I haven't felt excluded by that in the slightest (well, except that one time when the latest HPMOR thread clogged up the top Discussion comments of the week when I hadn't read HPMOR yet, and the occasional Discussion threads about MLP -- but that's a small minority of the time).
This article, courtesy of the recent Seq Rerun, seems serendipitous:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/yf/moral_truth_in_fiction/