Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:

  • Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
  • Do not quote yourself.
  • Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
  • No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

 

Rationality Quotes May 2013
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[-][anonymous]1600

"The spatial anomaly has interacted with the tachyonic radiation in the nebula, it's interfering with our sensors. It's impossible to get a reading."

"There's no time - we'll have to take the ship straight through it!"

"Captain, I advise against this course of action. I have calculated the odds against our surviving such an action at three thousand, seven hundred and forty-five to one."

"Damn the odds, we've got to try... wait a second. Where, exactly, did you get that number from?"

"I hardly think this is the time for-"

"No. No, fuck you, this is exactly the time. The fate of the galaxy is at stake. Trillions of lives are hanging in the balance. You just pulled four significant digits out of your ass, I want to see you show your goddamn work."

"Well, I used the actuarial data from the past fifty years, relating to known cases of ships passing through nebulae that are interacting with spatial anomalies. There have been approximately two million such incidents reported, with only five hundred and forty-two incidents in which the ship in question survived intact."

"And did you at all take into account that ship buil

... (read more)

To be exact, we tend to succeed twenty-four point five percent more often than the statistics would otherwise indicate

Well... not quite. The selection effect makes the survival number basically impossible to calculate, but regularly surviving risky scenarios seems like it would provide a bit better odds for the influence of moxie than 249:200.

Fun Bayes application: what's the likelihood ratio for the existence vs. nonexistence of moxie-based immunity to death during battle for military leaders, given the military history of Earth?

Well... not quite. The selection effect makes the survival number basically impossible to calculate, but regularly surviving risky scenarios seems like it would provide a bit better odds for the influence of moxie than 249:200.

At some point, if the Vulcan is smart enough, I suspect the calculation would begin to hinge more on plot twists and the odds that the story is nearing its end, as the hypothesis that they are wearing Plot Armor rises up to the forefront.

I'd also suspect that the Vulcan would realize quickly that as his prediction for the probability of success approaches 1, the odds of a sudden plot reversal that plunges them all in deep poo also approaches 1. And then the Vulcan would immediately adjust to always spouting off some random high-odds-against-us number all the time just to make sure they'd always succeed heroically.

Ow, this is starting to sound very newcomblike.

And then the Vulcan would immediately adjust to always spouting off some random high-odds-against-us number all the time just to make sure they'd always succeed heroically.

Holy crap, canon!Spock is a genius rationalist after all.

4Kawoomba
The C3PO of rationalists. (At least when in a fight, the bridge crew always takes great care to ask for damage reports, and whether someone anywhere on the ship broke a finger, before, you know, firing back.)
5[anonymous]
Hey, the humans have to do something while the computer (which somehow hasn't obtained sentience) does all the real work.

The computer is secretly making paper clips in cargo bay 2, beaming them into space when noone is looking.

I want to believe.

1Luke_A_Somers
The last line of reasoning doesn't quite work. Not every incident has an episode made out of it.
2DaFranker
I don't see why not. Clearly, they're even more immune to death, dismemberment and other Bad Endings when they're not in a running episode. Or they just never run into the kind of exciting situations that happen during episodes. I also suspect that distinguishing whether an episode is running would be even easier. One dead-obvious clue: The captain insists on going on an away mission, RedShirts are sent with him, all the RedShirts die unless they're part of the primary rotation bridge crew. Instant signal that an episode is running. AFAICT, very few redshirts ever die in this manner outside of episode incidents.
0Luke_A_Somers
I was referring to the chances that something would go wrong when it looks nearly certain to succeed. Things can go blissfully smoothly when the camera isn't running.

This discussion seems like it needs a reference to Redshirts by John Scalzi.

0DaFranker
Yes. Hell yes it did. *adds to want-to-read list*
0Gurkenglas
They do very many things that have a near-1 probability of succeeding, and only few of them are thwarted by plot.
0[anonymous]
How do we know that it still works even when the Vulcan doesn't believe what they're saying?
2TheOtherDave
If it doesn't, presumably the Vulcan should then immediately adjust to believing the high-odds-against-us number. (This would admittedly be much more difficult to pull off consistently.)
1[anonymous]
Maybe Vulcans are physiologically incapable of believing anything with insufficient evidence.
7khafra
I read that charitably as indicating occasional failures in non-deadly situations. Not even Captain Kirk wins 'em all.
[-]CCC150

There have been approximately two million such incidents reported, with only five hundred and forty-two incidents in which the ship in question survived intact.

Unweighted, that's 3690:1 odds.

we tend to succeed twenty-four point five percent more often than the statistics would otherwise indicate - and, in fact, that number jumps to twenty-nine point two percent specifically in cases where I state the odds against our success to three significant digits or greater

Since odds to three or more significant figures have been quoted, that gives us 2856:1 odds (still without weighting). From this, I conclude that the successful incidents usually involved ships that were either very differently designed to the ship in question, or were a long time ago (case in point - the 47-year-old success case). This implies that the current ship's design is actually somewhat more likely to fall afoul of the nebula than an average ship, or an older ship. Rather substantially, in fact; enough to almost exactly counter the determination/drive factor.

An investigation into the shipyards, and current design paradigms, may be in order once the trillions of lives have been saved. I suspect that too little emphasis is being placed on safety at some point in the design process.

An investigation into the shipyards, and current design paradigms, may be in order...

...as I recommended strenuously before we left dock at the beginning of this mission, since a similar analysis performed then gave approximately 8000:1 odds that before this mission was complete you would do something deeply stupid that got us all killed, no matter how strenuously I tried to instruct you in basic risk factor analysis. That having failed, I gave serious consideration to simply taking over the ship myself, which I estimate will increase by a factor of approximately 3000 the utility created by our missions (even taking into account the reduced "moxie factor", which is primarily of use during crises a sensible Captain would avoid getting into in the first place). However, I observe that my superiors in the High Command have not taken over Starfleet and the Federation, despite the obvious benefits of such a strategy. At first this led me to 83% confidence that the High Command was in possession of extremely compelling unshared evidence of the value of humanity's leadership, which at that time led me to update significantly in favor of that view myself. I have since then reduced that confidence to 76%, with a 13% confidence that the High Command has instead been subverted by hostile powers partial to humanity.

[-]CCC260

The steel-Vulcan in the original quote admits that humans have an edge in the field of interpersonal relations. I imagine that's why the Vulcans let the humans lead; because the humans are capable of persuading all the other races in the Federation to go along with this whole 'federation' idea, and leave the Vulcans more-or-less alone as long as they share some of their research results.

Or, to put it another way; Vulcan High Command has managed to foist off the boring administration work onto the humans, in exchange for mere unimportant status, and is not eager to have it land back on their laps again.

Of course, some Vulcans do think that a Vulcan-led empire would be an improvement over a human-led one. The last batch to think that went off and formed the Romulan Empire. The Vulcans and the Romulans are currently running a long-term, large-scale experiment to see which paradigm creates a more lasting empire in practice. (They don't tell the other races that it's all a political experiment, of course. They might not be great at interpersonal realtions, but they have found out in the past that that is a very bad idea).

5TheOtherDave
It's not mere unimportant status, though. The Federation makes decisions that affect the state of the Galaxy, and they make different decisions than they would under Vulcan control, and those differences cash out in terms of significant differences in overall utility. For a culture that believes that "the fate of the many outweighs the fate of the few, or the one," the choice to allow that just so they can be left alone seems bizarre. Of course, that assumes that they consider non-Vulcans to be part of "the many." Now that I think about it, there's no particular reason to believe that's a commonly held Vulcan value/belief.

The Federation makes decisions that affect the state of the Galaxy, and they make different decisions than they would under Vulcan control

Eh, questionable. I'm sure many of us have been in situations where we're advising more senior staff and the manager or whoever isn't really the one making the decision anymore - they're just the talking head we get to rubber stamp what those of us who actually deal with the problem have decided is going to happen.

In practice I tend to find that the people who control access to information, rather than the people who wield formal authority, tend to have the most power in an organisation.

2Zubon
This is a conceptually simple trade-off, although the math would be difficult. Assume that a Federation under Vulcan control would make better decisions but would have more difficulty implementing them (either on a sufficient scale or as effectively) because the strengths that make them better analysts are not the same strengths that make humans charismatic leaders. The Federation might not have as many planets, those planets might not be as willing to implement Vulcan ideas when advocated by Vulcans, etc. Is overall utility higher if Vulcans take the optimal action A% of the time at X% effectiveness or if humans take the optimal action B% of the time at Y% effectiveness? (You would adjust "the optimal action" for the relative strengths of the two species.) If you believed that AX > BY, you formed the Romulan Empire. If you believed that AX < BY, you joined the Federation. I don't know enough Star Trek lore to say what happens if you end up with different estimates than the rest of your faction (defection, agitation for political change, execution?).
1CCC
This was what I'd meant to say, only much, much better phrased. Thank you.
0CCC
It's Spock's belief... but Spock was half-human, and the other Vulcans mostly seemed to think he was perhaps a bit too attached to that side of his ancestry. I think that they definitely assigned a good deal less weight to non-Vulcans. (Not zero weight... they did help out Humanity a bit on first contact, after all... just less weight). Besides, given that the Vulcan High Council is pretty influential in the Federation, they can steer things their way at least some of the time; they might not be able to persuade the Federation to follow the path of maximal utility, but they can signpost the path (and warn about any cliffs in the area); the other races might not listen to them all the time, but they're quite likely to listen at least some of the time, severely limiting the utility loss.
7DaFranker
If I was rich enough, I would pay you to write fanfic like this.
3TheOtherDave
Given how well my time is recompensed these days, I suspect you could find many far-cheaper, equally good writers.
1DaFranker
Hmm, good point.
4DanArmak
Thanks for the link. I really enjoyed reading the comic archives.
3Kindly
One could object by pointing out that moxie, determination, drive, and the human spirit have the strongest effect in life-or-death situations: situations in which their rate of survival over the past three years is obviously 100%.
2[anonymous]
What I find curious about StarTrek models of... well, intelligence, if starship building is any indication of it... is that Romulans are on the same page as Vulcans. Forget 'Vulcans are more rational/logical/... then Humans'; they haven't outstripped the other subspecies! How have they been using their philosophy since Surak?
2CCC
Surak's philosophy was never about improving scientific progress. Surak's philosophy was all about shutting down all hints of emotion, with the explicit intention of shutting down anger specifically, and thus preventing the entire Vulcan species from blowing itself up in a massively destructive civil war. Vulcans, and by exension Romulans, are significantly more intelligent than humans; this is an advantage that both subspecies hold, and Surak's philosophies don't change that. Surak's philosophies speak of the inappropriateness of any sort of emotional reaction, and praise slow, careful, methodical progress, in which every factor is taken into account from all possible angles before the experiment is begun. Surak's philosophies speak out against such emotional weaknesses as enjoying one's work; a Vulcan who enjoys science may very well decide to move into a different field instead, one in which there is less danger of committing the faux pas of actually smiling. (Surak's philosophies go perhaps rather too far - to the point where a close association with a risk-taking species like humanity is probably a good thing for the Vulcans - but they do accomplish their aim of preventing extinction via civil war). Romulans, on the other hand, have no difficulty showing emotions. Some of them will enjoy their science, they'll take risks, they'll occasionally accidentally blow themselves up with dangerous experiments (or lose their tempers and blow up other Romulans on purpose). Somehow, they've managed to avoid suicidal, self-destructive civil war so far... but I'm somehow not surprised that the Vulcans have failed to outstrip them.
2[anonymous]
And yet it is still so easy to imagine such an outcome. Actually, I am more surprised that they chose such similar roads more than they are close in achievements. For example, maybe Vulcans would have made breakthroughs in areas that have no value for Romulans, and viva a versa.
5CCC
That the Vulcans and the Romulans have incredibly close levels of technology is surprising, yes; but not nearly as surprising as the idea that the Humans, the Klingons, the Betazoids, and about a hundred or so other species all have such incredibly similar technology levels, and all without any hint of shared history before they developed their seperate warp drives.
0[anonymous]
Aww, maybe we should control for the Mysterious Space Police culling thing, and then the results would diverge like preschoolers let out on a May day. Like, there's a Prime Prime Directive. The MSP didn't apprehend Nero (natch), and look what happened?! ...I'm making a fully general counterargument, aren't I?:)
0CCC
Well, considering that it's a fictional universe, the reason why so many species have such similar technology levels is clear; it's more enjoyable to listen to stories about species who are close enough technologically that there's some narrative tension about who will win in a given contest. While you can tell stories about vastly more powerful empires (see, for example, Q) such stories are better taken in small doses; and Q never actually goes flat-out against the Federation, because if he does, the Federation will lose instantly and there will be no story. (Occasionally, the Federation has an effect in a Q-vs.-Q conflict, but that's as far as it goes). I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "the Mysterious Space Police culling thing", though.
2[anonymous]
Agree. I meant there were other aliens far more technologically advanced who regulated the rates of development. (Sorry, I am not very interested in this discussion, but maybe someone other might be.)
1CCC
Thank you for the explanation.
1ChristianKl
You shouldn't trust people who claim to know 4 digits of accuracy for a forcast like this. The uncertainity involved in the calcuation has to be greater.

You shouldn't trust people who claim to know 4 digits of accuracy for a forcast like this.

You shouldn't trust a human person who makes that claim. But if we are using 'person' in a way that includes the steel-Vulcan from the quote then yes, you should.

The uncertainity involved in the calculation has to be greater.

It is all uncertainty. There is no particular reason to doubt the steel-Vulcan's ability to calibrate 'meta' uncertainties too.

In the face of all the other evidence about the relative capabilities of the species in question that the character in question is implied to have it would be an error to overvalue the heuristic "don't trust people who fail to signal humility via truncating calculations". The latter is, after all, merely a convention. Given the downsides of that convention (it inevitably makes predictions worse) it is relatively unlikely that the Vulcans would have the same traditions regarding significant figure expression.

And lo, Wedrifid did invent the concept of Steel Vulcan and it was good.

Do we actually have enough fictional examples of this to form a trope? (At least 3, 5 would be better.)

0ChristianKl
There inherent uncertainity in the input. The steel-Vulcan in question counted one specifc case as being 24% relevant to the current question. That's two digits of accuracy. If many of your input variables only have two digits of accuracy the end result shouldn't have four digits of accuracy.

If many of your input variables only have two digits of accuracy the end result shouldn't have four digits of accuracy.

Almost-inaudibly, whispering in a small corner of the room while scribbling in a notebook that the teacher is totally stupid while said teacher says something similar to the quote above:

under the assumption that all variables have equivalent ratios of weight to the final result and that the probability distribution of the randomness is evenly distributed across sub-digits of inaccuracy, along with a few other invisible assumptions about the nature of the data and calculations

Yep, that's me in high school.

In your example, the cited specific case only means that the final accuracy to be calculated is +- 0.01 individual ship relevance, which means that at the worst this one instance, by the standard half-the-last-significant-digit rule of thumb (which is not by any means an inherent property of uncertainties) means that there's +- 0.5% * 1 ship variance over the 542 : 2 000 000 ratio for this particular error margin.

Note also that "24% weight of the relevance of 1 ship in the odds" translates very poorly in digit-accuracies to "3745 : 1", beca... (read more)

If many of your input variables only have two digits of accuracy the end result shouldn't have four digits of accuracy.

That is indeed the (mere, human) convention as taught in high schools of our shared culture. See above regarding the absurdity of using that heuristic as a reason for rejecting the advice of what amounts to a superintelligence.

[-]Shmi100

It's not about accuracy, it's about not privileging 3700 over 3745. Neither is a particularly round number in, say, binary, and omitting saying "forty five" after converting this number into decimal system for human consumption is not much of a time saver.

0A1987dM
But re-mentioning the “forty five” after a human asks you “three thousand seven hundred?” is mostly pointless nitpicking, and demonstrates a lack of understanding of human (well, at least, of neurotypical human) psychology IMO.

Either that, or it reflects an accurate understanding of the things that humans (justifiably or otherwise) treat as signals of authoritative knowledge. I mean, there's a reason people who want to sound like experts quote statistics to absurd levels of precision; rounding off sounds less definitive to most people.

8DanielLC
Perhaps, but on the off chance that the captain doesn't listen, giving the exact probability increases the chances of success. The Vulcan mentioned that.
0Jiro
What does it mean to beat the odds by X percent? My first thought is that it means that the number of successes is (1+X) * the expected number of successes. If so, then beating a single 1-in-a-million shot means having 1 success where 1/1000000 success is expected, then X is 99999900 percent. That's an awful lot more than 29.2%. It's also strange because the exact number is affected by adding additional missions with 100% survivability--if you have 100 missions, one of which is 1 in a million odds and the rest of which are certain, and you beat them all, the number of successes is 100 while the expected number is 99.000001, and you only beat the odds by about 1%.
-1soreff
And with 542 survivals, assuming Poisson statistics, the one-sigma bounds are around +-4% of that. I'll believe Spock most significant figure, but not the other three. :-)
5Kindly
To summarize the important bits of the "Do steel-Vulcans provide excessive significant digits?" discussion: Suppose that the one-sigma range tells us that where the quote has 3745, some reasonable error analysis says 3745 plus or minus 173. Then the steel-Vulcan would still say 3745 and not, e.g., 3700 or 4000, for the following reasons: 1. 3745 is still the midpoint of the range of reasonable values, and thus the closest single value to "the truth". 2. Taking meta-uncertainty into account, you still should assign some probability to how likely you are to survive, which is going to be some probably-not-round number like 1 in 3745. This sort of accuracy is probably not very helpful to humans: I don't have a cognitive algorithm that lets me distinguish between 1 in 3745 odds and 1 in 3812 odds, so saying "about 1 in 4000" provides all the information I'll actually use. Presumably a species that can come up with this kind of answer in the first place feels differently about this; in fact, there's probably some strong cultural taboo against rounding.
[-]Tenoke550

‘Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that in your promiscuous pursuit of women you are merely trying to assuage your subconscious fears of sexual impotence?’

‘Yes, sir, it has.’

‘Then why do you do it?’

‘To assuage my fears of sexual impotence.’

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

explaining /= explaining away

[-]Zubon520

A lot of people gave very selflessly to build this warship so we can go out and battle the vikings, but the time has come to admit that hard work and hope are no substitute for actual knowledge and that we've made a really shitty ship. If we sail this ship against the vikings, we'll be massacred immediately.

Oglaf webcomic, "Bilge"

(Oglaf is usually NSFW, so I'm not linking, even if this particular comic has nothing worse than coarse language.)

[-]gwern590

A great illustration of sunk cost bias.

[-]Raemon140

Took me a second.

[-]gjm280

I find myself wondering whether that pun was the original impetus for the comic. (If so, I commend the artist's restraint, which isn't something one can often say about Oglaf.)

[-][anonymous]540

On the contrary, a sizable fraction of Oglaf's comics involve restraints.

Noriko: Wow, you must have a real knack for it!

Kazumi: That's not it, Miss Takaya! It takes hard work in order to achieve that.

Noriko: Hard work? You must have a knack for hard work, then!

- Gunbuster

[-]gwern260

Well, since Conscientiousness is heritable to a substantial degree, perhaps she inherited her knack for hard work.

Unless challenged to think otherwise, people quickly move from "Phew! Dodged a bullet on that one!" to "I'm a great bullet-dodger."

Discussing the "Near-miss bias" which they define as a tendency to "take more risk after an event in which luck played a critical role in deciding the event's [favorable] outcome."

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, page 150.

2Plubbingworth
There wouldn't happen to be anything that's sort of the opposite of this, would there? Screwing up often but sporadically, not due to inherent inability but because of simple inexpertise, making you say "I'm bad at this" more often?
0JStewart
Interesting. I wonder to what extent this corrects for people's risk-aversion. Success is evidence against the riskiness of the action.
[-][anonymous]430

When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this -- it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.

I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person -- to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know that the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.

She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happens. Nowadays there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics. ...

-- Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!

Fortunately, things have since gotten better in that respect.

Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.

Aristotle

[-][anonymous]380

.

-2skepsci
Witty to be sure, but obviously false. The causal connection between baseball and the content (as opposed to the name) of the law is probably fairly tenuous. The number three is ubiquitous in all areas of human culture.
9Prismattic
I think further investigation would reveal that is at most a Western cultural thing, not a hardwired human universal. Elsewhere in time and place, 4 has been the important number -- e.g. recurrences of 4 and 40 in the Hebrew scriptures; the importance of 4 and (negatively) 8 in Chinese culture, etc.. Possibly some other digits have performed similarly in other places as well.
7gwern
We can still blame the propaganda for helping make the laws appealing and getting them to pass And given the popularity of things named after people like "Laura's Law" or "Megan's Law", it wouldn't surprise me if the popularity was due to the rhetorical effect on the average voter.

One interesting thing about Ms. Dowd’s description of “hardball” political tactics is just how dainty and genteel her brass knuckle suggestions actually are. A speech, an appeal to reason: there is nothing here about lucrative contracts for political supporters, promises of sinecure jobs for politicians who lose their seats, a “blank check” for administrative backing on some obscure tax loophole that a particular politician could award to a favored client; there’s not even a delicate hint about grand jury investigations that can be stopped in their tracks or compromising photographs or wiretaps that need never see the light of day. Far be it from Ms Dowd to speak of or even hint at the kind of strategy that actual politicians think about when words like ‘hardball’ come to mind. Ms Dowd speaks of brass knuckles and then shows us a doily; at some level it speaks well of Ms. Dowd as a human being that even when she tries she seems unable to come up with an offer someone can’t refuse.

-- Walter Russell Mead, describing someone else's failure to understand what a desperate effort actually looks like.

[-]maia310

When a problem comes along / You must whip it / Before the cream sets out too long / You must whip it / When something's goin' wrong / You must whip it

Now whip it / Into shape / Shape it up / Get straight / Go forward / Move ahead / Try to detect it / It's not too late / To whip it / Whip it good

-- Devo, on the value of confronting problems rather than letting them fester

0johnlawrenceaspden
Isn't it better sometimes to ignore the problem and hope it goes away?
0maia
Maybe sometimes, but I think we tend to have the "ignore problems too much" failure mode more than the opposite.

Philosophy... is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place.

Daniel Dennett

But if the question is "Has this caused you to revise downward your estimate of the value of health insurance?" the answer has to obviously be yes. Anyone who answers differently is looking deep into their intestinal loops, not the Oregon study. You don't have to revise the estimate to zero, or even a low number. But if you'd asked folks before the results dropped what we'd expect to see if insurance made people a lot healthier, they'd have said "statistically significant improvement on basic markers for the most common chronic diseases. The fact that we didn't see that means that we should now say that health insurance, or at least Medicaid, probably doesn't make as big a difference in health as we thought.

-- Megan McArdle, trying to explain Bayesian updates and the importance of making predictions in advance, without referring to any mathematics.

9DanielLC
The value of health insurance isn't that it keeps you from getting sick. It's that it keeps you from getting in debt when you do get sick.

This may be true, but McArdle's point is precisely that this was not said before the study came out. At that time, people confidently expected that health insurance would, in fact, improve health outcomes. Your argument is one that was only made after the result was known; this is a classic failure mode.

(nods) Yup. Of course, McArdle's claims about what people would have said before the study, if asked, are also only being made after the results are known, which as you say is a classic failure mode.

Of course, McArdle is neither passing laws nor doing research, just writing articles, so the cost of failure is low. And it's kind of nice to see someone in the mainstream (sorta) press making the point that surprising observations should change our confidence in our beliefs, which people surprisingly often overlook.

Anyway, the quality of McArdle's analysis notwithstanding, one place this sort of reasoning seems to lead us is to the idea that when passing a law, we ought to say something about what we anticipate the results of passing that law to be, and have a convention of repealing laws that don't actually accomplish the thing that we said we were passing the law in order to accomplish.

Which in principle I would be all in favor of, except for the obvious failure mode that if I personally don't want us to accomplish that, I am now given an incentive to manipulate the system in other ways to lower whatever metrics we said we were going to measure. (Note: I am not claiming here that any such thing happened in the Oregon study.)

That said, even taking that failure mode into account, it might still be preferable to passing laws with unarticulated expected benefits and keeping them on the books despite those benefits never materializing.

Of course, McArdle's claims about what people would have said before the study, if asked, are also only being made after the results are known, which as you say is a classic failure mode.

I don't think that's true; if you read her original article on the subject, linked in the one I link, she quotes statistics like this:

Most of you probably have probably heard the statistic that being uninsured kills 18,000 people a year. Or maybe it's 27,000. Those figures come from an Institute of Medicine report (later updated by the Urban Institute) that was drawn from [nonrandom observational] studies.

And back in 2010, she said

I took a keen interest when, at the fervid climax of the health-care debate in mid-December, a Washington Post blogger, Ezra Klein, declared that Senator Joseph Lieberman, by refusing to vote for a bill with a public option, was apparently “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands” of uninsured people in order to punish the progressives who had opposed his reelection in 2006. In the ensuing blogstorm, conservatives condemned Klein’s “venomous smear,” while liberals solemnly debated the circumstances under which one may properly accuse one’s opponents of mass murder.

I don't think her statement is entirely post-hoc.

6TheOtherDave
Fair enough. I only read the article you linked, not the additional source material; I'm prepared to believe given additional evidence like what you cite here that her analysis is... er... can one say "pre-hoc"?

can one say "pre-hoc"?

Ante hoc.

4RolfAndreassen
Well, if not, one ought to be able to. I hereby grant you permission! :)
6Sabiola
I love this idea!
7AlanCrowe
There would have to be a two sided test. A tort of ineffectiveness by which the plaintiff seeks relief from a law that fails to achieve the goals laid out for it. A tort of under-ambition by which the plaintiff seeks relief from a law that is immune from the tort of ineffectiveness because the formally specified goals are feeble. Think about the American experience with courts voiding laws that are unconstitutional. This often ends up with the courts applying balancing tests. It can end up with the court ruling that yes, the law infringes your rights, but only a little. And the law serves a valid purpose, which is very important. So the law is allowed to stand. These kinds of cases are decided in prospect. The decision is reached on the speculation about the actual effects of the law. It might help if constitutional challenges to legislation could be re-litigated, perhaps after the first ten years. The second hearing could then be decided retrospectively, looking back at ten years experience, and balancing the actual burden on the plaintiffs rights against the actual public benefit of the law. Where though is the goal post? In practice it moves. In the prospective hearing the government will make grand promises about the huge benefits the law will bring. In the retrospective hearing the government will sail on the opposite tack, arguing that only very modest benefits suffice to justify the law. It would be good it the goal posts are fixed. Right from the start the law states the goals against which it will be assessed in ten years time. Certainly there needs to be a tort of ineffectiveness, active against laws that do not meet their goals. But politicians would soon learn to game the system by writing very modest goals into law. That needs to be blocked with a tort of under-ambition which ensures that the initial constitutionality of the law is judged only admitting in prospect those benefits that can be litigated in retrospect.
8Sabiola
The goal posts should definitely be fixed! And maybe some politicians would want to pass a law that benefits him and his friends in some way, even though it only has a small effect, so there ought to be some kind of safeguard against that, too. But the main problem I can see is anti-synergy. Suppose a law is adopted that totally would have worked, were it not for some other law that was introduced a little later? Should the first one be repealed, or the second one? But maybe the second one does accomplish its goal, and repealing the first one would have negative effects, now that the second one is in place... And with so many laws interacting, how can you even tell which ones have which effects, unless the effects are very large indeed? (Of course, this is a problem in the current system too. I'm glad I'm not a politician; I'd be paralyzed with fear of unintended consequences.)
3AlanCrowe
Good point! I've totally failed to think about multiple laws interacting.
0TimS
This is a perspective similar to DanielLC's point. Additionally, a commenter there makes the parallel point that we don't really know whether private insurance improves the outcome measures. True, but we shouldn't overstate the argument. The p-values were not low enough to count as "statistically significant," but the direction of change was towards improved health outcomes. One is doing something wrong with this evidence if one updates against improved health outcomes for public health insurance for the poor (i.e. Medicaid).
2Vaniver
Updates always move you towards what you just saw, and so if your estimate was above what you just saw, you update down. If you only consider the hypotheses that Medicaid "improves," "has no effect," or "harms," then this is weak evidence for "improves" (and "has no effect"). But a more sophisticated set of hypotheses is the quantitative effect of Medicaid; if one estimated beforehand that Medicaid doubled lifespans (to use an exaggerated example), they should revise their estimate downward after seeing this study.
2TimS
Fair enough. I should have said "McArdle and her political allies are making a mistake by not updating towards 'Medicaid improves health outcomes,'" given my perception of their priors.
-1Eugine_Nier
That's why McArdle recommended getting only catastrophic coverage.
-2CCC
It does help you to pay for (say) blood-pressure medication. This might be expected to result in more people with medical aid and blood-pressure problems taking their medication. It also helps to pay for doctors. This leads to more people going to the doctor with minor complaints, and increased chances of catching something serious earlier.
2RolfAndreassen
Er, yes, fine, but... to the extent that the study shows anything, it shows that the positive results of these effects, if they exist, are consistent with zero. Can we please discuss the data, now that we have some, and not theory?
8EHeller
This annoys me because she doesn't talk at all about the power of the study. Usually, when you see statistically insignificant positive changes across the board in a study without much power, its a suggestion you should hesitantly update a very tiny bit in the positive direction, AND you need another study, not a suggestion you should update downward. When ethics prevent us from constructing high power statistical studies, we need to be a bit careful not to reify statistical significance.
9RolfAndreassen
If the effect is so small that a sample of several thousand is not sufficient to reliably observe it, then it doesn't even matter that it is positive. An analogy: Suppose I tell you that eating garlic daily increases your IQ, and point to a study with three million participants and P < 1e-7. Vastly significant, no? Now it turns out that the actual size of the effect is 0.01 points of IQ. Are you going to start eating garlic? What if it weren't garlic, but a several-billion-dollar government health program? Statistical significance is indeed not everything, but there's such a thing as considering the size of an effect, especially if there's a cost involved. Moreover, please consider that "consistent with zero" means exactly that. If you throw a die ten times and it comes up heads six, do you "hesitantly update a very tiny bit" in the direction of the coin being biased? Would you do so, if you did not have a prior reason to hope that the coin was biased? I respectfully suggest that you are letting your already-written bottom line interfere with your math.
[-]DSimon150

If I throw a die and it comes up heads, I'd update in the direction of it being a very unusual die. :-)

[-]satt100

If the effect is so small that a sample of several thousand is not sufficient to reliably observe it, then it doesn't even matter that it is positive.

I strongly disagree.

An old comment of mine gives us a counterexample. A couple of years ago, a meta-analysis of RCTs found that taking aspirin daily reduces the risk of dying from cancer by ~20% in middle-aged and older adults. This is very much a practically significant effect, and it's probably an underestimate for reasons I'll omit for brevity — look at the paper if you're curious.

If you do look at the paper, notice figure 1, which summarizes the results of the 8 individual RCTs the meta-analysis used. Even though all of the RCTs had sample sizes in the thousands, 7 of them failed to show a statistically significant effect, including the 4 largest (sample sizes 5139, 5085, 3711 & 3310). The effect is therefore "so small that a sample of several thousand is not sufficient to reliably observe it", but we would be absolutely wrong to infer that "it doesn't even matter that it is positive"!

The heuristic that a hard-to-detect effect is probably too small to care about is a fair rule of thumb, but it's only a h... (read more)

4gwern
tl;dr: NHST and Bayesian-style subjective probability do not mix easily. Another example of this problem: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/25/beware-mass-produced-medical-recommendations/ Does vitamin D reduce all-cause mortality in the elderly? The point-estimates from pretty much all of the various studies are around a 5% reduction in risk of dying for any reason - pretty nontrivial, one would say, no? Yet the results are almost all not 'statistically significant'! So do we follow Rolf and say 'fans of vitamin D ought to update on vitamin D not helping overall'... or do we, applying power considerations about the likelihood of making the hard cutoffs at p<0.05 given the small sample sizes & plausible effect sizes, note that the point-estimates are in favor of the hypothesis? (And how does this interact with two-sided tests - vitamin D could've increased mortality, after all. Positive point-estimates are consistent with vitamin D helping, and less consistent with no effect, and even less consistent with it harming; so why are we supposed to update in favor of no help or harm when we see a positive point-estimate?) If we accept Rolf's argument, then we'd be in the odd position of, as we read through one non-statistically-significant study after another, decreasing the probability of 'non-zero reduction in mortality'... right up until we get the Autier or Cochrane data summarizing the exact same studies & plug it into a Bayesian meta-analysis like Salvatier did & abruptly flip to '92% chance of non-zero reduction in mortality'.
3wedrifid
That's a curious metric to choose. By that standard taking aspirin is about as healthy as playing a round of Russian Roulette.
3satt
It's a fairly natural metric to choose if one wishes to gauge aspirin's effect on cancer risk, as the study's authors did. Fortunately, the study's authors and I also interpreted the data by another standard. Daily aspirin reduced all-cause mortality, and didn't increase non-cancer deaths (except for "a transient increase in risk of vascular death in the aspirin groups during the first year after completion of the trials"). These are not results we would see if aspirin effected its anti-cancer magic by a similar mechanism to Russian Roulette.
1wedrifid
Pardon me. Mentioning only curiosity was politeness. The more significant meanings I would supplement with are 'naive or suspicious'. By itself that metric really is worthless and reading this kind of health claim should set off warning bells. Lost purposes are a big problem when it comes to medicine. Partly because it is hard, mostly because there is more money in the area than nearly anywhere else. And this is the reason low dose asprin is part of my daily supplement regime (while statins are not). "All cause mortality" is a magical phrase.
0Kawoomba
I recently stopped with the low dose aspirin, the bleeding when I accidentally cut myself has proven to be too much of an inconvenience. For the time being, at least.
1A1987dM
I'd assume they mean something like the per-year risk of dying from cancer conditional on previous survival -- if they indeed mean the total lifetime risk of dying from cancer I agree it's ridiculous.
1Alicorn
Am I missing a subtlety here, or is it just that cancer is usually one of those things that you hope to live long enough to get?
6gwern
Yeah, pretty much. There are other examples of this where something harmful appears to be helpful when you don't take into account possible selection biases (like being put into the 'non-cancer death' category); for example, this is an issue in smoking - you can find various correlations where smokers are healthier than non-smokers, but this is just because the unhealthier smokers got pushed over the edge by smoking and died earlier.
7EHeller
Have you read the study in question? The treatment sample is NOT several thousand, its about 1500. Further, the incidence of the diseases being looked at are only a few percent or less, so the treatment sample sizes for the most prevalent diseases are around 50 (also, if you look at the specifics of the sample, the diseased groups are pretty well controlled). I suggest the following exercise- ask yourself what WOULD be a big effect, and then work through if the study has the power to see it. Yes, but in this case, the sample sizes are small and the error bars are so large that consistent with zero is ALSO consistent with 25+ % reduction in incidence (which is a large intervention). The study is incapable from distinguishing hugely important effect from 0 effect, so we shouldn't update much at all, which is why I wished Mcardle had talked about statistical power. Before we ask "how should we update", we should ask "what information is actually here?" Edit: If we treat this as an exploration, it says "we need another study"- after all the effects could be as large as 40%! Thats a potentially tremendous intervention. Unfortunately, its unethical to randomly boot people off of insurance so we'll likely never see that study done.
7Unnamed
Health is extremely important - the statistical value of a human life is something like $8 million - so smallish looking effects can be practically relevant. An intervention that saves 1 life out of every 10,000 people treated has an average benefit of $800 per person. In this Oregon study, people who received Medicaid cost an extra $1,172 per year in total health spending, so the intervention would need to save 1.5 lives per 10,000 person-years (or provide an equivalent benefit in other health improvements) for the health benefits to balance out the health costs. The study looked at fewer than 10,000 people over 2 years, so the cost-benefit cutoff for whether it's worth it is less than 3 lives saved (or equivalent). So "not statistically significant" does not imply unimportant, even with a sample size of several thousand. An effect at the cost-benefit threshold is unlikely to show up in significant changes to mortality rates. The intermediate health measures in this study are more sensitive to changes than mortality rate, but were they sensitive enough? Has anyone run the numbers on how sensitive they'd need to be in order to find an effect of this size? The point estimates that they did report are (relative to control group) an 8% reduction in number of people with elevated blood pressure, 17% reduction in number of people with high cholesterol, and 18% reduction in number of people with high glycated hemoglobin levels (a marker of diabetes), which intuitively seem big enough to be part of an across-the-board health improvement that passes cost-benefit muster.
2RolfAndreassen
This would be much more convincing if you reported the costs along with the benefits, so that one could form some kind of estimate of what you're willing to pay for this. But, again, I think your argument is motivated. "Consistent with zero" means just that; it means that the study cannot exclude the possibility that the intervention was actively harmful, but they had a random fluctuation in the data. I get the impression that people here talk a good game about statistics, but haven't really internalised the concept of error bars. I suggest that you have another look at why physics requires five sigma. There are really good reasons for that, you know; all the more so in a mindkilling-charged field.
4Unnamed
I was responding to the suggestion that, even if the effects that they found are real, they are too small to matter. To me, that line of reasoning is a cue to do a Fermi estimate to get a quantitative sense of how big the effect would need to be in order to matter, and how that compares to the empirical results. I didn't get into a full-fledged Fermi estimate here (translating the measures that they used into the dollar value of the health benefits), which is hard to do that when they only collected data on a few intermediate health measures. (If anyone else has given it a shot, I'd like to take a look.) I did find a couple effect-size-related numbers for which I feel like I have some intuitive sense of their size, and they suggest that that line of reasoning does not go through. Effects that are big enough to matter relative to the costs of additional health spending (like 3 lives saved in their sample, or some equivalent benefit) seem small enough to avoid statistical significance, and the point estimates that they found which are not statistically significant (8-18% reductions in various metrics) seem large enough to matter. My overall conclusion about the (based on what I know about it so far) study is that it provides little information for updating in any direction, because of those wide error bars. The results are consistent with Medicaid having no effect, they're consistent with Medicaid having a modest health benefit (e.g., 10% reduction in a few bad things), they're consistent with Medicaid being actively harmful, and they're consistent with Medicaid having a large benefit (e.g. 40% reduction in many bad things). The likelihood ratios that the data provide for distinguishing between those alternatives are fairly close to one, with "modest health benefit" slightly favored over the more extreme alternatives.
3RolfAndreassen
Again, the original point McArdle is making is that "consistent with zero" is just completely not what the proponents expected beforehand, and they should update accordingly. See my discussion with TheOtherDave, below. A small effect may, indeed, be worth pursuing. But here we have a case where something fairly costly was done after much disagreement, and the proponents claimed that there would be a large effect. In that case, if you find a small effect, you ought not to say "Well, it's still worth doing"; that's not what you said before. It was claimed that there would be a large effect, and the program was passed on this basis. It is then dishonest to turn around and say "Ok, the effect is small but still worthwhile". This ignores the inertia of political programs.
7Unnamed
Most Medicaid proponents did not have expectations about the statistical results of this particular study. They did not make predictions about confidence intervals and p values for these particular analyses. Rather, they had expectations about the actual benefit of Medicaid. You cite Ezra Klein as someone who expected that Medicaid would drastically reduce mortality; Klein was drawing his numbers from a report which estimated that in the US "137,000 people died from 2000 through 2006 because they lacked health insurance, including 22,000 people in 2006." There were 47 million uninsured Americans in 2006, so those 22,000 excess deaths translate into 4.7 excess deaths per 10,000 uninsured people each year. So that's the size of the drastic reduction in mortality that you're referring to: 4.7 lives per 10,000 people each year. (For comparison, in my other comment I estimated that the Medicaid expansion would be worth its estimated cost if it saved at least 1.5 lives per 10,000 people each year or provided an equivalent benefit.) Did the study rule out an effect as large as this drastic reduction of 4.7 per 10,000? As far as I can tell it did not (I'd like to see a more technical analysis of this). There were under 10,000 people in the study, so I wouldn't be surprised if they missed effects of that size. Their point estimates, of an 8-18% reduction in various bad things, intuitively seem like they could be consistent with an effect that size. And the upper bounds of their confidence intervals (a 40%+ reduction in each of the 3 bad things) intuitively seem consistent with a much larger effect. So if people like Klein and Drum had made predictions in advance about the effect size of the Oregon intervention, I suspect that their predictions would have fallen within the study's confidence interval. There are presumably some people who did expect the results of the study to be statistically significant (otherwise, why run the study?), and they were wrong. But this isn't
4Vaniver
I do want to point out that, while I agree with your general points, I think that unless the proponents put numerical estimates up beforehand, it's not quite fair to assume they meant "it will be statistically significant in a sample size of N at least 95% of the time." Even if they said that, unless they explicitly calculated N, they probably underestimated it by at least one order of magnitude. (Professional researchers in social science make this mistake very frequently, and even when they avoid it, they can only very rarely find funding to actually collect N samples.) I haven't looked into this study in depth, so semi-related anecdote time: there was recently a study of calorie restriction in monkeys which had ~70 monkeys. The confidence interval for the hazard ratio included 1 (no effect), and so they concluded no statistically significant benefit to CR on mortality, though they could declare statistically significant benefit on a few varieties of mortality and several health proxies. I ran the numbers to determine the power; turns out that they couldn't have reliably noticed the effects of smoking (hazard ratio ~2) on longevity with a study of ~70 monkeys, and while I haven't seen many quoted estimates of the hazard ratio of eating normally compared to CR, I don't think there are many people that put them higher than 2. When you don't have the power to reliably conclude that all-cause mortality decreased, you can eke out some extra information by looking at the signs of all the proxies you measured. If insurance does nothing, we should expect to see the effect estimates scattered around 0. If insurance has a positive effect, we should expect to see more effect estimates above 0 than below 0, even though most will include 0 in their CI. (Suppose they measure 30 mortality proxies, and all of them show a positive effect, though the univariate CI includes 0 for all of them. If the ground truth was no effect on mortality proxies, that's a very unlikely result to
1gwern
Incidentally, how did you do that?
0Vaniver
If I remember correctly, I noticed an effect that did give a p of slightly less than .05 was a hazard ratio of 3, which made me think of running that test, and then I think spower was the r function that I used to figure out what p they could get for a hazard ratio of 2 and 35 experimentals and 35 controls (or whatever the actual split was- I think it was slightly different?).
0gwern
So you were using Hmisc::spower... I'm surprised that there was even such a function (however obtusely named) - why on earth isn't it in the survival library? I was going to try to replicate that estimate, but looking at the spower documentation, it's pretty complex and I don't think I could do it without the original paper (which is more work than I want to do).
0RolfAndreassen
It is of course very difficult to extract any precise numbers from a political discussion. :) However, if you click through some of the links in the article, or have a look at the followup from today, you'll find McArdle quoting predictions of tens of thousands of preventable deaths yearly from non-insured status. That looks to me like a pretty big hazard rate, no?
2satt
No. The Oracle says there're about 50 million Americans without health insurance. The predictions you quoted refer to 18,000 or 27,000 deaths for want of insurance per year. The higher number implies only a 0.054% death rate per year, or a 3.5% death rate over 65 years (Americans over 65 automatically get insurance). This is non-negligible but hardly huge (and potentially important for all that). Edit: and I see gwern has whupped me here.
0Vaniver
Eyeballing the statistics, that looks like a hazard ratio between 1.1 and 1.5 (lots of things are good predictors for mortality that you would want to control for that I haven't; the more you add, the closer that number should get to 1.1).
2satt
It looks like you're referring to a hazard ratio or maybe a relative risk, neither of which are the same as a "hazard rate" AFAIK.
2Vaniver
You're right; I'm thinking of hazard ratios. Editing.
0gwern
Over a population of something like 50 million people? Dunno.
3wedrifid
If I throw a die once and it comes up heads I'm going to be confused. Now, assuming you meant "toss a coin and it comes up heads six times out of ten". What is your intended 'correct' answer to the question? I think I would indeed hesitantly update a very (very) tiny bit in the direction of the coin being biased but different priors regarding the possibility of the coin being biased in various ways and degrees could easily make the update be towards not-biased. I'd significantly lower p(the coin is biased by having two heads) but very slightly raise p(the coin is slightly heavier on the tails side), etc.
4RolfAndreassen
My intended correct answer is that, on this data, you technically can adjust your belief very slightly; but because the prior for a biased coin is so tiny, the update is not worth doing. The calculation cost way exceeds any benefit you can get from gruel this thin. I would say "Null hypothesis [ie unbiased coin] not disconfirmed; move along, nothing to see here". And if you had a political reason for wishing the coin to be biased towards heads, then you should definitely not make any such update; because you certainly wouldn't have done so, if tails had come up six times. In that case it would immediately have been "P-level is in the double digits" and "no statistical significance means exactly that" and "with those errors we're still consistent with a heads bias".
6EHeller
I would think that our prior for "health care improves health" should be quite a bit larger than the prior for a coin to be biased.
-2Jayson_Virissimo
That depends on how long "we" have been reading Overcoming Bias.
6EHeller
Hanson's point is that we often over-treat to show we care- not that 0 health care is optimal. Medicaid patients don't really have to worry about overtreatment.
1Jayson_Virissimo
I was interpreting "health care improves health" as "healthcare improves health on the margin." Is this not what was meant? As someone who has a start-up in the healthcare industry, this runs counter to my personal experience. Also, currently "medicaid overtreatment" is showing about 676,000 results on Google (while "medicaid undertreatment" is showing about 1,240,000 results). Even if it isn't typical, it surely isn't an unheard-of phenomenon.
0EHeller
No, I meant going from 0 access to care to some access to care improves health, as we are discussing the medicaid study comparing people on medicaid to the uninsured. I currently work as a statistician for a large HMO, and I can tell you for us, medicaid patients generally get the 'patch-you-up-and-out-the-door' treatment because odds are high we won't be getting reimbursed in any kind of timely fashion. I've worked in a few states, and it seems pretty common for medicaid to be fairly underfunded (hence the Oregon study we are discussing). And generally, providing medicaid is moving someone from emergency-only to some-primary-care, which is where we should expect some impact- this isn't increasing treatment on the margin, its providing minimal care to a largely untreated population. So I randomly sampled ~5 in the first two pages, and 3 of those were articles about overtreatment that had a sidebar to a different article discussing some aspect of medicaid, so I'm not sure if the count is meaningful here. (The other 2 were about some loophole dentists were using to overtreat children on medicaid and bill extra, I have no knowledge of dental claims).
2Vaniver
This does not appear to be the actual change in access to care when going from being uninsured to on medicaid. As you mention, uninsured patients receive emergency-only care.
0Luke_A_Somers
Such a study might show that it doesn't matter on average. But you'd need those numbers to see if it's increasing the spread of values. That would mean that it really helps some and hurts others. If you can figure out which is which, then it'll end up being useful. Heck, this applies even if the average effect is negative. I don't know how often bio-researchers treat the standard deviation as part of their signal. I suspect it's infrequent.
-2RolfAndreassen
How large was your prior for "insurance helps some and harms others, and we should try to figure out which is which" before that was one possible way of rescuing insurance from this study? That sort of argument is, I respectfully suggest, a warning signal which should make you consider whether your bottom line is already written.
1Luke_A_Somers
I wasn't even thinking of insurance here. You were talking about garlic. I was thinking about my physics experiments where the standard deviation is a very useful channel of information.
7Unnamed
That is Kevin Drum's take. Post 1: Post 2:
2RolfAndreassen
If this were the only medical study in all of history, then yes, a non-significant result should cause you to update as your quote says. In a world with thousands of studies yearly, you cannot do any such thing, because you're sure to bias yourself by paying attention to the slightly-positive results you like, and ignore the slightly-negative ones you dislike. (That's aside from the well-known publication bias where positive results are reported and negative ones aren't.) If the study had come out with a non-significant negative effect, would comrade Drum have been updating slightly in the direction of "Medicaid is bad"? Hah. This is why we impose the 95% confidence cutoff, which actually is way too low, but that's another discussion. It prevents us from seeing, or worse, creating, patterns in the noise, which humans are really good at. The significance cutoff is not a technique of rationality, it is a technique of science, like blinding your results while you're studying the systematics. It's something we do because we run on untrusted hardware. Please do not relax your safeguards if a noisy result happens to agree with your opinions! That's what the safeguards are for! Then also, please note that Kevin Drum's prior was not actually "Medicaid will slightly improve these three markers", it was "Medicaid will drastically reduce mortality". (See links in discussion with TheOtherDave, below). If you switch your priors around as convenient for claiming support from studies, then of course no study can possibly cause you to update downwards. I would gently suggest that this is not a good epistemic state to occupy.
[-]satt270

For one mistake made for not knowing, ten mistakes are made for not looking.

James Alexander Lindsay

[-]pjeby250

Nowadays many educated people treat reinforcement theory as if it were something not terribly important that they have known and understood all along. In fact most people don't understand it, or they would not behave so badly to the people around them.

-- Karen Pryor, Don't Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training

it is often better to pull numbers out of your arse and use them to make a decision, than to pull a decision out of your arse.

-- Paul Crowley

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

This is a claim about reality. Do we actually know that pulling numbers out of your arse actually does produce better results than pulling the decisions out directly? Or does it just feel better, because you have a theory now?

3Paul Crowley
Years later, this unsurprising intuition is spectacularly confirmed by the Good Judgement Project; details in "Superforecasting".
2scav
Well at least if you pull numbers out of your arse and then make a decision based explicitly on the assumption that they are valid, the decision is open to rational challenge by showing that the numbers are wrong when more evidence comes in. And who knows, the real numbers may be close enough to vindicate the decision. If you just pull decisions out of your arse without reference to how they relate to evidence (even hypothetically), you are denying any method of improvement other than random trial and error. And when the real numbers become available, you still don't know anything about how good the original decision was.
1Estarlio
That's a good point. Plugging gut assumptions into models to make sure that the assumptions line up with each other generally produces better results for me. Beyond it just feeling better, it gives me things I can go away and test that I'd never have got otherwise. Like if I think something's 75% likely to happen in X period and I think that something else is more likely to happen than that - do I think that the second thing is 80% likely to happen? And does that line up with information that I already have? Numbers force you to think proportionally. They network your assumptions together until you can start picking out bits of data that you have that are testable. Intuitions aren't magic, of course, but they're rarely completely baseless.
0A1987dM
IME pulling decisions directly out of my arse usually produces results so bad that it'd be hard to do worse, except in certain situations in which it wouldn't even occur to me to use numbers anyway.

it is often better to pull numbers out of your arse and use them to make a decision, than to pull a decision out of your arse.

How often? I can imagine this heuristic being better or worse depending on the details of which figures are chosen and how the are used.

[-][anonymous]280

I figure it works better about 80% of the time, so I'm going to go with it.

[-]CCC160

If I had to guess, I'd say that it's often better because picking a few random numbers leads to actually thinking about the decision for at least half a minute.

In practice, guessing at numbers and running a calculation actually serves as a quick second opinion on your original intuitive decision. If the numbers imply something far different from the decision that System 1 is offering, I don't immediately shrug and go with the numbers: I notice that I am confused, and flag this as something where I need to consider the reliability both of the calculation and of my basic intuition. If the calculation checks out with my original intuition, then I simply go for it.

Basically, a heuristic utility calculation is a cheap error flag which pops up more often when my intuitions are out of step with reality than when they're in step with reality. That makes it incredibly valuable.

of which figures are chosen and how the are used.

On first pass, I read this as "which figures are chosen and how the arse is used". That seemed oddly appropriate.

0Paul Crowley
There's some good discussion in Thinking, Fast and Slow about when intuition works well.
4Richard_Kennaway
Does Paul Crowley fall under the recent clarification that the spirit of the quotes thread is against quoting LessWrong regulars?
0A1987dM
Huh! I hadn't heard of that. Retracted. (Anyway, I propose to state that explicitly.)
0Paul Crowley
But there's sometimes a thread for rationality quotes with the complementary rule :)
0dspeyer
Context
0[anonymous]
Paul is one of us, so not eligible to be quoted here.

With numbers you can do anything you like. Suppose I have the sacred number 9 and I want to get a number 1314, date of the execution of Jaques de Molay - a date dear to anyone who, like me, professes devotion ot the Templar tradition of knighthood. What do I do? I multiply 9 by one hundred and forty-six, the fateful day of the destruction of Carthage. How did I arrive at this? I divided thirteen hundred and fourteen by two, three, et cetera, until I found a satisfying date. I could also have divided thirteen hundred and fourteen by 6.28, the double of 3.14 and I would have got two hundred and nine. That is the year Attulus I, king of Pergamon, ascended the throne. You see?

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum (1989)

[-]Kindly110

In statistics this is known as "overfitting".

1Thomas
The Tau idea from Eco also?

I was pleasantly surprised to see this elegant phrasing of a (Machian?) rationalist principle in popular culture:

"There's an axiom in my business [i.e. law]: 'A difference that makes no difference is no difference.'"

-- Joe Adama in the TV series Caprica

9mcallisterjp
This is at least as old as Leibnitz.
0[anonymous]
Yes, I'm quoting it for its elegance and appearance in popular culture, not because it's a new idea. See first sentence.

We would all like to believe that if we win something it is because of our skill, but if we lose it is because of the good luck or cheating of our opponent. This is nowhere more apparent than in the game of backgammon. A good opponent will play in such a way that the dice rolls having highest probability will be "good rolls" for them on their next turn, enabling them to take the other player's pieces, consolidate their position, etc. However, since there is an element of randomness, when these rolls actually come up it is very difficult even for me to believe that my opponent's fortune is due to their skill rather than their luck. Whenever I am being consistently beaten by an opponent I have to fight very hard to make myself believe that there is actually something wrong with my play and figure out how to correct it.

This phenomenon is nowhere more apparent than in computer backgammon. Computer backgammon is essentially a solved problem. Unlike Chess or Go, the best neural network algorithms that run even on modest hardware will consistently beat most human players, and perhaps draw with the best in the world. In fact, we have learnt rather a lot from these algorit

... (read more)
[-]Cyan130

I like the quote, but I have a nitpick:

We would all like to believe that... if we lose it is because of the good luck or cheating of our opponent.

When I've lost in the first round of single-elimination tournaments, I've found myself hoping that the person who beat me would prove skilled enough to win the entire tournament. That way, my loss wouldn't mean that I totally sucked, but only that I wasn't the best. So I think the quoted observation fails to account for nuances relating to how losses inform us about our skill level.

[-]Pablo210

Ownership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea—whether it’s about politics or sports—what do we do? We love it perhaps more than we should. We prize it more than it is worth. And most frequently, we have trouble letting go of it because we can’t stand the idea of its loss. What are we left with then? An ideology—rigid and unyielding.

Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, New York, 2008, pp. 138-139

[-]pjeby210

When I argue with reality, I lose -- but only 100 percent of the time.

-- Byron Katie, Loving What Is

And I told her that no matter what the org chart said, my real bosses were a bunch of mice in cages and cells in a dish, and they didn’t know what the corporate goals were and they couldn’t be “Coached For Success”, the way that poster on the wall said.

0Said Achmiz
This doesn't really make sense. Just because the mice can't be coached for success, aren't aware of corporate goals, etc., it does not follow that they are one's "real bosses". Can the mice fire you? Can they give you a raise? Can they write you up for violations of corporate protocol? If you are having trouble with a coworker, can you appeal to the mice to resolve the issue? Do the mice, finally, decide what you work on? Your actual boss can take the mice away from you! Can the mice reassign you to a different boss?

There is, perhaps, a word missing from the English language. If Derek Lowe were speaking, instead of writing, he would put an exaggerated emphasis on the word real and native speakers of English would pick up on a special, metaphorical meaning for the word real in the phrase real boss. The idea is that there are hidden, behind the scenes connections more potent (more real?) than the overt connections.

There is a man in a suit, call him the actual boss, who issues orders. Perhaps one order is "run the toxicology tests". The actual boss is the same as the real boss so far. Perhaps another order is "and show that the compound is safe." Now power shifts to the mice. If the compound poisons the mice and they die, then the compound wasn't safe. The actual boss has no power here. It is the mice who are the real boss. They have final say on whether the compound is safe, regardless of the orders that the actual boss gave.

Derek Lowe is giving us an offshoot of an aphorism by Francis Bacon: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." Again the point is lost if one refuses to find a poetic reading. Nature accepts no commands; there are no Harry-Potter style spells. Nature issues no commands; we do not hear and obey, we just obey. (So why is Bacon advising us to obey?)

0DanArmak
The answer lies in his diary... ETA: No it doesn't. DanArmak: scholarship fail.
0Said Achmiz
That's the other Bacon.
0DanArmak
Do you mean the artist one? Can't link but: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon_(artist) But Wikiquote says it was the right one...
3Said Achmiz
It's the diary of Roger Bacon. (If I am totally confused and you were not making a Methods of Rationality reference like I thought you were, please ignore this entire subthread.)
3DanArmak
Oh dear. It turns out I thought MoR referenced Francis Bacon, not Roger Bacon... Francis was just so much more available as a "great person from the history of rationality and science" that I must have kept misreading the name every time. I had to check Wikipedia just now to make sure I knew who Roger Bacon even was! Thanks for correcting me, then. It does seem a bit odd why Harry would attach such importance to Roger Bacon, compared with someone like Francis.
2arundelo
It might be the extra cool-factor of Roger being farther back in history (died about 700 years before Harry Potter went to Hogwarts) than Sir Francis (about 360 years). Eliezer says (emphasis mine):
2DanArmak
Yes, that makes sense. Although the WIkipedia article on Roger Bacon has a section called "Changing interpretations of Bacon" that says: In other words, the things he did and wrote were always known correctly, but now it's known that others said similar things too. He wasn't a rationalist revolutionary or "ahead of his time", he was a point in an uninterrupted progression towards the modern idea of science.
0Said Achmiz
I'm afraid I just don't buy it. The distinguishing feature of one's boss is that this person has certain kinds of (formally recognized) power over you within your organization's hierarchy. No one thinks that their boss has the power to rearrange physical reality at a whim. My objection to the quote as a rationality quote is that it reads like this: "Because my job performance may be affected by the laws of physical reality, which my boss is powerless to alter, he (the boss) in fact has no power over me!" Which is silly. It's a sort of sounds-like-wisdom that doesn't actually have any interesting insight. By this logic, no one has any legal/economic/social power over anyone else, and no one is anyone's boss, ever, because anything that anyone can do to anyone else is, in some way, limited by the laws of physics. P.S. I think the Francis Bacon quote is either not relevant, or is equally vacuous (depending on how you interpret it). I don't think Bacon is "advising" us to obey nature. That would be meaningless, because we are, in fact, physically incapable of not obeying nature. We can't disobey nature — no matter how hard we try — so "advising" us to obey it is nonsense. In a similar vein, saying that the mice have "the final say" on whether the compound is safe is nonsensical. The mice have no say whatsoever. The compound is either safe or not, regardless of the mice's wishes or decisions. To say that the have "the final say" implies that if they wished, they might say differently. In short, I think a "poetic reading" just misleads us into seeing nonexistent wisdom in vacuous formulations.
[-]wylram170

No one thinks that their boss has the power to rearrange physical reality at a whim.

It is a very common feature of bad bosses that they think they have the authority to order their underlings to rearrange physical reality. This seems to be exactly what's going on in the original post.

it reads like this: "Because my job performance may be affected by the laws of physical reality, which my boss is powerless to alter, he (the boss) in fact has no power over me!"

The fact that the speaker is addressing his boss directly changes the meaning a lot. I'd read it as "No matter what official authority you have, if you order me to violate the laws of physics then the laws of physics are going to win." Referring to the mice as his "real boss" is an attempt to explain why he's constrained by the nature of reality to someone who spends a lot more time thinking about org charts than about the nature of reality.

8Said Achmiz
This makes sense.
3Free_NRG
The article is talking about a salary scheme in which a certain percentage of the salary was based on how performance matched against goals-so for a research guy such as Derek, his experimental results (his mice) were determining a part of his salary. No poetry required.
1GloriaSidorum
You're considering just the word "boss". Consider the phrase "real boss". Regardless of the meanings of the constituent words, the phrase itself can often be replaced with "the one with the real power", or "the one who actually makes the decisions." For example, "The king may have nominal power, but he's really only a figurehead, his vizier is the real boss." Now, we still find something lacking in that the mice don't actually make decisions, the people observing the mice do. However, if the people observing the mice care about doing good research, then decisions about what course of action to take in the future must take into account what happens with the mice. What happens with the mice provides evidence which forces the researchers to update their models, possibly changing the optimal course of action, or fail. The literal meaning "The mice provide evidence, forcing us to update our models, making us, in order to do our job correctly, change our decisions." may be expressed metaphorically as "The mice make decisions on how to do our job correctly" or "The mice are the real boss." From the context of the article, in which he uses this as an argument for not coming up with certain specific goals before beginning research, this is likely what the author meant.
1Said Achmiz
Well, except that the researchers could: a) Ignore the evidence b) Fudge or outright falsify the evidence (horribly unethical, but it happens) c) Abandon the experiments and do something else etc. and deciding to do any of these things is influenced heavily by what your boss does (i.e. what rules and incentives exist in your organization). I do get the point made by wylram in the other subthread (communicating to your boss that one cannot change reality by managerial fiat), and it's a good point, I just don't find that it's conveyed well by the original quote (or even the source article). The key issue here, for me, is that despite the fact that "the mice" (but really more like "the laws of reality") are what determine the outcome of the experiment, not your boss, that does not mean that said laws of reality, much less said mice, in any way supplant your boss as the agent who is in control of your career advancement, position in the company, etc. (Incidentally, that is why the vizier / figurehead analogy does not hold.)
0bogus
Yes, and yes. This is spelled out in the original post.
2Said Achmiz
I read the original post. The mice are not giving anyone any raises. The mice are not capable of human-level cognition, and do not occupy positions of administrative power in the company. The mice are just mice. Your actual, human boss decides whether to give you a raise, what you work on, etc. He or she might choose to implement a policy that ties your assigment and your compensation package, in some indirect way, to the behavior of the mice (although to be more accurate, to what you do with the mice), but to insist that it is therefore accurate to say that the mice are your bosses and are making the decisions that control your career, is absurd.

It's often a good habit to keep track of seemingly identical concepts separately, just in case you're wrong and they're not identical.

-- aristosophy

This is often a good idea in mathematics. Two concepts that are equivalent in some context may no longer be equivalent once you move to a more general context; for example, familiar equivalent definitions are often no longer equivalent if you start dropping axioms from set theory or logic (e.g. the axiom of choice or excluded middle).

4skepsci
Outside of mathematical logic, some familiar examples include: * compactness vs. sequential compactness—generalizing from metric to topological spaces * product topology vs. box topology—generalizing from finite to infinite product spaces * finite-dimensional vs. finitely generated (and related notions, e.g. finitely cogenerated)—generalizing from vector spaces to modules * pointwise convergence vs. uniform convergence vs. norm-convergence vs. convergence in the weak topology vs....—generalizing from sequences of numbers to sequences of functions

Arguable example: probability and uncertainty. (More or less identical in my theorizing, but some call the idea of their identity the ludic fallacy.)

1roystgnr
There's still a couple related fallacies that Bayesians can commit. Most related to the "ludic fallacy" as you've described it: if you treat both epistemic (lack of knowledge) and aleatory (lack of predetermination) uncertainty with the same general probability distribution function framework, it becomes tempting to try to collapse the two together. But a PDF-over-PDFs-over-outcomes still isn't the same thing as a PDF-over-outcomes, and if you try to compute with the latter you won't get the right results. Most related to the "ludic fallacy" as I inferred it from Taleb: if you perform your calculations by assigning zero priors to various models, as everybody does to make the calculations tractable, then if evidence actually points towards one of those neglected priors and you don't recompute with it in mind, you'll find that your posterior estimates can be grossly mistaken.
0johnlawrenceaspden
Oh, I read Taleb as using 'ludic fallacy' to mean using distributions with light tails.
3PrometheanFaun
However, equivalences are also the bread and butter of inference. Distinguishing more than you need to will slow you down.
3A1987dM
Unfortunately I only have a finite amount of storage available, so I can only do that up to a certain point.

One of the biggest tasks, according to Gardner, was tracking information and beliefs back to their roots. This is always important, but especially in a field as rich in hearsay as herbal medicine. One little piece of information, or an unsubstantiated report, can grow and become magnified, quickly becoming an unquestioned truism. She used as an example the truism that the extracts of the herb Ginkgo Biloba might cause dangerous bleeding. Everyone says it can. The journalists say it. The doctors say it. The herbalists say it. Even I say it! It's nearly impossible to read a scientific paper on Ginkgo that doesn't mention this alleged danger. But why do we say it - where did the information come from? Turns out, there was one case report - of a single person - who couldn't clot efficiently after taking Ginkgo. Another 178 papers were published that mentioned this danger, citing only this one report. Those 178 papers were cited by over 4,100 other papers. So now we have almost 4-and-a-half thousand references in the scientific literature - not to mention the tens of thousands of references in the popular press - to the dangers of Ginkgo, all traceable back to a single person whose bleeding may or may not have been attributable to the herb.

-Adam Stark

Upvoted initially because this seemed like a good example of what I've taken to calling a "leprechaun" - a fact that spreads in spite of limited empirical backing; however a quick Google search (fact-checking the fact-check, as it were) leads to this article which at the very least suggests that the second-hand story told above is somewhat exaggerated: the evidence for bleeding associated with Gingko Biloba is rather more solid than "one case report - of a single person". Upvote retracted, I'm afraid...

(ETA: also, the other story at that link makes for... interesting reading for a rationalist.)

4arborealhominid
Thanks for the fact-check! In retrospect, it probably would have been a good idea for me to fact-check this before I posted it. And yes, the other story is odd indeed. I actually hadn't read it before I posted the link.
9evand
... And I have no upvoted both of you for the irony of failing to fact-check an anecdote about the importance of proper fact-checking.

He who says "Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own... private horror of becoming a dupe... It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories... over enemies or over nature gained.

William James

This debate brings to mind one of the more interesting differences between the hard sciences and other fields. This occurs when you firmly believe A, someone makes a compelling argument, and within a few seconds you firmly believe not-A, to the point of arguing for not-A with even more vigor that you used for A just a few seconds ago.

-- Lou Scheffer

(Most recent example from my own life that springs to mind: "It seems incredibly improbable that any Turing machine of size 100 could encode a complete solution to the halting problem for all Turing machines of size up to almost 100... oh. Nevermind.")

[-]yli100

So what's the program? Is it the one that runs every turing machine up to length 100 for BusyBeaver(100) steps, and gets the number BusyBeaver(100) by running the BusyBeaver_100 program whose source code is hardcoded into it? That would be of length 100+c for some constant c, but maybe you didn't think the constant was worth mentioning.

4Eliezer Yudkowsky
Well, it's still encoded. But I actually meant to say "almost 100" in the original. And yes, that's the answer.
6A1987dM
Pretty sure that also happens in fields other than the hard sciences. For example, it is said that converts to a religion are usually much more fervent than people who grew up with it (though there's an obvious selection bias). (The advanced, dark-artsy version of this is claiming with a straight face to never have believed A in the first place, and hope the listener trusts what you're saying now more than their memory of what you said earlier, and if it doesn't work, claim they had misunderstood you. My maternal grandpa always tries to use that on my father, and almost always fails, but if he does that I guess it's because it does work on other people.)
8Eliezer Yudkowsky
The operative glory is doing it in five seconds.
2Manfred
And, being right.
0Nominull
That's harder to distinguish from the outside.
5wedrifid
That does (did?) seem improbable to me. I'd have expected n needed to be far larger than 100 before the overhead became negligible enough for 'almost n' to fit (ie. size 10,000 gives almost 10,000 would have seemed a lot more likely than size 100 gives almost 100). Do I need to update in the direction of optimal Turing machine code requiring very few bits?
4Eliezer Yudkowsky
In general, probably yes. Have you checked out the known parts of the Busy Beaver sequence? Be sure to guess what you expect to see before you look. In specific, I don't know the size of the constant c.
0A1987dM
I mentally replaced “100” with “N” anyway (and interpreted “almost N” in the obvious-in-the-context way).
-3wedrifid
You mentally threw away relevant information. ie. You merely made yourself incapable of thinking about what is claimed about the size of c relative to 100. That's fine but ought to indicate to you that you have little useful information to add in response to a comment that amounts to an expression of curious surprise that (c << 100). Where the context suggests it can be interpreted as an example of the Eliezer's-edits bug?
-1A1987dM
I hadn't read the before-the-edit version of the comment.
2Dorikka
I've also found this to be medium evidence that I'm not as informed about the subject as I thought that I was, so I back down by confidence somewhat. If I recently made an error that would have resulted in something very bad happening, I should be very careful about thinking that my next design is safe.
[-]elharo170

One of the most impressive features of brains – especially human brains — is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way. Give an apprentice the desire to impress his master and a chicken-sexing task, and his brain devotes its massive resources to distinguishing males from females. Give an unemployed aviation enthusiast a chance to be a national hero, and his brain learns to distinguish enemy aircraft from local flyboys. This flexibility of learning accounts for a large part of what we consider human intelligence. While many animals are properly called intelligent, humans distinguish themselves in that they are so flexibly intelligent, fashioning their neural circuits to match the task at hand. It is for this reason that we can colonize every region on the planet, learn the local language we’re born into, and master skills as diverse as playing the violin, high-jumping and operating space shuttle cockpits.

David Eagleman, Incognito, p. 71

9Eugine_Nier
Minor nitpick: The reason we can learn the local language is that languages are memetically selected for learnability by humans.
6Eliezer Yudkowsky
So is everything else except biology and physics.
2[anonymous]
The memetic evolution of baroque music in Europe is a development towards learnability? There are probably no more than 100 people alive that can make their way through Bach's 2nd Partita for violin.

There are probably no more than 100 people alive that can make their way through Bach's 2nd Partita for violin.

I'm pretty sure you're underestimating that by...a lot. Fermi estimate time:

Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin) are a cornerstone of the violin repertory. We may therefore assume that every professor of violin at a major university or conservatory has performed at least one of them at least once, just like we may assume that every professor of mathematics has studied the Lebesgue dominated convergence theorem. How many professors of violin are there? Let's just consider one country, the United States. Each state in the U.S. has at least two major public universities (typically "University of X" and "X State University", where X is the state); some have many more, and this doesn't even count private universities. Personal experience suggests that the average big state university has about one professor of violin. There are 50 states in the U.S., so that's 100 people already right there. And we have yet to count:

  • every other country in the world (including European countries like Germany where the enthusiasm for art music in general and J.S.
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Ever notice how you never hear humans playing music that humans aren't capable of learning to play? I think there may be some selection effects at play here...

4[anonymous]
Well, I never notice the satisfaction of that contradiction, quite, but I do notice that the history of baroque music includes the steady achievement of theretofore unreached technical difficulty.
4Insert_Idionym_Here
It might be more accurate to say that pretty much everything, including what we call biology and physics -- humans are the ones codifying it -- is memetically selected to be learnable by humans. Not that it all develops towards being easier to learn.
0[anonymous]
Wouldn't we see more regularity in the structure of languages then? English and classical Latin are almost opposites by every measure I can think to apply to a language (complexity of grammar, diversity of vocabulary and idiom, etc.). This doesn't seem like a good assumption.
8A1987dM
English and Latin aren't even anywhere near as different as two natural languages can be. Take a look at this for a quick example, and take a look at the Language Construction Kit (it's about constructed languages, but AFAICT most of the things exemplified aren't completely unheard-of among natural languages) for a lot more. (There are quite a few linguistic universals, but I'm not entirely convinced that all of them exist because a language flouting one of them would be unlearnable by humans, rather than (say) because they were inherited from a common ancestor.)
3Juno_Watt
There doesn't have to be one solution to "memetically selected for learnabillity"

PROF. PLUM: What are you afraid of, a fate worse than death?
MRS. PEACOCK: No, just death; isn't that enough?

--Clue (1985)

"I don't really understand metaphysics or why it's needed." -- Matt Simpson

"Sketch version: There is no "no metaphysics" anwser, there is only "metaphysics I just unconsciously accept" and "metaphysics I've actually thought about". You can do it well or you can do it badly but you can't not do metaphysics." -- Andrew Summitt

[-][anonymous]100

This is a wild guess, but (on the assumption that you endorse this quote) is the thought that MWI stands in relation to experimentally testable physics as something like a metaphysical thesis, and that instrumentalism doesn't lack metaphysical theses of this kind, but simply refuses to acknowledge and examine them?

Anyway, a related quote, and so far as I know the oldest of this kind:

The man who is ready to prove that metaphysical knowledge is wholly impossible..is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory of first principles. -F. H. Bradley "Appearance and Reality" 1893

Actually, it was someone asking what the heck I meant by "reality fluid", to which the answer is that I don't know either which is why I always call it "magical reality fluid". I mean, I could add in something that sounded impressive and might to some degree be helpful along the lines of "It's the mind-projection-fallacy conjugate of 'probability' as it appears inside hypotheses about collections of real things in which some real things are more predicted to happen to me than others for purposes of executing post-observation Bayesian updates, like, if the squared modulus rule appearing in the Born statistics reflected the quantity present of an actual kind of stuff" but I think saying, "It's magic, which is the mind-projection-fallacy conjugate of 'I'm confused'" would be wiser in a conversation like that. I think it's very important not to create the illusion of knowing more than you do, when you try to operate at the frontiers of your own ability to be coherent. At the same time, refusing to digress into metaphysics even to demarcate the things that confuse you, even to form ideas which can be explicitly incoherent rather than implicitly incoherent, is indeed to become the slave of the unexamined thought.

1[anonymous]
Thanks for the explanation.
-1Shmi
I wonder if others find the notion of "magical reality fluid" a useful moniker for "I have no clear idea of what's going on here, but something does, so I cannot avoid thinking about it". I confess it does nothing for me.
8Eliezer Yudkowsky
Some people do (I have already received multiple comments to this effect). Mileage possibly varies.
2wedrifid
Signalling sophistication and confidence when there is no object level reason for such confidence is one of the more destructive of human social incentives. I heartily endorse measures to prevent this. Seeing that someone is willing to admit uncertainty at the expense of their dignity increases the confidence I can have that their other expressions of confidence are more than social bullshit. I would of course encourage you to stop using "magical reality fluid" as soon as possible. That is, after someone figures the philosophy (or epistemology or physics) out with something remotely approaching rigour.
1Benya
Much as I love the idea of this and would like it to work for me, unfortunately as far as I can tell my brain simply treats "magical reality fluid" the same way as it would something bland like "degree of reality". Though come to think of it, I'm not actually sure whether or not I've really been saying the magical part to myself all this time. I'll try to make sure I don't leave it out in the future, and see whether it makes a difference.
4TheOtherDave
FWIW, it does a fine job for me of conveying "I don't quite know what I'm talking about here."
1A1987dM
Hypothesis: Whether or not a readers finds that useful correlates with whether or not they've read this.
0A1987dM
I wouldn't if it was the first time I read that phrase, but since I read EY's explanation of what he means by it I have had no trouble in remembering that. Sure, a long phrase full of hyphens starting with “whatever-the-hell-it-is-that-” would be clearer, but it would also be more of a PITA to type, so I can see why EY wouldn't use it.
1gwern
Reminds me of Popper (World of Parmenides):

But consider: Newton has thought things that no man before has ever thought. A great accomplishment to be sure. Perhaps the greatest achievement any human mind has ever made. Very well - what does that say of Newton, and of us? Why, that his mind is framed in such a way that it can out-think anyone else's. So all hail Isaac Newton! Let us give him his due, and glorify and worship whatever generative force can frame such a mind.

Now consider Hooke. Hooke has perceived things that no man before us has ever perceived. What does that say of Hooke, and of us? That Hooke was framed in some special way? No, for just look at you, Robert - by your leave, you are stooped, asthmatic, fitful, beset by aches and ills, your eyes and ears are no better than those of men who've not perceived a thousandth part of what you have.

Newton makes his discoveries in geometrical realms, where our minds cannot go, he strolls in a walled garden filled with wonders, to which he has the only key. But you Hooke, are cheek-by-jowl with all of humanity in the streets of London. Anyone can look at the things you have looked at. But in those things you see what no one else has. You are the millionth human to lo

... (read more)

Don't you understand anything about commitment, about being a pro, about sticking with what you say you wanna be? You don't do it just when you feel good. You don't do it just when you're not tired. You don't do it just when it's sunny. You do it every day of your life. You do it when it hurts to do it, when it's the last thing in the world that you wanna do, when there are a million reasons not to do it. You do it because you're a professional.

-- Teddy Atlas

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them — especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind...

Daniel Dennett

0tingram
Out of curiosity, would you happen to know which book this is from?

If we think of an intuition pump as a carefully design persuasion tool, we can see that it might repay us to reverse engineer the tool, checking out all the moving parts to see what they are doing... consider the intuition pump to be a tool with many settings, and "turn all the knobs" to see if the same intuitions still get pumped when you consider different variations.

Daniel Dennett

1Jack
Is this from the new book?
1lukeprog
Yes. And yes, it's great.

You can't do much carpentry with your bare hands, and you can't do much thinking with your bare brain.

Bo Dahlbom

If you find it strange that I make no use of the qualities one calls heat, cold, moistness, and dryness…, as the philosophers [of the schools] do, I tell you that these qualities appear to me to be in need of explanation, and if I am not mistaken, not only these four qualities, but also all the others, and even all of the forms of inanimate bodies can be explained without having to assume anything else for this in their matter but motion, size, shape, and the arrangement of their parts.

-- René Descartes

[-]gwern100

All knowledge, every empirical statement about the real world, is an "if..., then..." proposition; there is no "fact" without "theory". But we buy knowledge with the assumptions we make - the more assumptions made, the more knowledge obtained. ...all knowledge is paid for; if the assumptions are correct, we have a bargain.

--Clyde Coombs, A theory of data 1964, pg284,488

-2Lumifer
That really asks for the Samuel Johnson's refutation...
0Vaniver
You mean, "if matter exists and I can sense it, then I will sense the collision of real objects"? Johnson's refutation was of "the world doesn't exist," with "I can sense it." Coombs' statement is "interpretation of facts rest upon theories, which rest upon assumptions." This holds true for sense data- "if I am not hallucinating, there is a monitor in front of me."
0Lumifer
No, I don't think so. Bishop Berkeley, after all, wasn't entirely clueless and was quite familiar with the sensory input. But what Samuel Johnson actually had in mind is besides the point. It seems to me that the requirement to list assumptions for basic sensory data (absent a strong prior as in e.g. "I swallowed a strong psychoactive ten minutes ago") is rather pointless. Yes, solipsism may be correct, or the universe might be a simulation the code of which is about to be changed, etc. but once you put into doubt the basic sensory reality around you (for example, a big stone in front of your foot) you will quickly be forced to assume it back or the substrate for your mind might not survive. It's kinda like the off-switch problem -- I think it comes from Iain Banks' Culture novels. The Minds, the super-intelligent AIs, love to go off into virtual worlds and play with, say, architecture in a six-dimensional space with varying gravity. They find much more utility by staying in the virtual reality compared to the actual one. But -- their "bodies", the computing substrate is still in reality. And if someone flips the off-switch in reality while the Mind is being happy in the virtual world, well...
3Vaniver
It's not clear to me why you think this. Repeating it every time is tiresome, sure, and so that's why the assumptions should be implicitly stated rather than explicitly stated, unless explicitly stating them helps in that situation. But the central claim is that "all data is theory-laden," which is an important point. It applies to what we perceive "directly" just as well as it applies to the chemical composition of photographs of distant galaxies (to use David Deutsch's example), and so I don't see how a Johnsonian objection would apply.
0Lumifer
An important point, yes, but one which should not be reduced to an absurdity. If, while walking, I stub my toe on a rock, which assumptions and theory make this fact "theory-laden"?
-4Juno_Watt
You explicitly stated "If, while waking...". I once had a dream where I was explaining to someone that I could not possibly be dreaming...

He who is firm in will molds the world to himself.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hermann und Dorothea, IX. 303.

6CronoDAS
George Bernard Shaw
5gothgirl420666
Can someone please explain to me how this is a rationality quote? (not sarcastic)
7wedrifid
Seems to be along the lines of encouraging proactive agency. (Actively taking actions to optimise the world according to his preferences.) An instrumental rationality lesson. (There are also less positive messages embedded there, which are a mix of anti-epistemology and dark arts, but I assume Malik is intending the instrumental message.)
-1gothgirl420666
It seems to me personally like the much more rational quote would be "He who is firm in will molds himself to the world."
3wedrifid
There is a sense in which that is true, but unfortunately it is very close in concept space to a less rational message. Once one has already internalised the notion and intent to optimise the world according to one's preferences by any means necessary then it is a critical additional insight that one must do so by adapting to the universe that is and choosing the most effective actions within that context. Without the proactive intent already firmly in place the advice to mold oneself to the world could be misleading.
2gothgirl420666
My guess is that the vast majority of the people who are trying to change the world would be better off trying to adapt to the situation they're in, both in small areas (e.g. someone who hates the fact his friends smoke would be better off not hanging around them when they smoke or just accepting it, rather than berating them and trying to get them to quit), and in big areas (e.g. someone who is extremely upset about injustice in the world would be better off carving out their own small niche in which they can do a small amount of good, rather than trying to alter foreign policy to save the whole continent of Africa). And when there are times when one person can do a whole lot of good in the world, it probably looks much more like "having an idea no one has had before and causing a ripple effect" than "molding the world to your will".
3Nornagest
Nietzsche's hilariously intense (albeit somewhat tempestuous) intellectual crush on Goethe makes a little more sense to me now.

if you have to choose between two explanations and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, choose the other one.

-Paul Graham

0ChristianKl
Is he basically proposing to do the opposite of Occam's razor?
7Qiaochu_Yuan
No, he's correcting for a self-serving bias in the way humans generate explanations.

In Germany in 1911 the minimum requirement for a professor was a head circumference of 52 centimeters. This was used to discriminate against women; [one] leading medical physicist of the time stated: "We do not have to ask for the head circumference of women of genius — they do not exist." At the same time... a French scientist of note pointed out that, on average, women had brains which were closer in size to gorillas than they were to those of men! These serve as good examples of trying to use some sort of measure to come to the conclusion that was wanted... in the first place.

Kevin Warwick

3Nornagest
I don't suppose you've got a cite for the central claim here? It's a decent enough example of reasoning from the bottom line whether or not it turns out to be true, but I Googled a couple different sets of keywords, and the only thing that came up besides a whole mess of birth records and obstetricians' papers was Warwick's lecture notes.
9Morendil
Google turns up a source for the "women of genius" quote, a book "Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities" by D. Halpern. The book's quote is from someone named Bayertahl, and it's an indirect quotation from a 1989 article, "Sexual Dimorphism in the Human Brain: Dispelling the Myths" supposedly by a J. Janowsky. I say supposedly because looking for a fulltext leads me to a version with a similar title ("Sexual Dimorphism of the Human Brain: Myths and Realities") but is by M. A. Hofman and D. F. Swaab; it contains the Bayertahl quote in the original German and says that the primary source is this 1932 article by a Louis Bolk, "Hersenen en Cultuur" (Brains and Culture). This is also a full text, in Dutch; Google's translation seems to roughly confirm the claim as reported by Warwick (though the "women of genius" quote does not seem to appear in Bolk's article, at a first cursory glance).
2Randaly
This cites "Bayerthall 1911".
1lukeprog
This paper is my best lead so far, but it's behind a paywall at the moment. I think it's in "Bayerthal (1911)", whatever that turns out to be.
1lukeprog
Bayerthal (1911) is unfortunately in German. Now I'm waiting for access to this paper.
0lukeprog
Got it. But see here in any case.

I am also thankful that, once I had an appetite for philosophy, I did not fall into the hands of some so-called wise man, and that I did not waste my time publishing or attempting to solve logical puzzles, or busy myself with observing the sky.

-Marcus Aurelius

5DanArmak
Observing the sky is good and productive science. Perhaps he meant that as an emperor (or responsible senator, etc) he should not have been drawn into a serious scientific or philosophical career, but for those who can afford the time and effort, it's a fine pursuit.

I was told that that part was actually a reference to astrology.

0loup-vaillant
Gasp, I definitely didn't read that way. Observing the sky sounded like science, and the logical puzzles sounded like math. Plus, it was already useful at the time: it helped keep track of time, predict seasons…
8NancyLebovitz
There's a bit in CS Lewis about modern people thinking of astrology and alchemy as the same sort of thing, but when they were current, astrology was a way of asserting an orderly universe while alchemy was asserting human power to make things very different.
0katydee
Quite so-- and less obvious applications are evidenced by the example of Thales.
3Eliezer Yudkowsky
That's actually kind of sad. Hopefully times have changed since then.

It's my understanding that Marcus Aurelius no longer voices this opinion.

6DanArmak
And the people who preserved his words to reach us were more like wise men who watched the skies and solved the puzzle of cheaply distributing text, than like emperors or philosophers.

“Monads and atoms both are infinitely small, yet everything is made out of them; and in considering how such a paradox is possible, we must look to the interactions among them <...> But either way, we’re obliged to explain the things we see — like the church-tower — solely in terms of those interactions. ”

“Solely, Doctor? ”

“Solely, your highness. For if God made the world according to understandable, consistent laws <...> then it must be consistent through and through, top to bottom. If it is made of atoms, then it is made of atoms, and must b

... (read more)
1Nisan
Huh, I thought the point of atoms is that they're not infinitely small.
0BerryPick6
Liebniz didn't like that.

Reality, for me, is what is true. The truth is whatever is in front of you, whatever is really happening. Whether you like it or not, it's raining now. "It shouldn't be raining" is just a thought. In reality, there is no such thing as a "should" or a "shouldn't." These are only thoughts that we impose onto reality. The mind is like a carpenter's level. When the bubble is off to one side -- "It shouldn't be raining" -- we can know that the mind is caught in its thinking. When the bubble is right in the middle -- &quo

... (read more)
2MixedNuts
The naive application of that is to go around thinking "I shouldn't be thinking about 'should' all the time! I should stop doing that! I'm not thinking like I should!".
2pjeby
I have not found that this actually helps. As Jamie Zawinski might put it, "Now you have two problems."
1[anonymous]
I was originally confused when I read this quote, assuming that "should" was being used in the sense of "morally just". It makes a lot more sense with "should" meaning "according to my model of reality". I assume the latter is the intended meaning.
2pjeby
A little of both. Her point is that human brains have a tendency to confuse "is" and "ought", mixing the moral or preferential with the actual, thereby clouding the issue. If you don't want it to be raining, then feeling or protesting that it shouldn't be happening is an error. But it's an error that human brains commonly make, because our genes wish us to signal our disapproval of things we find objectionable, so that others will be persuaded to behave differently. The problem is that reality isn't going to behave differently because you think it should, and most of the time even people aren't going to behave differently just because you think they should. Protesting that something should or shouldn't be a particular way is generally a non-helpful response to things as they are: if you want to change how things are, that change can only be made to happen in the future. At the present moment, things simply are how they are, and there is nothing you can do about that without using a time machine. (Even then, the change will still have to happen in your subjective future!) The reason this passage uses "raining" is that it's a relatively innocuous example to introduce the problems involved in "arguing with reality", in a non-controversial way. Most of the subjects touched on in the rest of the book are things that people usually feel much more strongly about... and therefore have even more reason to separate "is" and "ought" about. (Like, "my spouse should listen to me", to stick to a still relatively-innocuous example.)
0[anonymous]
I'm not sure I see the problem the quotation is attacking then. Allowing for the very real possibility that I'm oblivious or live in a bubble, my model of how people work has them understanding the difference between "ought" and "expected" most of the time. I get the impression that there is a real insight here into how people think about the world, but there's a disconnect between the idea and the author's words that I'm not bridging.
5pjeby
Understanding it and applying it are two different things, in the same way that knowing about a bias doesn't stop you from exhibiting it. People tend to obsess over things that "shouldn't have" happened -- a mistake they made, an embarrassing situation, something infuriating that somebody else did, or some impending but inevitable life change. They fret and scheme and worry and just can't seem to get it out of their mind, even if they want to. This behavior is generally caused by the alief that the thing "should not" have happened that way, or that the upcoming thing should not happen, or that they "should have done better", or some other "should" belief. Byron Katie's book is about a method of surfacing and questioning these aliefs, so as to stop fretting over what can't be changed, thus to focus on what can. As Quirrelmort put it: While Byron Katie and Quirrelmort would disagree on quite a few things, this is one thing they have in common. (Interestingly, her book "I need your love; is that true?" is very Quirrelmortish in the sense of highlighting how much people's seeming goodness or altruism is driven by self-centeredness -- but it's a book about how to stop doing that yourself, not using other people's actions as a way to justify doing more of it. Indeed, it's about being able to have compassion for the misguided or self-centered actions of others, not contempt ala Quirrelmort. Hm. Actually, the more I think about it, the more she seems like a true opposite to Quirrelmort, in a way that neither Harry nor Dumbledore are. If she were in-world, she'd be sort of like a non-naive McGonagall crossed with a Dumbledore who could not be made to despair or blinded by grief or regret or vengeance.)

The most common mistake that people make in this regard is believing other people. For instance, a testimonial— whether it comes to you from a friend or blares out at you from a TV screen—is a poor criterion for determining truth.

A case in point is the experience of a writer for a popular fitness magazine who once wrote a facetious article about a “miracle supplement.” At the bottom of the page on which the article appeared, he had the magazine’s art department create a perforated square roughly the size of a postage stamp, next to which appeared the foll

... (read more)

We are enormously indebted to those academics; what could be more advantageous in an intellectual contest--whether it be bridge, chess, or stock selection--than to have opponents who have been taught thinking is a waste of energy?

Warren Buffet on proponents of the efficient market hypothesis

If you attempt to make sense of the world of ideas and meanings, free will and morality, art and science and even philosophy itself without a sound and quite detailed knowledge of evolution, you have one hand tied behind your back.

Daniel Dennett

6John_Maxwell
Does Dennett offer supporting arguments for this assertion?

When you have spoken the word, it reigns over you. When it is unspoken you reign over it.

-Arabian proverb

7Eliezer Yudkowsky
...this seems exactly, diametrically wrong.

Why do you say that? Many times, you say something publicly, it then becomes part of your identity, and after that there is a subconscious force that tries to make sure that your future actions and words are in line with what you said earlier.

3[anonymous]
This is also what I take from the quote - before I state a belief out loud I have a much easier time adjusting and retracting it - once it's out there, I've got pride and status tied up with it being right. Once I realized this a few years ago I starting making a conscious effort to not say things out loud until I was extremely confident that I was right. I still make this mistake more often than I would like, but less frequently.

...this seems exactly, diametrically wrong.

I would have said merely wrong. ie. When reversed it would still be stupidity. There seem to be both advantages and disadvantages to public expression with respect to it influencing you. Something along the lines of identity commitments on one side and the potential for denial, hypocrisy and lack of feedback on the other.

4Dorikka
One of the things that I dislike about aphorisms is that they sometimes compress insight so much that it's not easy to see what they were actually saying. I intuitively think that this is sometimes done because sounding deeply wise is often high status.
2khafra
I thought over verbal overshadowing when I read it.
3cody-bryce
A not-entirely-different quote has been posted in the past –A.L. Kitselman
1DanielLC
I'm not sure what that means.

An objection that can be brought against everything ought not to be brought against anything.

Lee Kelly.

[-][anonymous]50

Rodger Cotes defending Newton from the charge that his theory treats gravity as an occult cause:

I can hear some people disagreeing with this conclusion and muttering something or other about occult qualities. They are always prattling on and on to the effect that gravity is something occult, and that occult causes are to be banished completely from philosophy. But it is easy to answer them: occult causes are not those causes whose existence is very clearly demonstrated by observations, but only those whose existence is occult, imagined, and not yet prove

... (read more)

The stony path to truth is competing with seductive, easier paths that turn out to be dead ends.

Marcel Kinsbourne, quoted in Dennett (2013)

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

Matthew 7:13-14

-We can't go back. We don't understand everything yet.

-"Everything" is a little ambitious. We barely understand anything.

-Yeah. But that's what the first part of understanding everything looks like.

--from the ongoing animation xkcd: Time, dialogue transcript found here

Time is a created thing. To say "I don't have time" is to say "I don't want to"

  • Lao Tzu
[-]gwern120

Citation? I've read the Tao Teh Ching in a few translations and I don't recognize that at all; a Google and Google Books makes it sound like the usual apocrypha.

1JQuinton
Yeah, I could only find it in Google so I don't know the actual source. Lao Tzu is as good as any name, I suppose, if the name is translated literally.
4wedrifid
This is technically true for inclusive definitions of 'want' but highly misleading. There is a world of difference between "I want X but the opportunity cost (Y) is too great" and "I actively prefer !X". X and Y may be the prevention of parasitic worm infections and combating malaria. Precisely which limited resource is being allocated (time or money) changes little. If "I don't have time" is to be replaced with an expression which conveys more personal acceptance of responsibility then it would be reasonable to translate it to "I have other priorities" but verging on disingenuous to translate it into "I don't want to".
0Lumifer
I think you're reading this too literally. To my mind this says "You have the power to allocate your time" which is a non-trivial realization to some people. You can also understand this as saying "You allocate time to tasks according to how much you want to do them", an observation which also does not always rise to the conscious level.
1Vladimir_Nesov
This also requires a strange definition of "want" in order to become correct. Actions chosen for instrumental reasons sometimes differ from both the emotional urge and the all-else-equal reasoned preference, and so it's not particularly natural to include them under the label of "wanting".
0Lumifer
I see no problems with filing "actions chosen for instrumental reasons" under the category of "want" in this context. They could be consolidated with their goal, anyway -- for time allocation purposes there is not much sense in separating "walking to the fridge and opening it" out of the general "get a beer".
1Vladimir_Nesov
This becomes problematic when you try to distinguish an instrumental decision from its terminal valuation, for example "I don't want to be commuting to work, but I choose to do so in order to get there." (negative all-else-equal valuation, positive instrumental valuation).
0Lumifer
Again: in this context. Sometimes you need to decompose instrumentality from its terminal goal, sometimes you don't need to.

To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.

--Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs, "Western Civ"

8AlanCrowe
That clashes in an interesting way with the recent post on Privileging the Question. Let us draw up our own, independent list of things that matter. There will be some, high up our list, about which our culture has no particular belief. Our self imposed duty is to find out whether they are true or not, leaving less important, culturally prominent beliefs alone. Culture changes and many prominent beliefs of our culture will fade away, truth unchecked, before we are through with more urgent matters.
1cousin_it
I'm not sure you have avoided the question completely. When culture tells you, "X is the most important thing on which I have no particular belief", do you believe it?

Rationality is not the gold standard against which all other forms of thought are to be judged. Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged, along with all other forms of thought.

  • D. S. Wilson.

"If someone tells you their results before the results are gathered, be suspicious."

I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive, - Randall Munroe.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
0BerryPick6
That's been posted at least twice before that I can remember.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

  • Hannah Arendt
1Shmi
That's not true at all. It's those who made up their minds to be good but aren't who do the most evil.
3Eliezer Yudkowsky
I'm not sure that's true in aggregate. I think most of the evil is done by people going along with things - like, if you talked to them about it for a while they'd concede that some aspects of what they were going along with were sort of questionable and maybe a bit bad, but they don't think about that spontaneously.
-1Shmi
Right, sure, every evil overlord needs a group of willing henchmen and an army of reluctant-to-object enablers. So, the original quote is probably right "in aggregate", though not in the amount of evil per person. Even then, how do you attribute/distribute the amount of evil between, say, Pol Pot ordering the destruction of intelligentsia and the genocide of the Chinese minority and a peasant working his rice field in the countryside, occasionally affirming his allegiance to the regime, as required? Hmm, I recall HPMoR!Quirrell talking about it, but I'm not sure how much of it is author tract.
0mostrum
Does this imply that it's in the act of making up your mind?
1Shmi
What do you think? When did Nero, Queen Isabella, Robespierre, Lenin or Pol Pot become evil and why?
0grendelkhan
I think the problem is that it should take more than one explicitly evil person per country to cause that much damage.
-2JQuinton
I saw the quote as an allusion to friendly/unfriendly AI.

"People don't pay much attention to anything unless you give them reason to"

--The Night Circus

2DanArmak
People don't do anything unless they have a reason to - given a sufficiently broad definition of "reason".

Illustration of availability bias:

Baldrick: But then I will go to Hell forever for stealing.

Blackadder: Believe me, Baldrick, eternity in the company of Beelzebub, and all his hellish instruments of death, will be a picnic compared to five minutes with me... and this pencil.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVM4jR3TZsU

8pinyaka
Thus the availability bias defeats the Pascal mugging.

"Take a step back. Look at the bigger picture. That's how you devour a whale. One bite at a time."

-Congressman Frank Underwood in the TV series House of Cards

Suppose that, unlike in the “stone soup” scenario I outlined above, it eventually becomes clear that quantum annealing can be made to work on thousands of qubits, but that it’s a dead end as far as getting a quantum speedup is concerned. Suppose the evidence piles up that simulated annealing on a conventional computer will continue to beat quantum annealing, if even the slightest effort is put into optimizing the classical annealing code. If that happens, then I predict that the very same people now hyping D-Wave will turn around and—without the slighte

... (read more)
-2Eugine_Nier
Well, academia itself has been attempting to get away from doing the opposite. This is most noticeable in fields like medicine and especially psychology, where anyone disagreeing with whatever the consensus is at the moment is considered an anti-scientific flat-earther, whereas the fact that this consensus itself nearly reverses every couple decades is rarely brought up. Furthermore, on the occasions when someone does bring it up, the standard response is to say that the strength of science is that it can change it's consensus.
4satt
Which vicennial cycles of academic consensus have you found most noticeable?
1Eugine_Nier
Well, the standard example is nutrition advice. Other reasonably well-known examples include whether post-menopausal women should take estrogen supplements, and how dangerous marijuana is. An example with a longer period is the whole issue with eugenics.
2gwern
How many times has the academic consensus on those reversed, and does that match your original claim that for these century-plus old fields like medicine, ? EDIT: feel free to reply to my challenge any time, Eugine.
0satt
I thought you might be thinking of nutrition and something like eugenics, but wasn't sure because I didn't think they fitted the criteria that well. Anyway, thanks for indulging my curiosity.
-2Eugine_Nier
One interesting thing about eugenics, is that many of the people who supported the consensus on it while it was popular are still considered respectable whose support for eugenics is downplayed. Conversely, the people who opposed it while it was popular are still considered anti-science loons through the popular telling of misleading versions of history.

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

-- Eric Hoffer

5Randy_M
Perhaps, but absolute power tends to be the more relevant one, as it definitionally also includes the means to persue the goals derived from absolute corruption. I wonder where one could apply "Absolute" and not come up with a scary sounding conclusion. Absolute skepticism seems it would turn one into a gibbering madman. Absolute logic--well what is a dangerous AI but absolute logic plus power?
3Baruta07
Absolute knowledge also seems like it'd leave you gibbering... Just think about it: knowledge of everything, that is to say every atom of every single object in the universe. I can only say Ouch
2DanielLC
Absolute goodness? Anything else would be problematic. Making people smile is good. Tiling the universe with microscopic smiley faces is not.
1Randy_M
Absolute goodness seems tautalogically good. If you pick any one good trait or action and maximize it it grows ominous again.
2DanielLC
That's why I chose it. Like the smiling example I gave.
0Randy_M
Oh, actually I didn't see the connection with the smile-tile and the making people smile statements at first read. Since it isn't quite correct to say making people smile is good, but rather people smiling is typically a sign something good has happened. So a better (albeit common) example might be making people happy is good, wireheading is scary. But any connection to the top level post is growing tenuous.
1notriddle
Absolute non-contradiction? Since anything else (that is, any contradictory statement) is absolutely horrible, if absolute non-contradiction is also horrible then nothing good exists. edit: s/than nothing/then nothing/

The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 25-50 million people. World War II killed 60 million people; 107 is the order of the largest catastrophes in humanity’s written history. Substantially larger numbers, such as 500 million deaths, and especially qualitatively different scenarios such as the extinction of the entire human species, seem to trigger a different mode of thinking—enter into a ‘separate magisterium’. People who would never dream of hurting a child hear of an existential risk, and say, ‘Well, maybe the human species doesn’t really deserve to survive.’

... (read more)
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[-]Pablo140

Can someone explain to me what is going on here? The comment is getting downvoted and Eliezer himself is telling me not to quote him (or so it appears--it's not clear whether he is being serious or not). Before deciding to post the comment, I read the instructions closely and it seemed clear that the quote--which comes from a published book, not from LW, OB, or HPMoR--didn't violate any of the rules. Maybe this is all obvious to those who post regularly on this section, but I am myself rather puzzled by the whole thing.

Can someone explain to me what is going on here?

You have the honour to have provoked the introduction of a new guideline (or a more explicit and precise modified version of an existing one). The norms shall henceforth be clearer to everyone. Bravo!

The spirit of the no-LW, OB, HPMoR rule is that the community shouldn't be quoting itself in quotes threads. That has a dangerous echo chamber-y feel to it.

3Pablo
Thanks. I didn't perceive that this was the spirit of the rule precisely because it was explicitly restricted to apply to writings from certain websites and ebooks. If the purpose is to ban quotes by (past and present) members of LessWrong, why not simply write, "No quotes by past or present members of LessWrong"?

There's a family resemblance effect going on here. Since Eliezer is the founder of the site, quoting him violates the spirit of the rule more strongly than quoting off-site writings of other Less Wrongers.

0Qiaochu_Yuan
Dunno. Maybe that's what it should be.
0Shmi
Just don't quote Eliezer and you should be safe. Better yet, don't quote any of the LW regulars, regardless of where you found the quote. If you want to share something they posted elsewhere, use the Open thread or create a Discussion post, if it's interesting enough and you have something to add to the quote.
3Eliezer Yudkowsky
Thou shalt not quote Yudkowsky.
[-][anonymous]210

...how are we supposed to tell people about this rule?

Edit: Aw, I thought it was funny.

4Nornagest
Ever played Mao)?
1[anonymous]
Saying the name of the game ::gives card:: One of my fondest childhood memories.
0wedrifid
"We don't put quotes from Eliezer in the Rationality Quotes thread" seems to work. Quoting the expression of an authority is a way to lend persuasiveness to your rule assertion but it is not intrinsic to the process of rule explaining. I can tell people "Don't drive through intersections when the lights are red" and I'm telling someone about the rule without quoting anything.
9Kawoomba
Understood.
4Shmi
Is this a trivial extension of to include SI/MIRI stuff or a new commandment?

I think that the purpose of the current instruction is to refrain from quoting ourselves and each other. So I'd see it as a trivial extension to understand that Eliezer and other well-known members of the community should not be used for a source for quotes.

2Eliezer Yudkowsky
Yep, that trivial extension one.
-24Jiro

"Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?" "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"

  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2
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1gwern
Dupe: http://lesswrong.com/lw/8n9/rationality_quotes_december_2011/5erg
0[anonymous]
Aww, sorry. Do I delete it?
[-]Shmi-10

From Richard Feynman one last letter to his first wife, over a year after her death from TB (incidentally, antibiotics had been discovered and were being tested on humans a few months before her death; a year sooner, and she would have had a good chance of recovery):

My darling wife, I do adore you.
I love my wife. My wife is dead.
Rich.

P.S. Please excuse my not mailing this -- but I don't know your new address.

Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman.

The whole letter and the rest of the book is well wor... (read more)

0mostrum
Key-lock diaries aren't for no one but the writer.
[-]elharo-20

When it comes to understanding how our universe evolves, religion and theology have been at best irrelevant. They often muddy the waters, for example, by focusing on questions of nothingness without providing any definition of the term based on empirical evidence. While we do not yet fully understand the origin of our universe, there is no reason to expect things to change in this regard. Moreover, I expect that ultimately the same will be true for understanding of areas that religion now considers its own territory, such as human morality.

Science has been... (read more)

[-]Shmi-20

More from Scott Aaronson:

maybe there’s a yet-undiscovered law of physics implying that every Earth-like planet must eventually contain at least one kangaroo!

Replying to a many-world-like question

1wedrifid
While the linked to blog post discussion is somewhat interesting it seems misleading to call it a 'many-world-like question'. In trying to extract the 'rationalist moral' from the link perhaps the best quote that I can extract is the preceding sentence: At a stretch the 'rationalist moral' could be the general principle 'Don't make logical errors just because infinity confuses you'. (I'd certainly endorse that as an often neglected insight!)
[-]Shmi-30

Even more from the same source:

OK, now I’ll try to address free will.

Like consciousness, free will has an aspect that seems outside the scope of scientific investigation almost by definition. Are “you” the author of your choices? Well, what exactly do we mean by “you”? No matter what sequence of physical causes, random events, or even supernatural interventions led up to your making a particular choice, a skeptic could always claim that the choice wasn’t really made by “you,” but only by an impersonating demon that looks and acts like you.

On the other ha

... (read more)
6NancyLebovitz
A example of possibly resolvable different directions--
2MixedNuts
"If you are too different, you're probably going to break up" is not so groundbreaking that it's worth three minutes of your readers' lives.