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ExaminedThought comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013) - Less Wrong
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My name is Crystal, and I'm 25 years old. I don't see a lot of female names around here but I guess I'm used to that. I was the only girl in most of my college engineering classes. I was the only female programmer where I worked.
I've always tried to be rational in an intuitive sort of way. Knowing the truth is one of my prime life motivators, and I've always been strange to others because of it.
People so often don't want the truth because it hurts, but I've tended to treat that hurt like a thrill seeker would. I came up with a little motto for myself, "We grow by questioning what we know."
I have a shit ton of curiosity. I ask questions along the lines of "I wonder why..." that make people look at me like I've grown a second head. When ideas sound really strange, I want to investigate them. I grew up reading my dad's moldy Asimov books. I love reading and read tons of non-fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy.
Growing up, I wanted to be a scientist and a writer. I wanted to do both, perhaps, because I thought writers could never make any money. But I also wanted to help colonize space, which from a young age I thought was crucial to humanity’s survival.
After I finished my Computer Engineering and Computer Science degree, I set out to find a job. I'm not totally sure why I picked that major. I think I wanted to build Asimov's robots, but I'm not totally sure of my motivations now. I took the highest paying job offer I received and then I worked like a good worker bee. I was firmly on the Proper Path according to everyone I knew.
And I wanted to shoot myself in the head because programming business portals and websites for big chain restaurants was so utterly incompatible with how I saw the world and how I wanted to spend my time. I did not think I was contributing anything positive to the world with my work. I decided to leave my job without knowing what I wanted to do instead. I've been living on my savings and thinking I've been experiencing a dreadful existential crisis.
Through my years of researching ideas that struck me as strange, I've collected more and more traits that normal people find weird. I don't like ever wearing shoes. I'm a minimalist. I don't think advertising is moral. I don't buy much of anything physical. I don't think businesses have much incentive to be healthy or ethical. I'm not a Democrat or a Republican. I don't think voting third party helps. I've lied to my family that I've actually voted because they're horrified that someone wouldn't. I stopped eating meat. I'm an atheist. I've just recently heard of transhumanism and it feels like I've FINALLY found like minded people in that regard. I could come up with more, but that's probably enough.
I started blogging years ago and had no idea what the overall theme of the crap I was writing was. It took me a lot of writing to figure out what I was even trying to say. But I think what I've been writing about is my own convoluted stumbling around in the dark on how to think better. Trying to be rational when I didn't know Rationality was a Discipline.
I stumbled across HP:MoR on July 19, 2013 and read it all within four days. I always thought the snitch was stupid. And Ron was annoyingly dumb. I've read a ton of pop science books and even knew of some of the studies and biases that Harry/Eliezer talked about. Reading it was a weird feeling of focusing so much of what I've been stumbling around with into a Coherent Thing.
Then I moved on to the sequences that were referenced from HP:MoR. I downloaded the ebook copy for my Kindle. I've only read 20% of them, but I feel the very way I think changing again. A lot of it confirms what I already thought, but there's also epiphany after epiphany. When I go to sleep lately, I notice my thoughts are a nonsensical blend of probability this and that.
The sequences are like what I almost blindly wanted to do with my blog. But the sequences are obviously a million times better. What little I've written is put to shame. I would consider myself a Rationalist now only because I am on the path. I am very unconfident in my skills at this point.
It's not like your username sounds obviously feminine either, so how confident you are about whether a given user (except the obvious ones, say lukeprog or NancyLebovitz) is male or female?
But yes, according to the last survey, only around 10% of the people here are women, and even fewer among the most prolific contributors.
Digging through the survey, I'm surprised to see Myers Briggs types listed. I was wondering if LWers considered it to be pseudoscience before I even saw the question.
I wouldn't assume about the ones that aren't actual names. But I also wouldn't have guessed the number was as low as 10%!
Well, given that LW is/was* predominantly appealing to STEM-types, with a focus on computer science-y topics (artificial intelligence), decision theory etc., it's no wonder that the gender gap here reflects the gender gap in e.g. computer science colleges:
Edit: * "was" because Harry Potter!
Welcome!
Have you tried out Vibrams? I have found them to be a delightful shoe replacement.
That feeling will fade as you read and do more. I do want to call back to something you said earlier, though:
This is where you want to end up; it's one thing to talk a good game about biases, and another to understand them on the five second level. While reading through the sequences, it's helpful to try to turn the epiphanies into actions or reactions, rather than just abstract knowledge.
If you are interested in putting your programming skills to work on rationality education, you might want to get to know some people at CFAR; there are a number of useful things that could exist but don't yet because no one has programmed them. (Here's an example of one of the useful things that does exist.)
I do have a pair of Vibrams! The sprint model. Those and flip flops are all I wear.
I'm not sure how to turn most of the epiphanies into actions. But I try to think of examples of how myself or others have failed at a particular aspect of it. Is that what you mean by reactions? I'm the type of person to read it all as fast as possible and then go back and try to implement specific actions during a reread. Although some of the general frame of mind is already rubbing off on me I think.
Thank you for the suggestion about CFAR. I will be looking into it.
Sort of. The main thing is identifying a situation that will trigger a behavior. For example, whenever I notice I'm the least bit confused, I say out loud "I notice I am confused." This is an atomic action that I can do out of habit, and which will make me much more likely to follow up on the confusion. Oftentimes, this will be something like saying "event is on Saturday the 25th," and then noticing that Saturday isn't the 25th. This is something I really ought to get to the bottom of, because thinking the event is on the wrong day will lead to missing the event, which is totally preventable at this point if I notice my confusion.
Most people have defaults against noticing this sort of thing, though (I know I definitely did, even knowing a lot of decision science and about baises). Having a specific plan of action makes it way easier to react the right way in the moment, and having a workaround for one bias is better than knowing about twenty biases.
This is a better approach, I think, but I'm leery of recommending it because enough people have trouble reading through the sequences one time that suggesting it two times seems like asking too much.
I know this isn't true for everyone, but for me, Eliezer's writing is really fun to read; I've reread many of his posts just on that basis. The Sequences do have some dense parts, but for most parts, I couldn't tear myself away.
I applaud your pragmatic response to ridiculous social pressure.
I also prefer bare feet, though to a lesser extent. I hate wearing just socks, but I don't mind wearing worn tennishoes that bend easily.
Welcome to Less Wrong!
I don't have much else to say, except that several of your "traits that normal people find weird" are ones I share:
I've been approaching that view myself, more and more, but I don't think I've seen this talked about much here (not directly, anyway; a lot of the "Dark Arts" / manipulation discussions are applicable, though). I think it would be cool if you wrote a post or two about your thoughts on this issue. (And/or linked to any related blog posts you might have, if you're willing.)
Agreed.
Also agreed. This view, I think many people here share.
Yes, my family has a similar reaction to the idea of not voting.
Click me!
I was going to link to that. You beat me at linking to my own post!
Note: the post talks about priming research. I made the following comment there:
In general, a lot of research on priming is statistically dubious. There are a few robust findings, but there's also a lot of stuff that doesn't hold up under closer examination.
Welcome to LW. :)
Thanks!
Hm, well, it seems that I agree with the recommendations in the post; I use AdBlock (and get rather angry when certain websites try to guilt-trip me about doing so), and I don't watch commercials on TV (by not watching shows on TV at all). (Here's a question: does anyone know of a way to get rid of ads in Youtube videos?)
Of course, living in a city, it's difficult to avoid advertisements entirely. Billboards are all over the place.
What I'd like to see are discussions about the ethics of advertisement — that is, is it just unethical for companies to use these techniques? (And if so, what forms of advertisement are ok?) Is it unethical to advertise at all? My intuitions say "yes" to the former and "no" to the latter, but I haven't examined said intuitions very deeply.
I don't actually see ads on YouTube and assumed it was because of AdBlock.
Aha — it seems the extension you suggested is Adblock Plus (lowercase b), whereas I had been using an unrelated one called AdBlock (capital B, no "Plus"). I've now switched and the YouTube ads seem to be gone!
I'm sure many do; I agree with both statements. But I would caution against caching, or worse, identifying with, the belief that voting in general is pointless or otherwise not to be done.
As to my agreement with the beliefs stated: political identification is certainly a mind-killer, so it's a good idea not to identify internally as a member of a political party. Also, the existing major parties, and their leaders, are inevitably badly flawed, but using your single plurality vote (the only one you get in most English-speaking countries) to support a third party candidate isn't going to accomplish anything.
But I'd still encourage people to vote.
I have an ulterior motive for saying this. Personally, I feel the need to have some amount of not-entirely-rational hope to keep me going. I find some of that hope in voting system reform (which is also a gratifyingly interesting hobby). This sort of structural reform has little chance of succeeding if all the people who are unhappy with the current system become identified with not voting.
But even if you do not share my interest in this reform, I think there are times when participating in politics (which generally includes voting as one of the most basic steps) is a sensible and useful thing to do. The major parties will always be very flawed, but there are times when one of the choices on the ballot is clearly more flawed and when the power of participating is significant.
Would you caution this more strongly than you might caution against caching, or identifying with, any other comparably-specific belief?
Let's say we agree that "participating in politics" is a sensible and useful thing to do (I don't, for many nontrivial meanings of the phrase, but this is for the sake of argument). Is voting actually a meaningful, or effective, or necessary way to go about doing so? If so, why and how?
Are there many instances when one choice is clearly more flawed, such that you can see this in advance, and you also have a nontrivial chance of affecting the outcome with your participation?
For example, let's say it's 2012, and I think Obama is horrible, just horrible, and that him being re-elected would be a disaster (and I also somehow know that Romney will be a good president). I am in New York. What would you say, roughly, is the chance that with my vote, Romney takes NY, but without my vote, Obama takes NY?
Depends on what you mean by "comparably-specific". The belief I spoke of was a generalization: that because a certain set of elections were not worth worrying about, that all future elections will not be. A notable feature of elections is their variability; it is clearly the case that results vary.
A single vote is massively unlikely to affect anything important. Political campaigns, however, can have a reasonable probability of doing so. Campaigns are about convincing large numbers of people to vote in a certain way. The messages you put out about whether or not you intend to vote affect your friends. A 2012 study using a facebook button showed that by voting themselves, individuals could bring 4.5 other voters to the polls. Obviously the specific circumstances of that study are not likely to repeat, but the overall message that it's about more than just your one vote are likely to be applicable more generally. If you intend to canvass or phonebank, of course, this is even more relevant; it is likely that voting yourself is a better investment than trying to lie effectively about whether you believe individual votes matter.
Again, we'd have to define the terms, but if you have a significant altruistic term in your utility function I think it's a good bet.
Your choices are to be a habitual voter, a habitual nonvoter, or an occasional voter based on individual calculations of the expected value of each election. Whichever choice you make is leaky; if you have friends, they will be influenced by your decision. In this circumstance, being an occasional voter seems unlikely to be rational; your outlay on calculating the expected value, and the reduced contagion of your voting decision even when you do find that a specific election is worth it, probably overwhelm the trivial effort you save by not voting.
So the question is, is it worth a few hours a year to be a habitual voter? It would be easy to overestimate the cost, but remember, this should be compared not against the most effective possible use of those hours, but against the average effectiveness of your non-work hours. In dollar terms, this is probably a lifetime cost in the high four or low five figures. There is at least 10 times that money at stake in even the most trivial local election. You have to discount that by the weight of the altruism term in your utility function and by the average difference in quality between frontrunners, but for me those terms together shrink it by less than half an order of magnitude, so I'll ignore them.
So if there's better than a 10-30% chance that you will participate in an election with a margin of under around 5 votes (your vote plus the net margin of your social penumbra divided by two) in your lifetime, then voting is worth it. At 4 small local elections a year for 50 years, that means that if average margins are less than about 600-2000 votes on those elections, then it's likely to be worth it, without accounting for any intrinsic values (such as the feeling of having participated). That's in the right ballpark.
Roughly zero. And you'd multiply that by the chances that the national election swung on NY, which are also small. So great, you've found an example where voting wasn't worth it. Do you think it's safe to generalize from that example?
As I argued above, the main value of being a habitual voter is in convincing your friends to vote in small local elections; and yet you will probably spend more time talking with them about Obama and Romney than about your local sheriff or school board or judge or public transit administrator. That's not logical, but that's how people are.
I barely have 4.5 people that I ever discuss politics with, and all of their political views are at least as established as mine. I would be surprised if my voting brought so much as one other voter to the polls.
Good god, no!
This is contrary to my experience.
Am I really likely to spend more effort on deciding whether to vote than on deciding whom to vote for? Especially in local elections?
The problem is not that deciding to vote is itself some difficult, complex decision. The problem (well, a problem, anyway) is that in any election where I'm even remotely likely to influence the outcome (i.e. local elections), I have to spend a tremendous effort to even get enough relevant information about the candidates to make an informed decision, much less consider and analyze said information. And this isn't even factoring in the effort required to have a sufficient understanding of "the issues", and the political process, etc., all of which are crucial in figuring out what the effects of your vote will be.
One of my friends engages in political advocacy, votes, canvasses, researches candidates, and all that stuff. I see how much of her time it takes up. Personally, I think it's a colossal waste of her intelligence and talents. She could be writing, for example (which she does also, to be fair, but she could be writing more), or doing something else far more interesting and productive.
Also:
How do you figure this? Why aren't we comparing to work hours? And why are we valuing non-work hours only in money earned?
I think we've mostly said what we have to say, and this is off-topic.
My numbers showed that at best voting is instrumentally a break-even proposition. I do it because I find it hedonically rational; for instance, I don't have to lie to my family about it. Part of what makes it a net plus for me hedonically is that I have a vision and a plan for a world where a better voting system (such as approval voting or SODA voting) is used and so I am not doomed to eternally pick the lesser of two evils. I can understand if Crystal makes a different decision for her own hedonic reasons.
I also suspect that metarational considerations such as timeless decision theory would argue in favor of it, because free riding on other people's voting effort is akin to betrayal in a massively-multiplayer prisoners' dilemma. I have not worked out the math on that, but my mathematical intuition tends to be pretty good.
Your description of your friends' advocacy suggests you are attached to the idea that politics is a waste of time, not just for you, but for others. I suspect that belief of yours is not making you or anyone else happier. I recognize that you could probably make the converse criticism of me, but I am happy to prefer a world where aspiring rationalists vote to one where they don't (even when their vote would probably be negatively correlated with mine, as I suspect yours would be).
I waffle about this a lot.
Sure, one effect -- perhaps even the overwhelmingly primary effect -- of my vote is to influence which candidate gets elected, and to use that power responsibly I have to know enough to decide which candidate would be better to elect, which requires tremendous effort. (Of course, that's only an argument for not-voting if responsibly using my power to not-vote doesn't require equal knowledge/effort, but either way that's beside my point.)
But another effect is to reward or punish campaigns, which has an effect on the kind of campaigns that get run in the future, and it often seems to me that this is worth doing and requires less knowledge to do usefully.
Of course, the magnitude of the effects in question are so miniscule it's hard to care very much in either case.
I think most of your points here are well made, but
Most people do not have the option to add more hours of work and thereby receive more money at the same rate. If you work a salaried 9-5, it's misleading to calculate the value of your time as if your hours not already committed to work could be converted to money at the same rate, and even if you do work at a job that allows you to work overtime hours, you'll generally only have the choice of whether to make that tradeoff for specific hours out of your week, not any hour as-desired.
If you're typically employed, your work hours are already committed, so for the most part you only need to evaluate the tradeoffs on your remaining hours.
Well, all of that is actually false for me, as I can work my hours whenever I feel like, but that's moot; I feel like your comment addresses a point other than the one I made.
What I meant was — are we stipulating that voting necessarily takes place during hours when I can't work? Why? That seems unwarranted.
Also, I repeat this part of my question, which none of the above reasoning touches at all:
Let's say I work a salaried 9-5, have no option to work more, and vote after I leave work.
There's still some opportunity cost. Maybe I miss my favorite TV show or my WoW raid or whatever. Maybe I don't get to spend as much time with my family. Maybe I get less sleep. Why should we ignore such costs?
I agree that it's not wise to ignore the associated opportunity costs, but it's a rather common fallacy (at least, one that's popped up quite often here) that one's time is fungible for money at the rate one is compensated for work.
On the other hand, for many individuals there are also likely to be associated gains, such as the fact that voting tends to be widely viewed as an effective signal of conscientiousness. Personally, whatever my feelings about the likelihood of my vote having a meaningful effect on the course of an election, I would prefer most of my acquaintances to think of me as the sort of person who votes.
I, on the other hand, would really rather not be thought of as the sort of person who votes.
Who are your acquaintances that they view voting as an effective signal of conscientiousness? Like... normal people, or something? Because that's weird.
For someone who lives in New York? Yes. Yes it is.
(will respond to rest of your post later)