In my opinion, this is Establishment writing (Mao and Stalin as the "bad guys") only problematic to me because the strength against challenges of your presented ideas nontransparently rest on power alignment, rather than just their accuracy of modeling apparent reality and devising solutions to challenges we face.

This is the great case against hypocrisy, that hypocrisy allows us to act contrary to our ideals, and at times our ideals could have prevented holocausts. I suppose on the other side of the ledger must go the various "social graces" where hypocrisy supposedly smooths social interactions and lets us save face. Is there a way to weigh these two sides against each other, or is there a way to distinguish them, so we could have the good hypocrisy without excessive risk of the bad slipping in too?

When did Tyler say that overcoming bias is not important? Are you talking about this post here: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/08/how-important-i.html

He says it's not the most important thing in the world, not that it's not important. So, is your reading of Cowen biased? Or did I miss something?

J, that's Tyler quoting a summary of Hanson, not Tyler himself.

Robin, I think it'd be pretty silly to trade off social graces against the Inquisition, especially when some creative thinking could devise alternative social graces.

Seriously, we're trading off social graces against what?

In all human history, every great leap forward has been driven by a new clarity of thought. Except for a few natural catastrophes, every great woe has been driven by a stupidity. Our last enemy is ourselves; and this is a war, and we are soldiers.

Amazing quote.

Summary: if they can make you believe absurdities, they can make you commit atrocities.

Amen.

"In my opinion, this is Establishment writing (Mao and Stalin as the "bad guys") only problematic to me because the strength against challenges of your presented ideas nontransparently rest on power alignment, rather than just their accuracy of modeling apparent reality and devising solutions to challenges we face."

Don't you love post modernists? their rhetoric is frankly baffling to common sense (what they would term a mental power-structure - I'm not sure even they understand what it is their writing half the time)

Its obviously been long since humanity had to strive for objectivity and earnest disinterest because human bias was creating so much suffering in the world.

There isn't much known about Hopefully Anonymous, but I'm fairly certain he does not consider himself a post-modernist.

So let us be absolutely clear that where there is human evil in the world, where there is cruelty and torture and deliberate murder, there are biases enshrouding it. Where people of clear sight oppose these biases, the concealed evil fights back.

Funny, I seem to recall some leading anti-bias advocates promoting torture right here on this blog. Apparently one can be comfortably against bias and for torture without losing a moment's sleep about it.

mtraven - To be against bias is not the same as to be without bias, so even if we were to grant that James is "comfortably against bias and for torture without losing a moment's sleep", that would not constitute a counterexample to Eliezer's claim that "where there is...torture...there are biases enshrouding it."

"This is the great case against hypocrisy, that hypocrisy allows us to act contrary to our ideals, and at times our ideals could have prevented holocausts. I suppose on the other side of the ledger must go the various "social graces" where hypocrisy supposedly smooths social interactions and lets us save face. Is there a way to weigh these two sides against each other, or is there a way to distinguish them, so we could have the good hypocrisy without excessive risk of the bad slipping in too?"

I look at this a bit differently. Let's say there are four of us (Robin, Eliezer, TGGP, and me, HA) that want to persist as subjective conscious entities. What actions that the 4 of us take will maximize our persistence odds? I think every ideal should be subordinated to that. It's on this basis that I would criticize (or promote) hypocricies against ideals, and the occurance (or non-occurance) of holocausts.

"persist as subjective conscious entities. What actions that the 4 of us take will maximize our persistence odds? I think every ideal should be subordinated to that."

I'm not entirely sure I know what that means, but it SOUNDS like "each of us wants to be different -- it's more important than anything else that we be different from each other."

If my reading is correct, I fail to see why I would want to consider that my overriding priority. Particularly in placing over, say, the truth.

And Eliezer, it just keeps getting better and better. I had to stop reading Marginal Revolution precisely because, brilliant as Tyler is, he really does try to be too clever for his own good. It becomes frustrating to watch.

Flynn, response on my blog within the next ten minutes ("being different" isn't what I mean).

http://www.hopeanon.typepad.com

Flynn, HA is a near-total egoist who wants to live forever.

Why would a near-total egoist hope to be anonymous? :-)

HA, replied on your blog. Sorry about the confusion.

I feel you exaggerate the case here Eliezer. Overcoming bias will not solve all the problems in the world. There's even a chance it could make them worst. Let's look at hypocrisy, for instance:

This is the great case against hypocrisy, that hypocrisy allows us to act contrary to our ideals, and at times our ideals could have prevented holocausts. I suppose on the other side of the ledger must go the various "social graces" where hypocrisy supposedly smooths social interactions and lets us save face. Is there a way to weigh these two sides against each other, or is there a way to distinguish them, so we could have the good hypocrisy without excessive risk of the bad slipping in too?

There's a huge positive chunk of hypocrisy that we're missing there - hypocrisy allows us to have ideals higher than we can (and do) attain in our actions. It can have a tremendously aspirational effect. The phrase "all men are created equal" was written by rich, white slaveowners. Eliezer feels that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have written the same phrase, and set all their slaves free. I fear that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have kept their slaves and instead written "all rich, white men are created equal". And future progress would have been ruled out.

To summarise: hypocrisy is the distance between ideals and actions. Erasing that distance does not tell us whether our actions will rise or if our ideals will fall - especially over several generations. Without hypocrisy, people may just become more tolerant of those "arguments which are too brutal for most people to face".

Flynn,

Egoist!=egotist.

There's a huge positive chunk of hypocrisy that we're missing there - hypocrisy allows us to have ideals higher than we can (and do) attain in our actions. It can have a tremendously aspirational effect. The phrase "all men are created equal" was written by rich, white slaveowners. Eliezer feels that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have written the same phrase, and set all their slaves free. I fear that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have kept their slaves and instead written "all rich, white men are created equal". And future progress would have been ruled out.

Ah, now there's a powerful argument.

But at the same time, if hypocrisy had not decreased, we would still have rich white slaveowners.

It should be assumed by default that when I talk about the benefits of overcoming bias, I am talking about the sort of human being who comes into existence when they set out to overcome their own biases by acts of mental will and training. Not, necessarily, the sort of entity that you get if you do neurosurgery on a human; nor the sort of entity that would have evolved if deception and self-deception had not been part of the ancestral environment.

The sort of human being who makes a continual effort to overcome hypocrisy, and who manages to do so, will probably set the slaves free.

(Claiming that "ideal Bayesians" would not have sponsored an Inquisition obscures this point, since it launches too great a counterfactual; this was probably a mistake of writing, if not of fact.)

I regret that I have to disagree with the post, even though I am a great fan of Orwell.

Stalin and Hitler did not suffer from lack of clarity. They knew exactly what they were doing, knew why they were doing it, and were glad of the outcome. More logic and better writing would simply have helped them be even more effectively evil. Teaching clear thinking is important; but it will not stop evil people from having evil intentions or acting evil. Evil emerges from the heart and soul, not the head. Intellectuals who supported, and support, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Osama, Saddam, and so forth, knew what they doing. They got a vicarious thrill from the results, even if they did not get their hands dirty. Yes, they may have used wretched writing to hide the consequences from others, but they knew what they wanted. I might add that Orwell's hands were not clean; he fought with the Communists in Spain, he advocated hard-line total socialism in England of a type that would make George Mason economists gag.

Maybe you suffer from "intellectualist bias." Academics commonly do. That is a bias, that might go all the way back to Socrates, that the world only needs education to be good. A few courses in logic, rhetoric, and good writing, and everthing will be okay. So, sorry, but intellectualist bias may be the hardest to overcome.

So, in a sense, I am with Tyler on this one. It is good to overcome confirmation bias, or attribution bias, and so forth, but they are not at the top of my list.

Helping people to open their eyes and see human suffering, raising children to be compassionate, will do far more to get rid of the Hitlers and Castros than logic and writing classes. Maybe that is just my bias.

Eliezer, you seem to say that trying to reduce hypocrisy is good for people who are trying to overcome their biases. That seems a tautology, and doesn't seem that related to the issue you seemed to raise in the post, which is whether hypocrisy in society tends to promote holocausts.

"Helping people to open their eyes and see human suffering, raising children to be compassionate, will do far more to get rid of the Hitlers and Castros than logic and writing classes."

'Cause no one ever thought that Che Guivera or Lenin were acting out of a compassionate desire to end suffering. Nobody EVER claimed that.

Confucius on the Rectification of Names written some 2500 years ago.

"Tzu-lu asked 'If the Lord of Wei entrusts the government to you, what will you do first?"

"Correct names, surely!" the Master said.

"How can you stray so far from the point! What would that correct?"

"Tzu-lu, you are a boor. On matters of which he is ignorant a gentleman expresses no opinion. If names are incorrect, it is impossible to speak. When it is impossible to speak, work is not done. When work is not done, society breaks down and punishment is misapplied. When punishment is misapplied, the people do not know how to act. Therefore what the gentleman names is sure to be accurate, and what he says is sure to be actionable. It is simply that the gentleman is never careless in what he says."

Analects 13/3. Adaptation of A.C. Graham's translation in Disputers of the Tao.

Eliezer, you seem to say that trying to reduce hypocrisy is good for people who are trying to overcome their biases. That seems a tautology...

"The sort of human being who makes a continual effort to overcome hypocrisy, and who manages to do so, will probably set the slaves free." I don't quite see how this is tautological...

Stalin and Hitler did not suffer from lack of clarity.

Hitler certainly did. Stalin... maybe not, I don't know his case in as much detail. But it is their followers, and the rest of the world, who they managed to confuse. This is what Orwell opposed. He was not speaking to Stalin, but to the people who tried to excuse Stalin.

Helping people to open their eyes and see human suffering, raising children to be compassionate, will do far more to get rid of the Hitlers and Castros than logic and writing classes.

I'm supposed to applaud now, right?

Opening eyes is what I do. It's a lot more complicated than telling your kids, "Suffering is bad, m'kay?"

There's a long, long distance between being told by your parents not to murder, and learning how to actually see a "murder" taking place rather than an "alternative justice process". Morality without logic will be flushed down a toilet by self-deception.

David Brin has a nice analysis in his book _The Transparent Society_ of what makes open societies work so well (no doubt distilled from others). Essentially it is the freedom to criticize and hold accountable that keeps powerful institutions honest and effective. While most people do not care or dare enough there are enough "antibodies" in a healthy open society to maintain it, even when the "antibodies" themselves may not always be entirely sane (there is a kind of social "peer review" going on here among the criticisms).

Muddled thinking affects this process in several ways. It weakens the ability to perform and react to criticism, and may contribute to reducing the signal-to-noise ratio among whistleblowers by reducing the social "peer review". This is how muddled thinking can promote the loss of openness, democracy and accountability, in the long run leading to non-accountable leaders that have little valid feedback or can just ignore it.

But are biases the main source of muddled thinking? I think muddle is the sum of many different factors: biases, lack of knowledge, communications problems etc. In any situation one or a few factors are the most serious causes of muddle, but they may differ between issues - the biases we have discussed relating to new technology are different from the biases in conspiracy theory or everyday political behavior. To reduce muddle in a situation we ought to reduce the main muddling component(s), but that may be very different in different situations. Sometimes biases are the main problem, sometimes it might just be lack of communication ability. It might be more cost-effective giving people in a developing country camera cellphones than teaching them about availability biases - while in another country the reverse may be true. But clearly overcoming biases is a relevant component in attacking many forms of societally dangerous muddle.

Eliezer, do you see the distance between how you are discussing this topic and how Anders is? Invoking "Good and Evil", with Stalin and Mao (losers of conflicts with the anglosphere?) being "evil" seems to me to me to be an appropriation of the overcomingbias space more so than a good faith effort to intelligently expand that space. Anders approach in general and in this post in particular serves as a good contrast, in my opinion.

In my post here you can find links to defenses of Stalin and Mao. They do not deny that both killed a huge amount of people, or that a great many of those people were completely innocent and it was tragic that they were killed. The author instead states that Stalin and Mao gave enough benefits to people, who had previously been faced with even worse rule, that those unfortunate deaths should be viewed as cons outweighed by the pros. I can't do an effective job of presenting his case (for one thing I completely disagree with it and think the two were among the worst people in history) but I would like if he could explain more here, including why our view of them is so off.

While Eliezer and I may be approaching the topic differently, I think we have very much the same aim. My approach will however never produce anything worthy to go into anybody's quote file.

Anders & TGGP, Response on my blog within 10 minutes (so as not to flood overcomingbias with posts).

How come this blog won't remember my info? I keep clicking that damn checkbox to no effect.

I read Orwell's essay last night. Quite impressive, but I didn't immediately understand some of his criticisms. I did later on, and would like to share.

One thing that I had a revelation about is this pair of equivalent passages:

"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

"Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

At first, I didn't understand why Orwell thought that the second passage conveys only part of the meaning of the first. But later, I imagined each of them read by someone. The Bible quote was read with feeling by a beautiful woman. The modern pretentious BS was read by Microsoft Dave. The first evoked images of an army defeated because of bad luck and a wiseman who died poor because his ideas fell on deaf ears. The second didn't evoke any images or emotions.

And I realized that such abstract writing is dangerous because of this quality: it transmits all the information, and may make perfect sense, but creates no emotions. You can describe cities being burned to the ground like this, and people will react to this description as "somebody else's problem" or "necessary sacrifice".

But concrete imagery is not a cure-all:

"All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis."

Lots of imagery here, and it does provoke emotions. But the problem is that 90% of it is trite slogans. They already have a predetermined value: revolution good, bourgeoise ungood. If you avoid triteness and invent your own metaphors, people will actually have to decide whether your metaphor resembles what you're describing.

Also, I think that the word "clarity", if it was meant to convey what I wrote above, ironically doesn't do so very clearly. It suggests that you're fine as long as your words are easy to parse.

I think the recent 1984 quotes are close to encouraging generalization from fictional evidence. Bias and totalitarianism are not more connected because Orwell wrote a work of fiction connecting them; you may understand this on a gut level, but many readers probably don't. If there's a duty to make history available, isn't there a converse duty to make fiction unavailable?

Anyway, here are my thoughts on whether it's a good idea to choose bias.

The rules of the game are much different when you have bad faith, as in totalitarian societies, as opposed to comparing Democrats vs Republicans. Or are they?

steven, your criticism is valid only if Eliezer used the passage from 1984 in some way that properly requires that it actually have happened. It is not at all clear that he did so. For example, if he used it as a way to illustrate a point, clarifying his meaning, then it was not improperly used. If he used it as evidence of Orwell's own well-thought-out views on the subject, then again, it was not improperly used. There are many ways to use fiction that are not improper.

"For example, if he used it as a way to illustrate a point, clarifying his meaning, then it was not improperly used. If he used it as evidence of Orwell's own well-thought-out views on the subject, then again, it was not improperly used. There are many ways to use fiction that are not improper."

What his intentions were doesn't matter; what matters is the expected reaction of the audience, which in this case is going to see a vivid example supporting Eliezer's claim that human evil sets out to muddle thinking. This happens to be true, but it doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with Winston Smith or O'Brien, both of whom were made up by Orwell with (I suspect) one of Orwell's intentions being exactly that their fake historical authority would be used to support Orwell's (true) opinions. I wish we could all just agree on a norm banning references to fiction from any serious discussion about the real world. People seem completely incapable of handling the stuff.

Copy of my post defending Stalin and Mao from Hopeanon.

Hello, my defense of Stalin and Mao are simple and the links can be found here on the Entitled To an Opinion blog. My argument is simple. Stalin saved far more lives than he took. In fact, Czarism was three times more deadly on a per capita basis than the average for the Stalin years. Plus, Stalin set a world record for the fastest doubling of life expectancy in any land. This amazing feat was only broken by Mao in 1976. Therefore, based on those records, I hold that Stalin and Mao were two of the greatest humanitarians that the world has ever known.

There are plenty of ways to kill a man. You can do it with a bullet, work him to death, or you can kill him with hunger and disease. Dead is dead, one way or another. I liken Stalin and Mao to vaccines that, say, kill 50 people every year, but without the vaccine, 1000 would die. Or the death rate of abortions versus childbirth.

Further, the notion of the worst killers of all time is simply insane. Over his time, Stalin killed maybe 4 million. Yet he saved so many lives that at the end, he had saved a net 35 million lives, NET. In contrast, the transition to capitalism with its collapsing life expectancy may have killed up 15 million, NET. I suggest we look at net losses and gains of life when making lists of these "killers". Increase in life expectancy is not a given. Near the end of Stalin's rule, life expectancy was still about 35 in both Albania and China. There are places now that have life expectancy that low.

Let us look at China and India. They had similar figures in 1949. Since India took the capitalist road over the socialist one, we can compare nations by life expectancy and death rate. India is killing 4 million Indians per year, compared to China. That is the penalty for India not taking the Chinese path to development. Further, 14 million starve to death every year in the world, mostly in South Asia - India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan. I do not understand why killing 14 million a year is not chalked up to the worst killers of all, but S and M are? Figuring over time, we can see that compared to China, Indian capitalism has killed about 170 million Indians. And that comparison INCLUDES all of those killed by Mao (maybe 20 million).

I will also argue that there were really no deliberate famines in Ukraine or China. China's famine in 1958 was caused by gross stupidity. The one in the Ukraine had many causes, but deliberate starvation was not really among them.

Stalin's victim toll has been exaggerated. It is really 4 million instead of 20 or 40 or 60 or 120 or however many million.

Mao's looks the same - maybe 20 million as opposed to 40, 60, 80 or however many million.

Indian capitalism kills 4 million a year, minimum. I would argue that replacing it with a killing system that killed a lot less people would be a net good.

I really do not support most of the killing that Stalin and Mao did, but many of those killed by Stalin had taken up arms against the state, or were trying to overthrow the government, so they were not totally innocent. The initial killing of 3 million landlords, not by Mao, but by the outraged peasants themselves, was not a killing of innocents either. Almost of those landlords were serious criminals with a ton of blood on their hands.

This is a pretty interesting discussion. While the overall topic of this blog is the worthwhileness of overcoming bias, I think how that relates to "evil" is a pretty important facet of what we should talk about. Some of the comments on this post reminded me of a passage from a novel (a fantasy novel if you must know) on the nature of evil. I found it to be very profound and I think everyone here might find it sort of interesting. You'll have to excuse the use of some of the plot specific names, the beginning of each chapter of the book opens with a few paragraphs from the point of view of a historian who lives several thousand years after the events in the story take place.

"What is the nature of evil? Evil is mistakenly portrayed as a unified force. Tresserhorn, Stromgald, the Adnates of Soldevi, Varchild, all of these, we are told, were cut from the same cloth and share that same corrupted fabric. Yet these forces have battled each other as often as they have fought the forces of “good” and so can hardly be considered members of the same side. Some researches state that all who bear the stamp of evil are imperfect or faulty beings from the onset. The more generous scholar might classify them as being merely weak, corrupted by potent forces that poisoned them. Yet in the end, the historians label them all as “evil,” as if that state were a disease that could be contracted through mere proximity. So goes traditional thought. In reality, the various “forces of evil” all chose their paths for reasons that sounded good, even beneficial, at the time. They might have chosen their paths for personal advancement, for a particular belief or religion, for the desire of power, or even for patriotism or devotion. What unified them all, from Lim-Dûl to the Adnates, was usually the belief that they had “the answer” to whatever problem beset them. This answer often had the advantage of requiring minimal sacrifice on the part of the solver. Further, when the solution did require some degree of sacrifice, that sacrifice would be on the part of others who were unaware of a need for sacrifice in the first place. These other people, the ones making the sacrifices, often took umbrage when they learned of their situation. As a result, such unpleasant information was kept from them until the last moment. In this fashion, the first steps of deception, regardless of the reason, was evil born."

I tend to agree with what the author of that passage said about evil. When you look at people like Hitler, Mao, and Stalin it is clear they believed they had "the answer" or "the solution" to the problems they faced. But they lacked the ability to objectively see that their plans called for suffering on levels few people alive today can fathom (I know I certainly can't). They let their biases close their eyes to the deaths they caused because they simply had to be right in their own mind. Teaching everyone to be compassionate and to empathize with others will certainly help people become less cruel, but overcoming our biases is no less important a step.

Clear thinking is a necessary but insufficient condition for avoiding evil. Eichmann is a paradigmatic case of local rationality in the pursuit of evil ends. And right here on this blog, we see proudly rational thinkers advocating what most normal people would think of as evil, namely the employment of torture as a judicial punishment. I've argued against them, but perhaps my arguments aren't any good. Maybe it is more rational to apply shocks to the genitals or waterboarding than to lock someone in a cell. Maybe we don't have anything better than instinctive revulsion to keep us from evil. In which case, we should not be overcoming our biases, but listening closely to them.

mtraven, You're ignoring concepts like inquiring empirically whether situationally employed torture can reduce net torture in the world. I brought it up in the torture thread and I think every commenter ignored the concept. Also, I'm unconvinced that the desire to label indivuduals as "good" and "evil" comes from a good faith attempt to accurately model reality, or even optimally solve existential challenges we face. It seems to come more from a desire to use morality to create status heirarchies, although in some cases it could also create representational heirarchies privileging both the people framed as "good" and as "evil", to the detriment of those that embody neither archetypes.

I'm surprised no one else in engaging me on these ideas of moral and representational heirarchies as ends in and of themselves.

HA, that's exactly the sort of argument I'm talking about. It is too easy to convince oneself by some bit of reasoning that doing an evil act is OK -- maybe it reduces some other evil, maybe it gets rid of the Jews who you have convinced yourself are a source of evil. Maybe you can convince yourself that implementing some torture will reduce the total amount of suffering in the world. I would be extremely dubious. Reasoning from first principles about practical affairs is extremely unreliable, and has to be augmented with heuristics, intuition, and gut feelings. You have to be extremely suspicious when supposedly rational arguments lead you to morally revolting conclusions. (BTW, Ursula Leguin wrote a short story on these themes which is worth reading).

Now, "trusting your gut" is something of a metaheuristic, and not a very reliable one. For example, one of my least favorite philosphers, Leon Kass, uses similar arguments to argue against homosexuality, assissted reproduction, and eating ice-cream in public. His gut is apparently very sensitive to things like that; mine isn't. How do we reconcile our positions?

The answer is, we don't. Such disagreements can't be resolved by pure reason and thus enter the realm of politics. I know politics isn't popular around here, but that's how things work. Pro-torture and anti-torture factions will have to fight it out politically, just as the pro- and anti-homosexuality factions do. Which side are you on?

Tiiba, I've always considered this bible quote

"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

to be a paradigm of bad writing. The nasty trick it exemplifies is using a paradox to get one up on the reader without committing to a specific meaning.

If the race is not to the swift, who does win? The lucky? Contrast two aphorisms "the race is to the swift" and "the race is to the lucky". The second of these is useless. You cannot assess some-one's luck ahead of time, you have to discover who is lucky by waiting to see who wins and then say smugly "see I told you the lucky one would win."

This passage irritates me because the writer forces the reader to create the meaning of the passage from nothing and then the writer appropriates the readers efforts. There is something important to be said on this theme:

The race is to the swift and the battle to the strong, but the odds are never quite so short as the book maker offers and the greatest number are drowned when the sea takes the unshinkable ship with no lifeboats.

I've no doubt that the author of Ecclesiastes would say "that's it, you have got my meaning exactly" but that would be a lie; it is my meaning, I said it and he didn't.

"Pro-torture and anti-torture factions will have to fight it out politically, just as the pro- and anti-homosexuality factions do. Which side are you on?"

haha, that reads as deliberate bait to me. Presenting 2 options as if they're the only options seems to be preying on a dualistic/binary bias common in most people, and that I think stems from our primate roots. That sentence reads like it could be lifted from a George W. Bush speech, that type that's widely mocked for performing a lack of nuance.

When we think in ways that hide the consequences of our actions, there's no way we can make good choices based on consequences.

But when that isn't blurred we still might disagree about the choices. So if you don't think DDT affects songbirds you're likely to think DDT is entirely a good thing. But even when you know, you might decide that perfect fruits are more important than birds.

Moral choices aren't inevitable when you understand the facts, but without the facts it's even harder.

There's often a conflict between immediate things and distant implication. You can see the immediate good effects of DDT, it took years to work out the over-all bad consequences. HA makes the opposite claim about Stalin, the immediate deaths are obviously bad, but it takes effort to see the long-term good that came from them. So, who's right?

Scientific method is good where it works. Peer review is good for science when the science works. When you can't do controlled experiments it gets harder to tell what's going on.

Still, sometimes the language is central. When we say the US military is in iraq "protecting iraqis", it might work better to reduce the level of abstraction and say we're there "killing people and blowing things up". Or maybe we're "killing people that we think are about to kill the ones we don't want killed". When we say "train the iraqi army" we might say "train selected iraqis to kill people and blow things up under our direction". The clearer we say what we're doing, the easier it might get to create a better strategy.

J Thomas, I really like your last paragraph "Still, sometimes the language is central. When we say the US military is in iraq "protecting iraqis", it might work better to reduce the level of abstraction and say we're there "killing people and blowing things up". Or maybe we're "killing people that we think are about to kill the ones we don't want killed". When we say "train the iraqi army" we might say "train selected iraqis to kill people and blow things up under our direction". The clearer we say what we're doing, the easier it might get to create a better strategy."

I'm sure TGGP will agree with my request to you: Start a blog!

that reads as deliberate bait to me. Presenting 2 options as if they're the only options seems to be preying on a dualistic/binary bias common in most people, and that I think stems from our primate roots.

Everything we do stems from our primate roots. I don't know you well enough to deliberately bait you, but using that expression (which comes from ) is meant to signify that at some point, when dealing with politics, you have to stop spouting hot air, choose which side of an issue you are on, and fight for it. That attitude seems somewhat antithetical to the prevaiing ethos of this blog, but I'm a contrarian.

If you like, you can see it as a dominance battle between two large coalitions of primates, with Amnessty International, other anti-torture groups, the authors of the 8th amendment, and those who have some measure of respect for basic human rights on one side, with the other side consisting of various shadowy govenment organziations (parts of the CIA and military), fans of 24, Alan Dershowitz, and the hopelessly authoritarian. Which side are you on? Which band of primates do you think deserves to win this battle, which side do you want to associate yourself with?

I think what I am most opposed to is the epistemologically naive idea that you can talk about matters like this in an objective, apolitical way. So -- I have a bias against torture, I have no desire to overcome it. Orwell is not around to ask, but I think he'd feel the same way.

Whoops, messed up a link there, was supposed to read: comes from an old union song. The link is to my own blog where I am basically taking the opposing view, that forced-side-choosing is bad, in many circumstances. But I did say I was contrarian...

mtraven, my position is pretty transparent. I want to persist as a subjective conscious entity, forever, and everything else is subsidiary to that. To the degree torture (of myself or others) maximizes my persistence odds, then I perceive it to be in my interest to welcome it. To the degree torture (of myself or others) reduces my persistence odds, I oppose it.

To the degree you mtraven would place opposing torture over your own persistence as a subjective conscious entity is perhaps a triumph of meme over a subjective conscious individual, in my opinion.

Although if you're non-anonymous, then I understand how it can be in your interest to perform opposition to torture, regardless of how it affects your persistence odds.

mtraven, I'm not sure what it means to be "objective, apolitical" but I certainly hope that when issues arise here people here are willing to set aside what they think they know enough to imagine being uncertain and then trying to evaluate which way the evidence and analysis leans.

I'm puzzled, as usual, but perhaps more so: this post has helped clarify the lack of clarity in my understanding of "bias" as the word is used here. You see, I don't in general see an a priori distinction between "bias" and other kinds of heuristics; we are talking about computational shortcuts, ways to save on reasoning, and all of them go wrong sometimes. I'm glad to have scope insensitivity pointed out to me, and having seen the discussion on this blog may even keep me from some error at some time, but my reasoning will always be incomplete, my models will always fall short of being "isomorphic with reality." (A modeler's joke, along the lines of using a territory as its own map.) I am tempted to think of "bias" as a label for the systematic errors introduced by any given heuristic, such as valuation by prototype; is this fair?

If so, "overcoming bias" is one of those journey-rather-than-destination unattainables that at any given moment faces me with an economic sort of choice: I can spend more resources trying to overcome the bias introduced by each heuristic I use, i.e. in meta-inference, or I can spend more resources actually carrying out inferences by those heuristics -- expanding and pruning nodes in my actual current search-graph, so to speak, and coming to conclusions even though I know that some of them will turn out to have been wrong.

Is this an obviously bad way to think? Probably so -- because it leans me in Tyler's direction. Well, I dunno. This comment is an extremely imperfect representation of what I want to say...but I post it, on the grounds that I have to go listen to Dougie MacLean, a Scottish singer and songwriter, and achieving a more perfect (but never actually perfect) representation of what I want to say has a finite value, which at the margin somewhere loses out to getting on with the next thing. I thought that was true for everybody.

HA, you may have your personal single life goal worked out but I'm not sure why the rest of us should be interested. My goal is emphatically not persisting my subjective reality as far forward in time as possible, let alone yours. I have other people I care about, I probably care more about the quality of my life than quantity, I do have memes that I place a great deal of value on. Most other normal people feel the same way, I suspect.,

Robin, what evidence has been brought forth to support the proposition that torture may be a good idea? I have cited books that study the history and deployment of torture, and groups that work with actual torture victims and would be happy to supply you with data. There's some evidence for you. It may not be objective, but objectivity about such issues is unobtainable even in theory -- you can't even define torture without taking a stance about what constitutes torture as opposed to "harsh treatment".

You say I certainly hope that when issues arise here people here are willing to set aside what they think they know enough to imagine being uncertain and then trying to evaluate which way the evidence and analysis leans.. Carl Sagan (I think) said we should be open-minded, but not so open that our brains fall out. It's even more important when discussing issues as morally fraught as torture, that we don't open our minds so far that our souls fall out.

Carl Sagan (I think) said we should be open-minded, but not so open that our brains fall out. It's even more important when discussing issues as morally fraught as torture, that we don't open our minds so far that our souls fall out.

Well said.

"Carl Sagan (I think) said we should be open-minded, but not so open that our brains fall out. It's even more important when discussing issues as morally fraught as torture, that we don't open our minds so far that our souls fall out.

Well said.

Posted by: Eliezer Yudkowsky | September 16, 2007 at 06:07 PM"

What does that even mean? The quote and concept seem to distract from empirical inquiry and rational problem solving, rather than add to them. I'm not sure I see it as different in kind from "If it doesn't fit, then you must acquit."

HA, this is not the forum for it but perhaps somewhere else you might explain where you stand.

The way US law used to work, you or anybody else got to torture whenever you thought it was a good idea, and then you could expect to stand trial. If the police thought you did the right thing they might choose not to investigate, if the DA thought you did the right thing he might not prosecute, if the grand jury thought you did the right thing they might not continue, if the jury thought you did the right thing they might not convict, if the judge thought you did the right thing he might give a suspended sentence, and then if the governor or president thought you did the right thing he might pardon you.

The new way, the Bush administration gets to torture you if they sort of imagine you might fit some sort of criteria, with no oversight by anybody but them, and then if it turns out they were wrong and you don't fit their criteria they suffer no consequences, they don't owe you any money or apology or even an oops, in many cases they don't even have to let you go.

Somewhere along the continuum between those two is the approach that maximises your survival. I wonder where along that line it is. But as I understand it this blog is devoted to studying bias and not to a straightforward study of what's good for you. Maybe somewhere else....

Tom Myers,
I think the convention on this blog, among the small set of people who have such a precise definition, is that not every heuristic is a bias, that only heuristics whose errors are worth overcoming should be called biases. I don't like this usage. For one thing, it's really hard to know the cost of overcoming particular biases. It's easy to look at an isolated experiment and say: here's a procedure that would have been better, but that doesn't cover cost of actually changing your behavior to look out for this kind of error.

Also, there are other people on this blog that use bias to refer to systematic, but unexplained errors, where it's hard to call them heuristics. Without a mechanism, it's probably hard to overcome these, although not always impossible.

mtraven, do you really believe in the existence of the soul, or are you just using it because it is in common usage? At my blog I was thinking of writing a post whose title began "Thank god", then remembered I had already declared I was an agnotheist, and then considered "Thank goodness", but remembered I didn't believe in objective good either.

Do not take my rhetorical flourishes overly literally. We may be meat machines without an inhabiting ghost, but that doesn't mean that "soul" doesn't have meaningful connotations. In this context, it (roughly) means "our deep-seated representations of ourselves, and others, and morality, and our ability to empathize with others." It means that a rationality that only considers your own personal ends (as HA seems to advocate) is deficient. It means that people who blithely talk about torture as an option probably haven't spent too much effort imagining themselves, or a loved one, as the torturer or torture victim in the scenarios they are planning.

"Losing your soul" means getting out of touch with your basic humanity. Rationality is all well and good, but rationality alone can't suffice to make moral judgments -- as the case of Eichmann illustrates. Consider "soul" as shorthand for a whole bunch of basic, irrational, but vital aspects of thought.

Tom and Douglas, I'd take "bias" to mean something like "common feature of human thinking that gives us predictably wrong answers". Some biases might (for any given person) not be worth correcting, if correcting them requires sustained effort and similar effort could be more effective if deployed to other ends. I don't see why whether something's a "bias" should depend on whether it's the result of a heuristic operating out of the regime it was designed for, or on whether we can correct it.

I have the *feeling* that the term "bias" gets overused here (possible explanations if I'm right: mission creep plus rationalization, and the satisfaction of labelling others as "biased"), but I don't actually have concrete examples in mind. Perhaps I'm suffering from overidentification of overidentification of bias bias bias.

(Remark: this construction generalizes to produce noun phrases ending with an arbitrary number of instances of "bias". Similar but nicer construction, not due to me: "oysters oysters oysters split split split" is an English sentence, at least notionally, for all values of 3.)

Mtravern,
In my opinion you're preying on bias to achieve status advantage for yourself/posting name. But I don't think it will be as effective a social strategy in this overcomingbias medium as it would be in the general population.

Hopefully Anon, I can't imagine what great status or survival advantages you think I'm going to get by posting here. If I was interested in advancing my status I'd pick better activities than flaming pseudonymously on blogs, you may be sure.

But in a way you are right, but trivially. Presumably everybody who posts here or otherwise engages in human communication has, at some level, an underlying motive of increasing their status. Everybody hopes to make themselves look good. I don't see how my postings differ from anybody else's in this regard.

mtravern,
I'll have a response up to your post on my blog within 10 minutes.

http://www.hopeanon.typepad.com

getting out of touch with your basic humanity
I am a homo sapien, therefore my characteristics are human. Perhaps I should wonder why you have an inhuman bias against torture, but of course that is human as well.
Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto

Douglas, with regard to systematic but unexplained errors, would you agree that we can (usually) describe these as due to unidentified heuristics? I'm feeling very unsure about that, but I would like to have some fairly concrete way of thinking about this blog's subject matter, and at least this way it's something I've taught. :-) I'm not about to insist that all thought can be modeled with symbol-processing. It may even be that the most fundamental errors are those that arise without any symbol-processing -- I've just been reading a dog-trainer's book which emphasizes the errors we make in dealing with our dogs, simply because we automatically do what other primates do even when we've verbally worked it out. Still, by the time you get to correcting a bias found in less-obviously-symbolic process, say a neural net or genetic learning-algorithm, I think you're describing that bias and its correction via rules on patterns of symbols -- and that's the way I've been seeing this blog. (Is everybody asleep yet? Well, I suspect this thread was drying up anyway -- as you can see, I have a bias in favor of mixed metaphors.)

Douglas and g both respond in terms of cost, apparently agreeing that the value of bias-correction (in any given context) will be limited, and it may not be the best use of whatever resources you've got...this again seems Cowenesque to me, and I'm reasonably happy with it; we have few absolutes showing except for (a) HA's survival (which I tentatively rate as a rhetorical position, unlikely to show itself in HA's real-world behavior), and (b) anti-torture.

I was going to leave the torture theme strictly alone because I've never seen it come to any good end, but maybe it's worth saying: when you say you're "against torture", you haven't actually told me much at all because too many people mean too many things by "torture". In a blog post apparently dedicated to clarity, I think that's extraordinarily important.

Let me clarify: consider a long interrogation under bright lights when you want to sleep; is that torture? Some will very sincerely say yes, some will very sincerely (I believe) say no, and some will draw the line at some specific number of hours of sleep-deprivation. If someone opposes more than 10 hours as "torture", and you oppose more than 5 hours as "torture", you can class them as "pro-torture" but it strikes me as an anti-clarity sort of rhetorical move. Is (fake? real?) menstrual blood-smearing torture? Again, apparently sincere disagreement exists. Is (some specific kind of) fraternity hazing torture? Is boot camp torture? Do I have an opinion on any of those? Not really: my primary torture stance is not anti-torture or pro-torture, it's pro-clarity.

Specifically, I would focus on interrogation -- trying to get leave out O'Brien and Winston, just as I would leave out Saddam's people-shredders, on the grounds that the purposes involved are not obviously those of "enhanced interrogation" -- O'Brien isn't at that point looking for information, he's destroying Winston prior to execution for reasons I've never understood, but which I suspect the pyramid-of-prisoners people understood perfectly well; it has something to do with dominance. (Yes?) And I would not start out with rules that say "10 hours yes, 11 hours no" or "uncomfortable chair yes, stress position no". I would not even start out with a rule against waterboarding. I would start out with a rule that says that (1) interrogation should always be on video, that (2) any sequence of interrogation techniques (insults? lights? Madonna videos? waterboarding?) should be precisely described, that (3) any interrogator should have previously undergone any technique he or she applies on a publicly-available "licensing video", that (4) the interrogation video should immediately begin a chain of viewings and authorizations which ends with actual publication no more than N years (10?) later. I could go on about what I mean by "precisely described" and how the authorizers would be authorized and all that, but I suspect that (a) most people who describe themselves as "anti-torture" are, by now, angry, even though (b) any such pro-clarity rule would end up ruling out whatever it is that ordinary people think of as torture, while allowing the anti-torture people a maximal opportunity to explain specifically what they meant and why all of these (or all but X, Y, and Z) should be outlawed. So...gee. Am I biased in favor of clarity? Yes, but only to a limited extent. And I'm glad to learn from people who are biased against bias more than I am, especially if I can figure out what they mean.

Tom Myers,
Systematic but unexplained: sure, most errors are probably due to heuristics, but I'm not sure that's a useful statement. A number of posts here have been so specific, they don't seem like useful starting points for searching for heuristics.

Cost:
Most people don't seem to have sufficiently clear goals to make sense of whether something benefits or costs them, let alone balancing the two.
People live normal lives by not thinking too much about things, so it shouldn't be so surprising that they don't think in psych experiments in which it is often clear that analysis will help. But if one is interested in producing answers to questions that don't come up in normal life (eg, how much is medicine worth), avoiding everyday heuristics is probably worth the cost. Heuristics may well be worth overcoming in everyday life, as well, but I don't think any experiments I've heard about shed any light on this.

Torture:
Your proposals are too detailed. I don't imagine an opportunity to experiment enough to figure out how to structure torture, and if I do get an opportunity to experiment on government structure, torture is not going to be high on my list of variables. A government is an extremely expensive experimental apparatus. At least I can imagine how to experiment with corporal punishment, but I don't really have much of an idea of how one could go about comparing the efficacy of different interrogation methods or the general investigative qualities of, say, American and Japanese police.

I'm not inclined to find out what you mean by Saddam's people-shredders, but I imagine that one effect was a deterrent to crime, especially crime that would get Saddam's attention. Torture, especially creative torture with vivid imagery, may well exploit salience(?) biases to be a more effective deterrent (aside from the rationally greater desire to avoid torture+death than to avoid death). The role of whim on one's fate may also have (irrationally) increased the deterrent effect. The vague beliefs people hold about prison rape may play a very similar role in the US system. We do have arbitrary torture in our criminal justice system already.

Winston survives.

Douglas Knight: for me, thinking of "bias" (as used on this blog) as a result of heuristic processing is moderately useful 'cos (a) mainly, it just gives a general framework, a set of very concrete metaphors and therefore heuristics (and therefore biases) that I've worked with over the years; (b) it suggests that the problem of bias can be ameliorated but not solved, because you'll never get perfect heuristics and you'll never be able to do all the computing that's required to do without heuristics; (c) ah, well, I forget what (c) was gonna be. But it's useful for me, and I wanted to know if anybody here would point to a reason why I shouldn't use it. Nobody did, yet.

When you speak of the cost/value of "overcoming" heuristics, that's interesting...it jars slightly, which is good. I'm used to ideas of balancing out heuristics, of using meta-heuristics (i.e., explicit knowledge of the bias introduced by a particular heuristic) and such for overcoming the bias of a heuristic, but overcoming heuristics...strange. I'm not sure why that jars, but I thank you.

My mention of people-shredders was merely to distinguish that kind of torture, punitive/deterrent torture, from interrogative torture. The distinction matters because when I see people (say, Max Boot) defending practices which others class as torture, they aren't defending punitive/deterrent torture (or confession-inducing torture) at all; they're defending "interrogation techniques". Posts such as this one, I believe, lose some of their impact because they don't go as far as they could in achieving clarity; the people who might be criticized will, if exposed to this post, think of it as a straw-man argument: "That's not me at all". BTW, the people-shredders specifically may never have existed; if I'd remembered that as I typed, I'd have used Saddam's deterrent amputations instead:

nine Iraqi men whose right hands were amputated in 1995 on orders of Saddam Hussein as punishment for their alleged crime of dealing in American dollars.

In any case, I don't think it's worth attacking this kind of torture except in a context where someone's defending it; if Joe Schmoe defends an interrogator who tries to track down a house where IEDs are being made, Joe is not going to recognize himself in this criticism (nor should he.) It might be relevant in a discussion of the US prison system and its acceptance of prison rape, but even then, I don't think that a defender of that system (I'm not one) would recognize his own motives in O'Brien's. Having made that distinction, I would then drop the term "torture", as I said, because it does not help clarity; "pro-torture" and "anti-torture" have non-empty intersections. And my proposal may well be too detailed...but our current attempts to regulate interrogation are even more detailed, and I think they're detailed the wrong way. Whatever. The principle, I thought, was pretty simple: everything done by X should be documented, X must have voluntarily had it done to him first, and the documents should after some time-lapse be public so that X and his commanders are accountable. And I thought it an interesting kind of principle, in that it avoids the current kind of detail. Okay, probably not.

Yes, of course Winston "survives", in a sense. He's not executed. I was remembering, quite probably misremembering (can't find my copy, I think my eldest son took it years ago) a passage in which execution is represented as too easy: first he has to Love Big Brother, and then after that it doesn't matter if he's executed or not. Something about dominance, as I tried to say. (But is the Winston at the end...hmm. Is that survival? Maybe HA would consider it so; personally I felt that Winston the person had been destroyed. The politics of personal destruction, as it were. Unless I'm misremembering quite drastically, which is always possible.)

You probably won't go far wrong if you assume I agree with you on the points I don't respond to. I probably shouldn't have talked about them in the first place.

overcoming heuristics:
If we know a bias is caused by a heuristic, then we should use that heuristic less. But articulating a meta-heuristic about when to use it is very different implementing that meta-heuristic. Human minds aren't eurisko that can dial up the strength on heuristics. Even if we implement a heuristic, as in Kahneman's planning anecdote, and get more accurate information, we may simply ignore it.
The basic problem is system 1 vs 2, when to analyze a problem and when to trust unconscious systems. Perhaps we have control over the conscious analysis (but still, it has unconscious inputs). But even starting the process, turning on the conscious process, must be done from an unconscious start.

I guess we're not disagreeing about much, at this point, though I think that you're basically more optimistic than I, and this might cause us to form different conceptions of the "overcoming bias" enterprise. I agree that we're not Eurisko (and suddenly I'm remembering Lenat's talk at IJCAI-77, explaining AM's fixed-heuristics problem that then led him to Eurisko...I was a graduate student) but my feeling is that we don't in general even have the choice of using a given heuristic less: we don't in general have the choice of becoming a less initially biased person. Sometimes we do, and it's worth a try, I'll admit that. In general, however, I don't think much of my own rationality in speech or action or even writing: it's mainly in proofreading, especially shared proofreading, that we have the chance to overcome our biases. For this purpose, it's perfectly possible to say "this is a valuation by prototype" or whatever, and then think a meta-thought about errors found in association with that heuristic. (Nor do I really believe that we commonly have heuristics that aren't associated with bias--systematic error--it's just a question of identification and of doing the best we can. Not error-free, but error-correction.

Of course in order to do that, you need to be conscious of your heuristics, which isn't always possible either, but when you try to explain your opinions to somebody else, sometimes you notice the rule of inference you're applying, and then take a step backwards. And another. And another, until the metaphor falls off the cliff. :-) But until transhumanism actually works, or until Lenat successfully mixes Eurisko and Cyc (and, as he said in 1977: "It's our last problem. They'll handle the next one"), I think it's the best we can do, and I get the feeling you think we can do better. But I have no confidence in such feelings.