Epistemic Luck
Who we learn from and with can profoundly influence our beliefs. There's no obvious way to compensate. Is it time to panic?
During one of my epistemology classes, my professor admitted (I can't recall the context) that his opinions on the topic would probably be different had he attended a different graduate school.
What a peculiar thing for an epistemologist to admit!
Of course, on the one hand, he's almost certainly right. Schools have their cultures, their traditional views, their favorite literature providers, their set of available teachers. These have a decided enough effect that I've heard "X was a student of Y" used to mean "X holds views basically like Y's". And everybody knows this. And people still show a distinct trend of agreeing with their teachers' views, even the most controversial - not an unbroken trend, but still an obvious one. So it's not at all unlikely that, yes, had the professor gone to a different graduate school, he'd believe something else about his subject, and he's not making a mistake in so acknowledging...
But on the other hand... but... but...
But how can he say that, and look so undubiously at the views he picked up this way? Surely the truth about knowledge and justification isn't correlated with which school you went to - even a little bit! Surely he knows that!
A survey of anti-cryonics writing
(This was originally a link to a post on my blog, A survey of anti-cryonics writing. Eliezer asked me to include the entire text of the article here.)
For its advocates, cryonics offers almost eternal life. To its critics, cryonics is pseudoscience; the idea that we could freeze someone today in such a way that future technology might be able to re-animate them is nothing more than wishful thinking on the desire to avoid death. Many who battle nonsense dressed as science have spoken out against it: see for example Nano Nonsense and Cryonics, a 2001 article by celebrated skeptic Michael Shermer; or check the Skeptic's Dictionary or Quackwatch entries on the subject, or for more detail read the essay Cryonics–A futile desire for everlasting life by "Invisible Flan".
That it seems so makes me sad, because to my naive eyes it seems like it might work and I would quite like to live forever, but I know that I don't know enough to judge. The celebrated Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman tells a story of a US general who spoke to him at a party and explained that one big challenge in desert warfare is keeping the tanks fuelled given the huge distances the fuel has to travel. What would really help, the general said, would be if boffins like Feynman could invent a sort of engine that was powered by sand. On this issue, I'm in the same position as the general; in the same way as a tank fuelled by sand seems plausible enough to him, it makes sense to me to imagine that however your brain stores information it probably has something to do with morphology and chemistry, so there's a good chance it might not evaporate right away at the instant of legal death, and that freezing might be a way to keep the information there long enough for future societies to extract it with their future-technology scanning equipment.
And of course the pro-cryonics people have written reams and reams of material such as Ben Best's Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice on why they think this is exactly as plausible as I might think, and going into tremendous technical detail setting out arguments for its plausibility and addressing particular difficulties. It's almost enough to make you want to sign up on the spot.
Except, of course, that plenty of totally unscientific ideas are backed by reams of scientific-sounding documents good enough to fool non-experts like me. Backed by the deep pockets of the oil industry, global warming denialism has produced thousands of convincing-sounding arguments against the scientific consensus on CO2 and AGW. Thankfully in that instance we have blogs like Tim Lambert's Deltoid, RealClimate, and many others tracking the various ways that the denialists mislead, whether through cherry-picking evidence, misleading quotes from climate scientists, or outright lies. Their hard work means that denialists can barely move or speak without someone out there checking what they have to say against science's best understanding and pointing out the misrepresentations and discrepancies. So before I pony up my £25 a month to sign up to cryonics life insurance, I want to read the Deltoid of cryonics - the articles that take apart what cryonics advocates write about what they do and really go into the scientific detail on why it doesn't hang together.
Here's my report on what I've found so far.
Ethics has Evidence Too
A tenet of traditional rationality is that you can't learn much about the world from armchair theorizing. Theory must be epiphenomenal to observation-- our theories are functions that tell us what experiences we should anticipate, but we generate the theories from *past* experiences. And of course we update our theories on the basis of new experiences. Our theories respond to our evidence, usually not the other way around. We do it this way because it works better then trying to make predictions on the basis of concepts or abstract reasoning. Philosophy from Plato through Descartes and to Kant is replete with failed examples of theorizing about the natural world on the basis of something other than empirical observation. Socrates thinks he has deduced that souls are immortal, Descartes thinks he has deduced that he is an immaterial mind, that he is immortal, that God exists and that he can have secure knowledge of the external world, Kant thinks he has proven by pure reason the necessity of Newton's laws of motion.
These mistakes aren't just found in philosophy curricula. There is a long list of people who thought they could deduce Euclid's theorems as analytic or a priori knowledge. Epicycles were a response to new evidence but they weren't a response that truly privileged the evidence. Geocentric astronomers changed their theory *just enough* so that it would yield the right predictions instead of letting a new theory flow from the evidence. Same goes for pre-Einsteinian theories of light. Same goes for quantum mechanics. A kludge is a sign someone is privileging the hypothesis. It's the same way many of us think the Italian police changed their hypothesis explaining the murder of Meredith Kercher once it became clear Lumumba had an alibi and Rudy Guede's DNA and hand prints were found all over the crime scene. They just replaced Lumumba with Guede and left the rest of their theory unchanged even though there was no longer reason to include Knox and Sollecito in the explanation of the murder. These theories may make it over the bar of traditional rationality but they sail right under what Bayes theorem requires.
Most people here get this already and many probably understand it better than I do. But I think it needs to be brought up in the context of our ongoing discussion of normative ethics.
Unless we have reason to think about ethics differently, our normative theories should respond to evidence in the same way we expect our theories in other domains to respond to evidence. What are the experiences that we are trying to explain with our ethical theories? Why bother with ethics at all? What is the mystery we are trying to solve? The only answer I can think of is our ethical intuitions. When faced with certain situations in real life or in fiction we get strong impulses to react in certain ways, to praise some parties and condemn others. We feel guilt and sometimes pay amends. There are some actions which we have a visceral abhorrence of.
These reactions are for ethics what measurements of time and distance are for physics -- the evidence.
Debate tools: an experience report
Follow-up to: Argument Maps Improve Critical Thinking, Software Tools for Community Truth-Seeking
We are here, among other things, in an attempt to collaboratively refine the art of human rationality.
Rationality is hard, because the wetware we run rationality on is scavenged parts originally intended for other purposes; and collaboration is hard, I believe because it involves huge numbers of tiny decisions about what information others need. Yet we get by, largely thanks to advances in technology.
One of the most important technologies for advancing both rationality and collaboration is the written word. It affords looking at large, complex issues with limited cognitive resources, by the wonderful trick of "external cached thoughts". Instead of trying to hold every piece of the argument at once, you can store parts of it in external form, refer back to them, and communicate them to other people.
For some reason, it seems very hard to improve on this six-thousand-year-old technology. Witness LessWrong itself, which in spite of using some of the latest and greatest communication technologies, still has people arguing by exchanging sentences back and forth.
Previous posts have suggested that recent software tools might hold promise for improving on "traditional" forms of argument. This kind of suggestion is often more valuable when applied to a real and relevant case study. I found the promise compelling enough to give a few tools a try, in the context of the recent (and recurrent) cryonics debate. I report back here with my findings.
A problem with Timeless Decision Theory (TDT)
According to Ingredients of Timeless Decision Theory, when you set up a factored causal graph for TDT, "You treat your choice as determining the result of the logical computation, and hence all instantiations of that computation, and all instantiations of other computations dependent on that logical computation", where "the logical computation" refers to the TDT-prescribed argmax computation (call it C) that takes all your observations of the world (from which you can construct the factored causal graph) as input, and outputs an action in the present situation.
I asked Eliezer to clarify what it means for another logical computation D to be either the same as C, or "dependent on" C, for purposes of the TDT algorithm. Eliezer answered:
For D to depend on C means that if C has various logical outputs, we can infer new logical facts about D's logical output in at least some cases, relative to our current state of non-omniscient logical knowledge. A nice form of this is when supposing that C has a given exact logical output (not yet known to be impossible) enables us to infer D's exact logical output, and this is true for every possible logical output of C. Non-nice forms would be harder to handle in the decision theory but we might perhaps fall back on probability distributions over D.
I replied as follows (which Eliezer suggested I post here).
If that's what TDT means by the logical dependency between Platonic computations, then TDT may have a serious flaw.
"Put It To The Test"
Alt-rockers They Might Be Giants explain/advocate empiricism in a record aimed at young children.
A Much Better Life?
(Response to: You cannot be mistaken about (not) wanting to wirehead, Welcome to Heaven)
The Omega Corporation
Internal Memorandum
To: Omega, CEO
From: Gamma, Vice President, Hedonic Maximization
Sir, this concerns the newest product of our Hedonic Maximization Department, the Much-Better-Life Simulator. This revolutionary device allows our customers to essentially plug into the Matrix, except that instead of providing robots with power in flagrant disregard for the basic laws of thermodynamics, they experience a life that has been determined by rigorously tested algorithms to be the most enjoyable life they could ever experience. The MBLS even eliminates all memories of being placed in a simulator, generating a seamless transition into a life of realistic perfection.
Our department is baffled. Orders for the MBLS are significantly lower than estimated. We cannot fathom why every customer who could afford one has not already bought it. It is simply impossible to have a better life otherwise. Literally. Our customers' best possible real life has already been modeled and improved upon many times over by our programming. Yet, many customers have failed to make the transition. Some are even expressing shock and outrage over this product, and condemning its purchasers.
Applying utility functions to humans considered harmful
There's a lot of discussion on this site that seems to be assuming (implicitly or explicitly) that it's meaningful to talk about the utility functions of individual humans. I would like to question this assumption.
To clarify: I don't question that you couldn't, in principle, model a human's preferences by building this insanely complex utility function. But there's an infinite amount of methods by which you could model a human's preferences. The question is which model is the most useful, and which models have the least underlying assumptions that will lead your intuitions astray.
Utility functions are a good model to use if we're talking about designing an AI. We want an AI to be predictable, to have stable preferences, and do what we want. It is also a good tool for building agents that are immune to Dutch book tricks. Utility functions are a bad model for beings that do not resemble these criteria.
False Majorities
If a majority of experts agree on an issue, a rationalist should be prepared to defer to their judgment. It is reasonable to expect that the experts have superior knowledge and have considered many more arguments than a lay person would be able to. However, if experts are split into camps that reject each other's arguments, then it is rational to take their expert rejections into account. This is the case even among experts that support the same conclusion.
If 2/3's of experts support proposition G , 1/3 because of reason A while rejecting B, and 1/3 because of reason B while rejecting A, and the remaining 1/3 reject both A and B; then the majority Reject A, and the majority Reject B. G should not be treated as a reasonable majority view.
This should be clear if A is the koran and B is the bible.
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