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Against Amazement
Time start: 20:48:35
I
The feelings of wonder, awe, amazement. It's a very human experience, and it is processed in the brain as a type of pleasure. If fact, if we look at the number of "5 photos you wouldn't believe" and similar clickbait on the Internet, it functions as a mildly addictive drug.
If I proposed that there is something wrong with those feelings, I would soon be drowned in voices of critique, pointing out that I'm suggesting we all become straw Vulcans, and that there is nothing wrong with subjective pleasure obtained cheaply and at no harm to anyone else.
I do not disagree with that. However, caution is required here, if one cares about epistemic purity of belief. Let's look at why.
II
Stories are supposed to be more memorable. Do you like stories? I'm sure you do. So consider a character, let's call him Jim.
Jim is very interested in technology and computers, and he is checking news sites every day when he comes to work in the morning. Also, Jim has read a number of articles on LessWrong, including the one about noticing confusion.
He cares about improving his thinking, so when he first read about the idea of noticing confusion on a 5 second level, he thought he wants to apply it in his life. He had a few successes, and while it's not perfect, he feels he is on the right track to notice having wrong models of the world more often.
A few days later, he opens his favorite news feed at work, and there he sees the following headline:
"AlphaGo wins 4-1 against Lee Sedol"
He goes on to read the article, and finds himself quite elated after he learns the details. 'It's amazing that this happened so soon! And most experts apparently thought it would happen in more than a decade, hah! Marvelous!'
Jim feels pride and wonder at the achievement of Google DeepMind engineers... and it is his human right to feel it, I guess.
But is Jim forgetting something?
III
Yes, I know that you know. Jim is feeling amazed, but... has he forgotten the lesson about noticing confusion?
There is a significant obstacle to Jim applying his "noticing confusion" in the situation described above: his internal experience has very little to do with feelings of confusion.
His world in this moment is dominated with awe, admiration etc., and those feelings are pleasant. It is not at all obvious that this inner experience corresponds to a innacurate model of the world he had before.
Even worse - improving his model's predictive power would result in less pleasant experiences of wonder and amazement in the future! (Or would it?) So if Jim decides to update, he is basically robbing himself of the pleasures of life, that are rightfully his. (Or is he?)
Time end: 21:09:50
(Speedwriting stats: 23 wpm, 128 cpm, previous: 30/167, 33/183)
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Comments (6)
There are other emotional reactions which should register as confusion but don't.
Imagine a smart person who sees asphalt being deposited to pave a road. "How disgusting," they think. "Surely our civilization can think of something better than this." They spend a few minutes ruminating on various solutions for road construction and maintenance that would obviously be better than asphalt and then get distracted and never think about it again.
They thus manage to never realize that asphalt is a fantastic solution to this problem, that stacks of PhDs have been written on asphalt chemistry and thermal processes, that it's a highly optimized, cheap, self-healing material, that it's the most economical solution by leaps and bounds. All they noticed was disgust based purely on error and ignorance.
Any thought of the form "That's stupid, I can easily see a better way" should qualify as confusion.
Confusion is a sign that a mental model is incoherent, and as a general principle we cannot have incoherent models of facts. But a model can be perfectly coherent without being sound or complete.
"I can easily see a better way" is a sign of a model being incomplete, and should not be categorized as confusion.
Juergen Schmidhuber has a theory of artificial curiosity. His theory proposes that seeking confusion is actually a good thing. Agents that seek out situations where surprising things happen, put their internal models to the test and learn the most. And that's all curiosity is.
Amazement is just a form of curiosity. People who are interested in AlphaGo have had their internal models of AI progress challenged, and are updating them.
The problem isn't amazement but cheap amazement. It's like the problem with eating fast food at McDonalds isn't about eating food but about eating easily digestable food.
The amazement that Feymann talks about from understanding a flower on a deep level is much better.
Noticing amazement can be as wonderful as noticing confusion.
As the old joke goes, Alzheimer's is the best illness, there is no pain and each morning you get lots of interesting news.
But note that improving the model would result in less pleasant experiences of wonder, but also in less unpleasant experiences of disappointment. Basically you reduce your variance, but it's not obvious to me that you imperfect model necessarily has a pessimistic bias.
Indeed. Every pleasant surprise is an update, but not every update is a pleasant surprise.