Practicing what you preach

TwistingFingers

LessWrongers as a group are often accused of talking about rationality without putting it into practice (for an elaborated discussion of this see Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality). This behavior is particularly insidious because it is self-reinforcing: it will attract more armchair rationalists to LessWrong who will in turn reinforce the trend in an affective death spiral until LessWrong is a community of utilitarian apologists akin to the internet communities of anorexics who congratulate each other on their weight loss. It will be a community where instead of discussing practical ways to "overcome bias" (the original intent of the sequences) we discuss arcane decision theories, who gets to be in our CEV, and the most rational birthday presents (sound familiar?).

A recent attempt to counter this trend or at least make us feel better about it was a series of discussions on "leveling up": accomplishing a set of practical well-defined goals to increment your rationalist "level". It's hard to see how these goals fit into a long-term plan to achieve anything besides self-improvement for its own sake. Indeed, the article begins by priming us with a renaissance-man inspired quote and stands in stark contrast to articles emphasizing practical altruism such as "efficient charity"

So what's the solution? I don't know. However I can tell you a few things about the solution, whatever it may be:

It wont feel like the right thing to do; your moral intuitions (being designed to operate in a small community of hunter gatherers) are unlikely to suggest to you anything near the optimal task.
It will be something you can start working on right now, immediately.
It will disregard arbitrary self-limitations like abstaining from politics or keeping yourself aligned with a community of family and friends.
Speaking about it would undermine your reputation through signaling. A true rationalist has no need for humility, sentimental empathy, or the absurdity heuristic.

Whatever you may decide to do, be sure it follows these principles. If none of your plans align with these guidelines then construct a new one, on the spot, immediately. Just do something: every moment you sit hundreds of thousands are dying and billions are suffering. Under your judgement your plan can self-modify in the future to overcome its flaws. Become an optimization process; shut up and calculate.

I declare Crocker's rules on the writing style of this post.

So what's the solution? I don't know. However I can tell you a few things about the solution, whatever it may be:

It wont feel like the right thing to do; your moral intuitions (being designed to operate in a small community of hunter gatherers) are unlikely to suggest to you anything near the optimal task.
It will be something you can start working on right now, immediately.
It will disregard arbitrary self-limitations like abstaining from politics or keeping yourself aligned with a community of family and friends.
Speaking about it would undermine your reputation through signaling. A true rationalist has no need for humility, sentimental empathy, or the absurdity heuristic.

I declare Crocker's rules on the writing style of this post.

I'm really confused about why you're not understanding this.

You are confused because you do not understand, not because I do not understand.

If a physicist tells you nothing can accelerate past the speed of light that is evidence that nothing can accelerate past the speed of light.

Simply put, no. No it is not. Not unless the physicist can provide a reason to believe he is correct. Now, in common practice we assume that he can -- but only because it is normal for an expert in a given field to actually be able to do this.

Here's where your understanding, by the way, is breaking down: the difference between practical behavior and valid behavior. Bayesian rationality in particular is highly susceptible to this problem, and it's one of my main objections to the system in principle: that it fails to parse the process of forming beliefs from the process of confirming truth.

On the contrary modern science would be impossible without them since no one can possibly make all the observations necessary to support the reliability of a modern scientific theory.

No. This is a deeply wrong view of how science is conducted. When a researcher invokes a previous publication, what they are appealing to is not an authority but rather to the body of evidence as provided. No researcher could ever get away with saying, "Dr. Knowsitall states that X is true -- not without providing a citation of a paper where Dr. Knowsitall demonstrated that belief was valid." Authorities often possess such bodies of evidence and can readily convey said information, so it's easy to understand how this is so confusing for you folks, since it's a fine nuance that inverts your normal perspectives on how beliefs are to be formed, and more importantly demonstrates an instance where the manners in which one forms beliefs is separated from valid claims of truth.

I'll say it one last time: trusting someone has valid evidence is NOT the same thing as an appeal to authority, though it is a form of failure in efforts to determine truth.

Appeals to authority are always fallacious.

Simply put, no. No it is not. Not unless the physicist can provide a reason to believe he is correct. Now, in common practice we assume that he can -- but only because it is normal for an expert in a given field to actually be able to do this.

That's what makes the physicist an authority. If something is a reliable source of information "in practice" then it is a reliable source of information. Obviously if the physicist turns out not to know what she is talking about then beliefs based on that authority's testimony turn out to be wrong.

Here

... (read more)

5JoshuaZ15y

Here's what may be tripping you up. Very often it doesn't even make sense for humans to pay attention to small bits of evidence, because we can't really process them very effectively. So for most bits of tiny evidence (such as most very weak appeals to authority) often the correct action given our limited processing capability is to simply ignore them. But this doesn't make them not evidence. Say for example, I have a conjecture about all positive integers n, and I check it for every n up to 10^6. If I verify it for 10^6+1, working out how much more certain I should be is really tough, so I only treat the evidence in aggregate. Similarly, if I have a hypothesis that all ravens ravens are black, and I've checked it for a thousand ravens, I should be more confident when I checked the 1001st raven and find it is black. But actually doing that update is difficult. The question then becomes for any given appeal to authority, how reliable is that appeal? Note that in almost any field there's going to be some degree of relying on such appeals. In math for examples, there's a very deep result called the classification of finite simple groups. The proof of the full result is thousands of pages spread across literally hundreds of separate papers. It is possible at some point that some people have really looked at almost the whole thing, but the vast majority of people who use the classification certainly have not. Relying on the classification is essentially an appeal to authority.