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.

You are mistaken. It is exactly the same claim, rephrased to match the circumstances at most -- containing exactly the same assertion: "Authorities on a given topic can be mistaken; and as such no appeal to an authority can be, absent any other actual supporting materials, treated as a rational motive for belief. In all such cases, it is those supporting materials which comprise the nature of the argument." In the specific case you are taking as supporting evidence your justified belief that the individual had in fact directly observed the event, and the justified belief that the individual would relate it to you honestly. Those, together, comprise justification for the belief.

So in other words, you would like to distinguish between “appeal to authority” and “supporting materials” as though when someone refers you to the sayings of some authority, they expect you to consider these sayings as data purely “in themselves”, separately from whatever reasons you may have for believing that the sayings of that authority are evidentially entangled with whatever you want to know about.

Firstly, “appeal to authority” is generally taken simply to mean the act of referring someone to an authority during an argument about something – there is no connotation that this authority has no evidential entanglement with the subject of the argument, which would be bizarre (why would anyone refer you to him in that case?)

Secondly, if someone makes a statement about something, that in itself implies that there is evidential entanglement between that thing and their statement – i.e. the thing they are talking about is part of the chain of cause and effect (however indirect) that led to the person eventually making a statement about it (otherwise we have to postulate a very big coincidence). Therefore the idea that someone could make a statement about something without there being any evidential entanglement between them and it (which is necessary in order for it to be true that you should not update your belief at all based on their statement) is implausible in the extreme.

You started off by using “appeal to authority” in the normal way, but now you are attempting to redefine it in a nonsensical way so as to avoid admitting that you were mistaken (NB: there is no shame in being mistaken).

If you have read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, you may remember the bit where Quirrell demonstrates “how to lose” as an important lesson in magical combat. Correspondingly, in future I would advise you not to create edifices of nonsense when it would be easier just to admit your mistake. Debate is after all a constructive enterprise, not a battle for tribal status in which it is necessary to save face at all costs.

I’ll say again that the error that is facilitating your confusion about beliefs and evidence is the idea that belief is a binary quality – I believe, or I do not believe – when in fact you believe with probability 90%, or 55%, or 12.2485%. The way that the concept of belief and the phrase “I believe X” is used in ordinary conversation may mislead people on this point, but that doesn’t change the facts of probability theory.

This allows you to think that the question is whether you are “justified” in believing proposition X in light of evidence Y, when the right question to be asking is “how has my degree of belief in proposition X changed as a result of this evidence?” You are reluctant to accept that someone’s mere assertions can be evidence in favour of some proposition because you have in mind the idea that evidence must always be highly persuasive (so as to change your belief status in a binary way from “unjustified” to “justified”), otherwise it isn’t evidence – whereas actually, evidence is still evidence even if it only causes you to shift your degree of belief in a proposition from 1% to 1.2%.