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Comments (318)
Just because I thought it was funny (an ad at a local restaurant)
How many rationalists live in Africa, and especially South Africa? I'm kind of surprised that there is no LW meetup anywhere in Africa, I would have guessed that at least South Africa or Nigeria are sufficiently developed and have sufficiently prevalent internet access to have one. Should somebody who has more conscientiousness than I do (at least for now) start one here in South Africa?
In general you start meetups in cities and not countries. Do you happen to live Johannesburg or Cape Town?
It doesn't need that much conscientiousness. You just need to reserve a table at a restaurant.
Well I guess, to start one does not require that much conscientiousness, but to maintain one as the hero does.
If you actually get people together there a chance that another person is willing to maintain it.
If you're rational and you're in South Africa, why are you still in South Africa? How much do you value your life over the trivial inconvenience of moving?
...oddly strong words...
The homicide rate is 6.6 times what it is in America (US = 4.7 vs. SA = 31.0). And there are 107 countries with lower homicide rates than the US.
However, your specific locale in these countries and specific factors about you and your behaviors are more relevant than the overall homicide rate.
You know that's better than the homicide rate in New Orleans, LA or Newark, NJ -- right? X-/
Sure, but if you want to play that game, throw Cape Town into the mix :-)
The original question was:
Are you going to argue that everyone in New Orleans, Newark, etc. should immediately move out?
Maybe he meant life expectancy. Anyway, that too is locale specific and depends on your life style and (increasingly with age) on healthcare availability - which could be hampered a lot by moving abroad. Not taking into account increased stress due to unfamiliar environment and (likely) less satisfying job.
Life expectancy in SA is mostly dragged down by high infant mortality and the incidence of AIDS. Not that those might not be important to you, but they are manageable risks for an adult.
I'm a high school graduate, if I had good grades I would study overseas provided that I got a scholarship since during the next two years my parents won't earn much money. However, I have terrible grades (global average score in the international program I did) so that's not an easy option. I have slowly been building my conscientiousness to a point where, instead of learning lots of random things that interest me, I can systematically pursue an academic goal. So there's the possibility of extending a mandatory gap half-year, to a gap year where in the second half of my gap year I take say AP exams.
Moving from your home country is rarely a trivial inconvenience. Also, even assuming a high level of instrumental rationality, some preference sets would best be served by remaining in South Africa.
Hey, look: data.
Global, regional, and national disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for 306 diseases and injuries and healthy life expectancy (HALE) for 188 countries, 1990–2013: quantifying the epidemiological transition
I have developed a learned helplessness and external locus of control about gardening and personal food production. Since I care about close quality monitoring, I will be remediating this and learning to garden properly. Any guides to edible gardening for rationalists?
How to garden is site-specific. It will be different in different microclimates. I live in Canada, and once I read a gardening book from the UK and I had to laugh at the part where it said what I could plant in January. In Vancouver, maybe, but in the rest of Canada, no.
So...find books suited to your climate or maybe talk to people at a local garden club or nursery. Or talk to your neighbours, since their yards are most similar to yours, and so they may have experience at what works well in that type of soil and climate.
Grow what you will actually eat, not what you wish you would eat but won't actually eat. Learned this the hard way.
As such I now primarily grow tomatoes, green beans, sweet potatoes, malibar spinach, and strawberries despite being good at producing other things that would go to waste with some regularity.
(Still working on winter / fall gardening. Gonna try turnips and Fava beans.)
I would add to that that your first year or so, it is not bad to plant something easy that will overproduce. In the long run you aren't going to want much zucchini, but your first year it is motivating to have something come up that is edible, once the birds have eaten your berries, the insects have devastated your lettuce, and your tomatoes have mysteriously decided not to give you anything. I would have given up early on if I didn't have something that produced a reasonable amount the first year. And you can often give away excess fresh vegetables, gaining some small amount of social capital.
(OTOH, if you need to lose weight, eating what you grow rather than buying something you might like a little better should help. At least it pushed me from 44 to 40 kg (I am 157 cm high).)
ETA: there were other reasons, too, but I think this was what did it.
I'm going coldturkey on compulsive porn, music, junk foods, procrastination, negativity, worry, approval and gambling, all of which have been conceptualised as addictions, for at least one year and hopefully life. I've tried this moderation approach fmany times and failed, so this is it.
Cold turkey has always worked best form than gradual adjustment. BUT changing too many things at the same time is taxing on short term memory, and casual relapsing sometime meant a downward spiral that ended up disrupting the process.
I find it easir to remember to quit one thing at a time, I get less frustration from this approach.
Posting to thank you because your suggestion has helped me conquer a strong wave of sugar/carb cravings by listening to something.
Why cold turkey on music? Instead, maybe it would be better to find music that does not disrupt your concentration.
Also, some people say its better to change one thing at a time.
Gwern seems to have some evidence that music is always distracting.
A study that tests the effects on music on a task involving listening or speaking is not obviously relevant to tasks that do not involve your auditory pathways.
Also, [always distracting to the majority] does not equal [always distracting to everyone].
There is limited evidence that listening to music can help some people with ADHD maintain focus (something that I have personally found to be the case in non-academic situations). Reference.
My personal experience is that on task in which I am distractible because I am bored or under-engaged, music helps keep my 'squirrel!' circuit from firing.
Actually, I think when I said "always distracting" I was thinking about myself. I'm pretty much in front of a computer during my entire waking hours, so always involved with text. I agree that it doesn't have to be distracting for other kinds of activities like manual work.
With the ADHD study, I wonder if that might work by the music actually distracting them, but not by as much as other things would distract them without the music. Of course even if this is the case, the study would still show that it is helpful for them.
Good luck!
The description on Wikipedia of reactions to brief reactive psychosis is confusing and interesting. Can anyone who's experienced it share their experiences?
Is it bad to sleep in a hunched over or crunching or hooked kind of position?
After you are asleep you likely move soon anyway. That means you likely don't get very far by optimizing sleeping position.
The fetal position is fine. Avoid sleeping on your belly, but sleeping on the sides and back is fine too. As far as I'm aware, leg positioning is mostly to your tastes aside from that both of them should have the same position; don't have one outstretched and the other tucked against you.
I dunno, what does a literature search tell you?
I've read that genes explain about 50% of the intelligence. Does anyone know: Did these studies regard the fact that good genes for intelligence presuppose good genes of the parents and they determine the environment in which a child grows up too, so from that point of view genetics might explain more than 50% of intelligence.
It's probably a safe assumption that there exists some number of people dedicating their careers to the study of intelligence who are able to consider potential heritability confounders you can think up in five minutes.
Does anyone make productivity-time goals too? I sometimes say to myself, 30 seconds till you get to the bathroom, and it'll keep me focussed on that goal.
Slouching is unbecoming and say say it increases back pain. I have chronic lower back pain. When I feel like slouching or hunching, because I'm too tired to sit up straight, what are some alternatives where lying down is inappropriate?
I think that's largely outdated thought. Frequently taught and as a result global back pain rises rather then lowers. You get back pain when you freeze your body and prevent it from moving.
If you get an impulse to slouch inside your body follow it and make the movement consciously. That means your back goes back while the shoulders go up and in front.
If you shoulders go down while they are going in front you will likely tense up.
Conscious breathing can also be very valuable as a tool to stay in touch with your body.
Practice a lot when you are not too tired; exercising those muscles and building a habit of standing/sitting up straight will slowly increase your ability to do so more consistently.
I am much better able to maintain good posture comfortably and for longer periods of times when standing, and setting up my home computer with a standing desk has improved my posture and reduced my back pain.
I have also heard it recommended to have a mirror in a place where you will see yourself slumping; it will motivate you to sit/stand up when you see yourself. This has not been very practical for me, but may work for others.
yyay charity
I may be misremembering, but, I seem to recall Givewell looking directly at education measures.
Is there any explanation, term, or research into the phenomenon of shifting mental health diagnoses? Like getting diagnosis retracted, remissions, then appearance of symptoms suggesting something else, and so forthe? Perhaps there is an explanation for how or why mental health conditions might transform into one another?
which countries and places in the world in general is it unsafe to get sick in?
I'm concerned about the health systems in other countries but like the idea of traveling.
How are transfers between health systems arranged and when is it a good idea?
You can buy traveler's health insurance; it is not hard to find policies that will transport you to the nearest safe hospital, by airlift if necessary, and back to your home country if needed.
I disagree. I can only see health insurance domestically and travel insurance for sale separately.
Disclaimer I am not recommending this service specifically, it was just the first result when I Googled
I was talking about things like this -- this one is only for American citizens, but I would be surprised if you couldn't find an equivalent service in most developed nations.
Efficient charity: you don't need to be an altruist to benefit from contributing to charity
Effective altruism rests on two philosophical ideas: altruism and utilitarianism.
In my opinion, even if you're not an altruist, you might still want to use statistics to learn about charity.
Some people believe that they have an ethical obligation to cause a net 0 suffering. Others might believe they have an ethical obligation to cause only an average amount of suffering. In these causes, in order to reduce suffering to an acceptable level, efficient charity might be for you.
It's possible that in your life you will not come across enough ponds with drowning people that only you can save and you will have to pursue other means of reducing suffering. An alternate method is charity, and statistics can identify which charities and how much to donate.
In order to save money to satisfy your own preferences, you might want to donate as little as possible. You might also calculate that a different time might be best to donate (like after you die). But if you come to either of these conclusions, you're still using the idea of efficient charity.
Link: Computer-based [big five] personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans
Harvard Business Review: We're all terrible at understanding each other.
I'm very confused about something related to the Halting Problem. I discussed this on the IRC with some people, but I couldn't get across what I meant very well. So I wrote up something a bit longer and a bit more formal.
The gist of it is, the halting problem lets us prove that, for a specific counter example, there can not exist any proof that it halts or not. A proof that it does or does not halt, causes a paradox.
But if it's true that there doesn't exist a proof that it halts, then it will run forever searching for one. Therefore I've proved that the program will not halt. Therefore a proof that it doesn't halt does exist (this one), and it will eventually find it. Creating a paradox.
Just calling the problem undecidable doesn't actually solve anything. If you can prove it's undecidable, it creates the same paradox. If no Turing machine can know whether or not a program halts, and we are also Turing machines, then we can't know either.
I guess the answer to this point is that when constructing the proof that H(FL, FL) loops forever, we assume that H can't be wrong. So we are working in an extended set of axioms: the program enumerates proofs given some set of axioms T, and the English-language proof in the tumblr post uses the axiom system T + "T is never wrong" (we can write this T+CON(T) for short).
Now, this is not necessarily a problem. If you have reason to think that T is consistent, then most likely T+CON(T) is consistent also (except in weird cases). So if we had some reason to adopt T in the first place, then working in T+CON(T) is also a reasonable choice. (Note that this is different from working in a system which can prove its own consistency, which would be bad. The difference is that in T+CON(T), there is no way to prove that proofs using the additional "T is never wrong" axiom are correct).
More generally, the lesson of Gödel's incompleteness theorem is that it does not make sense to say that something is "provable" without specifying which proof system you are using, because there are no natural choice for an "ideal" system, they are all flawed. The tumblr post seems paradoxical because it implicitly shifts between two different axiom sets. In particular, it says
but a correct statement is, we can't prove it either using the same set of axioms as H used. We have to use some addtional ones.
No; provable and true are not the same thing. It may be the case that the program halts, but it is nevertheless impossible to prove that it halts except by "run it and see", which doesn't count.
Fortunately, H will never find your argument because it is not a correct proof. You rely on hidden assumptions of the following form (given informally and symbolically):
where #φ denotes the Gödel number of the proposition φ.
Statements of these form are generally not provable. This phenomenon is known as Löb's theorem - featured in Main back in 2008.
You use these invalid assumptions to eliminate the first two options from Either H returns true, or false, or loops forever. For example, if H returns true, then you can infer that "FF halts on input FF" is provable, but that does not contradict FF does not halt on input FF.
I'm very confused. Of course if φ is provable then it's true. That's the whole point of using proofs.
Yes, but it may be true without being provable.
But that statement isn't provable.
Then just assume it as an axiom.
Then the paradox you were describing fires and the system becomes inconsistent.
It is not that these statements are "not generally valid", but that they are not included within the axiom system used by H. If we attempt to include them, there will be a new statement of the same kind which is not included.
Obviously such statements will be true if H's axiom system is true, and in that sense they are always valid.
The intended meaning of valid in my post is "valid step in a proof" in the given formal system. I reworded the offending section.
Yes, and one also has to be careful with the use of the word "true". There are models in which the axioms are true, but which contain counterexamples to
Provable(#φ) → φ.Okay, an attempt to clear up the Halting Problem:
The proofs in question say it is impossible to algorithmically arrive at a Yes-or-No answer to the generalized question, "Does algorithm X have non-trivial property Y for input Z?", for any specific property Y. Poorly written proof at the bottom. It critically doesn't say that you can't have a Yes-or-No-or-Undecidable answer to that question. Introduce an uncertainty factor and the issue falls apart. Thus, you -can- write a Halting Oracle, so long as you're satisfied that sometimes it won't be able to say.
For purposes of AI Friendliness - which is certainly a non-trivial property - Rice's Theorem says we can't algorithmically prove that an AI - which is an algorithm - is, or is not, friendly, once we manage to define what friendly even is. We can theoretically, however, prove that AI is friendly, not friendly, or undecidably friendly. For our purposes, "not friendly" and "undecidably friendly" are probably equivalent.
For purposes of everything else, nothing at all says that it's impossible to prove whether or not a specific program will halt given a specific input. "But what about the program in Turing's diagonalization proof? Does it halt or not?" The input in that case (the Halting Oracle) can't exist in the first place, as the proof demonstrates.
"But what about this neat program I wrote that halts 25% of the time?" What did you use to generate a random number? Not being aware of your hidden inputs isn't the same as not having an input. For a given set of inputs, your algorithm halts 100%, or 0%, of the time.
A Halting Oracle that only says "Yes", "No", or "Provably Undecidable" hasn't (to my knowledge and research) been proven to be impossible - and a "Yes", "No", or "Maybe" Halting Oracle is quite trivial, as you can throw all cases you can't figure out an algorithm for into the "Maybe" pile. The proofs do not demonstrate that there are any algorithms which are nondeterministically halting for a given input, nor do they demonstrate that we can't prove that any given algorithm will or will not halt, nor do they even demonstrate that an algorithm can't prove that other algorithms will or will not halt - they demonstrate one thing and one thing only, and that is that there is no single algorithm which gives a "Yes" or "No" answer will work on all algorithms for all inputs.
An equivalent-to-Rice's-Theorem-for-our-very-limited-purposes-proof written like the halting problem proof. A trivial property in this case means it -can- vary by algorithm and input.
Suppose Algorithm Zed determines whether or not Algorithm X has non-trivial property Y for the input Z, returning a boolean value. Take Algorithm ScrewZed, with an input of AlgorithmZed, which has the non-trivial property Y iff its evaluation of AlgorithmZed, given the input of Algorithm ScrewZed with the input of AlgorithmZed, says it doesn't have non-trivial property Y. Paradox ensues, provided I wrote all this correctly.
I think I just proved this. If you can prove something is undecidable, it creates a paradox.
If you could prove any algorithm will halt or not halt, then you can easily make a halt-detection machine that works in all cases. There are some programs which do not halt, but which it's impossible to prove they will not halt.
But not for all cases, see above.
"If you could prove any algorithm will halt or not halt, then you can easily make a halt-detection machine that works in all cases."
That is only true if your proofs work from the same one set of axioms. But in reality you can choose different sets of axioms as needed. So it may be possible to prove of each and every algorithm that it will halt or not, but you cannot make a halt-detection machine that works in all cases, because your proofs use different sets of axioms.
What makes you say this?
If I can prove that the problem is undecidable, so can
H.Hsearches through all possible proofs, which must contain that proof too.If a problem is undecidable, that means no proof exists either way. Otherwise it would be decidable, in principle.
If no proof exists either way, and
Hsearches through all possible proofs, then it will not halt. It will keep searching forever.Therefore, if you can prove that it is undecidable, then you can prove that
Hwill not halt. AndHcan prove this too.So
Hhas proved that it will not halt, and returnsfalse. This causes a paradox.Technically you can't. You can prove it's undecidable as long as your axiom system is consistent. However, it's impossible for a consistent axiom system to prove its own consistency.
Perhaps. If so just make it an axiom. It's silly to use a system that doesn't believe it's consistent.
The problem is that no consistent system can prove it's own consistency. (Of course, an inconsistent system can prove all statements, including both its own consistency and inconsistency.)
Consider a system S. You can add the axiom "S is consistent", but now you have a new system that still doesn't know that it's consistent.
On the other hand, one can add the axiom "S is consistent even with this axiom added". Your new system is now inconsistent for more or less the reason you used in formulating the above paradox.
I'm not sure that my paradox even requires the proof system to prove it's own consistency.
But regardless, even if removing that does resolve the paradox, it's not a very satisfying resolution. Of course a crippled logic can't prove interesting things about Turing machines.
I would agree that it's not very satisfying, in the sense that there is no satisfying resolution to the paradox of the liar.
But logic is actually crippled in reality in that particular way. You cannot assume either that "this is false" is true, or that it is false, without arriving at a contradiction.
Your argument requires the proof system to prove it's own consistency. As we discussed before, your argument relies on the assumption that the implication
is available for all φ. If this were the case, your theory would prove itself consistent. Why? Because you could take the contrapositive
and substitute "0=1" for φ. This gives you
The premise "0≠1" holds. Therefore, the consequence "0=1 is not provable" also holds. At this point your theory is asserting its own consistency: everything is provable in an inconsistent theory.
You might enjoy reading about the Turing Machine proof of Gödel's first incompleteness theorem, which is closely related to your paradox.
0 is not equal to 1, so it's not inconsistent. I don't understand what you are trying to say with that.
It would be really silly for a system not to believe it was consistent. And, if it were true, it would also apply to the mathematicians making such statements. The mathematicians are assuming it's true, and it is obviously true, so I don't see why a proof system should not have it.
In any case I don't see how my system requires proving "x is provable implies x". It searches through proofs in a totally unspecified proof system. It then proves the standard halting problem on a copy of itself, and shows that it will never halt. It then returns false, causing a paradox.
Are saying that it's impossible to prove the halting problem?
So if something is not provable in a theory, that proves it is consistent?
I did read your link but I don't understand most of it.
TezlaKoil doesn't include his whole argument here. Basically he is using Gödel's second incompleteness theorem. The theorem proves that a theory sufficiently complex to express arithmetic cannot have a proof of the statement corresponding to "this theory is consistent" without being an inconsistent theory.
This doesn't show that arithmetic has a proof of "this theory is inconsistent" either. If it does, then arithmetic is in fact inconsistent. Since we think arithmetic is consistent, we think that the arithmetical formula corresponding to "arithmetic is consistent" is true but undecidable from within arithmetic.
It also doesn't imply that the theory composed of arithmetic plus "arithmetic is consistent" is inconsistent, because this theory is more complicated than arithmetic and does not assert its own consistency.
Of course we think the more complicated theory is true and consistent as well, but adding that would just lead to yet another theory, and so on.
If you try to use mathematical induction to form a theory that includes all such statements, that theory will have an infinite number of postulates and will not be able to be analyzed by a Turing machine.
If the system is inconsistent, your program will halt on all inputs with output dependent on whether it happens to find a proof of "this program halts" or "this program doesn't halt" first.
Well, mathematicians have been proving interesting things about Turing machines for the past century despite these limitations.
EDIT: Okay, now I read your article, and I see that what I wrote here is irrelevant. Leaving it here anyway, maybe someone else will like it.
I admit I didn't read your linked article thoroughly, but I will try to explain the basic theory and terminology.
In computer science, when we are talking about a computation that for any input always ends in a finite time and provides an answer, we call such computation algorithm, and the mathematical function computed by this algorithm is called "total recursive function" (or "computable function").
When we are talking about a computation that could potentially run forever, and such case of running forever is treated as an implied special value, we call such computation program, and the mathematical function computed by this algorithm is called "partial recursive function" -- a mathematical function with an undefined value for inputs where the program runs forever. (Algorithms are a subset of programs, and total recursive functions are a subset of partial recursive functions.)
Specifically, if we care about computations returning "yes" or "no", an algorithm corresponds to a total recursive function from X to { "yes", "no" }, where "X" is the input domain: strings, numbers, whatever your computation accepts as a valid input. If we care about computations that potentially run forever, such program corresponds to a partial recursive function from X to { "yes" }, where not returning value is an implied "no". (You could have other, equivalent definitions, but that would only make things less elegant mathematically.)
When debating things such as Halting Problem we have to pay extra big attention to the proper distinction between algorithms and programs, or respectively between total and partial recursive functions. When speaking about programs / partial recursive functions we have to pay attention to which answer is the implied one in case of the infinite computation (is "yes" explicit and "no" implied, or is "no" explicit and "yes" implied?). A simple mistake can change everything dramatically. For example:
Q1: "Can we make an algorithm which, given an arbitrary program and an arbitrary input for that program, determines whether the program will stop in finite time?"
A1: "No. See the standard debate about Halting Problem."
Q2: "Can we make a program which, given an arbitrary program and an arbitrary input for that program, determines whether the program will stop in finite time?"
A2: "Yes, trivially. Just simulate the given program, and print "yes" if the simulation stops."
Q3: "Can we make a program which, given an arbitrary program and an arbitrary input for that program, determines whether the program will run forever?"
A3: "No. If such program would be possible, then together (running in parallel) with the previous program they would make an algorithm solving the Halting Problem, which we already know is mathematically impossible."
I believe that if you will be very careful about which of these words you use, the confusion will be solved. In my opinion, most likely at some place you proved that a program exists for something, but then you started treating it as an algorithm.
From the link:
H proves that it can't decide the question one way or the other. The assumption that H can only return TRUE or FALSE is flawed: if a proof exists that something is undecidable, then H would need to be able to return "undecidable".
This example seems to verify the halting problem: you came up with an algorithm that tries to decide whether a program halts, and then came up with an input for which the algorithm can't decide one way or another.
His literally defined as either returning true or false. Or it can run forever, if it can't find a proof. It's possible to create another program which does return "UNDECIDABLE" sometimes. But that is notH.The point is that the behavior of
His paradoxical. We can prove that it can't returntrueorfalsewithout contradiction. But if that's provable, that also creates a contradiction, sinceHcan prove it to.Not only can
Hnot decide, but we can't decide whether or notHwill decide. Because we aren't outside the system, and the same logic applies to us.I did overlook the definition of H. Apologies.
More precisely, H will encounter a proof that the question is undecidable. It then runs into the following two if statements:
if check_if_proof_proves_x_halts(proof, x, i)
if check_if_proof_proves_x_doesnt_halt(proof, x, i)
Both return "false", so H moves into the next iteration of the while loop. H will generate undecidability proofs, but as implemented it will merely discard them and continue searching. Since such proofs do not cause H to halt, and since there are no proofs that the program halts or does not, then H will run forever.
If it is undecidable, then that means no proof exists (that
Hwill or will not halt.)If no proof exists, then
Hwill loop forever searching for one.Therefore undecidability implies
Hwill run forever. You've just proved this.Therefore a proof exists that
Hwill run forever (that one), andHwill eventually find it.Paradox...
As people have been saying, if H can make this argument it is inconsistent and does not work properly (i.e. it does not return True or False in the correct situations.)
No, it's the halting problem all the way down.
Not remotely! There's no proof that it halts, and there's no proof that it doesn't halt. It will run until it halts or the universe ends - there is no forever. The key is that there can be programs for which nobody can tell which one they are without actually trying them until they halt or the universe ends.
The halting problem doesn't actually imply this.
"It's the halting problem all the way down", doesn't resolve the paradox, but does express the issue nicely.
Do you not agree with the sentence you quoted? That if a proof of haltiness doesn't exist, it will search forever for one? And not halt? Because that trivially follows from the definition of the program. It searches proofs forever, until it finds one.
Nope, it also can't be proven that it'll search forever: it might halt a few billion years (or a few hundred ms) in. There's no period of time of searching after which you can say "it'll continue to run forever",as it might halt while you're saying it, which is embarrassing.
I am referring to the program
Hwhich I formally specified in the link I posted. H is a specific program which tries to determine if another program will halt.I then show how to create a counter example for
H. And show that ifHreturns eithertrueorfalse, it creates a contradiction. Therefore it can't ever returntrueorfalse.Therefore I've proved it will run forever. And this is just the standard proof of the halting problem. The weird part is that proving this also creates a contradiction.
It does not give a counterexample. It specifies a way that you could find a counterexample if there was a halting oracle. But if there was a halting oracle there wouldn't be any counterexample. So what is found is a contradiction.
The standard halting problem proof doesn't specify what the halting oracle is. It just shows how to construct a counter example for any halting oracle. I actually specified a halting oracle; a program which searches through all possible proofs until it finds a proof that it halts or not.
Then running it on the counterexample causes it to run forever. Therefore I've proved that it will run forever. The program will eventually find that proof, return false, and halt.
{All possible proofs} has infinitely many elements longer than zero, so your algorithm will (might) run forever on some programs that do halt, so it is not a halting oracle.
If a program halts, it's easy to prove that it halts. Just run it until it halts. The problem is proving that some programs won't halt.
Also, there is definitely some objective fact where you cannot get the right answer:
"After thinking about it, you will decide that this statement is false, and you will not change your mind."
If you conclude that this is false, then the statement will be true. No paradox, but you are wrong.
If you conclude that this is true, then the statement will be false. No paradox, but you are wrong.
If you make no conclusion, or continuously change your mind, then the statement will be false. No paradox, but the statement is undecidable to you.
There is no program such that no Turing machine can determine whether it halts or not. But no Turing machine can take every program and determine whether or not each of them halts.
It isn't actually clear to me that you a Turing machine in the relevant sense, since there is no context where you would run forever without halting, and there are contexts where you will output inconsistent results.
But even if you are, it simply means that there is something undecidable to you -- the examples you find will be about other Turing machines, not yourself. There is nothing impossible about that, because you don't and can't understand your own source code sufficiently well.
The program I specified is impossible to prove will halt. It doesn't matter what Turing machine, or human, is searching for the proof. It can never be found. It can't exist.
The paradox is that I can prove that. Which means I can prove the program searching for proofs will never halt. Which I just proved is impossible.
I looked at your specified program. The case there is basically the same as the situation I mentioned, where I say "you are going to think this is false." There is no way for you to have a true opinion about that, but there is a way for other people to have a true opinion about it.
In the same way, you haven't proved that no one and nothing can prove that the program will not halt. You simply prove that there is no proof in the particular language and axioms used by your program. When you proved that program will not halt, you were using a different language and axioms. In the same way, you can't get that statement right ("you will think this is false") because it behaves as a Filthy Liar relative to you. But it doesn't behave that way relative to other people, so they can get it right.
Gödel's incompleteness bites here. What theory is your halt-testing machine H searching for a proof within? H can only find termination proofs that are derivable from the axioms of that theory. What theory is your proof that H(FL,FL) does not terminate expressed in? I believe it will necessarily not be the same one.
To expand on this -
check_if_proof_proves_x_haltswill be working using a certain set of axioms and derivation rules. When you prove thatH(FL, FL)doesn't halt, you also use the assumption thatcheck_if_proof_proves_x_haltswill definitely return the true answer, which is an assumption thatcheck_if_proof_proves_x_haltsdoesn't have as an axiom and can't prove. (And the same for..._x_doesnt_halt.) SoHcan't use your proof. When it callscheck_if_proof_proves_x_doesnt_halton your proof, that function returns "false" because your proof uses an axiom that that function doesn't believe in.I'm not super confident about this stuff, but I think this is broadly what's going on.
I find myself occasionally in conversations that aim at choosing one of two (or more) courses of action. Here are some patterns that arise that frustrate me:
A: We'll get to City in an hour. When we're there, do you want to do X? Or maybe Y?
B: I haven't thought about it yet, I've been dodging sheep and potholes. What do you want to do?
A: Whatever you're comfortable doing.
B: Umm ... Which is easier to get to?
A: I don't know. Or, we could do C, D, or E?
B: Now I'm getting choice paralysis.
A: Well, I wanted to see if you were really enthusiastic for any of them when I mentioned them. Like "Ooh, C, we have to do C, it's awesome."
B: Are you enthusiastic for any of them? Or are there some that we can rule out because they'd be hard on you?
A: Well, I'm not very interested in X but I'd do it if you wanted to.
B: Wow, X was like the first option you proposed. I would have guessed that was the one you most favored.
A: No, that was the one I thought you would most want to do. It sounds okay but not great to me.
(It may be relevant that A has a mild physical disability and self-describes as an introvert, while B self-describes as an extrovert diagnosed with depression and anxiety. Both are relatively neurotypical for around here.)
A: Where should we eat dinner tonight? Can you look on the search results for "City restaurants"?
B: Well, there's Anna's Afghan, Caonima Chinese, Dack's Deli, and Ed's Ethiopian, plus a bunch of taquerias and burger joints.
A: That's too many options. Which are any good?
B: I already filtered out the ones that really didn't sound like we would like them. Like Pat's Pork-Fat BBQ Smokestack.
A: Ew, yeah, good idea, but it's still too many. We should narrow it down.
B: Okay, how about Dack's Deli? I could go for a turkey avocado sandwich.
A: How about Bob's or ... hey, there's a second page of search results. Flora's Flounder Fish, Greg's Garlic Gustables, ...
B: Wait, I thought you said we needed to narrow down the list we already had?
A: Well yes, we do.
B: So, I nominated Dack's Deli and you didn't respond, and extended the list of candidates instead. Should I take that as meaning that you're rejecting Dack's Deli outright and narrow the list down?
A: No, I just want more information. Any of these could turn out to suck.
B: Well, sure, but we don't need to find the very best budget restaurant in City. We just need to find one that is nice enough that we like it,
A: Caonima Chinese has an alpaca on their logo, but I'm not sure I want to go to a restaurant that tells me to fuck my mom.
B: Yeah, that is a little creepy. Mumble mumble hipsters mumble.
A: So you really want to go to Dack's Deli?
B: Not particularly but since all we know about any of these is the listings, we might as well choose kind of arbitrarily.
A: FIne, let's do that.
(The deli turned out to be closed, but the fish & chip shop next door was fine.)
It feels like we're running two different negotiation scripts. Mine (B) works by collecting a pool of candidate results (by brainstorming, or using a search engine, then filtering out things that we're definitely not up for doing, then doing a tiny bit of stack ranking and presenting the list. A's script seems to start out by proposing the option that A thinks I will like most, even if A doesn't want that option very much, then falling back to "rattle off some results and see if any elicit +++ enthusiasm.
Assume that the conversational partners have heard of NVC, value of information, basic business negotiation; and also assume that one another are acting in good faith. The limiting factor is not "can we come to equitable terms?" or "is this going to lead to a big fight?" ... it is more "can we more rapidly converge on a common-knowledge prediction of an enjoyable dinner, without spending huge mental effort on it up front?"
I would usually approach these types of decisions by doing research in advance, so that the options can be considered when not driving over potholes and hungry.
For example, the day before going to a city, A and B could each look up yelp reviews of restaurants in the city, and each write down a first choice and a second choise of the restaurants they would most like to go to, given constraints (eg. close to their other destination, open at the right time.) Then they could compare lists, and discuss, and decide which restaurant to go to before even leaving for the destination.
My impression from reading the conversations is that A and B are relatively good at communicating. They have different styles of communicating and different preferences. Over time, A and B might get to know each other's preferences better and be able to predict how the other person will respond with more accuracy, and that may shorten the amount of time it takes. I'm not sure there is a shortcut to convergence. The problem may be more that you are discussing things when tired and hungry and doing other things such as driving. If you have such conversations while you are both feeling kind of crappy, it may take longer to sort things out than if you discuss when in better circumstances.
This happens to my spouse and me very often. We've gotten pretty good at noticing after the second "I dunno, what do you want to do" round that we need to switch from ask mode to tell mode. Don't give options, just propose something, and say "any objection must take the form of a counterproposal" (yes, we say literally this sentence to each other a few times a week).
Especially when one partner is more tired than the other, we can instead just have the more engaged partner pick something and the tired one get one or two vetos before being forced to step up and actually accept something. This isn't always comfortable, especially when it's unclear that there exists a good solution.
Most of my social circle says "dinner semantics" to mean exactly this. So far we've skirted but basically avoided the trap of gaming it by bluffing - proposing an option you know is unacceptable to force someone else to propose.
It sounds to me as though the problem is that neither of you are very enthusiastic about any of the choices. One possibility is to identify a list of what's tolerable and then use a random method for choosing.
Another is to talk with each other about what each of you really like at a time when you aren't distracted and tired.
It's conceivable that one or both of you aren't good at remembering what you really like, in which case keeping records would help.
Along the same lines, although less generally applicable but with higher potential payoff; if neither person is very enthusiastic about an activity, it is worth looking at ways to eliminate it, change it, or automate it.
For example, if you are not enthusiastic about going out to eat, you might look at eating at home; if you do not want to go into the city, perhaps only one of you should go, or perhaps you can look into way to order goods online and complete tasks remotely.
The pro and con list of each of these modifications is long, and any given solution might work for you. However, I have had good results from deleting 'meh' activities from my routines, and things like hanging out with your SO and eating are really supposed to be intrinsically motivating, not exercises in satisficing.
Does anyone know of any posts or resources that are targeted at rationalists that help with extracting yourself and recovering from an abusive relationship?
I've been a longtime student of LessWrong and related communities, studied physics at a top school, great at programming, very introspective etc. etc. All the regular boxes checked. Just a week ago I left a relationship that I realized has become extremely abusive (both emotionally and physically) and I'm having a lot of trouble understanding how I ever got in that situation. Having intensely strong signals from my rational side (RUN RUN) and even stronger signals from my emotional side (GO BACK, YOU HAVE TO HELP HER) is a very uncomfortable position for me to be in and something I've never experienced before.
I had a moment of clarity a week ago after my significant other threatened in a calm, honest tone to give me sleeping pills, cut off certain of my body parts, and then make me watch her put them down the garbage disposal. I opened up to my entire family about everything going on over a frantically intense few hours because I realized soon I would go back to hiding what was going on so that everyone would continue to love her. They've rallied around me and prevented me from going back over the last week and it's been the most difficult week of my life. I knew I'd need to hedge against my future decision making because in that moment of clarity I saw the abuse victim cycle I was in. I've intensely wanted to go back at times over the last week and I know I would have if not for people preventing and constantly reminding me not to.
On some level it's fascinating. I've never been this irrational in my life. I can analyze the situation and output an answer that I know is correct intellectually... but every feeling I have is telling me the opposite, and they're the strongest feelings I've ever had. It's very uncomfortable and leaves me feeling like things would be easier if I just went back.
That was a bit long. I'll stop there and write more if there is any interest.
I think your feelings will change over time. Changing how you think about something may not change how you feel now, but it may lead to changes in how you feel in the future. It kind of sucks right now, but I don't think this conflict between your feelings and thoughts is permanent. It's a temporary thing you are going through.
Here are some articles I read that helped me understand abusive relationships a little better.
“I Can Handle It”: On Relationship Violence, Independence, and Capability http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/08/08/i-can-handle-it-on-relationship-violence-independence-and-capability/
It’s Not Your Relationship That’s Abusive, It’s Your Partner – Here’s Why That Distinction Matters http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/05/its-not-your-relationship-thats-abusive-its-your-partner-heres-why-that-distinction-matters/
Also, when a friend of mine was in a similar situation, he said that reading a book about Borderline Personality Disorder was helpful. His girlfriend had that. Your situation may be different.
I also think it may help to read books to help learn about and remember what healthy relationships look like. John Gottman's books are my favourite for that. Gottman has studied thousands of real life couples in his lab and has a good idea of what works and what doesn't.
Here's one that I liked, though if another of his books jibes with you more, then you might want to get that one:
Why Marriages Succeed and Fail by John Gottman http://www.amazon.com/Why-Marriages-Succeed-Fail-Yours/dp/0684802414/
And, Gottman has studied abusive relationships, and attempted to figure out why people abuse, and what patterns they have. He wrote a book about it, focusing on men abusing women, but I think it would be useful in the reverse situation.
When Men Batter Women by John Gottman and Neil Jacobson https://www.gottman.com/shop/when-men-batter-women/
That first link is very interesting-- what I'm taking away from it is that there is no shortcut. Your gut isn't necessarily on your side. Neither is your partner. The ideology which says it's on your side may not be quite as good as you think it is. The odds (if we can go with the article and its comments) that your friends are on your side are relatively good, but it's still a gamble.
You have to keep drilling down and hope that you hit reality.
As someone who has been through a lot of abuse, beware. Your future self, not your current self, feels the fallout from the abuse more so than your current self. You have adapted to your abusive situation, when it goes away, you will be maladapted. Get out. Just take it on blind faith that you should get out if you have to. You don't want to end up like me. In my case I was indeed subjected to violence like what might happen to you. To this day, I regret not retaliating, killing my abuser or torturing them back to save myself from even a portion of it. And I'm well aware that's very much not normal. Now, even though I have the opportunity, I don't want to and won't, but if I could go back in time, well...the point is that you should get out, and that's not at all going to be the hard point from there.
If someone threatens you and/or abuses you, call the police. That stuff is illegal. Do so as soon as you safely can.
Speaking as somebody who could easily be on the other side of that equation, except for a very rigorous moral system, including a rule to stay the hell away from people who scream "Victim!" into my brain, I can tell you exactly how you got into that situation.
She became whatever you needed her to be, in order for you to be the target she wanted you to be. (I can manipulate anybody into doing anything. I just have to become the person they would do that thing for - and my self is flexible in ways most people couldn't imagine.)
In particular, she became somebody who needed help, because you would try to help her.
It's important to realize - she doesn't need help. She never needed help. The person you want to help doesn't exist, and never did. That person was a mask that the person who threatened you wore to make you vulnerable.
Allow yourself to mourn the person you thought she was. But do not imagine that that person was ever her.
I've been thinking about your post for some time. It's sounds compelling and I can't quite put my finger on why. I want to rule out that it's just cause I like the things you post and your style. Can you elaborate on your victim rule please?
Perhaps you don't want to be the target an accusation of victimisation by someone who misattributes that status to people?
When I say they scream "Victim!", it's in something the way a rabbit's movements yell in a wolf's brain. It's hard to describe. It draws out predatory elements.
Thank you for the insight.
To all those who've read some HPMoR, I find it interesting that that's basically how Quirrel describes his and Harry's... differences from most people.
Buy and read this book right now: "No More Mr. Nice Guy" by Robert Glover
(I can't tell from your post whether you are male or female, but it doesn't matter. The book is equally good for either.)
In essence, this book may help you learn how to stop being a victim, how to set your own limits, and how to get your own needs met. It also may inoculate you against getting into future relationships like this.
I hope you don't wait with getting help until you find something targeted specifically for rationalists. Get all the help you can right now. A little bullshit here and there may annoy you, but non-rationalists can also have a lot of domain-specific knowledge.
If there are any methods -- rational or not -- to erase this feeling from your mind, do it a.s.a.p. That is priority #1. Stop your brain from ruining your life.
Congratulations on telling your family. Actually, telling anyone. Saying certain things aloud allows one to think about them more clearly.
I disagree with the one-sidedness of this advice - esp. without knowing all that much about the situation.
I have also been in a not really alike but also difficult situation and there are many layers. See also this. It might be that he understands only just too well that it was a mutual cycle. It might also be a cry for help on her side. Not that the method is acceptable but a signal it is. And I imagine a smart person can help her. Without going back. Someone else might help. Whatever help is the right kind here.
I'm still stuck in the Dark Arts mode and I'm aware of it, but I will ask you anyway:
Would you also give the same relationship advice to a battered woman?
I didn't give any advice. I urged for understanding that the situation might be more complex and layered than implied by the simplicity of the advice IN ALL CAPS. I hedged with lots of 'might' and 'if'. And I didn't intend to imply that the relationship should be repaired (at least not the romantic one; one cpuld hope to get along well though). In my worldview everyone is the hero of their own story to use that old picture and I work from the assumption that no side meant evil. It is difficult and may in many cases be impossible to untangle the vicious circle that developed. but even if one doesn't interact personally after the break-up doesn't mean that one can not or may not feel empathy and help. It could be possible to help indirectly in many ways like telling mutual friends or acquaintances to help. Offer to contact help lines or even offer material expenses (quite relevant in cases of break-ups). If these are refused or accusations are made due to it for me personally the human possible limit is reached. Also I don't think that there is a moral responsibility to help that much at all. Everyone has to draw ones individual line somewhere. Maybe I'm more altruistic than average.
And yes. Obviously I'd also propose to listen to a battered woman when she proposes to help her ex. If she understands the dynamics of his anger and maybe her part in the mutual circle. I don't propose that she go back to him though.
This feeds directly into what the OP has just broken free from: a cycle of continuously re-convincing himself that this relationship might not be what it appears on the surface and that he still has a responsibility to the other party.
One-sided advice is exactly what the brain needs to stop it from falling back to the endless well of excuses and rationalizations.
Maybe. But if you don't know more than I do from what what posted here your can't say with the strength you did in your post (though agree that by now some more details have become apparent).
I have been in a probably much less but still abusive relationship and if your are smart, reflective and it's not too abusive (though I guess that the level of abuse changes over time) you can break up without loosing everything of the relationship. After all both sides have a part in it and by denying worth one looses or misrepresents also ones own part in it. My view of her and us has changed by our breakup but I salvaged positive emotion for her, esp. the things we did right and what was good about her - without feeling compelled to help her overly. A point he is over too apparently now (yes, it does take time).
Could you back that up with non-anecdotal evidence please.
Thanks for this. I am pursuing help. I have scheduled appointments with two therapists (first office visit today) and I'm looking for a third to try to find one that I can work well with.
Erasing the dangerous thoughts is the hardest part and what I wish I had better methods for. I'm in general the type of person that likes to help others, and feel more empathy for her than any other person. Part of the reason I stayed so long is that I viewed the way she was treating me as an illness and thought to myself, what would I do if she had cancer? I'd stick around and be supportive and try to get her the help she needs. That's what I should do here. That analogy breaks when you start to not feel safe though, something that took me too long to realize.
Finally an opportunity to use my Dark Arts for the benefit of humanity. Here it goes:
You see the abusive mentality of your girlfriend as an illness, and your support as a cure. Your urge to stay is rationalized as a hypothesis that being there, exposing yourself to the abuse, somehow cures the illness. Now let's ignore the fact that it is you and your girlfriend for a moment, and ask a general question: Do you really believe, as a general rule, that the best way to cure abusive people is to give them a supply of victims? Is there any psychological pubblication suggesting that this could be true? If you were a psychologist, would you recommend this as a therapy? Because as far as I know, it is exactly the opposite: enabling harmful behavior, protecting people from natural consequences of their actions, makes it more difficult to heal. That means, your staying in the relationship actually makes your girlfriend's illness worse.
Returning to your specific case, is it your personal experience that the longer you are with your girlfriend, the less abusive she gets? (Something like: at the beginning, she was threatening to cause you serious bodily harm every day, now she barely does it once in a month.) Do you have any data to support the hypothesis that your "healing" actually works? Or is it all just imagination and wishful thinking?
Does your girlfriend take a therapy? If you believe she is ill, she definitely should. Using your analogy, if she had cancer, would you let her stay home avoiding the doctors and try to heal her using your power of love? What would be your opinion about someone who did exactly that? Because that's what you are doing right now.
If this wasn't a situation between you and your girlfriend, but e.g. your (male) friend you deeply care about and his abusive girlfriend, would you recommend your friend to stay in the relationship? Imagine that the friend is not dating her yet; he just noticed her a he likes her, but you already know that she is an abusive person. Would you recommend your friend to start dating her, knowing that this will happen afterwards, or would you try to stop him?
Imagine a parallel reality where you live with a girlfriend who is not abusive. Would you break up with her only to be able to start dating an abusive girl and have a tiny chance to heal her by your suffering... because doing that would feel more altruistic, so you are morally required to choose that instead of happiness with a non-abusive girl? I am not just talking hypothetically here; the non-abusive girlfriend actually exists in your future, and it is your choice whether you open yourself for the relationship with her, or if you dump her in favor of the abusive girl you have now.
Imagine that you stay with your girlfriend and she remains exactly the same, or keeps getting worse. (Which is quite likely: the best predictor of a person's behavior is their past behavior.) Imagine yourself ten years later, twenty years later, having dealt with the abuse all the time. Ask your 50-years old future you, who is probably too emotionaly broken to rescue themselves, if they could use a time machine and send a message back to the past, to your current self, what would that message say?
Do you want to have children one day? If yes, do you want your children to have an abusive mother? Do you want to see them abused in the same way you are, or worse? Because they will be more helpless than you are. And unlike you, they didn't choose this voluntarily. Please realize that if that happens, it may become impossible to do help those children in any way, because in the case of divorce, the judge will most likely let the mother keep the children, regardless of her personality. (Read some stories in "men's rights" debates to get an idea about how horribly family court can work in real life.)
Do you believe that decent human beings should help each other and support each other, as much as possible, especially when they are in a relationship? How does your girlfriend fulfill these criteria? Or do you perhaps believe that moral duties apply only on a few selected people (such as you) and don't apply to other people (such as your girlfriend)? That would mean you don't even consider her a member of the same "moral species".
If helping other people is a high priority in your life, is staying with your current girlfriend really generating maximum good? Imagine that you would find another girlfriend, who is not abusive, who would make you happy, which would probably make you more productive. Then you could together sometimes volunteer in a kitchen for poor people, or contribute some money to effective altruist causes. Wouldn't that generate more good?
For best outcome, please read this list repeatedly, focusing on the parts than resonated with you.
Thank you for this, exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.
Believe it or not, I've had almost every one of these thoughts myself over the last year and a half.
Nope. Don't believe it at all.
I have data to the contrary. I've spent a year and a half trying and the abuse has gotten progressively worse.
No. She doesn't acknowledge that she has a problem. When I try to talk to her about getting help she says that her problems are because of me and if I would just do what she says (a long an unreasonable and constantly shifting list) she would get better. She also believes I deserve what she does because I "push her over the edge."
Absolutely not
I do this all the time. I of course would not leave her to sacrifice myself for an abusive stranger.
It would tell me to leave ASAP and never look back. It would be sent as close to the beginning of the relationship as the time machine allowed.
Yes and no.
I believe moral duties apply to everyone and she has certainly failed at fulfilling hers. I don't think it's her fault, however you want to parse that sentence, but the consequences are real for me and should be for her too.
It wouldn't at all. I do care about helping others and in my normal state I'm an extremely high functioning and successful person. I've basically become a drone that works and worries about her and that's about it. I miss my former self and getting that back is one of the things that excites me most.
Thanks for the long response. The most difficult part of all this is feeling a bit insane myself. My rational mind can output the right answers, but I haven't been following them. Introspection and internal consistency (and a willingness to update) has always been something I'm naturally good at and valued greatly. I'm not the same person I was before this started and that's terrifying. I feel like I'm on the road to recovery though. Your comments are very helpful.
Heh. From a certain point of view, she really doesn't. If she cuts you up, that would be your problem.
A friend of a friend was dating a person who would fit this description exactly, and... well, it would be a long story. Towards the end the person demanded that they spend the whole day together, every day, which made them both unable to keep a job, so they just kept borrowing as much money as was possible from anyone. The victim was completely brainwashed, and despite trying to do everything, was beaten regularly, more and more severely. At the end, the victim's family kidnapped the victim and kept them in another country for a few months, not allowing them to use phone or internet. This finally allowed the victim to "awaken".
Meanwhile the abuser was evicted from the appartment they haven't paid rent for. Instead of finding a job, the abuser spent all their time trying to contact the victim, manipulating a wide social network quite successfully; but the family did a good job at hiding the victim until their "awakening", at which point the victim didn't want to see the abuser anymore. I don't have detailed information about what happened afterwards; I believe the family didn't call the police, but threatened to do so if the abuser tries to approach the victim anymore. (Institutions scare the abuser like shit.) The abuser is now homeless, works for food, and keeps a blog about how this all was a conspiracy of unfavorable parents against the True Love, with prayers to God to make the victim return to them. Note: the abuser is an atheist, but the victim is strongly religious; everything the abuser does is a calculated manipulation. Hopefully, as a homeless person, their ability to charm and seduce people will be diminished. The victim is back, living a normal life again, as far as I know. This happened about five years ago.
So, congratulations on quitting soon enough! You were not harmed; you didn't lose your job and savings.
For the victim in my story, it took less than one year. I mean, about a month to "awaken", a few more months to regain emotional balance and feel the certainty that even if they would meet the abuser again they wouldn't succumb to their manipulation, and the rest of the year to stop bitching about the abuser and focus on living their normal life again.
At this moment I would recommend trying to remember what you enjoyed doing before this all started, and perhaps contacting your old friends and doing it again.
Also, cut the contact. She will probably find many different reasons to talk to you; may blackmail you to talking. For example, if you forgot some of your property at her place, she may insist on meeting you one-on-one and having a conversation before she returns it to you. Do not, ever, meet her in an isolated place. She would probably try to brainwash you again, but if that fails, she might try some insane shit as a "punishment" -- cut you with a knife, start screaming that you raped her, or whatever crazy idea may come to her mind.
Glad I could help.
If you felt empathy for her, it would be the feeling of threatening to hurt you. You are feeling sympathy, guilt or something else. There is a difference.
Please write more about every part of your experience. As we know from a related field; "people who are sleep deprived don't know how sleep deprived they are". People in an abusive relationship don't know they are in an abusive relationship (until the moment of clarity) any writing about noticing things will help people potentially get away from bad relationships.
Edit: have some karma to help you recover and/also reap successful feeling from your present adventure
Thanks for the encouragement, I do intend to write more.
It's only been a week since I removed myself from the situation, and I'm already starting to feel shocked at how much worse it was than I realized at the time. Seeing the faces and hearing the comments of friends and family when I tell them stories makes a world of difference. Not one person has told me I'm making a bad decision.
If you'd asked me 3 years ago if I could ever be in a situation like this I would have assigned it very very low probability. Low probability events happen, but I think what is more likely is that it's a lot easier than I thought to become normalized to an increasingly toxic environment over time.
I think the best advice I could give so far is, if you think you're in an abusive relationship, talk to people about it. On some level I knew something was very wrong, but I began lying to family and friends about what was going on. I did this both to protect her, and to protect our future relationships as a couple. I was always optimistic about getting to a better place, and I didn't want people to hate her once we were there. I told my mother one small story once (far from the worst thing that had happened, and one story among many) and she called me in tears several weeks later saying she was worried I'd hate her for it but she had to tell me that she didn't think the wedding was a good idea (we were engaged).
I'm going to write a lot over the coming weeks and will make a post here if I think I uncover any worthwhile advice.
There's this, both for dealing with the aftermath of the break-up, as well as the break-up itself.
Thank you very much this is helpful.
beat me to it!
Has anyone got opinions on Clifford Geertz? He's supposedly the most-influential American anthropologist. I began reading his famous book, Interpretation of Cultures, and I'm struck by how illogical it is. He has interesting insights into his own perspective, but he's consistently completely unable to comprehend anyone else's perspective. Odd, for someone who says that's the purpose of his own profession. He fails to draw even caricatures or straw men of behaviorism and cognitivism, his main opponents, and just says they're wrong, then tells entertaining stories until the reader forgets that he never dealt with them.
His big point is that culture shouldn't be seen as a body of knowledge that people in a culture have, but a "web of significance". As far as I can tell this is a distinction without a difference.
He emphasizes the importance of semiotics. This is not a good sign.
I read another chapter, on cockfighting in Bali, and I begin to understand him better.
When he dismisses cognitivism, he's probably thinking of Levi-Strauss. The introductory chapter which seemed illogical to me was probably not intended to be a logical argument of any kind, but a summary of his views. Geertz seems to have the common non-hard-science mystical view of human thought, as something not amenable to logical analysis, and a view of logic as reductionist. He seems, like I suspect Wittgenstein does, to think that a logical analysis of language means analyzing individual words, and that the information provided by context and by the ways the words are put together is somehow beyond the grasp of logic, and that language and human activity just can't be explained that way.
Yes, but that's because he was doing stuff in the 50s and 60s, when there were a lot of old theories that were ripe for refining and overturning. He made a name for himself by saying a lot of things that seem obvious to us today -- questioning structuralism and functionalism as dominant paradigms was big news in the day. I would say that his work on theory is not worth the trouble it takes to get through it, but I have a low tolerance for bushwhacking through tangled prose. When you get to applied cases, he does make more sense, and can be engaging. I remember Peddlers and Princes being worth reading, although I think he had a good number of page-long paragraphs there too.
I've read a little Geertz, and I think part of what he means is that a culture is people doing stuff, not a body of knowledge or a bunch of patterns which can be abstracted away from the people engaging in a culture..
It's the "not" that I have problems with. First, knowledge is abstract, by definition, so to say "not a body of knowledge which can be abstracted..." is the same as to say "not a body of knowledge". Next, the thing that he says culture is, must be completely implicit in the body of knowledge or the bunch of patterns, or else it would have an independent existence from the members of the culture, and be literally the soul of an ethnic group, made out of invisible culture-stuff, much like the consciousness-stuff that John Searle says our minds our made of.
They are different perspectives on the same information. Likewise the behaviorists have a different perspective which also accounts for all of the same information.
He doesn't even notice this. He doesn't seem to make any attempt to understand anyone else's perspectives. He just says they're obviously wrong, using so many words and digressions that the reader assumes, coming to the end of a long paragraph, that there must have been an argument in there somewhere. It's the same style of argument George Steiner uses.
I wonder if he's unable to understand anyone else's perspectives because of his perspective. He says that anthropology is about trying to understand someone else's perspective, but that cannot consist of understanding what they're thinking (what he calls the cognitivist fallacy).
I've read very little of the book so far! It's just... so very unpromising. So much fail in so few pages.
This is a common behavior among hedgehogs. I tend to just ignore it and figure out where this person's model works, and where it's overreaching.
As I understood Geertz, he wasn't talking about invisible culture-stuff, he was talking about tacit culture stuff. The tacit understanding is how people in a culture can make changes which are likely to be satisfactory to other members of the culture, and how members of a culture identify what fits.
If my theory is correct, it gets really complicated as a culture changes over long periods of time and as a result of contact with other cultures.
I just tried this 'battleground god' thing and it told me:
I don't get it. Why can't I be unsure about the truth value of something just because it's a logical impossibility? My understanding of logic isn't exhaustive.
BattleGround God is bad arguing. It seems to have been created and tested by one person who had strong ideas about the type of person that was going to take it. The 'contradictory statements' that it identifies are 1. not actually contradictory, but 2. not presented in conjunction to each other, meaning that you have to take their re-wording of previous statements as consistent. They are not constant -- they replace wording indicating a broad idea with wording requiring a narrow (and specifically Judaic/Christian/Islamic) definition in order to 'catch you out'. Whacking through all the random things they think that you might believe (mostly wisely chosen if you are taking an exit poll at a church, but not so good on a philosophy site) makes it very boring to find their errors... But errors there are. Whoever wrote it was much more interested in catching out theists with murky ideas of rhetoric and not particularly interested in defining beliefs and testing for contradictions.
This person would not last 5 minutes in a discussion with a real human. This is not a good model of how to talk to theists, nor will any non-rational theist bother to play this game with any intent of taking its conclusions as valid. Nor should they.
It was so painful!
I just took that.
and
I answered the first question that way because I believe there are some inner convictions it is justified to base one's beliefs on (for instance, the belief that there is an external world and that I am not a brain in a vat), but I do not believe this is true for all inner convictions. So that is not actually a contradiction.
I didn't get any other "contradictions" and I suspect that it's because I took everything very literally there.
If you're using logic to determine truth values, then a logical impossibility is false. The reason is that if something is logically impossible, then its existence would create a contradiction and so violate the Law of Noncontradiction.
Your logic sounds consistent. Thanks, I'm happy to accept the utility of the law of non-contradiction and therefore don't believe in the logical impossibility of god anymore, not the logical impossibility of anything I conceive.
Maybe it's because I'm not bayesian enough:
If I accepted that:
Then I may not hold my current attitude. But I don't see reason to believe those premises.
I'm not certain where the problem lies, but I suspect that you may be misunderstanding the term "logical impossibility". It would not be used to indicate that you have come up with an argument that shows that something is impossible. Instead it would be used to indicate that something is actually impossible in any consistent universe.
To clarify, if I make the argument that 1. Socrates is a man, and 2. all men are mortal, that does not make it logically impossible for Socrates to live forever; it just means that I can show logically that Socrates won't die as long as these statements hold.
Logically impossible things are generally things like a square circle (exactly 4 right angles and exactly 0 angles in the same 2d shape); if they exist, it is because you misunderstand the terms being used in some way; if someone claims that this qualifies as a square circle, they have misunderstood what I am trying to communicate.
Likewise, people may say that an entity cannot be perfectly good and have allowed the holocaust; this might qualify god as a logical impossibility -- if we accept this judgement of morality, if we believe that god is perfectly good, and if we believe that the holocaust happened.
You could perhaps come up with a scenario in which God, being perfectly good, absolutely needed to implant memories of the holocaust into each of our memories.... or you could simply define god as an evil being. so I would say that "logical impossibility" is a bit strong.
Given this premise, I now agree that I misunderstood >'the term "logical impossibility".'
Though, I unfortunately don't understand what it does mean. I'll look it up now and see if that further clarifies.
So from the Wikipedia page, I now understand stand it as something whereby the components of the logical equation in some way denote that the other components are incompatible with it, perhaps they denote some character of the other components at a level of analysis beyond one particular level of characterisation or grouping.
However, if it also comes down to what a particular person can conceive as possibility, doesn't that come down to a particular person's ability to visualise, imagine or recombine concepts into a coherent whole - which almost certainly various between those more cognitively flexible and those who aren't?
In the Wikipedia example, understand why the sky is blue, not just at the physical level but psychological level of description, helps me imagine why someone might claim something apparently absurd like "the sky isn't a sky".
btw,w hen I googled for logical impossibility to get the Wikipage it suggested this stack exchange question
I think I see the problem. Whenever any philosopher says that something is logically impossible, they are specifically and openly aware that this is only conditionally true. For example, a square circle is only clearly a logical impossibility if the words square and circle mean the same thing every time I think them, including in the time period that I move from 'square' to 'circle'; if the ideas of 'square' and 'circle' actually do have a referent, and I am not just deluded into feeling a clear sense of meaning when I think those words, (and including all defining terms [such as 'right angle']); if I am correct in believing that two non-identical things are necessarily not one thing; if I am correct in believing language can refer to things other than semantic relationships; and many other fun things, including the big one: the assumption that I exist and am thinking.
However, once you have gotten everyone on the same page, and we all admit that we cannot prove that we exist, we start talking about highly conditional realities, such as those in which BattleGround God is more than a deluded memory, in which the words on the LessWrong are entered by other people, realities in which computers and circles and 'good' actually exist in some meaningful sense...
...and we don't all have the same set of conditionally accepted realities. Nor do we need to in order to make most arguments intelligible to both parties. As a matter of course, most of the things we talk about are propositioned on the existence of the external world as reported by our senses and the media. If we deviate from this, we specify this in some way.
And that explains logical impossibility... but then I realized that I hadn't read your original question carefully enough.
BG has conflated "belief that God is a logical impossibility" and "you know that She doesn’t exist." The second claim should be "you believe that She doesn’t exist." BG tried too hard, and it fails. Next time, use a Real Philosopher(TM).
While I don't agree with the way they phrased their explanation, it's akin to saying "I'm not sure if 2 + 2 = 4 is true, but I am sure it can't equal anything else." Then falling back to "but there could be oddities in the foundation of mathematics that I'm not aware of" when pressed on the inconsistency.
If you claim that your understanding of logic isn't exhaustive, I don't see how you can also claim that X is logically impossible. ("I'm not a car expert but there is no possible way the problem is with the engine")
Thanks for that analogy, that gives me a new way to think about it.
I believe I can agree with the 2 + 2 = 4 theorem because I already agree with agreement in the summation of the components represented.
To illustrate:
If I put up 2 figures, then another 2 fingers, I can reliable get consensus from a survey of people and my own intuition/memory that it represents 4 fingers, and correspondingly the number 4.
Meanwhile, I don't have any kind of clear idea of what people are on about when they say god, so doing any logical operation from there is unclear. The reason that understanding the component is important to doing an operation is that it may have an implicit modifier that affects the logical operation in and of itself.
For instance:
2 + (-2) = 4
the (-2), is not the same as 2, it's a different component which may sometimes appear to be a 2, but getting consensus about it from people, or figuring out what to do with your fingers when you read it, might confuse people into giving an answer that is less consistent.
It appears that I'm using a consensus theory of truth. I guess that's neccersary for any kind of discussion with more than one participant anyhow.
It makes more sense to think in terms of probabilities here, than "is or isn't". To what probability would you give god being a logical impossibility?
Thanks, that's an interesting point, but I don't think it can get a probability of being true or false because that would imply that the underlying concept can somehow be demonstrated true or false.
If it can be demonstrated true or false, then it's logical impossibility would be 0%, because anything that is testable and has yet to be tested has a possibility of being true or false, however small that may be, or else it's self-evident (100%).
Else, it cannot be demonstrated true or false, in which case the logical impossibility is 100%.
But the whole point of the original post was that you had logical uncertainty. That's why in Bayesian reasoning you can't have probabilites of 0 and 1 - to allow for the possibility, however small, of updating.
See also: How to convince me that 2+2 =3
Thanks, I don't really understand where I was coming from before. Maybe my new found understanding of the terminology around uncertainty has finally updated my intuitions :)
How can P(x doesn't exist) < P(x is logically impossible)? That's... well, logically impossible.
If I've understand correct, you're saying that the probability that x doesn't exist, can't less than the probabiltiy that x is logically impossible.
The reason that it can be true, is because I'm not smart enough to interpret that complicated proposition whether it's in symbolic form or even after I've managed to translate it into words.
Therefore, P(x doesn't exist) may very well be < P(x is logically impossible), I have no idea.
It is definitely true that this could be someone's subjective probability, if he he doesn't understand the statement.
But if you do understand it, a thing which is logically impossible doesn't exist, so the probability that a thing doesn't exist will be equal to or higher than the probability that it is logically impossible.
I feel like I might understand now. Can I represent your points as follows:
Assuming statement 1 is correct, without accepting a further premise I don't feel compelled to accept the second premise. It sounds like things which are logically impossible may in fact be equivelant to things which don't exist, and vice-versa. And that sounds intuitively compelling. If something was logically possible, it would happen. If it is wasn't possible, it's not going to happen. Or, the agent's modelling of the world is wrong.
Importantly, I don't accept premise 1, as I've indicated in another comment reply (something about how I find I'm wrong about the apparent impossibility of something, or possibility of something.)
I said "so the probability that a thing doesn't exist will be equal to or higher than etc." exactly because the probability would be equal if non-existence and logical impossibility turned out to be equivalent.
If you don't agree that no logically impossible thing exists, then of course you might disagree with this probability assignment.
A purple dog with octopus arms is logically possible, but does not exist.
Well, the conclusion should read not "more things" but "at least as many". Things might accidentally not exist.
I feel the fact that you reject premise 1 just means that you don't really grasp the concept of impossibility, logical or otherwise... Or you have a different concept of existence.
The reason why I used a semi-formal notation was to suggest that if you formalise it all, you can actually prove "P(x doesn't exist) ≥ P(x is impossible)" as a tautology. (Ignoring the issue that with specifically logical impossibility, you get into a bit of trouble with probability assignments to tautologies.)
Seems undecidable, circa Godel bla bla bla.
Uhm, what? Why? Bla bla bla indeed. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) It's not actually very relevant.
If you don't believe that logical (or, for that matter, any other sort of) impossibility implies non-existence, then you are understanding either "logical impossibility" or "non-existence" in a way different from just about everybody else. So if there is any point to this discussion, it should be to elucide how you understand them.
Thanks for making that clear to me. I don't like the idea of having inconstent terminology usage to everyone else, so in that case I'm at deep fault. A few minutes (hours?) ago I had a moment of clarity and I'm pretty sure I'm psychotic right now. I caught myself out in the delusion I've been having for a couple of days, which I have had in the past for unfortunately far longer, that society and economies are going to collapse and we're going to be forced to farm or raid people and because I'm passive and shit at gardening I'll die a horrible death. Which, I should have good reason to believe is absurd because economic collapses are extremely rare, highly unlikely in developed countries like ours, there are measures in place to intervene in food security crises, so on and so forthe. The point is, this is consistent my prolific shit posting over the last half-day which I will probably go back and perhaps get rid of the ones without comments. Meanwhile, this thread is probably going to be extremely interesting to me when I recover from this because it formalises how it captures, to some extent how I've been relating to the world. To some extent I miss that if I had managed to reply to your comment further into this state it might have been very interesting. On the other hand, perhaps if not for it, I wouldn't have recognised that this indeed is a problem right now and my delusion isn't just a single odd piece of psychosis admist normal thinking otherwise. Ok I better get off this thing and figure out to get some help so my assignments can still be submitted in time...I've lost so much karma in the last half day haha.
Unless this is some kind of self-doubt, or worry/anxiety thing and I'm just making a feel of myself to refuse actually updating my beliefs faced with compelling reason. I don't know, I feel very odd. I'll probably update this at some point. Unless something goes very wrong...a little while ago I was thinking of retiring this account and also how interesting it would be if someone wrote a suicide note on lesswrong. Ok I need to stop right now, this isn't right or relevant. Bye.
If you already know that square circles cannot exist, it follows that in fact they do not exist; nothing impossible happens, so a proposition like "I saw a square circle" automatically gets a truth value = 0 without having to bother examining it.
thats confirmation bias
And how do we compensate for confirmation bias?
"Wait, I must not yet discard the chance I'm wrong, because for all I know, square circles can—"
No, they can't. Ergo, they don't.
Sorry I don't follow. Please use baby steps for me.
The purpose of knowing about confirmation bias is to always keep in mind that you tend to overly favor your own preferred hypothesis, so you must adopt a detached perspective and try to consider all alternative explanations.
But in this case we are dealing with the rules of logic. Unless you're a follower of one of the many paraconsistent schools, there are no alternative explanations. The rules just work. It's not confirmation bias to favor an explanation based on the rules of logic.
Denying square circles a priori is not the same as denying black swans a priori: swans are real things in the real universe, and as such can have limitless variations. Swans that fall outside of their former definition force us to update the definition. A black swan is not a logical impossibility. Circles, on the other hand, are abstractions in our heads, and only have one form. Circles that fall outside of their definition are just not circles.
Going back to your original example: IF God is a logical impossibility, no instantiation of a God in the real universe will occur, because, again, nothing impossible happens. You don't need to bother examining the truth value of something that in principle can't occur, for the same reason geometrists don't go on field trips in search for square circles. You can trust logic; it simply won't happen.
I disagree.
You're implying that square circles are platonic concepts that aren't empirically verifiable. I would argue that they entirely are, just the task would be too difficult to be worth anyone's while. Just because something is in someone else's field of perception, doesn't make it any less real if it's a particular hypothesised shape, or a particular hypothesised colour. I could simply ask someone if they've seen a square circle and if everyone says no, can comfortably believe there aren't any till I perhaps see one, just as if I ask about black swans and if everyone says no, comfortable b eleive they don't exist unless I see one.
This is the assumption made in your last paragraph and I completely disagree. I've frequently found that things I thought were impossible happened. That kind of dogmatic certainty sounds awefully dangerous. While thinking about logic in that kind of self-consistent, but externally inconsistent sense seems to be absurd. One can describe a particular mythology that might make sense in a self-consistent way, but when related to other systems of belief isn't coherent.
Yes, any real-world circle is imperfect and deviates from being a circle in the mathematical sense. Something that's square deviates a lot from the circle in the mathematical sense and is thus no real circle.
There is a difference between things that are impossible per se and things we think are impossible. Logical impossibilities are impossible regardless of anyone's opinion. Good luck with that square circle survey.
Square circles exist in the Manhattan metric.
It is not really interesting that a circle can be X if you first change the definition of circle.
Are there any lesswrong-like sequences focused on economics, finance, business, management? Or maybe just internet communities like lesswrong focused on these subjects?
I mean, the sequences introduced me to some really complex knowledge that improved me a lot, while simultaneously being engaging and quite easy to read. It is only logical to assume that somewhere on the web, there must be some articles in the same style covering different themes. And if there are not, well, someone must surely do this, I think there is some demand for this kind of content.
So, feel free to link lesswrong-like series of blogposts on any theme, actually: that will be really helpful for me. P.S. In hindsight, i guess there may be some post here, on lesswrong, containing all these links I am looking for. If so, could anyone link me to it?
http://eco-comics.blogspot.com/ <- For economics - not a sequence, per se, but covering a broad range of material in an entertaining and (AFAIK) novel way. http://eco-comics.blogspot.com/2009/06/justice-league-and-comparative.html <- Probably the best post there
Eliezer used an approach of gradual but entertaining introduction so that a good many people stayed interested even though he was also encouraging them to make significant changes in the way they think. He also offered varied and interesting examples so that people understood what he meant.
I think you're overoptimistic about equivalent sequences for other subjects. I hope I'm wrong.
I've always been annoyed by how icky traditional sunscreen makes me feel, so I was happy to find out that there's a roll-on sunscreen that works reasonably well. I've used it a couple of times now, and while I wasn't outside for long enough that I would have burned when I used it in either case-- and therefore can't comment on the effectiveness of a single layer of the stuff-- I would say that applying it was much quicker and easier than applying traditional sunscreen. While applying sunscreen isn't the lowest hanging fruit in health interventions out there, it's still useful for reducing one's risk of death from melanoma (yay for living longer!).
Sunlight increases risk of melanoma but decreases risk of other, more deadly cancers. If you're going to get, say, 3 times your usual daily sunlight exposure, then sunscreen is probably a good idea, but otherwise it's healthier to go without. I'd guess a good heuristic is to get as much sunlight as your ancestors from 1000 years ago would have gotten.
I've got your citations.. right here
This whole article is worth reading, and has a number of counter-intuitive findings.
I've seen so many claims about the benefit or lack thereof of sunscreen. Do you have a citation?
This is something I'd eventually like to look into. Do you know which cancers sunlight protects against? Might sun exposure after one has applied sunscreen provide some protection against these cancers?
Basic sunscreen is zinc. To get that into an applicable form it is usually put into an oil suspension. As mentioned you don't like the oil. You can also get alcohol based suspension sunscreens that feel a lot nicer; and sunscreen in spray form. The benefit of oil is that it doesn't wash off so easily. But there's no point being stuck with oil based sunscreen if they make you feel that uncomfortable
This link might help: http://www.skinacea.com/sunscreen/physical-vs-chemical-sunscreen.html#.VdunDbKqqko as should https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunscreen
I was told a while ago that Asian sunscreen is different and less greasy and I bought some Japanese sunscreen from the internet. It feels much better than the regular American stuff.
Have you tried spray-on sunscreen?
I had a realization today that does not grant a separate thread.
I'm reading RAZ and got to Mysterious Answers, specifically Explain/Worship/Ignore?
I have kids. Most people know that kids love the question "why?" (If you didn't know - now you do. My family of origin has a joke that the last question of a longest stretch was number 37: why is mummy chewing on the carpet?)
When my daughter asks "why", I give her some answers usually pondering how I can influence the direction of the questions and information that I give her*. But in light of Explain/Worship/Ignore I am doing the best thing - explaining, showing her that there are layers upon layers of the stuff in this world and that it's a good idea to investigate further and further.
This made me very proud in my parenting.
*e.g. when she asks "why is the bus going?", I can answer about engines or about the driver or about the route or about planning of communal transport etc.
Why questions are very good and should be encouraged! But also, it is worth improving the questions, in addition to just answering them. So if a child asks "why is the bus going?", you can ask for a clarification "Do you mean what makes it move? Or do you mean where is it going?"; this models clearer language and better communication skills, it helps the child get an answer to the specific question that they intended, and it prevents why-questions from becoming the default I'm-bored-so-I-will-say-why-until-people-get-sick-of-talking-to-me routine.
Sorry, I know that was slightly off-topic.
Not sure if this is obvious of just wrong, but isn't it possible (even likely?) that there is no way of representing a complex mind that is sufficiently useful enough to allow an AI to usefully modify itself. For instance, if you gave me complete access to my source code, I don't think I could use it to achieve any goals as such code would be billions of lines long. Presumably there is a logical limit on how far one can usefully compress ones own mind to reason about it, and it seams reasonably likely that such compression will be too limited to allow a singularity.
There's certainly ways you can usefully modify yourself. For example, giving yourself a heads-up display. However, I'm not sure how much it would end up increasing your intelligence. You could get runaway super-intelligence if every improvement increases the best mind current!you can make by at least that much, but if it increases by less than that, it won't run away.
The ability to reason about large amounts of code seems to be more a memory and computation speed problem, than a logic problem. Computers already seem to be better than humans on these counts, so it seems like they may be better at understanding large pieces of code, once we have the whole "understanding" thing solved.
Heh. Qualify this under "crazy ideas". Chinese tech companies are motivating programmers by hiring cheerleaders. It would be interesting to know if this increases productivity. Do cheerleaders help improve results sports teams?
Related:
-- Scott Aaronson
I could cite numerous examples suggesting otherwise, NASA during the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era being the most famous.
Details?
Well mission control and the astronaut core were all male. Didn't seem to interfere with their ability to attract and retain top talent.
Never saw a CS department that looked like a monastery. As to pirate ships, well... :-D
Possibly. It depends what you hire them to do. See "The Wolf of Wall Street" for an example of effective (in the short term) motivation.