Growing up in a very religious country, I was indoctrinated thoroughly both at home and at school. I used to believe that some Christian beliefs made sense. When I was 14 years old or so, I began contemplating death – I said to myself, “Well, after I die I go to Hell or Heaven; the latter is preferable, so I'd better learn as soon as possible how I can make sure I'll go to Heaven.”

So I went on to read frantically about Christianity. With every iota of information processed, I strayed away from this religion. That is, the more I read, the less anything pertaining to it seemed plausible. “Where the hell is Hell? Can I visit before I die? Why doesn't God answer my prayers to tell me? Why do some people get to talk to God but not me?”, I retorted. In retrospective, my greatest strength was genuine curiosity – I wanted to know as much as possible about the truthfulness of my religion.

The irony here is that wanting to become more Christian-like led to my abandoning of Christianity. But I continued to learn more about other religions as well, thinking that one might be truer than the other. Of course, none of them seemed every remotely plausible; I concluded that religions are false. I turned into an atheist without even knowing that that word existed!

Eventually I stumbled on some articles regarding non-religion and discovered that my lack of religious beliefs are called 'atheism'. Since then, I have abandoned more beliefs tied to, say, politics or nutrition, thanks to applying bayesian probability to my hypotheses.

I had been an unintentional bayesian for my whole life!

Have you had any similar experiences? 

PS: This is my first article. I am looking forward to hearing feedback on it.

Edit #1: I should have used the term 'rationalist' instead of 'bayesian' because I didn't apply Bayes' theorem explicitly.

At LessWrong we encourage people to be curious. Curiosity causes people to ask questions, but sometimes those questions get misinterpreted as social challenges or rhetorical techniques, or maybe just regular questions that you don't have a "burning itch" to know the answers for (and hence maybe not particularly worth answering). I sometimes preface a question by "I'm curious," but of course anyone could say that so it's not a very effective way to distinguish oneself as being genuinely curious. Another thing I sometimes do is to try to answer the question myself and present one or more answers as my "guesses" and ask if one of them is correct, since someone who is genuinely curious is more likely put in such effort. But unfortunately sometimes that backfires when the person you're directing the question at interprets the guesses as a way to make them look bad, because for example you failed to hypothesize the actual answer and include it as one of the guesses, and all your guesses make them look worse than the actual answer.

I've noticed examples of this happening to others on LW (or at least possibly happening, since I can't be sure whether someone else really is curious) as well as to myself, and can only imagine that the problem is even worse elsewhere, where people may not give each other as much benefit of doubt as we do around here. So my question is, what can curious people do, to signal their genuine curiosity when asking questions? Has anyone thought about this question already, or perhaps can recognize some strategies they already employ and make them explicit for the rest of us?

ETA: Perhaps I should say a bit more about the kind of situation I have in mind. Often I'll see a statement from someone that either contradicts my existing beliefs about something or is on a topic that I'm pretty ignorant about, and it doesn't come with an argument or evidence to back it up. I'd think "I don't want to just take their word since they might be wrong, but there also seems a good chance that they know something that I don't in which case I'd really like to know what it is, so let's ask why they're saying what they're saying." And unfortunately this sometimes gets interpreted as "I'm pretty sure you're wrong, and I'm going to embarrass you by asking a question that I don't think you can answer."

ETA2: The reason I use "signal" in the title is that people who do just want to embarrass the other person would want to have plausible deniability. If it was clear that's their intention and it turns out that the other person has a perfectly good answer, then they'll be the one embarrassed instead. So ideally the curious person should send a signal that can't be faked by someone who just wants to pretend to be curious.

This post is about the development of our game based on Eliezer Yudkowsky's "The Twelve Virtues of Rationality".

Are games art?

It's an interesting question, but it seems that most people who answer that question in the affirmative are--intentionally or not--subscribing to the "hybrid art" view.  That is, that games are art because they combine story-telling, music, and visual style; interaction with the system of the game is in service to the storyline, music, and visual style.

I don't like that.  Here is why:

"Art" in general is creative expression through a medium. The hybrid-art view treats gameplay as the icing on the narrative-musical-visual cake.  When it should be that gameplay is the cake, and everything else is the icing.

Gameplay, or interaction with the system of the game, is a  medium for artistic expression, just like paint is for paintings.  I don't think anyone can deny that interaction with a gun during a hostile situation reeks havoc on our emotions, or that interaction with a loved one can run the emotional gamut.  Interaction is powerful.

Games can take advantage of the power of interaction to be expressive.  The art of the storyline, music, and visuals ought to be secondary to the art of the gameplay.

Twelve Virtues

I believe that gameplay is a very powerful way to learn, and so the single most important design principle for our current project is expression through gameplay.  We want to convey the meaning of each virtue through gameplay. The player should be able examine the method by which they interact with the game to learn the meaning behind the virtue.

For example:

In our Curiosity level which is where the game starts, the player must follow a mysterious cat that appears.  Very early in the level, the player is faced with a "point of no return".  If they jump down to the ground, they can't ever go back to the starting area.  They must choose to follow the cat, or stay in their "comfort zone" so to speak.  They must embrace their curiosity, or ignore it.  If they choose to follow the cat, they will eventually discover a much larger area full of mysteries to be solved.

A Slate article by psychologist Alison Gopnik about how preschoolers have already learned to accept what the teacher says rather than exploring things to develop their own understanding:

[...] Daphna ran through the same nine sequences with all the children, but with one group, she acted as if she were clueless about the toy. ("Wow, look at this toy. I wonder how it works? Let's try this," she said.) With the other group, she acted like a teacher. ("Here's how my toy works.") When she acted clueless, many of the children figured out the most intelligent way of getting the toy to play music (performing just the two key actions, something Daphna had not demonstrated). But when Daphna acted like a teacher, the children imitated her exactly, rather than discovering the more intelligent and more novel two-action solution.

[...]

These experts in machine learning argue that learning from teachers first requires you to learn about teachers. For example, if you know how teachers work, you tend to assume that they are trying to be informative. When the teacher in the tube-toy experiment doesn't go looking for hidden features inside the tubes, the learner unconsciously thinks: "She's a teacher. If there were something interesting in there, she would have showed it to me." These assumptions lead children to narrow in, and to consider just the specific information a teacher provides. Without a teacher present, children look for a much wider range of information and consider a greater range of options.

This experiment is from:

D. Buchsbaum, A. Gopnik, T.L. Griffiths, and P. Shafto (2011). Children's imitation of causal action sequences is influenced by statistical and pedagogical evidence. Cognition (in press). pdf

The other paper cited in the Slate article is:

E. Bonawitz, P. Shafto, H. Gweon, N.D. Goodman, E. Spelke, and L. Schulz (2011). The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery. Cognition (in press). pdf