Welcome to Less Wrong! (8th thread, July 2015)

Sarunas

19 Welcome to Less Wrong! (8th thread, July 2015)

22nd Jul 2015

7 min read

19

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A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

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_{Once a post gets over 500 comments, the site stops showing them all by default. If this post has 500 comments and you have 20 karma, please do start the next welcome post; a new post is a good perennial way to encourage newcomers and lurkers to introduce themselves. (Step-by-step, foolproof instructions here; takes <180seconds.)}

_{If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post.}

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19 Welcome to Less Wrong! (8th thread, July 2015)

by Sarunas

22nd Jul 2015

7 min read

273

19

A few notes about the site mechanics

EXTRA FEATURES:

There's actually more than meets the eye here: look near the top of the page for the "WIKI", "DISCUSSION" and "SEQUENCES" links.

A few notes about the community

A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.

Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!

_{If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post.}

_{Finally, a big thank you to everyone that helped write this post via its predecessors!}

Open Threads

Personal Blog

19

New Comment

Rendering 0/273 comments, sorted by

top scoring

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 7:18 PM

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InhalingExhaler10y60

Hello.

I found LessWrong after reading HPMoR. I think I woke up as a rationalist when I realised that in my everyday reasoning I always judjed from the bottom line not considering any third alternatives, and started to think what to do about that. I am currently trying to stop my mind from always aimlessly and uselessly wandering from one topic to another. I registered on LessWrong after I started to question myself on why do I believe rationality to work, and ran into a problem, and thought I could get some help here. The problem is expressed in the following text (I am ready to move it from welcome board to any other suitable one if needed):

John was reading a book called “Rationality: From AI to Zombies” and thought: “Well, I am advised to doubt my beliefs, as some of them may turn out to be wrong”. So, it occurred to John to try do doubt the following statement: “Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence”. But that was impossible to doubt, as this statement was a straightforward implication of the theorem X of probability theory, which John, as a mathematician, knew to be correct. After a while a wild thought ran through his mind: “What if every time a person looks at the proof of the theorem X, the Dark Lords of the Matrix alter the perception of this person to make the proof look correct, but actually there is a mistake in it, and the theorem is actually incorrect?” But John didn’t even consider that idea seriously, because such an extraordinary claim would definitely require extraordinary evidence.

Fifteen minutes later, John spontaneously considered the following hypothetical situation: He visualized a religious person, Jane, who is reading a book called “Rationality: From AI to Zombies”. After reading for some time, Jane thinks that she should try to doubt her belief in Zeus. But it is definitely an impossible action, as existence of Zeus is confirmed in the Sacred Book of Lightning, which, as Jane knows, contains only Ultimate and Absolute Truth. After a while a wild thought runs through her mind: “What if the Sacred Book of Lightning actually consists of lies?” But Jane doesn’t even consider the idea seriously, because the Book is surely written by Zeus himself, who doesn’t ever lie.

From this hypothetical situation John concluded that if he couldn’t doubt B because he believed A, and couldn’t doubt A because he believed B, he’d better try to doubt A and B simultaneously, as he would be cheating otherwise. So, he attempted to simultaneously doubt the facts that “Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence” and that “Theorem X is proved correctly”.

As he attempted to do it, and succeeded, he spent some more time considering Jane’s position before settling his doubt. Jane justifies her set of beliefs by Faith. Faith is certainly an implication of her beliefs (the ones about reliability of the Sacred Book), and Faith certainly belongs to the meta-level of her thinking, affecting her ideas about existence of Zeus located at the object level.

So, John generalized that if he had some meta-level process controlling his thoughts and this process was implied by the very thought he was currently doubting, it would be wise to suspend the process for the time of doubting. Because not following this rule could make him not to lose some beliefs which, from the outside perspective, looked as ridiculous as Jane’s religion. John searched through the meta-level controlling his thoughts. He was horrified to realize that Bayesian reasoning itself fitted the criteria: it was definitely organizing his thought process, and its correctness was implied by the theorem X he was currently doubting. So he was sitting, with his belief unsettled and with no ideas of how to settle it correctly. After all, even if he made up any idea, how could he know that it wasn’t the worst idea ever intentionally given to him by the Dark Lords of the Matrix? He didn’t allow himself to disregard this nonsense with “Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence” – otherwise he would fail doubting this very statement and there would be no point in this whole crisis of faith which he deliberately inflicted on himself…

Jane, in whose imagination the whole story took place, yawned and closed a book called “Rationality: From AI to Zombies”, lying in front of her. If learning rationality was going to make her doubt herself out of rationality, why would she even bother to try that? She was comfortable with her belief in Zeus, and the only theory which could point out her mistakes apparently ended up in self-annihilation. Or, shortly, who would believe anyone saying “We have evidence that considering evidence leads you to truth, therefore it is true that considering evidence leads you to truth”?

Richard_Kennaway10y30

Welcome to Less Wrong!

My short answer to the conundrum is that if the first thing your tool does is destroy itself, the tool is defective. That doesn't make "rationality" defective any more than crashing your first attempt at building a car implies that "The Car" is defective.

Designing foundations for human intelligence is rather like designing foundations for artificial (general) intelligence in this respect. (I don't know if you've looked at The Sequences yet, but it has a lot of material on the common fallacies the latter enterprise ... (read more)

1CCC10y

As soon as the Dark Matrix Lords can (and do) directly edit your perceptions, you've lost. (Unless they're complete idiots about it) They'll simply ensure that you cannot perceive any inconsistencies in the world, and then there's no way to tell whether or not your perceptions are, in fact, being edited. The best thing you could do is find a different proof and hope that the Dark Lord's perception-altering abilities only ever affected a single proof. [...] At this point, John has to ask himself - why? Why does it matter what is true and what is not? Is there a simple and straightforward test for truth? As it turns out, there is. A true theory, in the absence of an antagonist who deliberately messes with things, will allow you to make accurate predictions about the world. I assume that John cares about making accurate predictions, because making accurate predictions is a prerequisite to being able to put any sort of plan in motion. Therefore, what I think John should do is come up with a number of alternative ideas on how to predict probabilities - as many as he wants - and test them against Bayesian reasoning. Whichever allows him to make the most accurate predictions will be the most correct method. (John should also take care not to bias his trials in favour of situations - like tossing a coin 100 times - in which Bayesian reasoning might be particularly good as opposed to other methods)

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