At least three people have died playing online games for days without rest.  People have lost their spouses, jobs, and children to World of Warcraft.  If people have the right to play video games - and it's hard to imagine a more fundamental right - then the market is going to respond by supplying the most engaging video games that can be sold, to the point that exceptionally engaged consumers are removed from the gene pool.

How does a consumer product become so involving that, after 57 hours of using the product, the consumer would rather use the product for one more hour than eat or sleep?  (I suppose one could argue that the consumer makes a rational decision that they'd rather play Starcraft for the next hour than live out the rest of their lives, but let's just not go there.  Please.)

Nick Bostrom asks:

One sign that science is not all bogus is that it enables us to do things, like go the moon. What practical things does debiassing enable us to do, other than refraining from buying lottery tickets?

It seems to me that how to be smart varies widely between professions.  A hedge-fund trader, a research biologist, and a corporate CEO must learn different skill sets in order to be actively excellent - an apprenticeship in one would not serve for the other.

Yet such concepts as "be willing to admit you lost", or "policy debates should not appear one-sided", or "plan to overcome your flaws instead of just confessing them", seem like they could apply to many professions.  And all this advice is not so much about how to be extraordinarily clever, as, rather, how to not be stupid.  Each profession has its own way to be clever, but their ways of not being stupid have much more in common.  And while victors may prefer to attribute victory to their own virtue, my small knowledge of history suggests that far more battles have been lost by stupidity than won by genius.

I've always been annoyed by the term "risk-free bonds rate", meaning the return on US Treasury bills.  Just because US bonds have not defaulted within their trading experience, people assume this is impossible?  A list of major governments in 1900 would probably put the Ottoman Empire or Austria-Hungary well ahead of the relatively young United States.  Citing the good track record of the US alone, and not all governments of equal apparent stability at the start of the same time period, is purest survivorship bias.

The United States is a democracy; if enough people vote for representatives who decide not to pay off the bonds, they won't get paid.  Do you want to look at recent history, let alone ancient history, and tell me this is impossible?  The Internet could enable coordinated populist voting that would sweep new candidates into office, in defiance of prevous political machines.  Then the US economy melts under the burden of consumer debt, which causes China to stop buying US bonds and dump its dollar reserves.  Then Al Qaeda finally smuggles a nuke into Washington, D.C.  Then the next global pandemic hits.  And these are just "good stories" - the probability of the US defaulting on its bonds for any reason, is necessarily higher than the probability of it happening for the particular reasons I've just described.  I'm not saying these are high probabilities, but they are probabilities.  Treasury bills are nowhere near "risk free". 

Followup to:  Failing to Learn from History

There is a habit of thought which I call the logical fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence, which deserves a blog post in its own right, one of these days.  Journalists who, for example, talk about the Terminator movies in a report on AI, do not usually treat Terminator as a prophecy or fixed truth.  But the movie is recalled—is available—as if it were an illustrative historical case.  As if the journalist had seen it happen on some other planet, so that it might well happen here.  More on this in Section 6 of this paper.

There is an inverse error to generalizing from fictional evidence: failing to be sufficiently moved by historical evidence.  The trouble with generalizing from fictional evidence is that it is fiction—it never actually happened.  It's not drawn from the same distribution as this, our real universe; fiction differs from reality in systematic ways.  But history has happened, and should be available.

In our ancestral environment, there were no movies; what you saw with your own eyes was true.  Is it any wonder that fictions we see in lifelike moving pictures have too great an impact on us?  Conversely, things that really happened, we encounter as ink on paper; they happened, but we never saw them happen.  We don't remember them happening to us.

Suppose I told you that I knew for a fact that the following statements were true:

• If you paint yourself a certain exact color between blue and green, it will reverse the force of gravity on you and cause you to fall upward.
• In the future, the sky will be filled by billions of floating black spheres.  Each sphere will be larger than all the zeppelins that have ever existed put together.  If you offer a sphere money, it will lower a male prostitute out of the sky on a bungee cord.
• Your grandchildren will think it is not just foolish, but evil, to put thieves in jail instead of spanking them.

You'd think I was crazy, right?

Now suppose it were the year 1901, and you had to choose between believing those statements I have just offered, and believing statements like the following:

Followup to:  Stranger than History, Absurdity Heuristic / Absurdity Bias

Why is the future more absurd than people seem to expect?  (That is:  Why, historically, has the future so often turned out to be more "absurd" than people seem to have expected?)

One obvious reason is hindsight bias.  Hindsight does not just cause people to severely underestimate how much they would have been surprised.  Hindsight also leads people to overestimate how much attention they would have paid to the key factors, the factors that turned out to be important.  As R. H. Tawney put it:

"Historians give an appearance of inevitability to an existing order by dragging into prominence the forces which have triumphed and thrusting into the background those which they have swallowed up."

When people look at historical changes and think "I could have predicted X" or "You could have predicted X if you looked at factors 1, 2, and 3"; then they forget that people did not, in fact, predict X, perhaps because they were distracted by factors 4 through 117.  People read history books, see coherent narratives, and think that's how Time works.  Underestimating the surprise of the present, they overestimate the predictability of the future.

I suspect that a major factor contributing to absurdity bias is that, when we look over history, we see changes away from absurd conditions such as everyone being a peasant farmer and women not having the vote, toward normal conditions like a majority middle class and equal rights.  When people look at history, they see a series of normalizations.  They learn the rule, "The future grows ever less absurd over time."

Followup to:  Conjunction Fallacy

 "Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative..."
            -- Pooh-Bah, in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado

The conjunction fallacy is when humans rate the probability P(A&B) higher than the probability P(B), even though it is a theorem that P(A&B) <= P(B).  For example, in one experiment in 1981, 68% of the subjects ranked it more likely that "Reagan will provide federal support for unwed mothers and cut federal support to local governments" than that "Reagan will provide federal support for unwed mothers."

A long series of cleverly designed experiments, which weeded out alternative hypotheses and nailed down the standard interpretation, confirmed that conjunction fallacy occurs because we "substitute judgment of representativeness for judgment of probability".  By adding extra details, you can make an outcome seem more characteristic of the process that generates it.  You can make it sound more plausible that Reagan will support unwed mothers, by adding the claim that Reagan will also cut support to local governments.  The implausibility of one claim is compensated by the plausibility of the other; they "average out".

Which is to say:  Adding detail can make a scenario SOUND MORE PLAUSIBLE, even though the event necessarily BECOMES LESS PROBABLE.

If so, then, hypothetically speaking, we might find futurists spinning unconscionably plausible and detailed future histories, or find people swallowing huge packages of unsupported claims bundled with a few strong-sounding assertions at the center.

When I try to introduce the subject of advanced AI, what's the first thing I hear, more than half the time?

"Oh, you mean like the Terminator movies / the Matrix / Asimov's robots!"

And I reply, "Well, no, not exactly.  I try to avoid the logical fallacy of generalizing from fictional evidence."

Followup to:  Uncritical Supercriticality

One morning, I got out of bed, turned on my computer, and my Netscape email client automatically downloaded that day's news pane.  On that particular day, the news was that two hijacked planes had been flown into the World Trade Center.

These were my first three thoughts, in order:

I guess I really am living in the Future.
Thank goodness it wasn't nuclear.
    and then
The overreaction to this will be ten times worse than the original event.

FYI:  The Oxford Future of Humanity Institute is holding a conference on global catastrophic risks on July 17-20, 2008, at Oxford (in the UK).

I'll be there, as will Robin Hanson and Nick Bostrom.

Deadline for registration is May 26th, 2008.  Registration is ÂŁ60.