FADE IN around a serious-looking group of uniformed military officers.  At the head of the table, a senior, heavy-set man, GENERAL FRED, speaks.

GENERAL FRED:  The reports are confirmed.  New York has been overrun... by zombies.

COLONEL TODD:  Again?  But we just had a zombie invasion 28 days ago!

GENERAL FRED:  These zombies... are different.  They're... philosophical zombies.

CAPTAIN MUDD:  Are they filled with rage, causing them to bite people?

COLONEL TODD:  Do they lose all capacity for reason?

GENERAL FRED:  No.  They behave... exactly like we do... except that they're not conscious.

(Silence grips the table.)

COLONEL TODD:  Dear God.

In an amazing breakthrough, a multinational team of scientists led by Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal announced that the brain is composed of a ridiculously complicated network of tiny cells connected to each other by infinitesimal threads and branches.

The multinational team—which also includes the famous technician Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, and possibly Imhotep, promoted to the Egyptian god of medicine—issued this statement:

"The present discovery culminates years of research indicating that the convoluted squishy thing inside our skulls is even more complicated than it looks.  Thanks to Cajal's application of a new staining technique invented by Camillo Golgi, we have learned that this structure is not a continuous network like the blood vessels of the body, but is actually composed of many tiny cells, or "neurons", connected to one another by even more tiny filaments.

"Other extensive evidence, beginning from Greek medical researcher Alcmaeon and continuing through Paul Broca's research on speech deficits, indicates that the brain is the seat of reason.

"Nemesius, the Bishop of Emesia, has previously argued that brain tissue is too earthy to act as an intermediary between the body and soul, and so the mental faculties are located in the ventricles of the brain.  However, if this is correct, there is no reason why this organ should turn out to have an immensely complicated internal composition.

    The torches that lit the narrow stairwell burned intensely and in the wrong color, flame like melting gold or shattered suns.
    192... 193...
    Brennan's sandals clicked softly on the stone steps, snicking in sequence, like dominos very slowly falling.
    227... 228...
    Half a circle ahead of him, a trailing fringe of dark cloth whispered down the stairs, the robed figure itself staying just out of sight.
    239... 240...
    Not much longer, Brennan predicted to himself, and his guess was accurate:
    Sixteen times sixteen steps was the number, and they stood before the portal of glass.
    The great curved gate had been wrought with cunning, humor, and close attention to indices of refraction: it warped light, bent it, folded it, and generally abused it, so that there were hints of what was on the other side (stronger light sources, dark walls) but no possible way of seeing through—unless, of course, you had the key: the counter-door, thick for thin and thin for thick, in which case the two would cancel out.
    From the robed figure beside Brennan, two hands emerged, gloved in reflective cloth to conceal skin's color.  Fingers like slim mirrors grasped the handles of the warped gate—handles that Brennan had not guessed; in all that distortion, shapes could only be anticipated, not seen.
    "Do you want to know?" whispered the guide; a whisper nearly as loud as an ordinary voice, but not revealing the slightest hint of gender.
    Brennan paused.  The answer to the question seemed suspiciously, indeed extraordinarily obvious, even for ritual.

I'll be moving to Redwood City, CA in a week, so forgive me if I don't get a regular post out every day between now and then.  As a substitute offering, some items from my (offline) quotesfile:

"It appears to be a quite general principle that, whenever there is a randomized way of doing something, then there is a nonrandomized way that delivers better performance but requires more thought."
       -- E. T. Jaynes

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards!"
        -- Steve Jobs

"Saving a drowning child is no more a moral duty than understanding a syllogism is a logical one."
        -- Sam Harris, The End of Faith

Followup to:  Lonely Dissent

True story:  In July, I attended a certain Silicon Valley event.  I was not an organizer, or a speaker, or in any other wise involved on an official level; just an attendee.  It was an evening event, and after the main presentations were done, much of the audience hung around talking... and talking... and talking...  Finally the event organizer began dimming the lights and turning them back up again.  And the crowd still stayed; no one left.  So the organizer dimmed the lights and turned them up some more.  And lo, the people continued talking.

I walked over to the event organizer, standing by the light switches, and said, "Are you hinting for people to leave?"  And he said, "Yes.  In fact [the host company] says we've got to get out of here now - the building needs to close down."

I nodded.

I walked over to the exit.

I shouted, "LISTEN UP, EVERYONE!  WE'VE GOT TO GO!  OUR TIME HERE HAS PASSED!  YOU CAN TALK OUTSIDE IF YOU LIKE!  NOW FOLLOW ME... TO FREEDOM!"

People who grow up believing certain things,
even if they later stop believing them,
may not quite realize how the beliefs sound to outsiders...

(SCENE:  A small cottage in Nazareth.)

Joseph:  Mary, my dearest fiancée, there's something I've been meaning to talk to you about.

(Mary's shoulders slump.  Slowly, as if under a heavy burden, she turns around to face Joseph.)

Joseph:  You seem to be getting fat around the waistline, and throwing up in the morning, and, er, not getting any periods.  Which is odd, because it's sort of like -

Mary:  Yes!  I'm pregnant!  All right?  I'm PREGNANT!

Joseph:  How is that possible?

(Mary's shoulders slump further.)  Mary:  How do you think?

Joseph:  I don't know, that's why I'm asking you.  I mean, you're still a virgin, right?

(Mary looks up cautiously, and sees Joseph's face looking blankly puzzled.)

Joseph:  Well?

Mary:  God did it.

Joseph:  You had sex with -

Mary:  No!  Haha.  Of course not.  I mean, God just snapped his fingers and did one of those miracle things and made me pregnant.

Joseph:  God made you pregnant.

Mary:  (Starts to sweat.)  Yes.

Joseph:  Mary, that is just so... completely...

(Mary's eyes squeeze shut.)

Joseph:  ...COOL!

Followup to:  Politics and Awful Art

There's this thing called "derisive laughter" or "mean-spirited laughter", which follows from seeing the Hated Enemy get a kick in the pants.  It doesn't have to be an unexpected kick in the pants, or a kick followed up with a custard pie.  It suffices that the Hated Enemy gets hurt.  It's like humor, only without the humor.

If you know what your audience hates, it doesn't take much effort to get a laugh like that—which marks this as a subspecies of awful political art.

There are deliciously biting satires, yes; not all political art is bad art.  But satire is a much more demanding art than just punching the Enemy in the nose.  In fact, never mind satire—just an atom of ordinary genuine humor takes effort.

Imagine this political cartoon:  A building labeled "science", and a standard Godzilla-ish monster labeled "Bush" stomping on the "science" building.  Now there are people who will laugh at this—hur hur, scored a point off Bush, hur hur—but this political cartoon didn't take much effort to imagine.  In fact, it was the very first example that popped into my mind when I thought "political cartoon about Bush and science".  This degree of obviousness is a bad sign.

If I want to make a funny political cartoon, I have to put in some effort.  Go beyond the cached thought.  Use my creativity.  Depict Bush as a tentacle monster and Science as a Japanese schoolgirl.

Followup to:  Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult

    A novice rationalist studying under the master Ougi was rebuked by a friend who said, "You spend all this time listening to your master, and talking of 'rational' this and 'rational' that—you have fallen into a cult!"
    The novice was deeply disturbed; he heard the words, "You have fallen into a cult!" resounding in his ears as he lay in bed that night, and even in his dreams.
    The next day, the novice approached Ougi and related the events, and said, "Master, I am constantly consumed by worry that this is all really a cult, and that your teachings are only dogma."
    Ougi replied, "If you find a hammer lying in the road and sell it, you may ask a low price or a high one.  But if you keep the hammer and use it to drive nails, who can doubt its worth?"
    The novice said, "See, now that's just the sort of thing I worry about—your mysterious Zen replies."
    Ougi said, "Fine, then, I will speak more plainly, and lay out perfectly reasonable arguments which demonstrate that you have not fallen into a cult.  But first you have to wear this silly hat."

Followup to: Most of my posts over the last month...

Every now and then, you run across someone who has discovered the One Great Moral Principle, of which all other values are a mere derivative consequence.

I run across more of these people than you do.  Only in my case, it's people who know the amazingly simple utility function that is all you need to program into an artificial superintelligence and then everything will turn out fine...

It's incredible how one little issue can require so much prerequisite material.  My original schedule called for "Fake Utility Functions" to follow "Fake Justification" on Oct 31.

Talk about your planning fallacy.  I've been planning to post on this topic in "just a few days" for the past month.  A fun little demonstration of underestimated inferential distances.

You see, before I wrote this post, it occurred to me that if I wanted to properly explain the problem of fake utility functions, it would be helpful to illustrate a mistake about what a simple optimization criterion implied.  The strongest real-world example I knew was the Tragedy of Group Selectionism.  At first I thought I'd mention it in passing, within "Fake Utility Functions", but I decided the Tragedy of Group Selectionism was a long enough story that it needed its own blog post...

After the jump, you can see me dressed up as something so horrifyingly dreadful that it surpasses the comprehension of a mortal human mind.