I often hear people speak of democracy as the next, or the final, inevitable stage of human social development.  Its inevitability is usually justified not by describing power relations that result in democracy being a stable attractor, but in terms of morality - democracy is more "enlightened".  I don't see any inevitability to it - China and the Soviet Union manage(d) to maintain large, technologically-advanced nations for a long time without it - but suppose, for the sake of argument, that democracy is the inevitable next stage of human progress.

The May 18 2012 issue of Science has an article on p. 844, "Ancestral hierarchy and conflict", by Christopher Boehm, which, among other things, describes the changes over time of equality among male hominids.  If we add its timeline to recent human history, then here is the history of democracy over time in the evolutionary line leading to humans:

1. Pre-human male hominids, we infer from observing bonobos and chimpanzees, were dominated by one alpha male per group, who got the best food and most of the females.
2. Then, in the human lineage, hunter-gatherers developed larger social groups, and the ability to form stronger coalitions against the alpha; and they became more egalitarian.
3. Then, human social groups even became larger, and it became possible for a central alpha-male chieftain to control a large area; and the groups became less egalitarian.
4. Then, they became even larger, so that they were too large for a central authority to administer efficiently; and decentralized market-based methods of production led to democracy.  (Or so goes one story.)

There are two points to observe in this data:

• There is no linear relationship between social complexity, and equality.  Steadily-increasing social complexity lead to more equality, then less, then more.
• Enlightenment has nothing to do with it - if any theory makes sense, it is that social equality tunes itself to the level that provides maximal social competitive fitness.  Even if we agree that democracy is the most-enlightened political system, this realization says nothing about what the future holds.

I do believe "progress" is a meaningful term.  But there isn't some cosmic niceness built into the universe that makes everything improve monotonically along every dimension at once.

What does an memetic infection look like? Well, you would encounter something (probably on the internet) that seems very compelling. You think intensely about it for a while, and it spurs you to do something - probably to post something related on the internet. After a while, the meme may not seem that compelling to you anymore, and you wonder why you invested that time and energy. The meme has reproduced itself. For example, Bruce Sterling's response to the 'New Aesthetic' is a paradigmatic example of memetic infection: he encountered it, he found it compelling, he wrote about it, I read about it and now I know about it. (Note that the word 'infection' has a stigma to it, but I don't mean it to be necessarily a bad thing. I will use 'disease' to mean 'infection with bad consequences'.)

Now, let me jump to an apparently unrelated concept - Viral Eukaryogenesis. If I understand correctly, Viral Eukaryogenesis is the theory that eukaryotes (including you and me) are inheritors of a bargain between two kinds of life - metabolic life and viral life, something like the way lichens are a bargain between fungi and algae. The nucleus that characterizes eukaryotes is supposed to be descended from a virus protein shell, and the membrane-fusion proteins that we use for gamete fusion (crucial for sex) are supposed to be descended from viral infection proteins. I am not a biologist, but my understanding of the state of biology is that it is an interesting hypothesis, as yet neither proven nor disproven. However, I'm going to talk as if it were true, because I'm actually trying to make an analogy with memes.

Suppose you believe in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.  Schroedinger puts his cat in a box, with a device that has a 50% chance of releasing a deathly poisonous gas.  He will then open the box, and observe a live or dead cat, collapsing that waveform.

But Schroedinger's cat is lazy, and spends most of its time sleeping.  Schroedinger is a pessimist, or else an optimist who hates cats; and so he mistakes a sleeping cat for a dead cat with probability P(M) > 0, but never mistakes a dead cat for a living cat.

So if the cat is dead with probability P(D) >= .5, Schroedinger observes a dead cat with probability P(D) + P(M)(1-P(D)).

If observing a dead cat causes the waveform to collapse such that the cat is dead, then P(D) = P(D) + P(M)(1-P(D)).  This is possible only if P(D) = 1.

Note: I am testing two versions of my new post on rationality and romance.

Please upvote, downvote, or non-vote the below post as you normally would if you saw it on the front page (not the discussion section), but do not vote on the other version. Also, if your last name begins with a–k, please read and vote on this post first. If your last name begins with l–z, please stop reading and read this version instead. 

Rationality Lessons from Romance

Years ago, my first girlfriend (let's call her 'Alice') ran into her ex-boyfriend at a coffee shop. They traded anecdotes, felt connected, a spark of intimacy...

And then she left the coffee shop, quickly.

She told me later: "You have my heart now, Luke."

I felt proud, but even Luke₂₀₀₅ also felt a twinge of "the universe is suboptimal," because she hadn't been able to engage that connection any further. The cultural scripts defining our relationship said that only one man owned her heart. But surely that wasn't optimal for producing utilons?

This is an account of some lessons that I learned during my journey into rational romance. That journey started with a series of realizations like the one above — that I wasn't happy with the standard cultural scripts: monogamy, an assumed progression toward marriage, and ownership of another person's sexuality. I hadn't really noticed the cultural scripts up until that point. I was a victim of cached thoughts and a cached self.

Lesson: Until you explicitly notice the cached rules for what you're doing, you won't start thinking of them as something to be optimized. Ask: Which parts of romance do you currently think of as subjects of optimization? What else should you be optimizing?

Gather data

At the time, I didn't know how to optimize. I decided I needed data. How did relationships work? How did women work? How did attraction work? The value of information was high, so I decided to become a social psychology nerd. I began to spend less time with Alice so I could spend more time studying. 

Lesson: Respond to the value of information. Once you notice you might be running in the wrong direction, don't keep going that way just because you've got momentum. Stop a moment, and invest some energy in the thoughts or information you've now realized is valuable because it might change your policies, i.e., figuring out which direction to go.

Sanity-check yourself

Before long, I noticed that Alice was always pushing me to spend more time with her, and I was always pushing to spend more time studying psychology. I was unhappy, and I knew I could one day attract better mates if I had time to acquire the skills that other men had; men who were "good with women."

So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked. I thought she would appreciate this because she had previously expressed admiration for detailed honesty.

She asked that I kindly never speak to her again. I can't blame her. In retrospect, it's hard to think of a more damaging way to break up with someone. This gives you some idea of just how incompetent I was, at the time. I had an inkling of that myself - though I'm not sure if I realized right away, or if it only dawned on me six months later. But it was part of the motivation to solve my problems by reading books.

Lesson: Know your fields of incompetence. If you suspect you may be incompetent, sanity-check yourself by asking others for advice, or by Googling. (E.g. "how to break up with your girlfriend nicely", or "how to not die on a motorcycle" or whatever.)

Study

During the next couple years, I spent no time in (what would have been) sub-par relationships, and instead invested that time optimizing for better relationships in the future. Which meant I was celibate.

Neither Intimate Relationships nor Handbook of Relationship Initiation existed at the time, but I still learned quite a bit from books like The Red Queen and The Moral Animal. I experienced a long series of 'Aha!' moments, like:

• "Aha! It's not that women prefer jerks to nice guys, but they prefer confident, ambitious men to pushovers."
• "Aha! Body language and fashion matter because they communicate large packets of information about me at light speed, and are harder to fake than words."
• "Aha! Women are attracted to men with whom they have positive subjective experiences. That's why they like funny guys, for example!"

Within a few months, I had more dating-relevant head knowledge than any guy I knew.

Lesson: Use scholarship. Especially if you can do it efficiently, scholarship is a quick and cheap way to gain a certain class of experience points.

Just try it / just test yourself

Scholarship was warm and comfy, so I stayed in scholar mode for too long. I hit diminishing returns in what books could teach me. Every book on dating skills told me to go talk to women, but I thought I needed a completed decision tree first: What if she does this? What if she says that? I won't know what to do if I don't have a plan! I should read 10 more books, so I know how to handle every contingency.

The dating books told me I would think that, but I told myself I was unusually analytical, and could actually benefit from completing the decision tree in advance of actually talking to women.

The dating books told me I would think that, too, and that it was just a rationalization. Really, I was just nervous about the blows that newbie mistakes (and subsequent rejections) would lay upon my ego.

Lesson: Be especially suspicious of rationalizations for not obeying the empiricist rules "try it and see what happens" or "test yourself to see what happens" or "get some concrete experience on the ground". Think of the cost of time happening as a result of rationalizing. Consider the opportunities you are missing if you don't just realize you're wrong right now.

Use science, and maybe drugs

The dating books told me to swallow my fear and talk to women. I couldn't swallow my fear, so I tried swallowing brandy instead. That worked.

So I went out and talked to women, mostly at coffee shops or on the street. I learned all kinds of interesting details I hadn't learned in the books:

• Politics, religion, math, and programming are basically never the right subject matter when flirting.
• Keep up the emotional momentum. Don't stay in the same stage of the conversation (rapport, storytelling, self-disclosure, etc.) for very long.
• Almost every gesture or line is improved by adding a big smile.
• 'Hi. I've gotta run, but I think you're cute so we should grab a coffee sometime" totally works — as long as the other person is already attracted because my body language, fashion, and other signals have been optimized.
• People rarely notice an abrupt change of subject if you say "Yeah, it's just like when..." and then say something completely unrelated.

After a while, I could talk to women even without the brandy. And a little after that, I had my first one-night stand.

I was surprised by how much I didn't enjoy casual flings. I didn't feel engaged when I didn't know and didn't have much in common with the girl in my bed. But I kept having casual flings, mostly for their educational value. As research projects go, I guess they weren't too bad.

Lesson: Use empiricism and do-it-yourself science. Just try things. No, seriously.

Self-modify to succeed

By this time my misgivings about the idea of owning another's sexuality had grown into a full-blown endorsement of polyamory. I needed to deprogram my sexual jealousy, which sounded daunting. Sexual jealousy was hard-wired into me by evolution, right?

It turned out to be easier than I had predicted. Tactics that helped me destroy my capacity for sexual jealousy include:

• Whenever I noticed sexual jealousy in myself, I brought to mind my moral objections to the idea of owning another's sexuality.
• I thought in terms of sexual abundance, not sexual scarcity. When I realized there were thousands of other nearby women I could date, I didn't need to be so needy for any particular girl.
• Mentally, I continually associated 'jealousy' with 'immaturity' and 'neediness' and other concepts that have negative affect for me.

This lack of sexual jealousy came in handy when I built a mutual attraction with a polyamorous girl who was already dating two of my friends.

Lesson: Have a sense that more is possible. Know that you haven't yet reached the limits of self-modification. Try things. Let your map of what is possible be constrained by evidence, not by popular opinion.

Finale

I now enjoy higher-quality relationships — sexual and non-sexual — of a kind that wouldn't be possible with the social skills of Luke₂₀₀₅. I went for years without a partner I cared about, but it felt okay because the whole journey was seeded with frequent rewards: the thrill of figuring something out, the thrill of seeing people respond to me in a new way, the thrill of seeing myself looking better in the mirror each month.

There might have been a learning curve, but by golly, at the end of all that DIY science and rationality training and scholarship I'm seeing an awesome poly girl, I'm free to take up other relationships when I want, I know fashion well enough to teach it at rationality camps, and I can build rapport with almost anyone. My hair looks great and I'm happy. If you start out as a nerd, setting out to become a nerd about romance totally works, so long as you read the right nerd books and you know the nerd rule about being empirical. Rationality for the win.

You are not a Bayesian homunculus whose reasoning is 'corrupted' by cognitive biases.

You just are cognitive biases.

You just are attribution substitution heuristics, evolved intuitions, and unconscious learning. These make up the 'elephant' of your mind, and atop them rides a tiny 'deliberative thinking' module that only rarely exerts itself, and almost never according to normatively correct reasoning.

You do not have the robust character you think you have, but instead are blown about by the winds of circumstance.

You do not have much cognitive access to your motivations. You are not Aristotle's 'rational animal.' You are Gazzaniga's rationalizing animal. Most of the time, your unconscious makes a decision, and then you become consciously aware of an intention to act, and then your brain invents a rationalization for the motivations behind your actions.

If an 'agent' is something that makes choices so as to maximize the fulfillment of explicit desires, given explicit beliefs, then few humans are very 'agenty' at all. You may be agenty when you guide a piece of chocolate into your mouth, but you are not very agenty when you navigate the world on a broader scale. On the scale of days or weeks, your actions result from a kludge of evolved mechanisms that are often function-specific and maladapted to your current environment. You are an adaptation-executor, not a fitness-maximizer.

Agency is rare but powerful. Homo economicus is a myth, but imagine what one of them could do if such a thing existed: a real agent with the power to reliably do things it believed would fulfill its desires. It could change its diet, work out each morning, and maximize its health and physical attractiveness. It could learn and practice body language, fashion, salesmanship, seduction, the laws of money, and domain-specific skills and win in every sphere of life without constant defeat by human hangups. It could learn networking and influence and persuasion and have large-scale effects on societies, cultures, and nations.

Even a little bit of agenty-ness will have some lasting historical impact. Think of Benjamin Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, or Tim Ferris. Imagine what you could do if you were just a bit more agenty. That's what training in instrumental rationality is all about: transcending your kludginess to attain a bit more agenty-ness.

And, imagine what an agent could do without the limits of human hardware or software. Now that would really be something.

(This post was inspired by some conversations with Michael Vassar.)

Followup to: What's a "natural number"?

While thinking about how to make machines understand the concept of "integers", I accidentally derived a tiny little math result that I haven't seen before. Not sure if it'll be helpful to anyone, but here goes:

You're allowed to invent an arbitrary scheme for encoding integers as strings of bits. Whatever encoding you invent, I can give you an infinite input stream of bits that will make your decoder hang and never give a definite answer like "yes, this is an integer with such-and-such value" or "no, this isn't a valid encoding of any integer".

To clarify, let's work through an example. Consider an unary encoding: 0 is 0, 1 is 10, 2 is 110, 3 is 1110, etc. In this case, if we feed the decoder an infinite sequence of 1's, it will remain forever undecided as to the integer's value. The result says we can find such pathological inputs for any other encoding system, not just unary.

The proof is obvious. (If it isn't obvious to you, work it out!) But it seems to strike at the heart of the issue why we can't naively explain to computers what a "standard integer" is, what a "terminating computation" is, etc. Namely, if you try to define an integer as some observable interface (get first bit, get last bit, get CRC, etc.), then you inevitably invite some "nonstandard integers" into your system.

This idea must be already well-known and have some standard name, any pointers would be welcome!

[I made significant edits when moving this to the main page - so if you read it in Discussion, it's different now.  It's clearer about the distinction between two different meanings of "free", and why linking one meaning of "free" with morality implies a focus on an otherworldly soul.]

It was funny to me that many people thought Crime and Punishment was advocating outcome-based justice.  If you read the post carefully, nothing in it advocates outcome-based justice.  I only wanted to show how people think, so I could write this post.

Talking about morality causes much confusion, because most philosophers - and most people - do not have a distinct concept of morality.  At best, they have just one word that composes two different concepts.  At worst, their "morality" doesn't contain any new primitive concepts at all; it's just a macro: a shorthand for a combination of other ideas.

I think - and have, for as long as I can remember - that morality is about doing the right thing.  But this is not what most people think morality is about!

Faith

Faith is often described as belief without evidence.  The famous definition in Hebrews, in its best-known form, is close to that:

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." - Hebrews 11:1 (King James Version), often attributed to St. Paul

This is the way the term "faith" is used by religious people when they argue against the primacy of reason, as demonstrated in these quotes, which is the context I am concerned with.  (It's also the meaning used by atheists arguing against religious faith, eg. Sam Harris in The End of Faith.)  But the New International Version, which is less pretty, but translated more carefully by better scholars from more and older texts, says:

"Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see."

The Wikipedia and Plato entries on faith give information on the use of words translated as "faith" in English in different religions and philosophies.  Wikipedia cites the New American standard exhaustive concordance of the Bible as saying,

In English translations of the New Testament, the word faith generally corresponds to the Greek noun πίστις (pistis) or the Greek verb πιστεύω (pisteuo), meaning "to trust, to have confidence, faithfulness, to be reliable, to assure".^[22]

Theory

Scientific theory is also assurance about things unseen.  (If you can observe something directly, you don't need science.)  Science builds an abstract mental structure that interprets data and makes predictions from it.  It is also an epistemology for belief in things we can't see, like atoms, oxygen, radio waves, vast distances, or circulation of the blood.

The history of faith and theory

The most popular belief appears to be that faith is ancient, and scientific theory came along later to supersede it.  But I'm not aware of evidence for this.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-stoner-arms-dealers-20110316?print=true

Related to: simile, snobbery, adequate axioms

Writing poetry is harder than it sounds, but easy to practice. Once mastered, the emotional impact it can add to even casual conversation makes it more than worthwhile.

There are two sides to writing an effective poem: the top-down logic of metaphor and imagery, and the bottom-up mechanics of rhyme and meter. Manage both, or they won't meet in the middle.

Let's say you're trying to lift someone as high up into the air as possible. You could kneel and cup your hands, but that depends on them playing along and stepping in the right spot. You could sneak up behind and kick them squarely between the legs, but that won't get them very far, or for very long, and they won't put up with such treatment more than once. Or you could build a framework, hang a swing, and give them a series of properly-timed pushes in the right direction.

A pure technical explanation (the cupped hands) depends on the willingness of the reader to slog through the whole thing, do some independent research to fill any newly-discovered gaps in their knowledge base, and generally cooperate. Without that minimal enthusiasm, the most brilliant insights can and will be dismissed as "too long, didn't read."

Aggressive proselytizing, at the other extreme, sacrifices content to put as few demands on the reader as possible. It is, accordingly, viewed as even worse than useless. An active offense, spam, something to be isolated and destroyed.

Taking the time to lay out a pattern, a rhythm, means that people will have some reason to keep reading even if they don't know exactly what you mean. It's a comfortable set of boxes in which half-eaten ideas can be stored for later, or a resonant frequency to carry information until the full message can be compiled.

Resonant frequencies can't create something from nothing. The Tacoma Narrows bridge wobbled for hours before finally collapsing; cumulative energy transfer from the wind over the course of those hours was orders of magnitude more than would have been necessary for, say, a controlled demolition with shaped-charge explosives. The advantage is that slow, steady sources are easier to find and easier to regulate. An appeal to people's tendency toward pattern-completion can be spread out over pages, instead of requiring a single perfect paragraph, and will not be consciously resisted by anyone who does not realize they are being persuaded.

So, setting up the rhythm.

Look away from what your words actually mean. Consider what they sound like, which syllables are emphasized, the flavor of your favorite phonemes. Then look back, and shuffle things around until they match.

Reinforce parallel points with parallel structure.

Tempting though it may be to advertise your sophisticated vocabulary, or even invent or co-opt exotic terms and phrases for the precise elucidation of some nuanced concept, simple english works good because we all polish it.

Long lines of big words slow down the flow.

There's more to effective writing than I could cover in one essay, of course. People spend years studying this kind of thing, and the few who really master it are paid accordingly. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

Metaphor and imagery are harder to explain.

Most of the time, your objective in communicating is to reduce ambiguity. You lay out your thoughts in order, package them securely, and hope that they survive however many translations it takes until they can be reassembled in the same order inside someone else's mind. A word that means more than one thing is, in that context, a navigational hazard; it has too many degrees of freedom, so more information must be included to constrain it, lock in the single intended meaning. Unintended  potential interpretations are dangerous noise.

In compiling myth, you must cultivate multiple consistent interpretations. Ambiguity is, to a certain extent, your friend; whenever a word could mean more than one thing, that's a chance to save precious syllables, each meaning simultaneously developing a different level of interpretation. The catch is that, rather than using words as scalpels to meticulously dissect the issue one step at a time, you are juggling jagged axes and chainsaws. Every edge, every possible definition, must be sufficiently familiar to you that no disastrously unintended layer will emerge.

Different layers of the same message have different, but related, meanings. Each layer will be picked up by a different audience, or a different aspect of the reader's mind, and should be tailored for effectiveness accordingly. In my wisdom:foolishness :: tree:stones comparison, the feeling of validity comes from an appeal to the reader's intuitive understanding of botany and other basic physical sciences, typically developed since childhood.

In a sense, poetry is a perversion of public-key encryption. You take your message, in it's most concentrated form, and connect it to some nugget of knowledge or archetype. Without that cultural context, there's no signal, just patterned noise. The recipient applies their own private version of that archetype or meme, and treasures whatever insights can then be unpacked, thinking that it was a secret message intended just for them.