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Science vs. art
In the comments on Soulless Morality, a few people mentioned contributing to humanity's knowledge as an ultimate value. I used to place a high value on this myself.
Now, though, I doubt whether making scientific advances would give me satisfaction on my deathbed. All you can do in science is discover something before someone else discovers it. (It's a lot like the race to the north pole, which struck me as stupid when I was a child; yet I never transferred that judgement to scientific races.) The short-term effects of your discovering something sooner might be good, and might not. The long-term effects are likely to be to bring about apocalypse a little sooner.
Art is different. There's not much downside to art. There are some exceptions - romance novels perpetuate destructive views of love; 20th-century developments in orchestral music killed orchestral music; and Ender's Game has warped the psyches of many intelligent people. But artists seldom worry that their art might destroy the world. And if you write a great song, you've really contributed, because no one else would have written that song.
EDIT: What is above is instrumental talk. I find that, as I get older, science fails to satisfy me as much. I don't assign it the high intrinsic value I used to. But it's hard for me to tell whether this is really an intrinsic valuation, or the result of diminishing faith in its instrumental value.
I think that people who value rationality tend to place an unusually high value on knowledge. Rationality requires knowledge; but that gives knowledge only instrumental value. It doesn't (can't, by definition) justify giving knowledge intrinsic value.
What do the rest of you think? Is there a strong correlation between rationalism, giving knowledge high intrinsic value, and giving art low intrinsic value? If so, why? And which would you rather be - a great scientist, or a great artist of some type? (Pretend that great scientists and great artists are equally well-paid and sexually attractive.)
(I originally wrote this as over-valuing knowledge and under-valuing art, but Roko pointed out that that's incoherent.)
Under a theory that intrinsic and instrumental values are separate things, there's no reason why giving science a high instrumental value should correlate with giving it a high intrinsic value, or vice-versa. Yet the people here seem to be doing one of those things.
My theory is that we can't keep intrinsic and instrumental values separate from each other. We attach positive valences to both, and then operate on the positive valences. Or, we can't distinguish our intrinsic values from our instrumental values by introspection. (You may have noticed that I started using examples that refer to both intrinsic and instrumental values. I don't think I can separate them, except retrospectively; and with about as much accuracy as a courtroom witness asked to testify about an event that took place 20 years ago.)
It's tempting to mention friends and family in here too, as another competing fundamental value. But that would demand solving the relationship between personal values that you yourself take, and the valuations you would want a society or a singleton AI to make. That's too much to take on here. I want to talk just about intrinsic value given to science vs. art.
Oh, and saying science is an art is a dodge. You then have to say whether you value the knowledge, or the artistic endeavor. Also, ignore the possibility that your scientific work can make a safe Singularity. That would be science as instrumental value. I'm asking about science vs. art as intrinsic values.
EDIT: An obvious explanation: I was assuming that people here want to be rational as an instrumental value, and that we should find the distribution of intrinsic values to be the same as in the general populace. But of course some people are drawn here because rationality is an intrinsic value to them, and this heavily biases the distribution of intrinsic values found here.
Don't Believe You'll Self-Deceive
Followup to: Moore's Paradox, Doublethink
I don't mean to seem like I'm picking on Kurige, but I think you have to expect a certain amount of questioning if you show up on Less Wrong and say:
One thing I've come to realize that helps to explain the disparity I feel when I talk with most other Christians is the fact that somewhere along the way my world-view took a major shift away from blind faith and landed somewhere in the vicinity of Orwellian double-think.
"If you know it's double-think...
...how can you still believe it?" I helplessly want to say.
Or:
I chose to believe in the existence of God—deliberately and consciously. This decision, however, has absolutely zero effect on the actual existence of God.
If you know your belief isn't correlated to reality, how can you still believe it?
Shouldn't the gut-level realization, "Oh, wait, the sky really isn't green" follow from the realization "My map that says 'the sky is green' has no reason to be correlated with the territory"?
Well... apparently not.
One part of this puzzle may be my explanation of Moore's Paradox ("It's raining, but I don't believe it is")—that people introspectively mistake positive affect attached to a quoted belief, for actual credulity.
But another part of it may just be that—contrary to the indignation I initially wanted to put forward—it's actually quite easy not to make the jump from "The map that reflects the territory would say 'X'" to actually believing "X". It takes some work to explain the ideas of minds as map-territory correspondence builders, and even then, it may take more work to get the implications on a gut level.
Does blind review slow down science?
Previously, Robin Hanson pointed out that even if implementing anonymous peer review has an effect on the acceptance rate of different papers, this doesn't necessarily tell us the previous practice was biased. Yesterday, I ran across an interesting passage suggesting one way that anonymous review might actually be harmful:
Second, fame may confer license. If a person has done valuable work in the past, this increases the probability that his current work is also valuable and induces the audience to suspend its disbelief. He can therefore afford to thumb his nose at the crowd. This is merely the obverse of the "shamelessness" of the old, which Aristotle discussed. Peter Messeri argues in this vein that "senior scientists are better situated than younger scientists to withstand adverse consequences of public advocacy of unpopular positions," and that this factor may explain why the tendency for older scientists to resist new theories is, in fact, weak. And remember Kenneth Dover's negative verdict on old age (chapter 5)? He offered one qualification: "There just aren't any [aspects of old age which compensate for its ills] - except, maybe, a complacent indifference to fashion, because people no longer seeking employment or promotion have less to fear."
This point suggests that the use by scholarly journals of blind refereeing is a mistaken policy. It may cause them to turn down unconventional work to which they would rightly have given the benefit of doubt had they known that the author was not a neophyte or eccentric.
(From Richard A. Posner, "Aging and Old Age")
If this hypothesis holds (and Posner admits it hasn't been tested, at least at the time of writing), then blind review may actually slow down the acceptance of theories which are radical but true. Looking up the Peter Messeri reference gave me the article "Age Differences in the Reception of New Scientific Theories: The Case of Plate Tectonics Theory". It notes:
Formalization is a rationality technique
We are interested in developing practical techniques of rationality. One practical technique, used widely and successfully in science and technology is formalization, transforming a less-formal argument into a more-formal one. Despite its successes, formalization isn't trivial to learn, and schools rarely try to teach general techniques of thinking and deciding. Instead, schools generally only teach domain-specific reasoning. We end up with graduates who can apply formalization skillfully inside of specific domains (e.g. electrical engineering or biology), but fail to apply, or misapply, their skills to other domains (e.g. politics or religion).
The Golem
Anthony Ravenscroft writing on why it is important, in a relationship, to honestly communicate your grievances to the other person:
If you don't present your gripes to the responsible party, you cannot humanly bury those complaints - it's just not possible to "forget" about something that has hurt or stung you. Actually, you are probably "testing" these complaints against your experience of the person, trying to figure out what they would say, how they would react. You create a simulacrum in order to argue this all out in your head, and thus to avoid unpleasantness. Certain conclusions are made, which you file away. When another problem comes up, you then test this against your estimates of the person, which have been expanded by your previous guesswork.
Eventually, you will have created this huge guesswork of assumptions, which are so far removed from the actual person that they likely have no bearing on the reality. I call this "a golem made of boxes", a warehouse-sized beast that has nothing to do with the simple small human being from which it is supposedly modeled.
When I have had such a golem used against me, I was told by my lover that she had kept a rather ugly situation from me "because I know how you'd react." I described to her exactly what the situation was, as I'd pieced it together very accurately (you can do this with the actions of humans, not the humans themselves). She was stunned. When I described for her how the root assumptions she had made were very largely off the mark, she actually became very angry with me, defending the golem as though it represented the truth, and therefore I must be lying! In the end, she could have better determined my reaction from writing down the possibilities on slips of paper and choosing one out of a hat. ...
The golem is handy, but almost entirely dishonest. It begins from faulty (incomplete, biased) data, and runs rapidly downhill from there.
The map and the territory. How have you had the golem used against you? When have you, yourselves, made the mistake of resorting to a golem and had it blow in your face?
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