Interesting. This makes me less skeptical of Derren Brown's color illusion video (summary: a celebrity mentalist uses NLP techniques to convince a woman yellow is red, red is black etc.).
It's only a small step away from what complete amateurs can do in a room in a university. Human judgement is careful not to get caught up with the actual real world when there is social influence at stake!
I don't think social influence alone is a good explanation for the delusion in the video. Or more precisely, I don't think the delusion in the video can be explained as just a riff on the Asch conformity experiment.
Derren Brown's explanations for his effects are not to be relied on. Remember, he is a magician. Misdirection is one of the pillars of conjuring, and a plausible lie is a powerful misdirector.
I'm merely less skeptical that the woman in the video is a stooge after hearing what Nancy had to say. But yes, the anchoring techniques he uses in the video might be nothing but deliberate misdirection.
That reminds me of a weird experience. I was listening to and watching a singer do a song about his guitar. One verse described it as blue. The next verse described it as green.
Then I saw the guitar as a bright color that I couldn't specify. I'm not sure I would have said it wasn't red.
Fortunately, he concluded with a verse about it being teal, and my ability to connect the color of his guitar to words was repaired.
Interesting. This makes me less skeptical of Derren Brown's color illusion video (summary: a celebrity mentalist uses NLP techniques to convince a woman yellow is red, red is black etc.).
I may simply be unclear on what it means to be "wrong about the subjective quality of your own conscious experience," but it seems to me that this post is completely irrelevant to that question. All of the evidence shows flaws in our predictive ability, our memory, and our language. I don't see any contradictions or wrongness; indeed, I'm still unsure what such would look like. I'll go through it step by step.
Someone predicted that people couldn't experience echolocation. He was wrong. No evidence was offered that he could experience echolocation. Moreover, comparing the ability of the untrained to notice the difference between a T-shirt and a mixing bowl, and the ability of a bat or dolphin to render rich detail is disingenuous. But disputing the detail is besides the point: his mistake was about his abilities, not his actual experience. It's not like he experienced echolocation and didn't know it, or failed to and thought he did.
Does a coin look circular? This seems to be purely semantic and, if anything, a product of language. No one is disputing my ability to see a coin or predict or understand its properties. The problem is mostly whether we're describing the image on our retina or the translation our brain maps onto it. We see an elliptical image which we almost inseverably perceive as round because of the operations our brain does. I don't see anyone making a mistake about what coins look like, or having some erroneous experience.
When you're asked to imagine something, your brain does one thing. When you're asked to reflect on your imagination, or recall your brain has trouble doing so. This doesn't seem like someone being wrong about conscious experience so much as (at most) having difficulty consciously remembering a prior experience. Where's the error?
Dreaming in color - I don't even see where you're going with this. Some people do, some don't. It changes over time. Where's the error? Are there people who think they dream in color but don't, or vice versa? How is this relevant?
[ETA: Further discussion suggests the argument: there isn't a real change in frequency of color in dreams, but there is one in reporting, therefore, people are making mistakes. To that, I think there are two responses:
This evidence is very weak. It's entirely possible that there has been a change in dream color. Since we have no idea what causes it, it's rather hasty to say, "More (or fewer) people must be making mistakes than did before." It's not impossible, it's just weak evidence where we have no understanding of the mechanism.
This is likely a language error. For many people, dreams are unlike the waking world. This is rather like the circular/elliptical coin. It's not information about the dreams. It's not a problem with us experiencing our dreams.]
There are things that occur below our consciousness - this seems principally an issue of memory. Our brain doesn't register (and certainly doesn't record) certain things. There's no error here. It's not that I feel I have no feet when I do, or that I feel I am not driving when I am.
It's possible I've simply misinterpreted the claim you're making. But if it's:
you can be wrong about the subjective quality of your own conscious experience.
I really fail to see a single shred of evidence in everything you cite. You show that there are errors in our memory and our ability to predict, but you do not offer a single example of someone being wrong about the subjective quality of their own experience - it doesn't even seem like you suggest what such error would look like.
Even if I am missing something, it still seems like your point is that "What constitutes your subjective experience is unclear" not "X is a subjective experience that is wrong."
Perhaps the post could be improved if it laid out the types of errors our intuitions can make (e.g. memory errors, language errors, etc.). Each type of error could then be analyzed in terms of how seriously it impacts prevalent theories of cognition (or common assumptions in mainstream philosophy). As it stands, the post seems like a rather random (though interesting!) sampling of cognitive errors that serve to support the somewhat unremarkable conclusion that yes, our seemingly infallible intuitions have glitches.
This strikes me as the most cultish-sounding thing I've seen here-- more so, say, than the boot camp.
This may be unreasonable on my part since I don't have specific blogs in mind, but really-- in the huge universe of blogs, no others are rationalist enough?
We couldn't even settle on science and math blogs which would be of interest?
I dunno Nancy. I mean you start off innocently clicking on a link to a math blog. Next minute you're following these hyperlinks and soon you find yourself getting sucked into a quantum healing website. I'm still trying to get a refund on these crystals I ended up buying. Let's face it. These seemingly harmless websites with unrigorous intellectual standards are really gateway drugs to hard-core irrationality. So I have a new feature request: every time someone clicks on an external link from Less Wrong, a piece of Javascript pops up with the message: "You are very probably about to enter an irrational area of the internet. Are you sure you want to continue?" If you have less than 100000 karma points, clicking yes simply redirects you the sequences.
A circular coin held at a slant to you doesn't look like a true ellipse. The half that's closer to you will be fuller and the half that's away from you will be flatter because of perspective.
ETA: Pfft points out below that circles actually map to ellipses under perspective projection. Before I posted this, I took a look at an angled circle, and it looked as I described it-- at the moment, they're looking like true ellipses.
Speaking of the yellow banana, people do a lot of filling in with color. Take a careful look at someone who's wearing a monochrome garment. Very little of it will be the color you think it is-- most of it will be much lighter or much darker, and this doesn't take into account the effects of the colors of nearby objects getting reflected onto it.
It took a major effort of will for me to hear the way I pronounce water. I have a Delaware accent, and I say warter. It looks ugly in print, but it sounds wetter and altogether more like H2O than the more usual wahter-- which also looks weird in print.
My last name is Lebovitz. Most of the people I've dealt with can't say it accurately or remember it, even if they're told it twice, had it spelled for them, and shown it in print. The problem is that Leibowitz is more common, and most people seem to slot in the more common name so strongly that they can't perceive immediate sensory input that's a little different.
This is an irritant for me, but the cognitively important aspect is that if something so simple (all the phonemes in my name are part of the standard English set) and objective is so hard to perceive, how much more are we missing which doesn't have a person saying "that's a short 'e' and a 'v' not a 'w' " to us?
Speaking of the yellow banana, people do a lot of filling in with color.
One of Dennett's points is the misleading notion that our mind "fills in". In the case of vision, our brain doesn't "paint in" missing visual data, such as the area in our field of vision not captured by our fovea. Our brains simply lack epistemic hunger for such information in order to perform the tasks that they need to.
I've noticed that this account potentially explains how color works in my dreams. My dreams aren't even black and white - the visual aspects are mostly just forms. However, if the color has meaning or emotion, it's there. I recently had a dream where I looked up at the sky, and the moon was huge and black, moving in a rapid arc across the sky then suddenly diving into the Earth causing an apocalyptic wave of dirt to head towards me. The vivid blackness was present, because it meant something to me emotionally. The houses, in comparison, merely had form, but no color. In any case, it seems that the question "Do we dream in color?" can't be answered adequately if using a "filling in" model of the mind.
Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained is a very relevant piece of work here. Early in his book, he seeks to establish that our intuitions about our own perceptions are faulty, and provides several scientific examples to build his case. The Wikipedia entry on his multiple drafts theory gives a reasonable summary.
What I dislike most about the idea is that it gives some sort of official collective endorsement to external websites. One thing I like about LW is that except for the institutions that historically gave rise to it (OB and SIAI), it has no official doctrine and official endorsements. There are issues of broad consensus, but they are never officially presented as such. Thus, even if I have some disagreements with the majority on these issues, I can always voice my arguments without the unpleasant feeling that I'm invading the forum as an outsider trying to pick arguments over matters of consensus. (Which would constitute borderline trolling even if I'm right.)
Now, if there is a list of officially LW-endorsed websites, and I think some of them are bad and I don't want to endorse them by any means, raising such concerns would mean picking fruitless and frustrating arguments with the majority. And frankly, I think it is quite plausible that some websites hit enough "applause lights" that they might find themselves on the LW endorsement list, even though their intellectual standards leave much to be desired.
If individual LW members wish to promote external websites, I'm all for it. They can post links in discussions, and by all means allow them to post links in their profiles more conspicuously and prominently than now, not just to their own websites but also to a list of favorite websites. But please don't insist on an official list of collectively endorsed links.
You've articulated some of the problems of a blogroll well. Perhaps the blogroll idea could be evolved into a concept that better fits the needs of this community, while retaining its core value and simplicity:
1) Along side a link could be its controversy level, based on the votes for and against the link. By making the controversy explicit, the link can no longer be seen as a straight-up endorsement.
2) Along side a link could be its ranking based on say only the top 50 users. This would let people explicitly see what the majority vs. the "elite rationalists" thought - an interesting barometer of community rationality.
3) Split the "blogroll" in two - all-time most votes vs. most votes in the last week/month. This would alleviate the problem of staleness that Nancy pointed out. This is also nice because the links could be for not just websites, but any interesting new article.
4) Allow discussion of any link. Comments could warn users of applause lights etc. This is perhaps why the current voting system works well for choosing top posts, despite the problems you point out with majority opinion. A poor post/link can never get past the gauntlet of critical comments.
You could generalize this to the point that ordinary posts essentially become a special case of an "internal link". Anyway, enough about a technical proposal - at this point I'm reluctant to push any harder on this. An impression I have of Less Wrong is that it's somewhat of a walled garden (albeit a beautiful one!) and that such changes would open it up a little, while maintaining its integrity. The resistance people have seems to be rooted in this - a fear of in any way endorsing "inferior intellectual standards". What we should instead be fearful of is not doing everything we can to raise the sanity waterline.
Blogroll / Side Bar Section for Links to Rationality Related Websites. I love Overcoming Bias, but it seems a bit biased that Overcoming Bias is the only other website linked from here.
I don't like this idea. The choice of websites to put on the sidebar is likely to be contentious. What exactly qualifies a website to be endorsed by LW? How should a website be judged considering the various PR implications of endorsing it? Also, who exactly stands behind the endorsement, considering that LW is a group blog?
What's more, LW members already have the option to put website links in their profiles, and the websites authored or endorsed by prominent LW contributors are thus already given significant promotion.
A website has a specific goal that it's trying to uniquely achieve, and a general goal that places it within a community of like-minded websites. Less Wrong's specific goal is to refine the art of human rationality, and its general goal is to raise the sanity waterline. If other websites are successfully raising the sanity waterline, it behooves Less Wrong to link to them.
I don't like this idea. The choice of websites to put on the sidebar is likely to be contentious. What exactly qualifies a website to be endorsed by LW? How should a website be judged considering the various PR implications of endorsing it? Also, who exactly stands behind the endorsement, considering that LW is a group blog?
I agree that there's genuine challenges in selecting which websites to link to, especially for a community blog. But a community blog, if it meets those challenges, actually has the greater potential to choose a good set of links. Less Wrong should strive to have a better set of links than its sister site, Overcoming Bias. These links matter. It's a standard feature of blogs, and for good reason. I've discovered many great websites this way. Unfortunately, never via Less Wrong.
What's more, LW members already have the option to put website links in their profiles, and the websites authored or endorsed by prominent LW contributors are thus already given significant promotion.
While I think high-karma Less Wrong users deserve promotion, it's not the only criteria for which promotion is justified. If there's a great sanity waterline raising website out there, it should be linked to, whether or not there's a high-karma Less Wrong user running it. On my own website I link to Wikipedia's argument fallacy list and cognitive bias list. Without digressing into a debate as to whether Less Wrong should link to these lists too, I'll merely point out that with the criteria you're suggesting, such links would necessarily have zero value. I think JGWeissman's proposal would choose the appropriate value for such links.
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If this study occurred in the US then it isn't so improbable. In the 1920s the primary form of entertainment were black and white movies. This might have had enough influence that many of the people who would have had dreams in color had substantial parts of those dreams in "color" but the only relevant colors were black and white. (This notion is partially inspired by my own dreams- I dream in color, but occasionally cartoon characters show up, and when they do, they look like they would in the cartoon even as they interact with normal people, or something sort of like that. So it isn't implausible to me that something similar could happen with black and white characters.)
I believe the primary form of entertainment for the last million years has had plenty of color.