Well, why does anyone want to do anything? Your question implied that there one might want to "do better", which strikes me as underinformed.

EDIT I just figured out something really interesting but am almost out of charge in the computer, will update in a bit

Maybe because someone wants to?

It might fit one's preferences better than programming, and the pay isn't different by orders of magnitude.

It sort of fits an (not very common) idiomatic pattern where the compliment is empty-to-sarcastic, but it seems pretty obvious that you didn't intend it that way, and I can't actually think of any examples I learned the idiom from.

It seems like you're trying to ask this nicely, which is good, and I don't know how Swimmer963 feels about this so I'm not upset on her behalf, but in general I read this sort of comment as less insulting when it doesn't use a phrase like "someone as smart as you".

I feel almost ashamed for asking that question, partly because it's quite impolite and inappropriate to ask a question like that (at least outside of LW) and maybe also because it might betray some kind of deeply rooted egghead-elitism on my part that I still can't quite manage shake off, but I simply can't resist this attempt to satisfy my raging curiosity: What's the reason why someone as smart as you chooses to become a nurse?

Also: Do you think of your perfectionism as largely useful, largely a hindrance, or kind-of-a-mixed-bag?

[Part 1]

I like this post, I also doubt there is much coherence let alone usefulness to be found in most of the currently prevailing concepts of what consciousness is.

I prefer to think of words and the definitions of those words as micro-models of reality that can be evaluated in terms of their usefulness, especially in building more complex models capable of predictions. As in your excellent example of gender, words and definitions basically just carve complex features of reality into manageable chunks at the cost of losing information - there is a trade-off and getting it right enhances the usefulness of words and the concepts behind them. In 99.9% of cases the concept of biological gender is perfectly applicable to everyday life and totally a "good enough" model of reality, as long as you have the insight that hermaphrodites are actually also a real thing. In a case where you have to deal with one, the correct reaction is to adopt a more complex model of reality instead of trying to fit a complex reality into a model that is designed to compress information into categories with some inevitable information loss. Biological gender is a really good high-level model of reality, because it draws its imaginary line in an area where very few exceptions actually exist in reality. It's an especially sharp distinction if you think of biological gender as having testiclular/ovarial(?) tissue, but in very rare instances this model will still miss to encompass rare special cases where the complexity of reality defies your model. "Mental gender" seems to be a rather different yet in most cases more useful everyday concept of gender, because we usually care more about creating models of other peoples' minds than about whether or not they have testicular or ovarian tissues - outside of curiosity or medical context. The lesson here is that your model of reality will always fall short no matter where you draw the line (at least at "higher levels" of reality, "low-level" models of atoms or particles are much more precise and unambiguous, than models of "higher-level" things like "persons" (When exactly does a fetus become a person?) or "societies" (are two people a society? How about eight?) and I'm quite sure any models of whatever "consciousness" is face the same problem).

In other words I think it's better to think of models/maps in terms of their usefulness, not in terms of right or wrong. In my opinion the job of a model is to make something understandable and more predictable, the job of a model is not to "reflect reality as closely as possible", especially of complex higher-level things. The "perfect model" in the latter sense would essentially be a perfect carbon copy of a real thing and tells you exactly as much -or as little- as the thing you're trying to model already does anyway. The usefulness of a model lies in compacting information enough to become understandable while also predicting outcomes better than competing models.

If you accept that notion, the question really becomes how should the term consciousness be defined to be useful and describe / differentiate something we actually care about. So we'd like to represent a part of reality we care about in a way that compresses information while retaining a high level of usefulness - meaning we can understand it but without cutting away vital parts and ideally in terms of being able to make predictions if we were to integrate the concept of consciousness into models with the potential to predict outcomes.

So which part of reality should the term consciousness try to model in order to be useful? I find it highly problematic and close to maximum uselessness to think of consciousness as some kind of continuum on which we rank information processing in living things/agents. Some people actually really think of consciousness as rocks having 0, bacteria having perhaps 0.001, bees having 0.01, rats having 0.1, dogs maybe 0.2, humans perhaps 0.5. Maximum uselessness I would argue as it tells you nothing. Why not just substitute consciousness with some notion of "maximum calculations per second" then and reserve the term consciousness for something we actually care about instead of wasting such a nice word on something we don't really care so much about - and more importantly on something we can already express with other words and concepts like "information processing".

What's funny about consciousness is that no one really agrees what exactly the definition should be but somehow everyone agrees that it's really really important. Why do we care so much about something we seemingly know close to nothing about? Seriously though why do we?

Look at all those hilarious "quantum consciousness" or "become more conscious" concepts peddled by the self-help industry complex. Possessing consciousness seems really high status nowadays, unlike say... all those lousy low-status life forms like frogs and bees and mice. The idea that somehow you can improve your consciousness seems very appealing, because if insects and birds have little or none of that thing called consciousness, and people surely have some of that thing called consciousness, then logically if I can get more of that awesome "consciousness" than my neighbor I'm superior than him in just the same way I'm superior to a frog. Really, self-help opened my eyes to how unconsciously I lived my life once and nowadays I feel strongly about helping all those low-consciousness people realize their full potential and I do my best to help them become more conscious beings...

It sounds ridiculous but couldn't that be part of why consciousness is so damn important to us even if he have no clue what exactly it is? I may have no idea what that consciousness is but somehow I really insist that I have it, I mean if everyone else says s/he has it I surely have it too, can't be left out. Whatever consciousness is, we usually agree that bacteria doesn't have it and we do so it must be important if some kinds of life have it and others don't.

Okay let's get serious again. What distinct features of minds exactly do we actually explicitly (and perhaps implicitly) care about, when we usually attempt employ that murky concept of consciousness? Hmm... well if we care about it, we might gain insight into what exactly it is we care about by thinking about which specific situations make us choose to employ that word and maybe from there we can distill why we seem to care so much.

Well whatever consciousness means, most people agree the concept of awareness seems highly related or somehow relevant to it. Consciousness is often used as a synonym for self-awareness, but what on earth is that exactly? (And why would we ever need two words for the exact same thing?) For some people it means having "internal experiences", for others "being aware of having internal experiences", which doesn't quite seem to be the same thing from where I stand... but where do these intuitions about something I seemingly know nothing about come from? Probably personal experiences...

Sometimes I read a paragraph and my mind stars wandering and daydreaming until I snap out of it and think to myself "Jesus I was totally gone for a second where was I again?" I realize my eyes are at the bottom of the paragraph already and it seems like I semi-remember that they kept wandering over the letters and words as if I was actually reading them... without being aware. And moreover my mind reawakening seems to have been triggered by arriving at the end of that paragraph and going "now what?", seemingly out of habit because I usually stop at the end of a paragraph and consider if I actually "got" what I read there. And sure enough upon rereading the paragraph, it seems very familiar to me... but I was not at all sure whether I read it or not just a few seconds ago, and I'd say whatever the word "self-aware" means shouldn't really include that experience (or non-experience?) I just described. But did I lack "awareness" or just "self-awareness" in that example? Hmm...

[Part 1]

I like this post, I also doubt there is much coherence let alone usefulness to be found in most of the currently prevailing concepts of what consciousness is.

I prefer to think of words and the definitions of those words as micro-models of reality that can be evaluated in terms of their usefulness, especially in building more complex models capable of predictions. As in your excellent example of gender, words and definitions basically just carve complex features of reality into manageable chunks at the cost of losing information - there is a trade-off and getting it right enhances the usefulness of words and the concepts behind them. In 99.9% of cases the concept of biological gender is perfectly applicable to everyday life and totally a "good enough" model of reality, as long as you have the insight that hermaphrodites are actually also a real thing. In a case where you have to deal with one, the correct reaction is to adopt a more complex model of reality instead of trying to fit a complex reality into a model that is designed to compress information into categories with some inevitable information loss. Biological gender is a really good high-level model of reality, because it draws its imaginary line in an area where very few exceptions actually exist in reality. It's an especially sharp distinction if you think of biological gender as having testiclular/ovarial(?) tissue, but in very rare instances this model will still miss to encompass rare special cases where the complexity of reality defies your model. "Mental gender" seems to be a rather different yet in most cases more useful everyday concept of gender, because we usually care more about creating models of other peoples' minds than about whether or not they have testicular or ovarian tissues - outside of curiosity or medical context. The lesson here is that your model of reality will always fall short no matter where you draw the line (at least at "higher levels" of reality, "low-level" models of atoms or particles are much more precise and unambiguous, than models of "higher-level" things like "persons" (When exactly does a fetus become a person?) or "societies" (are two people a society? How about eight?) and I'm quite sure any models of whatever "consciousness" is face the same problem).

In other words I think it's better to think of models/maps in terms of their usefulness, not in terms of right or wrong. In my opinion the job of a model is to make something understandable and more predictable, the job of a model is not to "reflect reality as closely as possible", especially of complex higher-level things. The "perfect model" in the latter sense would essentially be a perfect carbon copy of a real thing and tells you exactly as much -or as little- as the thing you're trying to model already does anyway. The usefulness of a model lies in compacting information enough to become understandable while also predicting outcomes better than competing models.

If you accept that notion, the question really becomes how should the term consciousness be defined to be useful and describe / differentiate something we actually care about. So we'd like to represent a part of reality we care about in a way that compresses information while retaining a high level of usefulness - meaning we can understand it but without cutting away vital parts and ideally in terms of being able to make predictions if we were to integrate the concept of consciousness into models with the potential to predict outcomes.

So which part of reality should the term consciousness try to model in order to be useful? I find it highly problematic and close to maximum uselessness to think of consciousness as some kind of continuum on which we rank information processing in living things/agents. Some people actually really think of consciousness as rocks having 0, bacteria having perhaps 0.001, bees having 0.01, rats having 0.1, dogs maybe 0.2, humans perhaps 0.5. Maximum uselessness I would argue as it tells you nothing. Why not just substitute consciousness with some notion of "maximum calculations per second" then and reserve the term consciousness for something we actually care about instead of wasting such a nice word on something we don't really care so much about - and more importantly on something we can already express with other words and concepts like "information processing".

What's funny about consciousness is that no one really agrees what exactly the definition should be but somehow everyone agrees that it's really really important. Why do we care so much about something we seemingly know close to nothing about? Seriously though why do we?

Look at all those hilarious "quantum consciousness" or "become more conscious" concepts peddled by the self-help industry complex. Possessing consciousness seems really high status nowadays, unlike say... all those lousy low-status life forms like frogs and bees and mice. The idea that somehow you can improve your consciousness seems very appealing, because if insects and birds have little or none of that thing called consciousness, and people surely have some of that thing called consciousness, then logically if I can get more of that awesome "consciousness" than my neighbor I'm superior than him in just the same way I'm superior to a frog. Really, self-help opened my eyes to how unconsciously I lived my life once and nowadays I feel strongly about helping all those low-consciousness people realize their full potential and I do my best to help them become more conscious beings...

It sounds ridiculous but couldn't that be part of why consciousness is so damn important to us even if he have no clue what exactly it is? I may have no idea what that consciousness is but somehow I really insist that I have it, I mean if everyone else says s/he has it I surely have it too, can't be left out. Whatever consciousness is, we usually agree that bacteria doesn't have it and we do so it must be important if some kinds of life have it and others don't.

Okay let's get serious again. What distinct features of minds exactly do we actually explicitly (and perhaps implicitly) care about, when we usually attempt employ that murky concept of consciousness? Hmm... well if we care about it, we might gain insight into what exactly it is we care about by thinking about which specific situations make us choose to employ that word and maybe from there we can distill why we seem to care so much.

Well whatever consciousness means, most people agree the concept of awareness seems highly related or somehow relevant to it. Consciousness is often used as a synonym for self-awareness, but what on earth is that exactly? (And why would we ever need two words for the exact same thing?) For some people it means having "internal experiences", for others "being aware of having internal experiences", which doesn't quite seem to be the same thing from where I stand... but where do these intuitions about something I seemingly know nothing about come from? Probably personal experiences...

Sometimes I read a paragraph and my mind stars wandering and daydreaming until I snap out of it and think to myself "Jesus I was totally gone for a second where was I again?" I realize my eyes are at the bottom of the paragraph already and it seems like I semi-remember that they kept wandering over the letters and words as if I was actually reading them... without being aware. And moreover my mind reawakening seems to have been triggered by arriving at the end of that paragraph and going "now what?", seemingly out of habit because I usually stop at the end of a paragraph and consider if I actually "got" what I read there. And sure enough upon rereading the paragraph, it seems very familiar to me... but I was not at all sure whether I read it or not just a few seconds ago, and I'd say whatever the word "self-aware" means shouldn't really include that experience (or non-experience?) I just described. But did I lack "awareness" or just "self-awareness" in that example? Hmm...

With pleasure!

Ok, so the old definition of "knowledge" was "justified true belief". Then it turned out that there were times when you could believe something true, but have the justification be mere coincidence. I could believe "Someone is coming to see me today" because I expect to see my adviser, but instead my girlfriend shows up. The statement as I believed it was correct, but for a completely different reason than I thought. So Alvin Goldman changed this to say, "knowledge is true belief caused by the truth of the proposition believed-in." This makes philosophers very unhappy but Bayesian probability theorists very happy indeed.

Where do causal and noncausal statistical models come in here? Well, right here, actually: Bayesian inference is actually just a logic of plausible reasoning, which means it's a way of moving belief around from one proposition to another, which just means that it works on any set of propositions for which there exists a mutually-consistent assignment of probabilities.

This means that quite often, even the best Bayesians (and frequentists as well) construct models (let's switch to saying "map" and "territory") which not only are not caused by reality, but don't even contain enough causal machinery to describe how reality could have caused the statistical data.

This happens most often with propositions of the form "There exists X such that P(X)" or "X or Y" and so forth. These are the propositions where belief can be deduced without constructive proof: without being able to actually exhibit the object the proposition applies to. Unfortunately, if you can't exhibit the object via constructive proof (note that constructive proofs are isomorphic to algorithms for actually generating the relevant objects), I'm fairly sure you cannot possess a proper description of the causal mechanisms producing the data you see. This means that not only might your hypotheses be wrong, your entire hypothesis space might be wrong, which could make your inferences Not Even Wrong, or merely confounded.

(I can't provide mathematics showing any formal tie between causation/causal modeling and constructive proof, but I think this might be because I'm too much an amateur at the moment. My intuitions say that in a universe where incomputable things don't generate results in real-time and things don't happen for no reason at all, any data I see must come from a finitely-describable causal process, which means there must exist a constructive description of that process -- even if classical logic could prove the existence of and proper value for the data without encoding that constructive decision!)

What can also happen, again particularly if you use classical logic, is that you perform sound inference over your propositions, but the propositions themselves are not conceptually coherent in terms of grounding themselves in causal explanations of real things.

So to use my former example of the Great Filter Hypothesis: sure, it makes predictions, sure, we can assign probabilities, sure, we can do updates. But nothing about the Great Filter Hypothesis is constructive or causal, nothing about it tells us what to expect the Filter to do or how it actually works. Which means it's not actually telling us much at all, as far as I can say.

(In relation to Overcoming Bias, I've ranted on similarly about explaining all possible human behaviors in terms of signalling, status, wealth, and power. Paging /u/Quirinus_Quirrell... If they see a man flirting with a woman at a party, Quirrell and Hanson will seem to explain it in terms of signalling and status, while I will deftly and neatly predict that the man wants to have sex with the woman. Their explanation sounds until you try to read its source code, look at the causal machine working, and find that it dissolves into cloud around the edges. My explanation grounds itself in hormonal biology and previous observation of situations where similar things occurred.)

So Alvin Goldman changed this to say, "knowledge is true belief caused by the truth of the proposition believed-in." This makes philosophers very unhappy but Bayesian probability theorists very happy indeed.

If I am insane and think I'm the Roman emperor Nero, and then reason "I know that according to the history books the emperor Nero is insane, and I am Nero, so I must be insane", do I have knowledge that I am insane?

I admire the restraint involved in waiting nearly five years before selecting a favorite.