From what I've read, one needs to train oneself on paradigm cases. So, for example, with wine tasting, you develop your verbal acuity by learning how to describe fairly ordinary wines.
I don't know how to port this strategy over to verbal acuity for rationality.
I don't know how to port this strategy over to verbal acuity for rationality.
Perhaps by vocalising simple logic? When you make a simple decision, such as "I'm going to walk to work today instead of catching the bus", go over your logic for the decision, even after you've started walking, as if you're explaining your decision to someone else. I often do this (not out loud, but as a mental conversation), just for something to pass the time, and I find that it actually helps me organise my thoughts and explain my logic to other real people.
Sexual Weirdtopia:
The government takes a substantial interest in people's sex lives. People are expected to register their sexual preferences with government agencies. A certain level of sexual education and satisfaction is presumed to be a basic right of humanity, along with health care and enough income to live on. Workers are entitled to five days' annual leave for seeking new or maintaining old romantic and sexual relationships, and if your lover leaves you because you're working too hard, you can sue your employer and are likely to win. Private prostitution is illegal, but the government maintains an agency of sex workers, who can be hired for a fee, or allocated free of charge to adults who apply on the basis of "sexual hardship" (defined as having not had sex in the last six months), and form part of "optional field work" for sex education classes at the appropriate level. There are government funded dating and matchmaking agencies. Also, mandatory registration for Creepy Doms and Terrible Exes.
Creepy and more than a little disturbing? Yes. Arguably better than the standard Sexual Utopia in some respects? Yes, if you'd asked me when I was 18 or even 21. What use is a sexually permissive society when you, personally, aren't getting any?
I think I've started to do this already for Disputing Definitions, as has my girlfriend, just from listening to me discussing that article without reading it herself. So that's a win for rationality right there.
To take an example that comes up in our household surprisingly often, I'll let the disputed definition be " steampunk ". Statements of the form "X isn't really steampunk!" come up a lot on certain websites, and arguments over what does or doesn't count as steampunk can be pretty vicious. After reading "Disputing Definitions", though, I learnt how to classify those arguments as meaningless, and get to the real question, being "Do I want this thing in my subculture / on my website"? I think the process by which I recognise these questions goes something like this:
1) Make the initial statement. "A hairpin made out of a clock hand isn't steampunk!"
2) Visualise, even briefly, every important element in what I've just said. Visualising a hairpin produces an image of a thing stuck through a woman's hair arrangement. Visualising a clock hand produces a curly, tapered object such as one might see on an antique clock. Visualising "steampunk" produces... no clearly defined mental image.
3) Notice that I am confused. Realise that I've just made a statement about something that I can't properly visualise, something that I don't think I've properly defined in my own brain, so how can I expect anyone else to have a proper definition at all, let alone one that agrees with mine? (Honestly, the fact that I keep writing "steampunk" in quotation marks should have been a clue already.)
4) Correct my mistake. "Hmm, now that I think about it, what I just said didn't actually mean anything. What's the point of this discussion again? Are we arguing about whether or not this picture should be on the website, or whether this person should be going to conventions, or what? If so, let's talk about that specifically. Let's not pretend that "steampunk" exists as a concrete category boundary in the phase space of fashion accessories, okay?"
Now, this process can fall down at step 2 when I, personally, have a very well-defined mental image of what a word means (such as "sound", which I will always take to mean "compression waves of the sort that a human or other animal might detect as auditory input, whether or not a listener is actually present"), but which other people might interpret differently. Here, the trick to step 2 is to imagine my listener's most obvious responses, based on my experience in discussing the topic previously (such as "But there's nobody to hear it, so by definition there's no sound!"). If I can imagine somebody saying this, without also being forced to imagine that the speaker is hopelessly misinformed, mentally deficient, or some other kind of irrational mutant, then what I'm saying must have some defect, and I should re-examine my words.
As for a training exercise, step 2 seems to be the one to train. The "rationalist taboo" technique seems pretty effective here. Discuss a topic with the student, and when they use a word that doesn't seem to mean anything, or means too many things at once, taboo it and get them to restate their point. Encourage the student to visualise everything they say, if only briefly, and explain that anything they can't visualise properly is suspect.
Alternatively, allow the student to get into a couple of disputes over definitions, let them experience firsthand how frustrating it is, then point them to this blog and show them that there's a solution. Their frustration will drive them to adopt a method of implementing the solution in their own discourse. Worked for me!
But that is precisely it - it's no longer a Pascal mugging if the threat is credible. That is, in order to be successful, the mugger needs to be able to up the utility claim arbitrarily! It is assumed that we already know how to handle a credible threat, what we didn't know how to deal with was a mugger who could always make up a bigger number, to a degree where the seeming impossibility of the claim no longer offsets the claimed utility. But as I showed, this only works if you don't enter the mugger's thought process into the calculation.
This actually brings up an important corollary to my earlier point: The higher the number, the less likely the coupling is between the mugger's claim and the mugger's intent.
A person who can kill another person might well want 5$, for whatever reason. In contrast, a person who can use power from beyond the Matrix to torture 3^^^3 people already has IMMENSE power. Clearly such a person has all the money they want, and even more than that in the influence that money represents. They can probably create the money out of nothing. So already their claims don't make sense if taken at face value.
Maybe the mugger just wants me to surrender to an arbitrary threat? But in that case, why me? If the mugger really has immense power, they could create a person they know would cave in to their demands.
Maybe I'm special for some reason. But if the mugger is REALLY that powerful, wouldn't they be able to predict my actions beforehand, a-la Omega?
Each rise in claimed utility brings with it a host of assumptions that need to be made for the action-claimed reaction link to be maintained. And remember, the mugger's ability is not the only thing dictating expected utility, but also the mugger's intentions. Each such assumption not only weakens the probability of the mugger carrying out their threat because they can't, it also raises the probability of the mugger rewarding refusal and/or punishing compliance. Just because the off-chance comes true and the mugger contacting me actually CAN carry out the threat, does not make them sincere; the mugger might be testing my rationality skills, for instance, and could severely punish me for failing the test.
As the claimed utility approaches infinity, so does the scenario approach Pascal's Wager: An unknowable, symmetrical situation, where an infinite number of possible outcomes cancel each other out. The one outcome that isn't canceled out is the loss of 5$. So the net utility is negative. So I don't comply with the mugger.
I'm still not sure I'm fully satisfied with the level of math my explanation has, even though I've tried to set the solution in terms of limits and attractors. But I think I can draw a graph that dips under zero utility fairly quickly (or maybe doesn't really ever go over it?), and never goes back up - asymptotic at -5$ utility. Am I wrong?
A person who can kill another person might well want 5$, for whatever reason. In contrast, a person who can use power from beyond the Matrix to torture 3^^^3 people already has IMMENSE power. Clearly such a person has all the money they want, and even more than that in the influence that money represents. They can probably create the money out of nothing. So already their claims don't make sense if taken at face value.
Ah, my mistake. You're arguing based on the intent of a legitimate mugger, rather than the fakes. Yes, that makes sense. If we let f(N) be the probability that somebody has the power to kill N people on demand, and g(N) be the probability that somebody who has the power to kill N people on demand would threaten to do so if he doesn't get his $5, then it seems highly likely that Nf(N)g(N) approaches zero as N approaches infinity. What's even better news is that, while f(N) may only approach zero slowly for easily constructed values of N like 3^^^^3 and 4^^^^4 because of their low Kolmogorov complexity, g(N) should scale with 1/N or something similar, because the more power someone has, the less likely they are to execute such a miniscule, petty threat. You're also quite right in stating that the more power the mugger has, the more likely it is that they'll reward refusal, punish compliance or otherwise decouple the wording of the threat from their actual intentions, thus making g(N) go to zero even more quickly.
So, yeah, I'm pretty satisfied that Nf(N)g(N) will asymptote to zero, taking all of the above into account.
(In more unrelated news, my boyfriend claims that he'd pay the mugger, on account of him obviously being mentally ill. So that's two out of three in my household. I hope this doesn't catch on.)
I think this is actually the core of the issue - not certainty of your probability, per se, but rather how it is derived. I think I may have finally solved this!
See if you can follow me on this... If Pascal Muggers were completely independent instances of each other - that is, every person attempting a Pascal's Mugging has their own unique story and motivation for initiating it, without it correlating to you or the other muggers, then you have no additional information to go on. You shut up and multiply, and if the utility calculation comes out right, you pay the mugger. Sure, you're almost certainly throwing money away, but the off-chance more than offsets this by definition. Note that the probability calculation itself is complicated and not linear: Claiming higher numbers increases the probability that they are lying. However it's still possible they would come up with a number high enough to override this function.
At which point we previously said: "Aha! So this is a losing strategy! The Mugger ought not be able to arbitrarily manipulate me in this manner!" Or: "So what's stopping the mugger from upping the number arbitrarily, or mugging me multiple times?" ...To which I answer, "check the assumptions we started with".
Note that the assumption was that the Mugger is not influenced by me, nor by other muggings. The mugger's reasons for making the claim are their own. So "not trying to manipulate me knowing my algorithm" was an explicit assumption here.
What if we get rid of the assumption? Why, then now an increasingly higher utility claim (or recurring muggings) don't just raise the probability that the mugger is wrong/lying for their own inscrutable reasons. It additionally raises the probability that they are lying to manipulate me, knowing (or guessing) my algorithm.
Basically, I add in the question "why did the mugger choose the number 3^^^3 and not 1967? This makes it more likely that they are trying to overwhelm my algorithm, (mistakenly) thinking that it can thus be overwhelmed". If the mugger chooses 4^^^4 instead, this further (and proportionally?) increases said suspicion. And so on.
I propose that the combined weight of these probabilities rises faster than the claimed utility. If that is the case, then for all claimed utilities x higher than N, where N is a number that prompts a negative expected utility result, x would likewise produce a negative expected utility result.
Presumably, an AI with good enough grasp of motives and manipulation, this would not pose a problem for very long. We can specifically test for this behavior, checking the AI's analysis for increasingly higher claims and seeing whether the expected utility function really has a downward slope under these conditions.
I can try to further mathematize this (is this even a real word?). Is this necessary? The answer seems superficially satisfactory. Have I actually solved it? I don't really have a lot of time to keep grappling with it (been thinking about this on and off for the past few months), so I would welcome criticism even more than usual.
This is a very good point - the higher the number chosen, the more likely it is that the mugger is lying - but I don't think it quite solves the problem.
The probability that a person, out to make some money, will attempt a Pascal's Mugging can be no greater than 1, so let's imagine that it is 1. Every time I step out of my front door, I get mobbed by Pascal's Muggers. My mail box is full of Pascal's Chain Letters. Whenever I go online, I get popups saying "Click this link or 3^^^^3 people will die!". Let's say I get one Pascal-style threat every couple of minutes, so the probability of getting one in any given minute is 0.5.
Then, let the probability of someone genuinely having the ability to kill 3^^^^3 people, and then choosing to threaten me with that, be x per minute - that is, over the course of one minute, there's an x chance that a genuine extra-Matrix being will contact me and make a Pascal Mugging style threat, on which they will actually deliver.
Naturally, x is tiny. But, if I receive a Pascal threat during a particular minute, the probability that it's genuine is x/(0.5+x), or basically 2x. If 2x * 3^^^^3 is at all close to 1, then what can I do but pay up? Like it or not, Pascal muggings would be more common in a world where people can carry out the threat, than in a world where they can't. No amount of analysis of the muggers' psychology can change the prior probability that a genuine threat will be made - it just increases the amount of noise that hides the genuine threat in a sea of opportunistic muggings.
This problem sounds awfully similar to the halting problem to me. If we can't tell whether a Turing machine will eventually terminate without actually running it, how could we ever tell if a Turing machine will experience consciousness without running it?
Has anyone attempted to prove the statement "Consciousness of a Turing machine is undecideable"? The proof (if it's true) might look a lot like the proof that the halting problem is undecideable. Sadly, I don't quite understand how that proof works either, so I can't use it as a basis for the consciousness problem. It just seems that figuring out if a Turing machine is conscious, or will ever achieve consciousness before halting, is much harder than figuring out if it halts.
Do we even need the destination? When you consider "fun" as something that comes from a process, from the journey of approaching a goal, then wouldn't it make sense to disentangle the journey and the goal? We shouldn't need the destination in order to make the journey worthwhile. I mean, if the goal were actually important, then surely we'd just get our AI buddies to implement the goal, while I was off doing fun journey stuff.
For a more concrete example:
I like baking fruitcakes. (Something I don't do nearly often enough these days.) Mixing the raw ingredients is fun, and licking the bowl clean afterwards is always good times.
I also like eating fruitcake. Fruitcake is tasty.
Now, one of the things that induces me to bake a fruitcake rather than, say, play Baldur's Gate II is that, afterwards, there will be fruitcake. However, there have been times when other people (usually my mother) have been baking a fruitcake, and I have enthusiastically joined in the process, even though I know that she's better at it than I am, and even if I don't participate, there will still be fruitcake at the end of the day. So clearly I place some value on the process independently of the result.
I suspect, in fact, that actually getting the fruitcake at the end of the baking process is unnecessary to my enjoyment of the process. Maybe I'd be just as happy if we swapped the cake to another family for a cheesecake they'd just made. Maybe the need to be "rewarded" for participating in a process that was rewarding in itself, is just a cognitive bias that I can overcome. After all, if I really wanted a fruitcake, I could buy one, or just let my mother do the baking. The more I look at this, the more the fruitcake itself seems like fake justification for the baking process.
Now consider this situation in a world where optimal fruitcakes are constructed by nanomachines on demand. I should still be able to enjoy baking, even though the final product of the process is of trivial value. If I can separate the process from the goal - if, in fact, I can stop thinking of the baking process as a "journey" and instead just call it a goal in itself - a 4D goal - then I think that would be a substantial step towards being able to find fun in a post-work, post-scarcity world.
Damnit, now I want fruitcake.
What really struck me with this parable is that it's so well-written that I felt genuine horror and revulsion at the idea of an AI making heaps of size 8. Because, well... 2!
So, aside from the question of whether an AI would come to moral conclusions such as "heaps of size 8 are okay" or "the way to end human suffering is to end human life", the question I'm taking away from this parable is, are we any more enlightened than the Pebblesorters? Should we, in fact, be sending philosophers or missionaries to the Pebblesorter planet to explain to them that it's wrong to murder someone just because they built a heap of size 15?
Incidentally: How would it affect your intuition if you instead could participate in the Intergalactic Utilium Lottery, where probabilities and payoffs are the same but where you trust the organizers that they do what they promise?
If I actually trust the lottery officials, that means that I have certain knowledge of the utility probabilities and costs for each of my choices. Thus, I guess I'd choose whichever option generated the most utility, and it wouldn't be a matter of "intuition" any more.
Applying that logic to the initial Mugger problem, if I calculated, and was certain of, there being at least a 1 in 3^^^^3 chance that the mugger was telling the truth, then I'd pay him. In fact, I could mentally reformulate the problem to have the mugger saying "If you don't give me $5, I will use the powers vested in me by the Intergalactic Utilium Lottery Commission to generate a random number between 1 and N, and if it's a 7, then I kill K people." I then divide K by N to get an idea of the full moral force of what's going on. If K/N is even within several orders of magnitude of 1, I'd better pay up.
The problem is the uncertainty. Solomonoff induction gives the claim "I can kill 3^^^^3 people any time I want" a substantial probability, whereas "common sense" will usually give it literally zero. If we trust the lottery guys, questions of induction versus common sense become moot - we know the probability, and must act on it.
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They are both physical objects, usually containing some metal and of roughly the same height, that have the ability to stop traffic, thus are found on a road, and have the colors of silver and white and (presumably by the specification of "that") also red in common?
(sarcasm) Really? I hadn't noticed in the slightest... (/sarcasm)
Talking with people that do not agree with you as though they were people. That is taking what they say seriously and trying to understand why they are saying what they say. Asking questions helps. Also, assume that they have reasons that seem rational to them for what they say or do, even if you disagree.
This also helps in actually reasoning with people. To show that something is irrational, it is needed to show that it is irrational within the system that they are using, not your own. Bashing someone over the head with ones reasonings in ones own system doesn't (usually) work (unless one believes there is an absolute correct reasoning system that is universally verifiable, understandable, and acceptable to everyone (and the other person thinks likewise, or one happens to actually be right about that assumption)). Often times, such reasonings when translated to what the other person's system is become utter nonsense. This is why materialists have such a hard time dealing with much of religion and platonic thought, and vice versa.
Taking as an assumption that the thing one is trying to show is irrational (or doesn't exist) is actually irrational (or actually doesn't exist) is perhaps the worst thing to do when constructing an argument meant to convince people that believe otherwise. For example see, The Amazing Virgin Birth and try and think of it from a Catholics perspective.
I think this is a very important point. If we can avoid seeing our political enemies as evil mutants, then hopefully we can avoid seeing our conversational opponents as irrational mutants. Even after discounting the possibility that you, personally, might be mistaken in your beliefs or reasoning, don't assume that your opponent is hopelessly irrational. If you find yourself thinking, "How on earth can this person be so wrong!", then change that exclamation mark into a question mark and actually try to answer that question.
If the most likely failure mode in your opponent's thoughts can be traced back to a simple missing fact or one of the more tame biases, then supply the fact or explain the bias, and you might be able to make some headway.
If you trace the fault back to a fundamental belief - by which I mean one that can't be changed over the course of the conversation - then bring the conversation to that level as quickly as possible, point out the true level of your disagreement, and say something to the effect of, "Okay, I see your point, and I understand your reasoning, but I'm afraid we disagree fundamentally on the existence of God / the likelihood of the Singularity / the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics / your support for the Parramatta Eels[1]. If you want to talk about that, I'm totally up for that, but there's no point discussing religion / cryonics / wavefunction collapse / high tackles until we've settled that high-level point."
There are a lot of very clever and otherwise quite rational people out there who have a few... unusual views on certain topics, and discounting them out of hand is cutting yourself off from their wisdom and experience, and denying them the chance to learn from you.
[1] Football isn't a religion. It's much more important than that.