The Robbers Cave Experiment had as its subject 22 twelve-year-old boys, selected from 22 different schools in Oklahoma City, all doing well in school, all from stable middle-class Protestant families.  In short, the boys were as similar to each other as the experimenters could arrange, though none started out knowing any of the others.  The experiment, conducted in the aftermath of WWII, was meant to investigate conflicts between groups. How would the scientists spark an intergroup conflict to investigate? Well, the first step was to divide the 22 boys into two groups of 11 campers -

- and that was quite sufficient.  There was hostility almost from the moment each group became aware of the other group's existence. Though they had not needed any name for themselves before, they named themselves the Eagles and the Rattlers.  After the researchers (disguised as camp counselors) instigated contests for prizes, rivalry reached a fever pitch and all traces of good sportsmanship disintegrated.  The Eagles stole the Rattlers' flag and burned it; the Rattlers raided the Eagles' cabin and stole the blue jeans of the group leader and painted it orange and carried it as a flag the next day.

Each group developed a stereotype of itself and a contrasting stereotype of the opposing group (though the boys had been initially selected to be as similar as possible).  The Rattlers swore heavily and regarded themselves as rough-and-tough.  The Eagles swore off swearing, and developed an image of themselves as proper-and-moral.

Consider, in this light, the episode of the Blues and the Greens in the days of Rome.  Since the time of the ancient Romans, and continuing into the era of Byzantium and the Roman Empire, the Roman populace had been divided into the warring Blue and Green factions.  Blues murdered Greens and Greens murdered Blues, despite all attempts at policing. They died in single combats, in ambushes, in group battles, in riots.

Previously in series: Rationality Verification

From when I was still forced to attend, I remember our synagogue's annual fundraising appeal.  It was a simple enough format, if I recall correctly.  The rabbi and the treasurer talked about the shul's expenses and how vital this annual fundraise was, and then the synagogue's members called out their pledges from their seats.

Straightforward, yes?

Let me tell you about a different annual fundraising appeal.  One that I ran, in fact; during the early years of a nonprofit organization that may not be named.  One difference was that the appeal was conducted over the Internet.  And another difference was that the audience was largely drawn from the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/early-adopter/programmer/etc crowd.  (To point in the rough direction of an empirical cluster in personspace.  If you understood the phrase "empirical cluster in personspace" then you know who I'm talking about.)

I crafted the fundraising appeal with care.  By my nature I'm too proud to ask other people for help; but I've gotten over around 60% of that reluctance over the years.  The nonprofit needed money and was growing too slowly, so I put some force and poetry into that year's annual appeal.  I sent it out to several mailing lists that covered most of our potential support base.

And almost immediately, people started posting to the mailing lists about why they weren't going to donate.  Some of them raised basic questions about the nonprofit's philosophy and mission.  Others talked about their brilliant ideas for all the other sources that the nonprofit could get funding from, instead of them.  (They didn't volunteer to contact any of those sources themselves, they just had ideas for how we could do it.)

Now you might say, "Well, maybe your mission and philosophy did have basic problems—you wouldn't want to censor that discussion, would you?"

Hold on to that thought.

Because people were donating.  We started getting donations right away, via Paypal.  We even got congratulatory notes saying how the appeal had finally gotten them to start moving.  A donation of $111.11 was accompanied by a message saying, "I decided to give **** a little bit more.  One more hundred, one more ten, one more single, one more dime, and one more penny.  All may not be for one, but this one is trying to be for all."

But none of those donors posted their agreement to the mailing list.  Not one.

Followup to:  The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition

Yesterday's post concluded:

To form accurate beliefs about something, you really do have to observe it. It's a very physical, very real process: any rational mind does "work" in the thermodynamic sense, not just the sense of mental effort...  So unless you can tell me which specific step in your argument violates the laws of physics by giving you true knowledge of the unseen, don't expect me to believe that a big, elaborate clever argument can do it either.

One of the chief morals of the mathematical analogy between thermodynamics and cognition is that the constraints of probability are inescapable; probability may be a "subjective state of belief", but the laws of probability are harder than steel.

People learn under the traditional school regimen that the teacher tells you certain things, and you must believe them and recite them back; but if a mere student suggests a belief, you do not have to obey it.  They map the domain of belief onto the domain of authority, and think that a certain belief is like an order that must be obeyed, but a probabilistic belief is like a mere suggestion.

They look at a lottery ticket, and say, "But you can't prove I won't win, right?"  Meaning:  "You may have calculated a low probability of winning, but since it is a probability, it's just a suggestion, and I am allowed to believe what I want."

Here's a little experiment:  Smash an egg on the floor.  The rule that says that the egg won't spontaneously reform and leap back into your hand is merely probabilistic.  A suggestion, if you will.  The laws of thermodynamics are probabilistic, so they can't really be laws, the way that "Thou shalt not murder" is a law... right?

So why not just ignore the suggestion?  Then the egg will unscramble itself... right?

[PDF of this article updated Aug. 23, 2011]

[skip to preface]

Whenever I write a new article for Less Wrong, I'm pulled in two opposite directions.

One force pulls me toward writing short, exciting posts with lots of brain candy and just one main point. Eliezer has done that kind of thing very well many times: see Making Beliefs Pay Rent, Hindsight Devalues Science, Probability is in the Mind, Taboo Your Words, Mind Projection Fallacy, Guessing the Teacher's Password, Hold Off on Proposing Solutions, Applause Lights, Dissolving the Question, and many more.

Another force pulls me toward writing long, factually dense posts that fill in as many of the pieces of a particular argument in one fell swoop as possible. This is largely because I want to write about the cutting edge of human knowledge but I keep realizing that the inferential gap is larger than I had anticipated, and I want to fill in that inferential gap quickly so I can get to the cutting edge.

For example, I had to draw on dozens of Eliezer's posts just to say I was heading toward my metaethics sequence. I've also published 21 new posts (many of them quite long and heavily researched) written specifically because I need to refer to them in my metaethics sequence.¹ I tried to make these posts interesting and useful on their own, but my primary motivation for writing them was that I need them for my metaethics sequence.

And now I've written only four posts² in my metaethics sequence and already the inferential gap to my next post in that sequence is huge again. :(

So I'd like to try an experiment. I won't do it often, but I want to try it at least once. Instead of writing 20 more short posts between now and the next post in my metaethics sequence, I'll attempt to fill in a big chunk of the inferential gap to my next metaethics post in one fell swoop by writing a long tutorial post (a la Eliezer's tutorials on Bayes' Theorem and technical explanation).³

So if you're not up for a 20-page tutorial on human motivation, this post isn't for you, but I hope you're glad I bothered to write it for the sake of others. If you are in the mood for a 20-page tutorial on human motivation, please proceed.

Followup to:  No Individual Particles, Identity Isn't In Specific Atoms, Timeless Physics, Timeless Causality

People have asked me, "What practical good does it do to discuss quantum physics or consciousness or zombies or personal identity?  I mean, what's the application for me in real life?"

Before the end of today's post, we shall see a real-world application with practical consequences, for you, yes, you in today's world.  It is built upon many prerequisites and deep foundations; you will not be able to tell others what you have seen, though you may (or may not) want desperately to tell them.  (Short of having them read the last several months of OB.)

In No Individual Particles we saw that the intuitive conception of reality as little billiard balls bopping around, is entirely and absolutely wrong; the basic ontological reality, to the best of anyone's present knowledge, is a joint configuration space.  These configurations have mathematical identities like "A particle here, a particle there", rather than "particle 1 here, particle 2 there" and the difference is experimentally testable.  What might appear to be a little billiard ball, like an electron caught in a trap, is actually a multiplicative factor in a wavefunction that happens to approximately factor.  The factorization of 18 includes two factors of 3, not one factor of 3, but this doesn't mean the two 3s have separate individual identities—quantum mechanics is sort of like that.  (If that didn't make any sense to you, sorry; you need to have followed the series on quantum physics.)

In Identity Isn't In Specific Atoms, we took this counterintuitive truth of physical ontology, and proceeded to kick hell out of an intuitive concept of personal identity that depends on being made of the "same atoms"—the intuition that you are the same person, if you are made out of the same pieces.  But because the brain doesn't repeat its exact state (let alone the whole universe), the joint configuration space which underlies you, is nonoverlapping from one fraction of a second to the next.  Or even from one Planck interval to the next.  I.e., "you" of now and "you" of one second later do not have in common any ontologically basic elements with a shared persistent identity.

Followup to:  Infinite Certainty 

1, 2, and 3 are all integers, and so is -4.  If you keep counting up, or keep counting down, you're bound to encounter a whole lot more integers.  You will not, however, encounter anything called "positive infinity" or "negative infinity", so these are not integers.

Positive and negative infinity are not integers, but rather special symbols for talking about the behavior of integers.  People sometimes say something like, "5 + infinity = infinity", because if you start at 5 and keep counting up without ever stopping, you'll get higher and higher numbers without limit.  But it doesn't follow from this that "infinity - infinity = 5".  You can't count up from 0 without ever stopping, and then count down without ever stopping, and then find yourself at 5 when you're done.

From this we can see that infinity is not only not-an-integer, it doesn't even behave like an integer.  If you unwisely try to mix up infinities with integers, you'll need all sorts of special new inconsistent-seeming behaviors which you don't need for 1, 2, 3 and other actual integers.

Homo sapiens' environment of evolutionary adaptedness (aka EEA or "ancestral environment") consisted of hunter-gatherer bands of at most 200 people, with no writing.  All inherited knowledge was passed down by speech and memory.

In a world like that, all background knowledge is universal knowledge.  All information not strictly private is public, period.

In the ancestral environment, you were unlikely to end up more than one inferential step away from anyone else.  When you discover a new oasis, you don't have to explain to your fellow tribe members what an oasis is, or why it's a good idea to drink water, or how to walk.  Only you know where the oasis lies; this is private knowledge.  But everyone has the background to understand your description of the oasis, the concepts needed to think about water; this is universal knowledge.  When you explain things in an ancestral environment, you almost never have to explain your concepts.  At most you have to explain one new concept, not two or more simultaneously.

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

- Gandhi

Now that most communication is remote rather than face-to-face, people are comfortable disagreeing more often. How, then, can we disagree well? If the goal is intellectual progress, those who disagree should aim not for name-calling but for honest counterargument.

To be more specific, we might use a disagreement hierarchy. Below is the hierarchy proposed by Paul Graham (with DH7 added by Black Belt Bayesian).¹

DH0: Name-Calling. The lowest form of disagreement, this ranges from "u r fag!!!" to "He’s just a troll" to "The author is a self-important dilettante."

DH1: Ad Hominem. An ad hominem ('against the man') argument won’t refute the original claim, but it might at least be relevant. If a senator says we should raise the salary of senators, you might reply: "Of course he’d say that; he’s a senator." That might be relevant, but it doesn’t refute the original claim: "If there’s something wrong with the senator’s argument, you should say what it is; and if there isn’t, what difference does it make that he’s a senator?"

DH2: Responding to Tone. At this level we actually respond to the writing rather than the writer, but we're responding to tone rather than substance. For example: "It’s terrible how flippantly the author dimisses theology."

DH3: Contradiction. Graham writes: "In this stage we finally get responses to what was said, rather than how or by whom. The lowest form of response to an argument is simply to state the opposing case, with little or no supporting evidence." For example: "It’s terrible how flippantly the author dismisses theology. Theology is a legitimate inquiry into truth."

DH4: Counterargument. Finally, a form of disagreement that might persuade! Counterargument is "contradiction plus reasoning and/or evidence." Still, counterargument is often directed at a minor point, or turns out to be an example of two people talking past each other, as in the parable about a tree falling in the forest.

DH5: Refutation. In refutation, you quote (or paraphrase) a precise claim or argument by the author and explain why the claim is false, or why the argument doesn’t work. With refutation, you're sure to engage exactly what the author said, and offer a direct counterargument with evidence and reason.

DH6: Refuting the Central Point. Graham writes: "The force of a refutation depends on what you refute. The most powerful form of disagreement is to refute someone’s central point." A refutation of the central point may look like this: "The author’s central point appears to be X. For example, he writes 'blah blah blah.' He also writes 'blah blah.' But this is wrong, because (1) argument one, (2) argument two, and (3) argument three."

DH7: Improve the Argument, then Refute Its Central Point. Black Belt Bayesian writes: "If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents' arguments. But if you're interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents' arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you [also] must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse."² Also see: The Least Convenient Possible World.

Having names for biases and fallacies can help us notice and correct them, and having labels for different kinds of disagreement can help us zoom in on the parts of a disagreement that matter.