I am highly grateful to Alexey Morgunov and Adam Casey for reviewing and commenting on an earlier draft of this post, and pestering me into migrating the content from many emails to a somewhat coherent post.
Will Crouch has posted about the Centre for Effective Altruism and in a follow up post discussed questions in more detail. The general sense of the discussion of that post was that the arguments were convincing and that donating to CEA is a good idea. Recently, he visited Cambridge, primarily to discuss 80,000 hours, and several Cambridge LWers spoke with him. These discussions caused a number of us to substantially downgrade our estimates of the effectiveness of CEA, and made our concerns more concrete.
Great post. The meet sounds awesome and touched on many things I'm interested in. I'd love to be on the same continent to attend these more regularly than once a year.
One possible typo: "This was followed by multiple passes for people to affiliated with any proposed topic".
Thanks. Definite typo, Fixed.
This post is part of the Cambridge LW meetup group's attempt to publish what works for us, and try to make good meetups easier.
Breaking the ice and topic selection
A consistent problem has been starting discussion, and more generally breaking the ice. Last week, an Execute by Default style hack was used to reduce social inhibitions (everyone danced for 30 seconds), which was highly successful, though awkward. It was proposed again this week, and there was sufficient collective laughter at the recollection to effectively break the ice. This may also have been helped by a change in room, which replaced chairs with couches.
A new algorithm for selecting a topic was used: One person proposed a (deliberately easy-to-beat) topic, and running around the group, each person proposed a alternate topic or passed. This was followed by multiple passes for people to affiliate with any proposed topic. Amongst 7 people, the first pass produced a 5-2 split, and the group of two merged into the main topic.
The topic chosen was involuntary signalling. The others are here so as to keep them salient for future meetups.
Signalling by Dress
It was observed that most people seem to react to dress, and that as a group (largely mathematicians or similarly inclined) there is a tendency not to optimise the reactions we generate. Several people asked what might work better, and checked to see whether the social status of others in the social group of mathematicians correlated with their appearance or dress. It appeared that if it did, we are insufficiently good at observing our cognitive processes to notice. As a corollary, it wasn't clear that feedback from other members of the group was likely to contain much signal.
A concrete mechanism to extract information on how other people perceive dress was made: Generate multiple photos in various styles, and then use OKCupid's "MyBestFace" or similar services to get some information back
Signalling for Access
There was some discussion of how one might present in interview; this was confounded by a lack of access to interviewers. Discussion was more productive when moved to aspects of social engineering. Specific examples raised were accessing a hospital outside of visiting hours, entering a college without being challenged by porters, or avoiding inconvenience in airports. A combination of speed, posture (head level, back straight, shoulders back) and contextual dress was the extent of noted tricks.
Signalling by Posture
Considerable time was spent discussing how posture signals. Some people went around the group, saying what they would draw from other people's body language. Some postural changes were noted as very saliently causing a change in perception of the correctness of statements made at the same time (in particular, straightening the back and lifting the head). Extant scholarship was not discussed, but extensive experimentation occurred targeting specific received signals and querying specific postures. The dynamics of norm violation were also discussed, in the context of taking the communal coffee table as a footrest.
Specific suggestions to use a mirror or camera to analyse oneself or attempt to analyse other people in general were made.
Pre-commitments
All of the public commitments made last week were done, which seemed to be a cheap win. We reran the procedure:
List of proposed and unused topics:
Meeting at California Coffee Company Basilica (coffee shop), Szent Istvan ter 4-5. http://www.californiacoffeeco.net/?page_id=50〈=en.
Please come and bring friends. If you have questions, contact AlexeyM.
The foundational problem in your thesis is that you have grounded "rationality" as a normative "ought" on beliefs or actions. I dispute that assertion.
Rationality is more reasonably grounded as selecting actions so as to satisfy your explicit or implicit desires. There is no normative force to statements of the form "action X is not rational", unpacked as "If your values fall into {large set of human-like values}, then action X is not optimal, choosing for all similar situations where the algorithm you use is run".
There may or may not be general facts about what it is "rational" for "people" to do; it depends rather crucially on how consistent terminal values are across the set of "people". Neglecting trade with Clippy, it is (probably) not rational for humans to convert Jupiter to paperclips. Clippy might disagree.
It should be clear that rational actions are predicated on terminal values, and do not carry normative connotations. Given terminal values, your means of selecting actions may be rational or otherwise. Again, this is not normative; it may be suboptimal.
The thrust of your argument appears to be that: 1) Trolley problems are idealised 2) Idealisation can be a dark art rhetorical technique in discussion of the real world. 3) Boo trolley problems!
This is strange, this is the second comment that summarized an argument that I'm not actually making, and then argues against the made up summary.
My argument isn't against idealization - which would be an argument against any sort of generalized hypothetical and against the majority of fiction ever made.
No, my argument is that trolley problems do not map to reality very well, and thus, time spent on them is potentially conducive to sloppy thinking. The four problems I listed were perfect foresight, ignoring secondary effects, ignoring human nature, and constraining decisions to two options - these all lead to a lower quality of thinking than a better constructed question would.
There's a host of real world, realistic dilemmas you could use in place of a (flawed) trolley problem. Layoffs/redundancies to try to make a company more profitable or keep the ship running as is (like Jack Welch at GE), military problems like fighting a retreating defensive action, policing problems like profiling, what burden of proof in a courtroom, a doctor getting asked for performance enhancing drugs with potentially fatal consequences... there's plenty of real world, reality-based situations to use for dilemmas, and we would be better off for using them.
From your own summary:
I think that trolley problems contain perfect information about outcomes in advance of them happening, ignore secondary effects, ignore human nature, and give artificially false constraints.
Which is to say they are idealised problems; they are trued dilemmas. Your remaining argument is fully general against any idealisation or truing of a problem that can also be used rhetorically. This is (I think) what Tordmor's summary is getting at; mine is doing the same.
Now, I think that's bad. Agree/disagree there?
So, I clearly disagree, and further you fail to actually establish this "badness". It is not problematic to think about simplified problems. The trolley problems demonstrate that instinctual ethics are sensitive to whether you have to "act" in some sense. I consider that a bug. The problem is that finding these bugs is harder in "real world" situations; people can avoid the actual point of the dilemma by appealing for more options.
In the examples you give, there is no similar pair of problems. The point isn't the utilitarianism in a single trolley problem; it's that when two tracks are replaced by a (canonically larger) person on the bridge and 5 workers further down, people change their answers.
Okay, finally, I think this kind of thinking seeps over into politics, and it's likewise bad there. Agree/disagree?
You don't establish this claim (I disagree). It is worth observing that the standard third "trolley" problem is 5 organ recipients and one healthy potential donor for all. The point is to establish that real world situations have more complexity -- your four problems.
The point of the trolley problems is to draw attention to the fact that the H.Sap inbuilt ethics is distinctly suboptimal in some circumstances. Your putative "better" dilemmas don't make that clear. Failing to note and account for these bugs is precisely "sloppy thinking". Being inconsistent in action on the basis of the varying descriptions of identical situations seems to be "sloppy thinking". Failing on Newcomb's problem is "sloppy thinking". Taking an "Activists" hypothetical as a true description of the world is "sloppy thinking". Knowing that the hardware you use is buggy? Not so much.
The thrust of your argument appears to be that: 1) Trolley problems are idealised 2) Idealisation can be a dark art rhetorical technique in discussion of the real world. 3) Boo trolley problems!
There are a number of issues.
First and foremost, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Even if you are granted the substance of your criticisms of the activists position, this does not argue per se against trolley problems as dilemmas. The fact that they share features with a "Bad Thing" does not inherently make them bad.
Secondly, the whole point of considering trolley problems is to elucidate human nature and give some measure of training in cognition in stressful edge cases. The observation that humans freeze or behave inconsistently is important. This is why the trolley problems have to be trued in the sense that you object to - if they are not, many humans will avoid thinking about the ethical question being posed. In essence "I don't like your options, give me a more palatable one" is a fully general and utterly useless answer; it must be excluded.
Thirdly, your argument turns on the claim that merely admitting trolley problems as objects of thought somehow makes people more likely to accept dichotomies that "justify tyranny and oppression". This is risible. Even if the dichotomy is a false one, you surely should find one or the other branch preferable. It is perfectly admissible to say:
"I prefer this option (implicitly you presume that will be the taxation), but that if this argument is to be the basis for policy, then there are better alternatives foo, bar, etc., and that various important real world effects have been neglected."
Those familiar with the trolley problems and general philosophical dilemmas are more likely to be aware of the idealisations and voice these concerns cogently if idealisations are used in rhetoric or politics.
Fourthly, in terms of data, I would challenge you to find evidence suggesting that study of trolley problems leads to acceptance of tyranny. I would note (anecdotally) that communities where one can say "trolley problem" without needing to explain further seem to have a higher density of the libertarians and anarchists than the general population.
So in rough summary: 1) Your conclusion does not follow from the argument. 2)Trolley problems are idealised because if they aren't humans evade rather than engage. 3) Noting and calling out dark arts rhetoric is roughly orthogonal to thinking about trolley problems (conditional on thinking). 4) Citation needed wrt. increased tyranny in those who consider trolley problems.
Let's take the stock market as an example. The stock market prices are in principle predictable, only not from the data itself but from additional data taken from the newspapers or other sources. How does the CRM apply if the data does not in itself contain the neccessary information?
Let's say I have a theory that cutting production costs will increase stock prices in relation to the amount of cost cut and the prominence of the company and the level of fear of a crash on the stock market and the level of a "bad news indicator" that is a weighted sum of bad press for the company in the past. How would I test my theory with CRM?
In the wider sense, MML still works on the dataset {stock prices, newspapers, market fear}. Regardless of what work has presently been done to compress newspapers and market fear, if your hypothesis is efficient then you can produce the stock price data for a very low marginal message length cost.
You'd write up the hypothesis as a compressor-of-data; the simplest way being to produce a distribution over stock prices and apply arithmetic coding, though in practice you'd tweak whatever state of the art compressors for stock prices exist.
Of course the side effect of this is that your code references more data, and will likely need longer internal identifiers on it, so if you just split the cost of code across the datasets being compressed, you'd punish the compressors of newspapers and market fear. I would suggest that the solution is to deploy shapely value, with the value being the number of bits saved overall by a single compressor working on all the data sets in a given pool of cooperation.
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Meditation:
It has been claimed that logic and mathematics is the study of which conclusions follow from which premises. But when we say that 2 + 2 = 4, are we really just assuming that? It seems like 2 + 2 = 4 was true well before anyone was around to assume it, that two apples equalled two apples before there was anyone to count them, and that we couldn't make it 5 just by assuming differently.
We might mean many things by "2 + 2 = 4". In PA: "PA |- SS0 + SS0 = SSSS0", and so by soundness "PA |= SS0 + SS0 = SSSS0" In that sense, it is a logical truism independent of people counting apples. Of course, this is clearly not what most people mean by "2+2=4", if for no other reason than people did number theory before Peano.
When applied to apples, "2 + 2 = 4" probably is meant as: "apples + the world |= 2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples". the truth of which depends on the nature of "the world". It seems to be a correct statement about apples. Technically I have not checked this property of apples recently, but when I consider placing 2 apples on a table, and then 2 more, I think I can remove 4 apples and have none left. It seems that if I require 4 apples, it suffices to find 2 and then 2 more. This is also true of envelopes, paperclips, M&M's and other objects I use. So I generalise a law like behaviour of the world that "2 things + 2 things makes 4 things, for ordinary sorts of things (eg. apples)".
At some level, this is part of why I care about things that PA entails, rather than an arbitrary symbol game; it seems that PA is a logical structure that extracts lawlike behaviour of the world. If I assumed a different system, I might get "2+2=5", but then I don't think the system would correspond to the behaviours of apples and M&M's that I want to generalise.
(On the other hand, PA clearly isn't enough; it seems to me that strengthened finite Ramsey is true, but PA doesn't show it. But then we get into ZFC / second order arithmetic, and then systems at least as strong as PA_ordinal, and still lose because there are no infinite descending chains in the ordinals)