Will bond yields go up, or down, or remain the same? If you're a TV pundit and your job is to explain the outcome after the fact, then there's no reason to worry. No matter which of the three possibilities comes true, you'll be able to explain why the outcome perfectly fits your pet market theory . There's no reason to think of these three possibilities as somehow opposed to one another, as exclusive, because you'll get full marks for punditry no matter which outcome occurs.

But wait! Suppose you're a novice TV pundit, and you aren't experienced enough to make up plausible explanations on the spot. You need to prepare remarks in advance for tomorrow's broadcast, and you have limited time to prepare. In this case, it would be helpful to know which outcome will actually occur—whether bond yields will go up, down, or remain the same—because then you would only need to prepare one set of excuses.

Alas, no one can possibly foresee the future. What are you to do? You certainly can't use "probabilities". We all know from school that "probabilities" are little numbers that appear next to a word problem, and there aren't any little numbers here. Worse, you feel uncertain. You don't remember feeling uncertain while you were manipulating the little numbers in word problems. College classes teaching math are nice clean places, therefore math itself can't apply to life situations that aren't nice and clean.  You wouldn't want to inappropriately transfer thinking skills from one context to another.  Clearly, this is not a matter for "probabilities".

This summary was posted to LW main on February 8th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

• Berlin Meetup: 08 February 2013 07:30PM
• London Meetup, 10th Feb: 11 February 2013 02:00PM
• Brussels meetup: 16 February 2013 01:00PM
• Moscow: Rationality in our daily life: 17 February 2013 04:00PM
• Bielefeld Meetup, February 20th: 20 February 2013 07:00PM
• First meetup in Frankfurt (Main) : 22 February 2013 06:30PM
• Tokyo Meetup: 01 March 2013 07:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

• Austin, TX: 09 February 2019 01:30PM
• Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-01]: 10 February 2013 11:00AM
• Love and Sex in Salt Lake City: 16 February 2014 01:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

Followup to:  Thou Art Physics, Timeless Control, Hand vs. Fingers, Explaining vs. Explaining Away

I know (or could readily rediscover) how to build a binary adder from logic gates.  If I can figure out how to make individual logic gates from Legos or ant trails or rolling ping-pong balls, then I can add two 32-bit unsigned integers using Legos or ant trails or ping-pong balls.

Someone who had no idea how I'd just done the trick, might accuse me of having created "artificial addition" rather than "real addition".

But once you see the essence, the structure that is addition, then you will automatically see addition whenever you see that structure.  Legos, ant trails, or ping-pong balls.

Even if the system is - gasp!- deterministic, you will see a system that, lo and behold, deterministically adds numbers.  Even if someone - gasp! - designed the system, you will see that it was designed to add numbers.  Even if the system was - gasp!- caused, you will see that it was caused to add numbers.

Let's say that John is standing in front of an orphanage which is on fire, but not quite an inferno yet; trying to decide whether to run in and grab a baby or two.  Let us suppose two slightly different versions of John - slightly different initial conditions.  They both agonize.  They both are torn between fear and duty.  Both are tempted to run, and know how guilty they would feel, for the rest of their lives, if they ran.  Both feel the call to save the children.  And finally, in the end, John-1 runs away, and John-2 runs in and grabs a toddler, getting out moments before the flames consume the entranceway.

This, it seems to me, is the very essence of moral responsibility - in the one case, for a cowardly choice; in the other case, for a heroic one.  And I don't see what difference it makes, if John's decision was physically deterministic given his initial conditions, or if John's decision was preplanned by some alien creator that built him out of carbon atoms, or even if - worst of all - there exists some set of understandable psychological factors that were the very substance of John and caused his decision.

Followup to:  Timeless Physics, Timeless Causality, Thou Art Physics

People hear about many-worlds, which is deterministic, or about timeless physics, and ask:

If the future is determined by physics, how can anyone control it?

In Thou Art Physics, I pointed out that since you are within physics, anything you control is necessarily controlled by physics.  Today we will talk about a different aspect of the confusion, the words "determined" and "control".

The "Block Universe" is the classical term for the universe considered from outside Time.  Even without timeless physics, Special Relativity outlaws any global space of simultaneity, which is widely believed to suggest the Block Universe—spacetime as one vast 4D block.

When you take a perspective outside time, you have to be careful not to let your old, timeful intuitions run wild in the absence of their subject matter.

In the Block Universe, the future is not determined before you make your choice.  "Before" is a timeful word.  Once you descend so far as to start talking about time, then, of course, the future comes "after" the past, not "before" it.

An epistle to the physicists:

When I was but a little lad, my father, a Ph.D. physicist, warned me sternly against meddling in the affairs of physicists; he said that it was hopeless to try to comprehend physics without the formal math. Period.  No escape clauses.  But I had read in Feynman's popular books that if you really understood physics, you ought to be able to explain it to a nonphysicist.  I believed Feynman instead of my father, because Feynman had won the Nobel Prize and my father had not.

It was not until later—when I was reading the Feynman Lectures, in fact—that I realized that my father had given me the simple and honest truth.  No math = no physics.

By vocation I am a Bayesian, not a physicist.  Yet although I was raised not to meddle in the affairs of physicists, my hand has been forced by the occasional gross misuse of three terms:  Simple, falsifiable, and testable.

The foregoing introduction is so that you don't laugh, and say, "Of course I know what those words mean!"  There is math here.

I'm sorry I took so long to post this. My computer broke a little while ago. I promise this will be relevant later.

A surgeon has to perform emergency surgery on a patient. No painkillers of any kind are available. The surgeon takes an inert saline IV and hooks it up to the patient, hoping that the illusion of extra treatment will make the patient more comfortable. The patient asks, "What's in that?" The doctor has a few options:

1. "It's a saline IV. It shouldn't do anything itself, but if you believe it's a painkiller, it'll make this less painful.
2. "Morphine."
3. "The strongest painkiller I have."

-The first explanation is not only true, but maximizes the patient's understanding of the world.
-The second is obviously a lie, though, in this case, it is a lie with a clear intended positive effect: if the patient thinks he's getting morphine, then, due to the placebo effect, there is a very real chance he will experience less subjective pain.
-The third is, in a sense, both true and a lie. It is technically true. However, it's somewhat arbitrary; the doctor could have easily have said "It's the weakest painkiller I have," or "It's the strongest sedative I have," or any other number of technically true but misleading statements. This statement is clearly intended to mislead the hearer into thinking it is a potent painkiller; it promotes false beliefs while not quite being a false statement. It's Not Technically Lying. It seems that it deserves most, if not almost all, the disapproval that actually lying does; the truth does not save it. Because language does not specify single, clear meanings we can often use language where the obvious meaning is false and the non-obvious true, intentionally promoting false beliefs without false statements.

EDIT, 4/18:  I'm closing the survey.  I'll post analysis and a better anonymized version of the raw data in a day or so.  236 people responded; thanks very much to all who did.

For survey participants curious about the calibration questions, the answers are:

Number of republics the USSR broke up into, following the output of the cold war: 15.

The year in which the global population reached 1 billion: 1804.

The average percentage of a watermelon's weight that comes from water: 92.

On the topic of: Control theory

Yesterday, PJ Eby sent the subscribers of his mailing list a link to an article describing a control theory/mindhacking insight he'd had. With his permission, here's a summary of that article. I found it potentially life-changing. The article seeks to answer the question, "why is it that people often stumble upon great self-help techniques or productivity tips, find that they work great, and then after a short while the techniques either become ineffectual or the people just plain stop using them anyway?", but I found it to have far greater applicability than just that.

Richard Kennaway already mentioned the case of driving a car as an example where the human brain uses control systems, and Eby mentioned another: ask a friend to hold their arm out straight, and tell them that when you push down on their hand, they should lower their arm. And what you’ll generally find is that when you push down on their hand, the arm will spring back up before they lower it... and the harder you push down on the hand, the harder the arm will pop back up! That's because the control system in charge of maintaining the arm's position will try to keep up the old position, until one consciously realizes that the arm has been pushed and changes the setting.

Control circuits aren't used just for guiding physical sequences of actions, they also regulate the workings of our mind. A few hours before typing out a previous version of this post, I was starting to feel restless because I hadn't accomplished any work that morning. This has often happened to me in the past - if, at some point during the day, I haven't yet gotten started on doing anything, I begin to feel anxious and restless. In other words, in my brain there's a control circuit monitoring some estimate of "accomplishments today". If that value isn't high enough, it starts sending an error signal - creating a feeling of anxiety - in an attempt to bring that value into the desired range.

The problem with this is that more often than not, that anxiety doesn't push me into action. Instead I become paralyzed and incapable of getting anything started. Eby proposes that this is because of two things: one, the control circuits are dumb and don't actually realize what they're doing, so they may actually take counter-productive action. Two, there may be several control circuits in the brain which are actually opposed to each other.

Here we come to the part about productivity techniques often not working. We also have higher-level controllers - control circuits influencing other control circuits. Eby's theory is that many of us have circuits that try to prevent us from doing the things we want to do. When they notice that we've found a method to actually accomplish something we've been struggling with for a long time, they start sending an error signal... causing neural reorganization, eventually ending up at a stage where we don't use those productivity techniques anymore and solving the "crisis" of us actually accomplishing things. Moreover, these circuits are to a certain degree predictive, and they can start firing when they pick up on a behavior that only even possibly leads to success - that's when we hear about a great-sounding technique and for some reason never even try it. A higher-level circuit, or a lower-level one set up by the higher-level circuit, actively suppresses the "let's try that out" signals sent by the other circuits.