Cross-posted from Huffington Post. See also The End of Bullshit at the Hands of Critical Rationalism.

Debating season is in full swing, and as per usual the presidential candidates are playing fast and loose with the truth. Fact-checking sites such as PolitiFact and FactCheck.org have had plenty of easy targets in the debates so far. For instance, in the CNN Republican debate on September 16, Fiorina made several dubious claims about the Planned Parenthood video, as did Cruz about the Iran agreement. Similarly, in the CNN Democratic debate on October 13, Sanders falsely claimed that the U.S. has "more wealth and income inequality than any other country", whereas Chafee fudged the data on his Rhode Island record. No doubt we are going to see more of that in the rest of the presidential campaign. The fact-checkers won't need to worry about finding easy targets.

Research shows that fact-checking actually does make a difference. Incredible as it may seem, the candidates would probably have been even more careless with the truth if it weren't for the fact-checkers. To some extent, fact-checkers are a deterrent to politicians inclined to stretch the truth.

At the same time, the fact that falsehoods and misrepresentations of the truth are still so common shows that this deterrence effect is not particularly strong. This raises the question how we can make it stronger. Is there a way to improve on PolitiFact's and FactCheck.org's model - Fact-Checking 2.0, if you will?

Spencer Greenberg of ClearerThinking and I have developed a tool which we hope could play that role. Greenberg has created an application to embed videos of recorded debates and then add subtitles to them. In these subtitles, I point out falsehoods and misrepresentations of the truth at the moment when the candidates make them. For instance, when Fiorina says about the Planned Parenthood video that there is "a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain", I write in the subtitles:

We think that reading that a candidate's statement is false just as it is made could have quite a striking effect. It could trigger more visceral feelings among the viewers than standard fact-checking, which is published in separate articles. To over and over again read in the subtitles that what you're being told simply isn't true should outrage anyone who finds truth-telling an important quality.

Another salient feature of our subtitles is that we go beyond standard fact-checking. There are many other ways of misleading the audience besides playing fast and loose with the truth, such as evasions, ad hominem-attacks and other logical fallacies. Many of these are hard to spot for the viewers. We must therefore go beyond fact-checking and also do argument-checking, as we call it. If fact-checking grew more effective, and misrepresenting the truth less viable a strategy, politicians presumably would more frequently resort to Plan B: evading questions where they don't want the readers to know the truth. To stop that, we need careful argument-checking in addition to fact-checking.

So far, I've annotated the entire CNN Republican Debate, a 12 minute video from the CNN Democratic Debate (more annotations of this debate will come) and nine short clips (1-3 minutes) from the Fox News Republican Debate (August 6). My aim is to be as complete as possible, and I think that I've captured an overwhelming majority of the factual errors, evasions, and fallacies in the clips. The videos can be found on ClearerThinking as well as below.

The CNN Republican debate, subtitled in full.



The first 12 minutes of the CNN Democratic debate.

Nine short clips from the Fox News Debate: Christie and Paul, Bush, Carson, Cruz, Huckabee, Kasich, Rubio, Trump, Walker.

What is perhaps most striking is the sheer number of falsehoods, evasions and fallacies the candidates make. The 2hr 55 min long CNN Republican debate contains 273 fact-checking and argument-checking comments (many of which refer to various fact-checking sites). In total, 27 % of the video is subtitled. Similar numbers hold for the other videos.

Conventional wisdom has it that politicians lie and deceive on a massive scale. My analyses prove conventional wisdom right. The candidates use all sorts of trickery to put themselves in a better light and smear their opponents.

All of this trickery is severely problematic from several perspectives. Firstly, it is likely to undermine the voters' confidence in the political system. This is especially true for voters on the losing side. Why be loyal to a government which has gained power by misleading the electorate? No doubt many voters do think in those terms, more or less explicitly.

It is also likely to damage the image of democracy. The American presidential election is followed all over the world by millions if not billions of people. Many of them live in countries where democracy activists are struggling to amass support against authoritarian regimes. It hardly helps them that the election debates in the U.S. and other democratic countries look like this.

All of these deceptive arguments and claims also make it harder for voters to make informed decisions. Televised debates are supposed to help voters to get a better view of the candidates' policies and track-records, but how could they, if they can't trust what is being said? This is perhaps the most serious consequence of poor debates, since it is likely to lead to poorer decisions on the part of the voters, which in turn will lead to poorer political leadership and poorer policies.

Besides functioning as a more effective lie deterrent to the candidates, improved fact-checking could also nudge the networks to adjust the set-up of the debates. The way the networks lead the debates today hardly encourages serious and rational argumentation. To the contrary, they often positively goad the candidates against each other. Improved fact-checking could make it more salient to the viewers how poor the debates are, and induce them to demand a better debate set-up. The networks need to come up with a format which incentivizes the candidates to argue fairly and truthfully, and which makes it clear who has not. For instance, they could broadcast the debate again the next day, with fact-checking and argument-checking subtitles.

Another means to improve the debates is further technological innovation. For example, there should be a video annotation equivalent to Genius.com, the web application which allows you to annotate text on any webpage in a convenient way. That would be very useful for fact-checking and argument-checking purposes.

Fact-checking could even become automatic, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicted it would be within five years in 2006. Though Schmidt was over-optimistic, Google algorithms are able to fact-check websites with a high degree of accuracy today, whilst Washington Post already has built a rudimentary automatic fact-checker.

But besides new software applications and better debating formats, we also need something else, namely a raised awareness among the public what a great problem politicians' careless attitude to the truth is. They should ask themselves: are people inclined to mislead the voters really suited to shape the future of the world?

Politicians are normally held to high moral standards. Voters tend to take very strict views on other forms of dishonest behavior, such as cheating and tax evasion. Why, then, is it that they don't take a stricter view on intellectual dishonesty? Besides being morally objectionable, intellectual dishonesty is likely to lead to poor decisions. Voters would therefore be wise to let intellectual honesty be an important criterion when they cast their vote. If they started doing that on a grand scale, that would do more to improve the level of political debate than anything else I can think of.

Thanks to Aislinn Pluta, Doug Moore, Janko Prester, Philip Thonemann, Stella Vallgårda and Staffan Holmberg for their contributions to the annotations.

I like going to see movies with my friends.  This doesn't require much elaboration.  What might is that I continue to go see movies with my friends despite the radically different ways in which my friends happen to enjoy watching movies.  I'll separate these movie-watching philosophies into a few broad and not necessarily all-encompassing categories (you probably fall into more than one of them, as you'll see!):

(a): Movie watching for what was done right.  The mantra here is "There are no bad movies." or "That was so bad it was good."  Every movie has something redeeming about it, or it's at least interesting to try and figure out what that interesting and/or good thing might be.  This is the way that I watch movies, most of the time (say 70%).

(b): Movie watching for entertainment.  Mantra: "That was fun!".  Critical analysis of the movie does not provide any enjoyment.  The movie either succeeds in 'entertaining' or it fails.  This is the way that I watch movies probably 15% of the time.

(c): Movie watching for what was done wrong.  Mantra: "That movie was terrible."  The only enjoyment that is derived from the movie-watching comes from tearing the film apart at its roots--common conversation pieces include discussion of plot inconsistencies, identification of poor directing/cinematography/etc., and even alternative options for what could have 'fixed' the film to the extent that the film could even said to be 'fixed'.  I do this about ~12% of the time.

(d): Sneer. Mantra: "Have you played the drinking game?".  Vocal, public, moderately-drunken dog-piling of a film's flaws are the only way a movie can be enjoyed.  There's not really any thought put into the critical analysis.  The movie-watching is more an excuse to be rambunctious with a group of friends than it is to actually watch a movie.  I do this, conservatively, 3% of the time.

What's worth stressing here is that these are avenues of enjoyment.  Even when a (c) person watches a 'bad' movie, they enjoy it to the extent that they can talk at length about what was wrong with the movie. With the exception of the Sneer category, none of these sorts of critical analysis are done out of any sort of vindictiveness, particularly and especially (c).

So, like I said, I'm mostly an (a) person.  I have friends that are (a) people, (b) people, (c) people, and even (d) people (where being a (_) person means watching movies with that philosophy more than 70% of the time).

This can generate a certain amount of friction.  Especially when you really enjoy a movie, and your friend starts shitting all over it.

Or at least, that's what it feels like from the inside!  Because you might have really enjoyed a movie because you thought it was particularly well-shot, or it evoked a certain tone really well, but here comes your friend who thought the dialogue was dumb, boring, and poorly written.  Fundamentally, you and your friend are watching the movie for different reasons.  So when you go to a movie with 6 people who are exclusively (c), category (c) can start looking a whole lot like category (d) when you're an (a) or (b) person.

And that's no fun, because (d) people aren't really charitable at all.  It can be easy to translate in one's mind the criticism "That movie was dumb" into "You are dumb for thinking that movie wasn't dumb".  Sometimes the translation is even true!  Sneer Culture is a thing that exists, and while its connection to my 'Sneer' category above is tenuous, my word choice is intentional.  There isn't anything wrong with enjoying movies via (d), but because humans are, well, human, a sneer culture can bloom around this sort of philosophy.

Being able to identify sneer cultures for what they are is valuable.  Let's make up a fancy name for misidentifying sneer culture, because the rationalist community seems to really like snazzy names for things:

Typical Sneer Fallacy: When you ignore or are offended by criticism because you've mistakenly identified it as coming purely from sneer.  In reality, the criticism was genuine and actually true, to the extent that it represents someone's sincere beliefs, and is not simply from a place of malice.

This is the point in the article where I make a really strained analogy between the different ways in which people enjoy movies, and how Eliezer has pretty extravagantly committed the Typical Sneer Fallacy in this reddit thread.

Some background for everyone that doesn't follow the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent tumblr-sphere:  su3su2u1, a former physicist, now data scientist, has a pretty infamous series of reviews of HPMOR.  These reviews are not exactly kind.  Charitably, I suspect this is because su3su2u1 is a (c) kind of person, or at least, that's the level at which he chose to interact with HPMOR.  For disclosure, I definitely (a)-ed by way through HPMOR.

su3su2u1 makes quite a few science criticisms of Eliezer.  Eliezer doesn't really take these criticisms seriously, and explicitly calls them "fake".  Then, multiple physicists come out of the woodwork to tell Eliezer he is wrong concerning a particular one involving energy conservation and quantum mechanics (I am also a physicist, and su3su2u1's criticism is, in fact, correct.  If you actually care about the content of the physics issue, I'd be glad to get into it in the comments.  It doesn't really matter, except insofar as this is not the first time Eliezer's discussions of quantum mechanics have gotten him into trouble) (Note to Eliezer: you probably shouldn't pick physics fights with the guy whose name is the symmetry of the standard model Lagrangian unless you really know what you're talking about (yeah yeah, appeal to authority, I know)).

I don't really want to make this post about stupid reddit and tumblr drama.  I promise.  But I think the issue was rather succinctly summarized, if uncharitably, in a tumblr post by nostalgebraist.

The Typical Sneer Fallacy is scary because it means your own ideological immune system isn't functioning correctly.  It means that, at least a little bit, you've lost the ability to determine what sincere criticism actually looks like.  Worse, not only will you not recognize it, you'll also misinterpret the criticism as a personal attack.  And this isn't singular to dumb internet fights.

Further, dealing with criticism is hard.  It's so easy to write off criticism as insincere if it means getting to avoid actually grappling with the content of that criticism:  You're red tribe, and the blue tribe doesn't know what it's talking about.  Why would you listen to anything they have to say?  All the blues ever do is sneer at you.  They're a sneer culture.  They just want to put you down.  They want to put all the reds down.

But the world isn't always that simple.  We can do better than that.

Example nicked from this online Berkeley lecture.

Monopolies are bad (morality and economics agree here).

Firms that pollute are bad (morality and economics agree here).

What about monopolies that pollute?

What about strong monopolies that pollute and receive government subsidies?

Well...

Pollution, and other negative externalities, cause firms to produce too much of their product. That's because they don't pay the full cost of the product, including the impact of pollution.

The equilibrium behaviour for monopolies is to produce too little of their product, to keep prices and profits high.

So a monopoly that pollutes is subject to two opposite tendencies: the unpriced-pollution tendency to produce too much, and the monopolistic tendency to produce too little. If the effects are of comparable magnitude, then the monopoly might be much closer to social optimum than a free market would be (the social optimum, incidentally, will generally involve some pollution: we need to accept some pollution in the production of fertiliser, for instance, in order to have enough food to stop people starving).

In fact, if the monopolistic effect is too strong, then the firm may under-produce, even taken the pollution effect into account. In that case, we can approach closer to the social optimum by... subsidising the polluting monopoly to produce more!!

And that, my friends, is why economics is not a morality tale.

I saw this conundrum at Alexander Pruss's blog and I thought LWers might enjoy discussing it:

Consider the following sequence of events:

1. You roll a fair die and it rolls out of sight.
2. An angel appears to you and informs you that you are one of a countable infinity of almost identical twins who independently rolled a fair die that rolled out of sight, and that similar angels are appearing to them all and telling them all the same thing. The twins all reason by the same principles and their past lives have been practically indistinguishable.
3. The angel adds that infinitely many of the twins rolled six and infinitely many didn't.
4. The angel then tells you that the angels have worked out a list of pairs of identifiers of you and your twins (you're not exactly alike), such that each twin who rolled six is paired with a twin who didn't roll six.
5. The angel then informs you that each pair of paired twins will be transported into a room for themselves. And, poof!, it is so. You are sitting across from someone who looks very much like you, and you each know that you rolled six if and only if the other did not.

Let H be the event that you did not roll six. How does the probability of H evolve?

After step 1, presumably your probability of H is 5/6. But after step 5, it would be very odd if it was still 5/6. For if it is still 5/6 after step 5, then you and your twin know that exactly one of you rolled six, and each of you assigns 5/6 to the probability that it was the other person who rolled six. But you have the same evidence, and being almost identical twins, you have the same principles of judgment. So how could you disagree like this, each thinking the other was probably the one who rolled six?

Thus, it seems that after step 5, you should either assign 1/2 or assign no probability to the hypothesis that you didn't get six. And analogously for your twin.

But at which point does the change from 5/6 to 1/2-or-no-probability happen? Surely merely physically being in the same room with the person one was paired with shouldn't have made a difference once the list was prepared. So a change didn't happen in step 5.

And given 3, that such a list was prepared doesn't seem at all relevant. Infinitely many abstract pairings are possible given 3. So it doesn't seem that a change happened in step 4. (I am not sure about this supplementary argument: If it did happen after step 4, then you could imagine having preferences as to whether the angels should make such a list. For instance, suppose that you get a goodie if you rolled six. Then you should want the angels to make the list as it'll increase the probability of your having got six. But it's absurd that you increase your chances of getting the goodie through the list being made. A similar argument can be made about the preceding step: surely you have no reason to ask the angels to transport you! These supplementary arguments come from a similar argument Hud Hudson offered me in another infinite probability case.)

Maybe a change happened in step 3? But while you did gain genuine information in step 3, it was information that you already had almost certain knowledge of. By the law of large numbers, with probability 1, infinitely many of the rolls will be sixes and infinitely many won't. Simply learning something that has probability 1 shouldn't change the probability from 5/6 to 1/2-or-no-probability. Indeed, if it should make any difference, it should be an infinitesimal difference. If the change happens at step 3, Bayesian update is violated and diachronic Dutch books loom.

So it seems that the change had to happen all at once in step 2. But this has serious repercussions: it undercuts probabilistic reasoning if we live in multiverse with infinitely many near-duplicates. In particular, it shows that any scientific theory that posits such a multiverse is self-defeating, since scientific theories have a probabilistic basis.

I think the main alternative to this conclusion is to think that your probability is still 5/6 after step 5. That could have interesting repercussions for the disagreement literature.

Of course, it turns out they're actually last among developed nations in real health outcomes.

The U.S. ranks #1 among 17 affluent, western countries in the percentage of people aged 5 to 34 who rate their health as good. Unfortunately, when doctors look at people’s actual health, at indicators such as obesity, diabetes, and simply the chance that someone will die before his or her next birthday, the U.S. ranks last: young Americans are #17 out of 17 in real health.

My mother won't watch animated movies.  It doesn't matter what the content is.  Whether it's Sponge Bob or Grave of the Fireflies, she believes that animation is used only for shows for children, and that adults shouldn't watch shows for children.  She's incapable of changing this belief, because even if I somehow convince her to sit and watch an animated film, she sees what she expects, not what's in front of her.

I think this is the same thing that creation scientists and climate-change deniers do.  They literally cannot perceive what is in front of them, because they are already convinced they know what it is.

Here's an interesting test, which I discovered by accident:  There's a hilarious series of fan-made parodies of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic on YouTube called Friendship is Witchcraft.  They took show videos and redubbed them to have different stories in which various ponies are robots, fascists, or cult members planning to awaken Cthulhu.  I've shown these videos to four people without explanation, just saying "You've got to see this!" and bringing up "Cute From the Hip" on YouTube.

The same thing always happens.  They watch with stony, I-must-be-polite-to-Phil faces, without laughing.  Eventually I realize that they think they're watching an episode of My Little Pony.  I explain that it's a parody, and they say, "Oh!"  I'd think that lines like "I know we've taught you to laugh in the face of death," "If you think one of your friends is a robot, kids, report them to the authorities so that they can be destroyed!", "I'm covered in pig's blood!", or, "Are you busy Friday?  We need a willing victim for our ritual sacrifice" would prompt some questions.  They don't.  They are so determined to see a TV show for little girls that that's what they see, regardless of what's in front of them.

And I don't mean that they must concern themselves with death in the sense of ending death, or removing its sting through mental backups, or delaying it to the later ages of the universe; or in the sense of working to decrease the probability of extinction risks and other forms of megadeath; or even in the sense of saving as many lives as possible, as efficiently as possible. All of that is legitimate and interesting. But I mean something far more down to earth.

First, let me specify more precisely who I am talking about. I mean people who are trying to maximize the general welfare; who are trying to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number; who are trying to do the best thing possible with their lives. When someone like that makes decisions, they are implicitly choosing among possible futures in a very radical way. They may be making judgments about whether a future with millions or billions of extra lives is better than some alternative. Whether anyone is ever in a position to make that much of a difference is another matter; but we can think of it like voting. You are at least making a statement about which sort of future you think you prefer, and then you do what you can, and that either makes a difference or it doesn't.

It seems to me that the discussions about the value of life among utilitarians are rather superficial. The typical notion is that we should maximize net pleasure and minimize net pain. Already that poses the question of whether a life of dull persistent happiness is better or worse than a life of extreme highs and lows. A more sophisticated notion is that we should just aspire to maximize "utility", where perhaps we don't even know what utility is yet. Certainly the CEV philosophy is that we don't yet know what utility really is for human beings. It would be interesting to see people who took that agnosticism to heart, people whose life-strategy amounted to (1) discovering true utility as soon as possible (2) living according to interim heuristics whose uncertainty is recognized, but which are adopted out of the necessity of having some sort of personal decision procedure.

So what I'm going to say pertains to (2). You may, if you wish, hold to the idea that the nature of true utility, like true friendliness, won't be known until the true workings of the human mind are known. What follows is something you should think on in order to refine your interim heuristics.

The first thing is that to create a life is to create a death. A life ends. And while the end of a life may not be its most important moment, it reminds us that a life is a whole. Any accurate estimation of the utility of a life is going to be a judgment of that whole.

So a utilitarian ought to contemplate the deaths of the world, and the lives that reach their ends in those deaths. Because the possible futures, that you wish to choose between, are distinguished by the number and nature of the whole lives that they contain. And all these dozens of people, all around the world of the present, ceasing to exist in every minute that passes, are examples of completed lives. Those lives weren't necessarily complete, in the sense of all personal desires and projects having come to their conclusion; but they came to their physical completion.

To choose one future over another is to prefer one set of completed lives to another set. It would be a godlike decision to truly be solely responsible for such a choice. In the real world, people hardly choose their own futures, let alone the future of the world; choice is a lifelong engagement with an evolving and partially known situation, not a once-off choice between several completely known scenarios; and even when a single person does end up being massively influential, they generally don't know what sort of future they're bringing about. The actual limitations on the knowledge and power of any individual may make the whole quest of the "ambitious utilitarian" seem quixotic. But a new principle, a new heuristic, can propagate far beyond one individual, so thinking big can have big consequences.

The main principle that I derive, from contemplating the completed lives of the world, is cautionary antinatalism. The badness of what can happen in a life, and the disappointing character of what usually happens, are what do it for me. I am all for the transhumanist quest and the struggle for a friendly singularity, and I support the desire of people who are already alive to make the most of that life. But I would recommend against the creation of life, at least until the current historical drama has played itself out - until the singularity, if I must use that word. We are in the process of gaining new powers and learning new things, there are obvious unknowns in front of us that we are on the way to figuring out, so at least hold off until they have been figured out and we have a better idea of what reality is about, and what we can really hope for, from existence.

However, the object of this post is not to argue for my special flavor of antinatalism. It is to encourage realistic consideration of what lives and futures are like. In particular, I would encourage more "story thinking", which has been criticized in favor of "systems thinking". Every actual life is a "story", in the sense of being a sequence of events that happens to someone. If you were judging the merit of a whole possible world on the basis of the whole lives that it contained, then you would be making a decision about whether those stories ought to actually occur. The biographical life-story is the building block of such possible worlds.

So an ambitious utilitarian, who aspires to have a set of criteria for deciding among whole possible worlds, really needs to understand possible lives. They need to know what sort of lives are likely under various circumstances; they need to know the nature of the different possible lives - what it's like to be that person; they need to know what sort of bad is going to accompany the sort of good that they decide to champion. They need to have some estimation of the value of a whole life, up to and including its death.

As usual, we are talking about a depth of knowledge that may in practice be impossible to attain. But before we go calling something impossible, and settling for a lesser ambition, let's at least try to grasp what the greater ambition truly entails. To truly choose a whole world would be to make the decision of a god, about the lives and deaths that will occur in that world. The future of our world, for some time to come, will repeat the sorts of lives and deaths that have already occurred in it. So if, in your world-planning, you don't just count on completely abolishing the present world and/or replacing it with a new one that works in a completely different way, you owe it to your cause to form a judgement about the totality of what has already happened here on Earth, and you need to figure out what you approve of, what you disapprove of, whether you can have the good without the bad, and how much badness is too much.

Less Wrong was created to produce rationalists, so that many causes could benefit from the efforts of those rationalists. The point is not just to have nice place to talk about rationality, but to really make ourselves stronger, to apply the lessons that we learn here to improve our own lives, and to improve the world.

80,000 Hours is an organization created to provide direct domain specific help to people who want to support charitable causes, the same causes Less Wrong is supposed to produce rationalists to support. 80,000 Hours has goals clearly aligned with ours. Provided we think they are pursuing their aligned goals effectively, we should be excited about this. We should be happy when they reach out to us, to see how we can work together.

So, I am very disappointed to see the negative reception of a Less Wrong post by 80,000 Hours member Benjamin Todd, asking us what questions we would like 80,000 Hours to answer for us. They are basically offering to do free research for us on things that we care about, because our goals are aligned. And yet, as of this writing, that post has a score of -7, and it has received comments complaining that it is an ad. To be clear, ads of the sort that we want to avoid do not offer free services relevant to a core purpose of our community. I won't argue whether or not the post was an ad, but I will say that it belongs on Less Wrong and we should give it a good reception.

I would like to thank Benjamin Todd and others at 80,000 hours for their work in helping people be more effective philanthropists and otherwise support important causes, and for engaging Less Wrong in this project. I also thank everyone who responded to post with their actual questions about making a difference.

And, please, can we be nice to people who help us?

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality