Translating bad advice

16 Sophronius 14 April 2015 09:20AM

While writing my Magnum Opus I came across this piece of writing advice by Neil Gaiman:

“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”

And it struck me how true it was, even in other areas of life. People are terrible at giving advice on how to improve yourself, or on how to improve anything really. To illustrate this, here is what you would expect advice from a good rationalist friend to look like:

1)      “Hey, I’ve noticed you tend to do X.”

2)      “It’s been bugging me for a while, though I’m not really sure why. It’s possible other people think X is bad as well, you should ask them about it.”

3)      Paragon option: “Maybe you could do Y instead? I dunno, just think about it.”  

4)      Renegade option: “From now on I will slap you every time you do X, in order to help you stop being retarded about X.”

I wish I had more friends who gave advice like that, especially the renegade option. Instead, here is what I get in practice:

1)      Thinking: Argh, he is doing X again. That annoys me, but I don’t want to be rude.

2)      Thinking: Okay, he is doing Z now, which is kind of like X and a good enough excuse to vent my anger about X

3)      *Complains about Z in an irritated manner, and immediately forgets that there’s even a difference between X and Z*

4)      Thinking: Oh shit, that was rude. I better give some arbitrary advice on how to fix Z so I sound more productive.

As you can see, social rules and poor epistemology really get in the way of good advice, which is incredibly frustrating if you genuinely want to improve yourself! (Needless to say, ignoring badly phrased advice is incredibly stupid and you should never do this. See HPMOR for a fictional example of what happens if you try to survive on your wits alone.) A naïve solution is to tell everybody that you are the sort of person who loves to hear criticism in the hope that they will tell you what they really think. This never works because A) Nobody will believe you since everyone says this and it’s always a lie, and B) It’s a lie, you hate hearing real criticism just like everybody else.

The best solution I have found is to make it a habit to translate bad advice into good advice, in the spirit of what Neil Gaiman said above: Always be on the lookout for people giving subtle clues that you are doing something wrong and ask them about it (preferably without making yourself sound insecure in the process, or they’ll just tell you that you need to be more confident). When they give you some bullshit response that is designed to sound nice, keep at it and convince them to give you their real reasons for bringing it up in the first place. Once you have recovered the original information that lead them to give the poor advice, you can rewrite it as good advice in the format used above. Here is an example from my own work experience:

1)      Bad advice person: “You know, you may have your truth, but someone else may have their own truth.”

2)      Me, confused and trying not to be angry at bad epistemology: “That’s interesting. What makes you say that?”

3)      *5 minutes later*. “Holy shit, my insecurity is being read as arrogance, and as a result people feel threatened by my intelligence which makes them defensive? I never knew that!”

Seriously, apply this lesson. And get a good friend to slap you every time you don’t.

The Ten Commandments of Rationality

-5 Sophronius 30 March 2014 04:36PM

(Disclaimer/TL;DR: This article, much like Camelot, is a silly place/post. Nonetheless I think it presents a pretty solid list of 10 rationality lessons to take away from Less Wrong which must not be forgotten upon pain of eternal damnation/irrationality.)


In a realm not far from here, somewhere within a bustling metropolis, there lies an old and dusty book. It is placed in a most conspicuous location; in the middle of a busy street where countless citizens walk by it every day. Yet none pick it up, for it is placed on a pedestal just high enough that it cannot be reached or seen easily, and the slight inconvenience of standing on one’s toes to reach for it is sufficient to deter most. Yet if a traveller were sufficiently aware to look up and see the book,  and curious enough to reach for it, and willing to suffer the slight discomfort of having to touch its muddy cover to open and read its ancient pages, that one would find within a wealth of wisdom and rationality that would transform the reader’s life forever. For this is the most holy Book of Bayes, and its first and last pages both read thusly:

 

The Ten Commandments of Rationality

 

1)  Thou shalt never conflate the truth or falsehood of a proposition with any other characteristic, be it the consequences of the proposition if it be true, or the consequences of believing it for thyself personally, or the pleasing or unpleasant aesthetics of the belief itself. Furthermore, thou shalt never let thy feelings regarding the matter overrule what thy critical faculties tells thee, or in any other way act as if reality might adjust itself in accordance with thine own wishes.

2)     Thou shalt not accept any imperfect situation if it may be optimized, nor shalt thou abstain from improving upon a situation by imagining ever better options without acting on any of them, nor must thee allow thyself to be paralyzed with fear or apathy or indecision when any action is still superior to doing nothing at all. Thus let it be said: Thou shalt not allow thyself to be beaten by a random number generator.

3)     Thou shalt not declare any matter to be unscientific, or inherently irrational, or a false question, or with any other excuse wilfully close thine own eyes and expel all curiosity regarding the matter before thou hast even asked thyself whether the question is worth answering. To transgress thusly is to forfeit any chance to update thy own beliefs on a matter that is truly unusual to thee.  

4)    Thou shalt not hold goals or beliefs which conflict with each other, in such a manner as to violate most divine transitivity, and thereby set thyself up for most ignominious defeat, and rest easy in knowing this fact. Rather shalt thou engage in mindfulness and self-reflection, and in doing so find thy own true priorities, and solve any inconsistencies in a utility maximising manner so that thou may not fall prey to the wrath of the most holy Dutch Book, which is merciless but just.

5)     Thou shalt never engage in defeatism, nor wallow in ennui or existential angst, or in any other way declare that thy efforts are pointless and that exerting thyself is entirely without merit. For just as it is true that matters may never get to the point where they cannot possibly get any worse, so is it true that no situation is impossible to improve upon. 

6)    Thou shalt never judge a real or proposed action by any metric other than this: The expected consequences of the action, both direct and indirect, be they subtle or blatant, taking into account all relevant information available at the time of deciding and no more or less than this.

7)     Thou shalt never sit back on thy lazy laurels and wait for rationality to come to thee, nor shalt thou declare that thy beliefs must be correct as all others have failed to convince thee of the contrary: The cultivation of thy rationality and the falsification of thine beliefs is thine own most sacred task, which is eternal and never finished, and to leave it to others is to invite doom upon the validity of thine own beliefs and actions, for in this case others will never serve thee as well as thou might serve thyself.

8)    Thou shalt never let argumentation stand in the way of knowledge, nor let knowledge stand in the way of wisdom, nor let wisdom stand in the way of victory, no matter how wise or clever it makes thee feel. Also shalt thou never conflate exceptions for rules or rules for exceptions when arguing any issue, nor bring up minutiae as if they were crucial issues, nor allow oneself to be swept away in arguing for the sake of argumentation, nor act to score cheap and yea also easy points, nor present thy learnings in a needlessly ambiguous manner such as this if it can be helped, or in any other way allow oneself to lose sight of thine most sacred goal, which is victory.

9)     Thou shalt never assign a probability exactly equal to 0 or 1 to any proposition, nor declare to the skies that thy certainty regarding any matter is absolute, nor any derivation of such, for to do so is to declare thyself infallible and is placing thyself above thine most holy lord, Bayes.

10)  Thou shalt never curse thy rationality, and wish for ye immediate satisfaction over thy eventual victory, all for the sake of base emotion, which is transient whereas victory is transcendent. Let it be known that it is an unspoken truth amongst rationalists -indeed it is the first and most elementary rule of rationality and yet oft forgotten by those practiced in the art- that base impulse and most holy reason are as a general rule incompatible, as there cannot be two skies.

 

Such are the Ten Commandments of Rationality. And Lo! If one abides by these rules, then let it be said that they act virtuously, and the heavens shall reward them with the splendour of higher expected utility relative to the counterfactual wherein they did not act virtuously. But to those who do not act virtuously, but rather act with irrationality in their minds and biases in their thinking, and who in doing so break any of the Commandments of Rationality, to them let it be said that they have transgressed against thy lord Bayes, and they shall be smitten by the twin gods of Cause and yea also Effect as surely as if they had smitten themselves. For let it be said: The gods of causality may be blind, but their aim doth be excellent regardless.

 

(All silliness aside, what do you all think? Is this a good list of 10 things to take away from Less Wrong? Do you have a better list? Are posts like these a waste of time? Or, Bayes forbid, did I get my thees and thous wrong somewhere? Let me know in the comments.)

In favour of terseness

12 Sophronius 08 March 2014 06:01PM

I like posts that are concise and to the point. Posts like that maximize my information/effort ratio. I would really like to see experienced rationalists simply post a list of things they believe on any given subject with a short explanation for why they believe each of those things. Then I could go ahead and adjust my beliefs based on those lists as necessary.

Sadly I don’t see any posts like this. Presumably this is because of the social convention where you’re expected to back up any public belief with arguments, so that other people can attempt to poke holes in them. I find this strange because the arguments people present rarely have anything to do with why they believe those things, which makes the whole exercise a giant distraction from the main point that the author is trying to bring across. In order to prevent this kind of derailment, posters tend to cover their arguments with endless qualifications so that their sentences read like this: “I personally believe that, in cases X Y Z and under circumstances B and C, ceteris paribus and barring obvious exceptions, it seems safe to say that murder is wrong, though of course I could be mistaken.” The problems with such excessive argumentation and qualification are threefold:

  1. The post becomes less readable: The information/effort ratio is lowered.
  2. It becomes much more difficult to tell what the author genuinely believes: Are they really unsure or just trying to appear humble? Is that their true objection, or just an argument?
  3. Despite everything, someone is STILL going to miss the point and reply that sometimes killing people is ok in certain situations, and then the next 100 comments will be about that.

By contrast, terseness makes posts more readable and makes it less likely that the main point is misunderstood. So if we as a community could just relax the demand for argumentation and qualification somewhat, and we all focussed on debating the main points of posts instead of getting sidetracked, then perhaps experienced rationalists here could write nice and concise posts that give clear and direct answers to complicated questions. Instead, some of the sequences are so long and involve so many arguments, counter-arguments and disclaimers that I feel the point is lost entirely.

 

Less Wrong’s political bias

-6 Sophronius 25 October 2013 04:38PM

(Disclaimer: This post refers to a certain political party as being somewhat crazy, which got some people upset, so sorry about that. That is not what this post is *about*, however. The article is instead about Less Wrong's social norms against pointing certain things out. I have edited it a bit to try and make it less provocative.)

 

A well-known post around these parts is Yudkowski’s “politics is the mind killer”. This article proffers an important point: People tend to go funny in the head when discussing politics, as politics is largely about signalling tribal affiliation. The conclusion drawn from this by the Less Wrong crowd seems simple: Don’t discuss political issues, or at least keep it as fair and balanced as possible when you do. However, I feel that there is a very real downside to treating political issues in this way, which I shall try to explain here. Since this post is (indirectly) about politics, I will try to bring this as gently as possible so as to avoid mind-kill. As a result this post is a bit lengthier than I would like it to be, so I apologize for that in advance.

I find that a good way to examine the value of a policy is to ask in which of all possible worlds this policy would work, and in which worlds it would not. So let’s start by imagining a perfectly convenient world: In a universe whose politics are entirely reasonable and fair, people start political parties to represent certain interests and preferences. For example, you might have the kitten party for people who like kittens, and the puppy party for people who favour puppies. In this world Less Wrong’s unofficial policy is entirely reasonable: There is no sense in discussing politics, since politics is only about personal preferences, and any discussion of this can only lead to a “Jay kittens, boo dogs!” emotivism contest. At best you can do a poll now and again to see what people currently favour.

Now let’s imagine a less reasonable world, where things don’t have to happen for good reasons and the universe doesn’t give a crap about what’s fair. In this unreasonable world, you can get a “Thrives through Bribes” party or an “Appeal to emotions” party or a “Do stupid things for stupid reasons” party as well as more reasonable parties that actually try to be about something. In this world it makes no sense to pretend that all parties are equal, because there is really no reason to believe that they are.

As you might have guessed, I believe that we live in the second world. As a result, I do not believe that all parties are equally valid/crazy/corrupt, and as such I like to be able to identify which are the most crazy/corrupt/stupid. Now I happen to be fairly happy with the political system where I live. We have a good number of more-or-less reasonable parties here, and only one major crazy party that gives me the creeps. The advantage of this is that whenever I am in a room with intelligent people, I can safely say something like “That crazy racist party sure is crazy and racist”, and everyone will go “Yup, they sure are, now do you want to talk about something of substance?” This seems to me the only reasonable reply.

The problem is that Less Wrong seems primarily US-based, and in the US… things do not go like this. In the US, it seems to me that there are only two significant parties, one of which is flawed and which I do not agree with on many points, while the other is, well… can I just say that some of the things they profess do not so much sound wrong as they sound crazy? And yet, it seems to me that everyone here is being very careful to not point this out, because doing so would necessarily be favouring one party over the other, and why, that’s politics! That’s not what we do here on Less Wrong!

And from what I can tell, based on the discussion I have seen so far and participated in on Less Wrong, this introduces a major bias. Pick any major issue of contention, and chances are that the two major parties will tend to have opposing views on the subject. And naturally, the saner party of the two tends to hold a more reasonable view, because they are less crazy. But you can’t defend the more reasonable point of view now, because then you’re defending the less-crazy party, and that’s politics. Instead, you can get free karma just by saying something trite like “well, both sides have important points on the matter” or “both parties have their own flaws” or “politics in general are messed up”, because that just sounds so reasonable and fair who doesn’t like things to be reasonable and fair? But I don’t think we live in a reasonable and fair world.

It’s hard to prove the existence of such a bias and so this is mostly just an impression I have. But I can give a couple of points in support of this impression. Firstly there are the frequent accusations of group think towards Less Wrong, which I am increasingly though reluctantly prone to agree with. I can’t help but notice that posts which remark on for example *retracted* being a thing tend to get quite a few downvotes while posts that take care to express the nuance of the issue get massive upvotes regardless of whether really are two sides on the issue. Then there are the community poll results, which show that for example 30% of Less Wrongers favour a particular political allegiance even though only 1% of voters vote for the most closely corresponding party. I sincerely doubt that this skewed representation is the result of honest and reasonable discussion on Less Wrong that has convinced members to follow what is otherwise a minority view, since I have never seen any such discussion. So without necessarily criticizing the position itself, I have to wonder what causes this skewed representation. I fear that this “let’s not criticize political views” stance is causing Less Wrong to shift towards holding more and more eccentric views, since a lack of criticism can be taken as tacit approval. What especially worries me is that giving the impression that all sides are equal automatically lends credibility to the craziest viewpoint, as proponents of that side can now say that sceptics take their views seriously which benefits them the most. This seems to me literally the worst possible outcome of any politics debate.

I find that the same rule holds for politics as for life in general: You can try to win or you can give up and lose by default, but you can’t choose not to play.