Related to: Privileging the Hypothesis

Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.

-- Paul Graham

There's an old saying in the public opinion business: we can't tell people what to think, but we can tell them what to think about.

-- Doug Henwood

Many philosophers—particularly amateur philosophers, and ancient philosophers—share a dangerous instinct: If you give them a question, they try to answer it.

-- Eliezer Yudkowsky

Here are some political questions that seem to commonly get discussed in US media: should gay marriage be legal? Should Congress pass stricter gun control laws? Should immigration policy be tightened or relaxed? 

These are all examples of what I'll call privileged questions (if there's an existing term for this, let me know): questions that someone has unjustifiably brought to your attention in the same way that a privileged hypothesis unjustifiably gets brought to your attention. The questions above are probably not the most important questions we could be answering right now, even in politics (I'd guess that the economy is more important). Outside of politics, many LWers probably think "what can we do about existential risks?" is one of the most important questions to answer, or possibly "how do we optimize charity?" 

Why has the media privileged these questions? I'd guess that the media is incentivized to ask whatever questions will get them the most views. That's a very different goal from asking the most important questions, and is one reason to stop paying attention to the media. 

The problem with privileged questions is that you only have so much attention to spare. Attention paid to a question that has been privileged funges against attention you could be paying to better questions. Even worse, it may not feel from the inside like anything is wrong: you can apply all of the epistemic rationality in the world to answering a question like "should Congress pass stricter gun control laws?" and never once ask yourself where that question came from and whether there are better questions you could be answering instead.

I suspect this is a problem in academia too. Richard Hamming once gave a talk in which he related the following story:

Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, "Do you mind if I join you?" They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with!

Academics answer questions that have been privileged in various ways: perhaps the questions their advisor was interested in, or the questions they'll most easily be able to publish papers on. Neither of these are necessarily well-correlated with the most important questions. 

So far I've found one tool that helps combat the worst privileged questions, which is to ask the following counter-question:

What do I plan on doing with an answer to this question?

With the worst privileged questions I frequently find that the answer is "nothing," sometimes with the follow-up answer "signaling?" That's a bad sign. (Edit: but "nothing" is different from "I'm just curious," say in the context of an interesting mathematical or scientific question that isn't motivated by a practical concern. Intellectual curiosity can be a useful heuristic.)

(I've also found the above counter-question generally useful for dealing with questions. For example, it's one way to notice when a question should be dissolved, and asked of someone else it's one way to help both of you clarify what they actually want to know.)

Statistical analysis of terrorist groups' longevity, aims, methods and successes reveal that groups are self-contradictory and self-sabotaging, generally ineffective; common stereotypes like terrorists being poor or ultra-skilled are false. Superficially appealing counter-examples are discussed and rejected. Data on motivations and the dissolution of terrorist groups are brought into play and the surprising conclusion reached: terrorism is a form of socialization or status-seeking.

 http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror

Followup to:  Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles

Albert:  "Every time I've listened to a tree fall, it made a sound, so I'll guess that other trees falling also make sounds.  I don't believe the world changes around when I'm not looking."
Barry:  "Wait a minute.  If no one hears it, how can it be a sound?"

While writing the dialogue of Albert and Barry in their dispute over whether a falling tree in a deserted forest makes a sound, I sometimes found myself losing empathy with my characters.  I would start to lose the gut feel of why anyone would ever argue like that, even though I'd seen it happen many times.

On these occasions, I would repeat to myself, "Either the falling tree makes a sound, or it does not!" to restore my borrowed sense of indignation.

(P or ~P) is not always a reliable heuristic, if you substitute arbitrary English sentences for P.  "This sentence is false" cannot be consistently viewed as true or false.  And then there's the old classic, "Have you stopped beating your wife?"

Now if you are a mathematician, and one who believes in classical (rather than intuitionistic) logic, there are ways to continue insisting that (P or ~P) is a theorem: for example, saying that "This sentence is false" is not a sentence.

But such resolutions are subtle, which suffices to demonstrate a need for subtlety.  You cannot just bull ahead on every occasion with "Either it does or it doesn't!"

So does the falling tree make a sound, or not, or...?

Followup to:  Arguing "By Definition"

The one comes to you and says:

Long have I pondered the meaning of the word "Art", and at last I've found what seems to me a satisfactory definition: "Art is that which is designed for the purpose of creating a reaction in an audience."

Just because there's a word "art" doesn't mean that it has a meaning, floating out there in the void, which you can discover by finding the right definition.

It feels that way, but it is not so.

Wondering how to define a word means you're looking at the problem the wrong way—searching for the mysterious essence of what is, in fact, a communication signal.

Now, there is a real challenge which a rationalist may legitimately attack, but the challenge is not to find a satisfactory definition of a word.  The real challenge can be played as a single-player game, without speaking aloud.  The challenge is figuring out which things are similar to each other—which things are clustered together—and sometimes, which things have a common cause.

If you define "eluctromugnetism" to include lightning, include compasses, exclude light, and include Mesmer's "animal magnetism" (what we now call hypnosis), then you will have some trouble asking "How does electromugnetism work?"  You have lumped together things which do not belong together, and excluded others that would be needed to complete a set.  (This example is historically plausible; Mesmer came before Faraday.)

We could say that electromugnetism is a wrong word, a boundary in thingspace that loops around and swerves through the clusters, a cut that fails to carve reality along its natural joints.

Followup to:  Sneaking in Connotations

"This plucked chicken has two legs and no feathers—therefore, by definition, it is a human!"

When people argue definitions, they usually start with some visible, known, or at least widely believed set of characteristics; then pull out a dictionary, and point out that these characteristics fit the dictionary definition; and so conclude, "Therefore, by definition, atheism is a religion!"

But visible, known, widely believed characteristics are rarely the real point of a dispute.  Just the fact that someone thinks Socrates's two legs are evident enough to make a good premise for the argument, "Therefore, by definition, Socrates is human!" indicates that bipedalism probably isn't really what's at stake—or the listener would reply, "Whaddaya mean Socrates is bipedal?  That's what we're arguing about in the first place!"

Now there is an important sense in which we can legitimately move from evident characteristics to not-so-evident ones.  You can, legitimately, see that Socrates is human-shaped, and predict his vulnerability to hemlock.  But this probabilistic inference does not rely on dictionary definitions or common usage; it relies on the universe containing empirical clusters of similar things.

This cluster structure is not going to change depending on how you define your words.  Even if you look up the dictionary definition of "human" and it says "all featherless bipeds except Socrates", that isn't going to change the actual degree to which Socrates is similar to the rest of us featherless bipeds.

Followup to:  Something to Protect

The following may well be the most controversial dilemma in the history of decision theory:

A superintelligence from another galaxy, whom we shall call Omega, comes to Earth and sets about playing a strange little game.  In this game, Omega selects a human being, sets down two boxes in front of them, and flies away.

Box A is transparent and contains a thousand dollars.
Box B is opaque, and contains either a million dollars, or nothing.

You can take both boxes, or take only box B.

And the twist is that Omega has put a million dollars in box B iff Omega has predicted that you will take only box B.

Omega has been correct on each of 100 observed occasions so far - everyone who took both boxes has found box B empty and received only a thousand dollars; everyone who took only box B has found B containing a million dollars.  (We assume that box A vanishes in a puff of smoke if you take only box B; no one else can take box A afterward.)

Before you make your choice, Omega has flown off and moved on to its next game.  Box B is already empty or already full.

Omega drops two boxes on the ground in front of you and flies off.

Do you take both boxes, or only box B?

And the standard philosophical conversation runs thusly:

One-boxer:  "I take only box B, of course.  I'd rather have a million than a thousand."

Two-boxer:  "Omega has already left.  Either box B is already full or already empty.  If box B is already empty, then taking both boxes nets me $1000, taking only box B nets me $0.  If box B is already full, then taking both boxes nets $1,001,000, taking only box B nets $1,000,000.  In either case I do better by taking both boxes, and worse by leaving a thousand dollars on the table - so I will be rational, and take both boxes."

One-boxer:  "If you're so rational, why ain'cha rich?"

Two-boxer:  "It's not my fault Omega chooses to reward only people with irrational dispositions, but it's already too late for me to do anything about that."

Followup to:  An Alien God, Adaptation-Executers not Fitness-Maximizers, Evolutionary Psychology

Before the 20th century, not a single human being had an explicit concept of "inclusive genetic fitness", the sole and absolute obsession of the blind idiot god.  We have no instinctive revulsion of condoms or oral sex.  Our brains, those supreme reproductive organs, don't perform a check for reproductive efficacy before granting us sexual pleasure.

Why not?  Why aren't we consciously obsessed with inclusive genetic fitness?  Why did the Evolution-of-Humans Fairy create brains that would invent condoms?  "It would have been so easy," thinks the human, who can design new complex systems in an afternoon.

Followup to:  Terminal Values and Instrumental Values

Are apples good to eat?  Usually, but some apples are rotten.

Do humans have ten fingers?  Most of us do, but plenty of people have lost a finger and nonetheless qualify as "human".

Unless you descend to a level of description far below any macroscopic object - below societies, below people, below fingers, below tendon and bone, below cells, all the way down to particles and fields where the laws are truly universal - then practically every generalization you use in the real world will be leaky.

(Though there may, of course, be some exceptions to the above rule...)

Mostly, the way you deal with leaky generalizations is that, well, you just have to deal.  If the cookie market almost always closes at 10pm, except on Thanksgiving it closes at 6pm, and today happens to be National Native American Genocide Day, you'd better show up before 6pm or you won't get a cookie.

Our ability to manipulate leaky generalizations is opposed by need for closure, the degree to which we want to say once and for all that humans have fingers, and get frustrated when we have to tolerate continued ambiguity.  Raising the value of the stakes can increase need for closure - which shuts down complexity tolerance when complexity tolerance is most needed.

Followup to:  Empty Labels

In the game Taboo (by Hasbro), the objective is for a player to have their partner guess a word written on a card, without using that word or five additional words listed on the card.  For example, you might have to get your partner to say "baseball" without using the words "sport", "bat", "hit", "pitch", "base" or of course "baseball".

As soon as I see a problem like that, I at once think, "An artificial group conflict in which you use a long wooden cylinder to whack a thrown spheroid, and then run between four safe positions."  It might not be the most efficient strategy to convey the word 'baseball' under the stated rules - that might be, "It's what the Yankees play" - but the general skill of blanking a word out of my mind was one I'd practiced for years, albeit with a different purpose.

I was recently having a conversation with some friends on the topic of hour-by-hour productivity and willpower maintenance—something I've struggled with my whole life.

I can avoid running away from a hard problem the first time I see it (perseverance on a timescale of seconds), and I can stick to the same problem for years; but to keep working on a timescale of hours is a constant battle for me.  It goes without saying that I've already read reams and reams of advice; and the most help I got from it was realizing that a sizable fraction other creative professionals had the same problem, and couldn't beat it either, no matter how reasonable all the advice sounds.

"What do you do when you can't work?" my friends asked me.  (Conversation probably not accurate, this is a very loose gist.)

And I replied that I usually browse random websites, or watch a short video.

"Well," they said, "if you know you can't work for a while, you should watch a movie or something."

"Unfortunately," I replied, "I have to do something whose time comes in short units, like browsing the Web or watching short videos, because I might become able to work again at any time, and I can't predict when—"

And then I stopped, because I'd just had a revelation.