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Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment
Strategic Reliabilism is an epistemological framework that, unlike other contemporary academic theories, is grounded in psychology and seeks to give genuine advice on how to form beliefs. The framework was first laid out by Michael Bishop and J.D. Trout in their book Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment. Although regular readers here won’t necessarily find a lot of new material here, Bishop and Trout provide a clear description of many of the working assumptions and goals of this community. In contrast to standard epistemology, which seeks to explain what constitutes a justified belief, Strategic Reliabilism is meant to explain excellent reasoning. In particular, reasoning is excellent to the extent it reliably and efficiently produces truths about significant matters. When combined with the Aristotelian principle that good reasoning tends to produce good outcomes in the long run (i.e. rationalists should win), empirical findings about good reasoning gain prescriptive power. Rather than getting bogged down in definitional debates, epistemology really is about being less wrong.
The book is an easily read 150 pages, and I highly recommend you find a copy, but a chapter-by-chapter summary is below. As I said, you might not find a lot of new ideas in this book, but it went a long ways in clarifying how I think about this topic. For instance, even though it can seem trivial to be told to focus on significant problems, these basic issues deserve a little extra thought.
If you enjoy podcasts, check out lukeprog’s interview with Michael Bishop. This article provides another overview of Strategic Reliabilism, addressing objections raised since the publication of the book.
The Neuroscience of Pleasure
The scientific approach to self-help suggests that a better understanding of who we are can help us achieve happiness and other goals. Most centrally, it will be helpful to understand our brains, because it is our brains that generate happiness and goals.
In particular, I'd like to explore the neuroscience of pleasure and desire. Today's post covers the neuroscience of pleasure; the next post will cover the neuroscience of desire. After each post I'll consider some of the implications for self-help. In a later post, I'll consider how this research can inform the pursuit of Friendly AI.
Introducing Affective Neuroscience
The last decade has seen the arrival of affective neuroscience: the study of the neural mechanisms behind emotion, including pleasure and desire.1 Most questions remain unanswered, and experts disagree on many specifics,2 but there are some things we can state with confidence. We begin with the reward system in the brain.
The reward system consists of three major components (image)3:
- Liking: The 'hedonic impact' of reward, comprised of (1) neural processes4 that may or may not be conscious and (2) the conscious experience of pleasure.
- Wanting: Motivation for reward, comprised of (1) processes of 'incentive salience' that may or may not be conscious and (2) conscious desires.
- Learning: Associations, representations, and predictions about future rewards, comprised of (1) explicit predictions and (2) implicit knowledge and associative conditioning (e.g. Pavlovian associations).
Unfortunately, the interaction between these components is extraordinarily complex, and many puzzles remain.5
I'll share two examples of our ignorance. First: pleasure electrodes. For decades, it was thought that electrical stimulation of certain structures caused pleasure, because rats and humans would self-administer this stimulation hundreds or thousands of times each hour if allowed to do so.6 But a careful reading of the transcripts reveals the causation of wanting, not liking. Sometimes, the cause was even an unpleasant nervousness.7 Though, there are a few exceptions where liking was produced.8
Second: dopamine. For decades, experts thought dopamine was 'the pleasure chemical'.9 But this is probably false.10 Lack of dopamine does not impair 'liking' reactions.11 And in humans, perceived pleasure is not reduced by loss of dopamine.12 Dopamine has a big role in wanting, instead.13
Today we focus on 'liking' or pleasure.
Procedural Knowledge Gaps
I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.
(And yes, I have one. It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market? Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website. There goes my one idea. Where do I go and what do I do there?)
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