Comment author: DanArmak 09 October 2015 05:53:09PM 1 point [-]

If I understand your argument, you're saying that given a sufficiently bad history book, some fiction will be better. The answer to that isn't "read fiction to understand history", it's "find a really good history book whose narrative isn't misleading".

(Not that I agree with OP's point, but I think your rebuttal doesn't work.)

Comment author: abramdemski 09 October 2015 07:32:12PM 0 points [-]

Exactly. The mindset that says twisting the truth is a basically bad thing doesn't then conclude that fiction is OK because it's sometimes less twisty than (well-manipulated) fact.

Comment author: DanArmak 09 October 2015 05:46:07PM *  1 point [-]

Thanks for the explanation. This lets me get back to my original point: why focus on fiction? What makes fiction more like wireheading or more 'counterfeit' than the great majority of the things we do that aren't immediately necessary for survival? Compare the following:

  • We read fiction to produce pleasurable experiences. Outside our brains, the effect is mostly to shape culture and the market (with various second order effects), and pay a bunch of people to produce and distribute fiction.
  • We eat ice cream to produce pleasurable experiences. Outside our brains, the effect is mostly to raise cane sugar and dairy cows (who might be suffering a lot), and pay a bunch of people to distribute components and make ice cream.
  • We take trips to beautiful natural sites to produce pleasurable experiences. Outside our brains, the effect is mostly the tourism market.
  • We have casual sex to produce pleasurable experiences. Outside our brains, the effect is mostly nil.
  • We listen to music (the kind without words, so it doesn't count as fiction) to produce pleasurable experiences. Outside our brains, the effect is mostly to shape culture in various ways, and pay some people to make music.

All these activities also contribute to various forms of social bonding and of mental health, but that's just as true for fiction.

These are intended as a few random examples out of many others. Other than working to earn money, maintaining social relations, and a few necessary maintenance activities like shopping, almost all our actions are intended to create pleasurable experiences internal to our brains. What makes fiction different from any other such activity, and the value it creates more 'counterfeit' or wireheading-like?

Comment author: abramdemski 09 October 2015 07:26:48PM 1 point [-]

I feel confused, and am likely missing some bad assumption. For the purpose of working through the assumptions, I'll keep arguing the anti-fiction side...

The part of me that feels like doing away with fiction could be a good idea also would be OK with doing away with many of those other things you mentioned. Eating ice cream is bad as a matter of fact (this doesn't seem to require much argument). It's just a superstimulus for "good food", and furthermore, negatively impacts health. Noticing this (consciously noticing it on a repeated basis) can in fact move preferences away from ice cream and toward healthier food, to the point where ice cream doesn't even feel tempting except socially.

(My actual motivational state is not like this, but rather flips back and forth between finding ice cream appealing and not. I have not decided to adjust my emotional state entirely toward the reality, largely because this change in motivational state would have some negative social consequences.)

Trips to beautiful natural sites do seem kind of silly to me. Looking at nice scenery is nice, but on the order of nice things, it seems like something I'm willing to pay significantly less for than what most people are. That's neither here nor there for the debate, though. The part of me that is interested in doing away with fiction says that at least this experience is fact-oriented. There is something valuable about going and seeing real scenery -- historical sites of importance, and things like that -- which is not there when the scenery is entirely simulated. The part of me concerned with wireheading says that this is enough to distinguish between the kind of pleasure produced by visiting real places vs simulating pleasant scenery.

The difference between real and simulated scenery in this respect can easily be blurred. A natural landscape is very different from a landscape specifically optimized by human hands to be pleasant. The part of me concerned with wireheading starts to be concerned about the second. (My actual motivations don't, though -- if things have been arranged in what feels like good taste to me, I enjoy it. Highly optimized landscapes such as malls and theme parks rarely feel like they're in "good taste" however.)

Casual sex isn't desirable to me. The part of me which is concerned with wireheading-like things says that this is because it's not connected to a wider web of meaning. This might be my actual reason. (I prefer a prolonged relationship -- "just sex" sounds like a painful thing emotionally.)

Music is good. The part of me concerned with wireheading says it isn't -- it's just an empty superstimulus.

Overall, I'd say the conclusion of this chain of thought is that to count things as actually-good rather than merely seemingly-good I'd like them to be connected to a wider web of meaning, rather than isolated. "fake" really means "shallow" (surface-level, lacking deeper connections). Taking things out of devil's-advocate mode, this does not seem entirely damning to fiction. It suggests that fiction can in fact be valuable, to the degree that its meaning is interconnected with other things.

It also bears noticing that this argument applies rather heavily to me and my preferences, not necessarily to other people.

Aumann Agreement Game

9 abramdemski 09 October 2015 05:14PM

I've written up a rationality game which we played several times at our local LW chapter and had a lot of fun with. The idea is to put Aumann's agreement theorem into practice as a multi-player calibration game, in which players react to the probabilities which other players give (each holding some privileged evidence). If you get very involved, this implies reasoning not only about how well your friends are calibrated, but also how much your friends trust each other's calibration, and how much they trust each other's trust in each other.

You'll need a set of trivia questions to play. We used these. 

The write-up includes a helpful scoring table which we have not play-tested yet. We did a plain Bayes loss rather than an adjusted Bayes loss when we played, and calculated things on our phone calculators. This version should feel a lot better, because the numbers are easier to interpret and you get your score right away rather than calculating at the end.

Comments (9)
Comment author: DanArmak 08 October 2015 09:25:41PM *  3 points [-]

Then, what places fiction further along the axis than these other things? What makes it less "productive"?

How do you define "productive" in the first place - productive towards what goals? What is special about those goals (whatever they are) that is different from consuming fiction as a goal, or a means towards the goal of experiencing the kinds of thoughts and emotions fiction produces? Sex, music, ice cream and mountain climbing are also "merely" means towards brain states.

Comment author: abramdemski 09 October 2015 04:59:17PM 2 points [-]

As I inticated in this reply, I think the wireheading claim is separate from the productivity question. Fiction being productive (as a means of relaxing or stretching the imagination or such) is something that could save it from the wireheading complaint, because then it would not have to be justified as an end-in-itself.

The way I see it, wireheading is a complaint about things which produce counterfeit value. If the complaint is valid, wirehead-like things are things which fool the brain into thinking there is value where there is none. In the case of a literal wirehead, this is by direct stimulation of the value-detecting brain-bits. In the case of fiction, it's by a kind of superstimulus for social interaction and other human values. No actual social interaction takes place, but you feel as if you are getting to know people (usually important, sexy people) and getting caught up in an important chain of events.

The question is: is this counterfeit value, or real value?

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 08 October 2015 08:48:14PM 1 point [-]

What makes sex or music part of this world but (the experience of) fiction not?

I think abramdemski doesn't construe this as a either/or-dichotomy but as a continuous dimention from max-productive to wireheading. And he seems to argue that fiction is more on the wireheading side:

it's very close to advocating wireheading

You ask for other aspects like listening to music and sex:

The consumption of fiction is a way to produce a pleasurable experience. We act in a certain way to induce a desirable state of mind and body. How is fiction different from eating tasty food, listening to moving music, going on a nature trip with pretty views, or having sex? These other things also use time and energy that could be "spent on fact".

And I think you can place these also somewhere on the space. For music in particular there is not a single place but a range from jolly music song and laughter in a community to passive listening to random music during a commute. Hm, I guess the same range can be shown for sex.

Comment author: abramdemski 09 October 2015 04:50:33PM 1 point [-]

Actually, I think it's not a continuum from "productive" to "wireheading". I think there's a continuum from "immediate end-in-itself" to "delayed gratification" to "doing what's best for the future societies" (let's call this the fun vs productive continuum), and then there's a continuum in what you consider to be an end-in-itself which ranges from wireheading (max-happiness utilitarianism; good/bad is exclusively about good/bad mental state) to preference utilitarianism (what's good is defined in terms of minds, but involves stuff outside of minds) to something like "the divine aesthetic" (maximize some fully external-to-minds notion of beauty in the universe, so things like dead planets with beautiful clouds count as positive, even if they are never observed by a conscious entity).

This second spectrum is the one I'm pointing at when I say fiction is further toward wireheading.

Fiction Considered Harmful

5 abramdemski 08 October 2015 06:34PM

Epistemic status: playing devil's advocate.

I wrote the following a couple of weeks back for a meet-up post, and Gunnar_Zarncke suggested I should turn it into a discussion post:

continue reading »
Comments (80)

Meetup : West LA: Fact-Checking

1 abramdemski 11 September 2015 11:12PM

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA: Fact-Checking

WHEN: 16 September 2015 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE: 11066 santa monica blvd, la, ca

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.

Parking is free in the lot out front or on the street nearby.

Discussion: Checking assumptions is important. Sometimes that can be a matter of thinking things through yourself, but often we are better off looking for what other people have found. The first hurdle is to notice that we can check an assumption in this way -- often we do not even get that far. Once we've thought of actually checking, a simple search or wikipedia check may be sufficient. Sometimes, however, we need to dive deeper.

Where do you look for information? What do you do if a search brings up contradictory information? If an issue is not "settled science", do you give up? How do you decide whether an article is BS? How do you account for the relative weight of evidence from anecdotal answers to a question vs scientific research? How do you weight arguments against empirical evidence?

Recommended Reading:

This will be a bring-your-own-recommended-reading meetup! This forces you to practice the skill of investigating, differentiating useful references, and so on. Please make the assumption that no one else will do this and you'll have to be the only person bringing any useful information.

No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required; this will be generally accessible.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA: Fact-Checking

Comments (0)

Meetup : West LA: Fiction Considered Harmful

1 abramdemski 05 September 2015 03:48AM

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA: Fiction Considered Harmful

WHEN: 09 September 2015 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE: 11066 santa monica la ca

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.

Parking is free in the lot out front or on the street nearby.

Discussion: Fiction is not a lie, but it is a variety of untruth. It absorbs time and energy which could be spent on fact. Although we make a conscious distinction between fictional worlds and reality, we will often use fictional examples when evaluating real-life situations. It has been argued that we should learn to take joy in the world we actually live in. Why should we allow fiction to warp our view of reality?

Perhaps fiction offers a fun, relaxing break. I can understand this claim in two different ways. The first version is that reading fiction gives us a rest from serious thinking, restoring us in some way. So, is this really true? Often when we feel tired of thinking, we're really tired of thinking about some particular thing. We gain new mental energy when we switch to something else. We think this means we're unable to do productive work, and need to take a break; but often, we could continue to be productive on a sufficiently different task, which gave us the same variety as a "break" would. (This is anecdotal. I recall seeing a discussion of this in a lesswrong post, but didn't figure out which one.) Alternatively, if we really are exhausted, reading fiction might not be restoring our energy as much as taking a nap or perhaps meditating. In either case, the pro-fiction argument seems murky. Answering this question is difficult, because it's far from obvious why certain types of thinking seem to take "mental effort" and leave us feeling drained. (It seems it might be a mechanism for sensing high opportunity cost, or it might be due to depleting a physical resource in the brain.)

A second way to interpret this is that consuming fiction is closer to being an end, rather than a means. The joy which fiction creates, or the rich inner experience, may be a good in and of itself. Whether it's useful for restorative purposes or not, it's good that society keeps churning the fiction mill, because it's one of the things which makes life worthwhile. Some people will readily agree with this, while others will feel it's very close to advocating wireheading. At a recent LW meetup here in LA, one person argued that if you're going to enjoy living in some universe, it might as well be the real one. I suppose the idea is that we should seek to make the enjoyable aspects of fiction into a reality, rather than exercising shallow escapism. I'm not sure this view can be defended, however. If you've got something like a computational theory of mind, and believe that uploading yourself into a virtual world is OK, how do you draw a firm line between "reality" and "fiction" to say which kinds of experiences are really valuable and in which you're just fooling yourself? Is it a matter of a sufficiently detailed simulation, which includes other conscious beings rather than puppets, and so on?

Maybe...

Robin Hanson discusses the social value of stories: those who read fiction are more empathetic toward others, seemingly fooled by story logic into acting as if good behavior is always rewarded and bad behavior punished. Although clearly valuable, this gives me the uneasy sense that stories are manipulative control directives. I may enjoy the story, but does that make me comfortable accepting control directives from this particular author? Or should we examine the moral character of the author, before reading?

To make our arguments stick, we've got to compare fiction to relevant alternatives. It seems to me that we can have almost as much fun reading biographies, memoirs, and (entertainingly written) history as we can reading fiction... and all with the advantage of being real facts about the real world, which seems at least a little useful.

Recommended Reading:

No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required; this will be generally accessible.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA: Fiction Considered Harmful

Comments (1)

Meetup : West LA: Problem Solving

1 abramdemski 09 August 2015 11:20PM

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA: Problem Solving

WHEN: 12 August 2015 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE: 11066 santa monica blvd

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.

Parking is free in the lot out front or on the street nearby.

Discussion: Our group has been doing something we call "rationality moments", sharing success or failure in skills of rationality since we last saw each other. Naturally, this leads to some discussion of how to solve problems which we may be having. It occurs to me that group problem-solving is a skill which can go wrong, and that there is knowledge out there about how to avoid pitfalls and how to get good results.

Recommended Reading:

It's encouraged that you think about the problem and look for good resources yourself, but here is what I found:

The wikipedia article on groupthink (which as I understand it says that we don't know very much at all about what causes groupthink or what may prevent it, in the empirical findings section)

Wikipedia on problem solving has interesting points.

Here is a short document about effective problem-solving for groups.

Hold Off On Proposing Solutions

Don't get caught up solving the wrong problem.

Polya on problem solving

A short article on avoiding bias in decision making, which has the same format of many such articles (IE, not chosen because it especially sticks out).

No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required; this will be generally accessible.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA: Problem Solving

Comments (0)
Comment author: Pancho_Iba 14 July 2015 11:10:25PM 0 points [-]

So, should I seek for reasonableness or rationality to prevail, whenever the rational is outside the Overton window? My dilemma is that I find more pleasure on being rational, so rationality stands I should seek for rationality, whereas the reasonable thing to do would be to stand with reasonableness and shut up.

The point is: whenever I can't decide on one over the other, which criterion should I use to make the decission, since each seems to point towards itself? This is fun.

Comment author: abramdemski 15 July 2015 07:34:59PM *  1 point [-]

In hindsight, writing a post about Rational vs Reasonable has the unfortunate effect of causing people to ask which is better and how to choose between them, as well as risking causing people to accuse people of being reasonable rather than rational and things of that nature.

These are not good outcomes.

There's a very general issue with "X vs Y" posts, which is that they make the distinction look contentious rather than merely useful. Brienne wrote about this in connection with her Ask Culture vs Guess Culture. A similar failure mode occurs when people debate epistemic vs instrumental rationality.

As nyralech replied, the answer is to use what best serves your goals. The two are not opposed; nor are they allied; nor is it a balancing act between them. Where being reasonable does not serve rationality, the Way opposes your reasonableness; where being reasonable does serve rationality the Way opposes your unreasonableness. "The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means." etc.

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