= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Privileging the Question
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.
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.)
Rational Me or We?
Martial arts can be a good training to ensure your personal security, if you assume the worst about your tools and environment. If you expect to find yourself unarmed in a dark alley, or fighting hand to hand in a war, it makes sense. But most people do a lot better at ensuring their personal security by coordinating to live in peaceful societies and neighborhoods; they pay someone else to learn martial arts. Similarly, while "survivalists" plan and train to stay warm, dry, and fed given worst case assumptions about the world around them, most people achieve these goals by participating in a modern economy.
The martial arts metaphor for rationality training seems popular at this website, and most discussions here about how to believe the truth seem to assume an environmental worst case: how to figure out everything for yourself given fixed info and assuming the worst about other folks. In this context, a good rationality test is a publicly-visible personal test, applied to your personal beliefs when you are isolated from others' assistance and info.
I'm much more interested in how we can can join together to believe truth, and it actually seems easier to design institutions which achieve this end than to design institutions to test individual isolated general tendencies to discern truth. For example, with subsidized prediction markets, we can each specialize on the topics where we contribute best, relying on market consensus on all other topics. We don't each need to train to identify and fix each possible kind of bias; each bias can instead have specialists who look for where that bias appears and then correct it.
Perhaps martial-art-style rationality makes sense for isolated survivalist Einsteins forced by humanity's vast stunning cluelessness to single-handedly block the coming robot rampage. But for those of us who respect the opinions of enough others to want to work with them to find truth, it makes more sense to design and field institutions which give each person better incentives to update a common consensus.
Lawful Uncertainty
Previously in series: Lawful Creativity
From Robyn Dawes, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World:
"Many psychological experiments were conducted in the late 1950s and early 1960s in which subjects were asked to predict the outcome of an event that had a random component but yet had base-rate predictability - for example, subjects were asked to predict whether the next card the experiment turned over would be red or blue in a context in which 70% of the cards were blue, but in which the sequence of red and blue cards was totally random.
In such a situation, the strategy that will yield the highest proportion of success is to predict the more common event. For example, if 70% of the cards are blue, then predicting blue on every trial yields a 70% success rate.
What subjects tended to do instead, however, was match probabilities - that is, predict the more probable event with the relative frequency with which it occurred. For example, subjects tended to predict 70% of the time that the blue card would occur and 30% of the time that the red card would occur. Such a strategy yields a 58% success rate, because the subjects are correct 70% of the time when the blue card occurs (which happens with probability .70) and 30% of the time when the red card occurs (which happens with probability .30); .70 * .70 + .30 * .30 = .58.
In fact, subjects predict the more frequent event with a slightly higher probability than that with which it occurs, but do not come close to predicting its occurrence 100% of the time, even when they are paid for the accuracy of their predictions... For example, subjects who were paid a nickel for each correct prediction over a thousand trials... predicted [the more common event] 76% of the time."
(Dawes cites: Tversky, A. and Edwards, W. 1966. Information versus reward in binary choice. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71, 680-683.)
Do not think that this experiment is about a minor flaw in gambling strategies. It compactly illustrates the most important idea in all of rationality.
The correct response to uncertainty is *not* half-speed
Related to: Half-assing it with everything you've got; Wasted motion; Say it Loud.
Once upon a time (true story), I was on my way to a hotel in a new city. I knew the hotel was many miles down this long, branchless road. So I drove for a long while.
After a while, I began to worry I had passed the hotel.
So, instead of proceeding at 60 miles per hour the way I had been, I continued in the same direction for several more minutes at 30 miles per hour, wondering if I should keep going or turn around.
- I wasn't sure if I was a good enough writer to write a given doc myself, or if I should try to outsource it. So, I sat there kind-of-writing it while also fretting about whether the task was correct.
- (Solution: Take a minute out to think through heuristics. Then, either: (1) write the post at full speed; or (2) try to outsource it; or (3) write full force for some fixed time period, and then pause and evaluate.)
- I wasn't sure (back in early 2012) that CFAR was worthwhile. So, I kind-of worked on it.
- An old friend came to my door unexpectedly, and I was tempted to hang out with her, but I also thought I should finish my work. So I kind-of hung out with her while feeling bad and distracted about my work.
- A friend of mine, when teaching me math, seems to mumble specifically those words that he doesn't expect me to understand (in a sort of compromise between saying them and not saying them)...
- Duncan reports that novice Parkour students are unable to safely undertake certain sorts of jumps, because they risk aborting the move mid-stream, after the actual last safe stopping point (apparently kind-of-attempting these jumps is more dangerous than either attempting, or not attempting the jumps)
- It is said that start-up founders need to be irrationally certain that their startup will succeed, lest they be unable to do more than kind-of work on it...
Generalizing From One Example
Related to: The Psychological Unity of Humankind, Instrumental vs. Epistemic: A Bardic Perspective
"Everyone generalizes from one example. At least, I do."
-- Vlad Taltos (Issola, Steven Brust)
My old professor, David Berman, liked to talk about what he called the "typical mind fallacy", which he illustrated through the following example:
There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like?
Upon hearing this, my response was "How the stars was this actually a real debate? Of course we have mental imagery. Anyone who doesn't think we have mental imagery is either such a fanatical Behaviorist that she doubts the evidence of her own senses, or simply insane." Unfortunately, the professor was able to parade a long list of famous people who denied mental imagery, including some leading scientists of the era. And this was all before Behaviorism even existed.
The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery1 to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images2.
Dr. Berman dubbed this the Typical Mind Fallacy: the human tendency to believe that one's own mental structure can be generalized to apply to everyone else's.
making notes - an instrumental rationality process.
The value of having notes. Why do I make notes.
Story time!
At one point in my life I had a memory crash. Which is to say once upon a time I could remember a whole lot more than I was presently remembering. I recall thinking, "what did I have for breakfast last Monday? Oh no! Why can't I remember!". I was terrified. It took a while but eventually I realised that remembering what I had for breakfast last Monday was:
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not crucial to the rest of my life
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not crucial to being a function human being
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I was not sure if I usually remember what I ate last Monday; or if this was the first time I tried to recall it with such stubbornness to notice that I had no idea.
After surviving my first teen-life crisis I went on to realise a few things about life and about memory:
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I will not be remembering everything forever.
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Sometimes I forget things that I said I would do. Especially when the number of things I think I will do increases past 2-3 and upwards to 20-30.
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Don't worry! There is a solution!
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As someone at the age of mid-20s who is already forgetting things; a friendly mid-30 year old mentioned that in 10 years I will have 1/3rd more life to be trying to remember as well. Which should also serve as a really good reason why you should always comment your code as you go; and why you should definitely write notes. "Past me thought future me knew exactly what I meant even though past me actually had no idea what they were going on about".
The foundation of science.
Observation
There are many things that could be considered the foundations of science. I believe that one of the earliest foundations you can possibly engage in is observation.
Evidence
In a more-than-goldfish form; observation means holding information. It means keeping things for review till later in your life; either at the end of this week; month or year. Observation is only the start. Writing it down makes it evidence. Biased, personal, scrawl, (bad) evidence all the same. If you want to be more effective at changing your mind; you need to know what your mind says.
Review
It's great to make notes. That's exactly what I am saying. It goes further though. Take notes and then review them. Weekly; monthly; yearly. Unsure about where you are going? Know where you have come from. With that you can move forward with better purpose.
My note taking process:
1. get a notebook.
This picture includes some types of notebooks that I have tried.
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A4 lined paper cardboard front and back. Becomes difficult to carry because it was big. And hard to open it up and use it as well. side-bound is also something I didn't like because I am left handed and it seemed to get in my way.
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bad photo but its a pad of grid-paper. I found a stack of these on the middle of the ground late at night as if they fell off a truck or something. I really liked them except for them being stuck together by essentially nothing and falling to pieces by the time I got to the bottom of the pad.
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lined note paper. I will never go back to a book that doesn't hold together. The risk of losing paper is terrible. I don't mind occasionally ripping out some paper but to lose a page when I didn't want to; has never worked safely for me.
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Top spiral bound; 100 pages. This did not have enough pages; I bought it after a 200pager ran out of paper and I needed a quick replacement, well it was quick – I used it up in half the time the last book lasted.
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Top spiral bound 200 pages notepad, plastic cover; these are the type of book I currently use. 8 is my book that I am writing in right now.
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300 pages top spiral bound – as you can see by the tape – it started falling apart by the time I got to the end of it.
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small notebook. I got these because they were 48c each, they never worked for me. I would bend them, forget them, leave them in the wrong places, and generally not have them around when I wanted them.
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I am about half way through my current book; the first page of my book says 23/7/15, today it is 1/9/15. Estimate a book every 2 months. Although it really depends on how you use it.
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a future book I will try, It holds a pen so I will probably find that useful.
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also a future one, I expect it to be too small to be useful for me.
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A gift from a more organised person than I. It is a moleskin grid-paper book and I plan to also try it soon.
The important take-aways from this is – try several, they might work in different ways and for different reasons. Has your life change substantially i.e. you don't sit much at a desk any more? Is the book not working; maybe another type of book would work better.
I only write on the bottom of the flip-page, and occasionally scrawl diagrams on the other side of the page. But only when they relevant. This way I can always flip through easy, and not worry about the other side of the paper.
2. carry a notebook. Everywhere. Find a way to make it a habit. Don't carry a bag? You could. Then you can carry your notepad everywhere with you in a bag. Consider a pocket-sized book as a solution to not wanting to carry a bag.
3. when you stop moving; turn the notebook to the correct page and write the date.
Writing the date is almost entirely useless. I really never care what the date is. I sometimes care that when I look back over the book I can see the timeline around which the events happened, but really – the date means nothing to me.
What writing the date helps to do:
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make sure you have a writing implement
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make sure it works
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make sure you are on the right page
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make sure you can see the pad
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make sure you can write in this position
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make you start a page
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make you consider writing more things
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make it look to others like you know what you are doing (signalling that you are a note-taker, is super important to help people get used to you as a note-taker and encourage that persona onto you)
This is the reason why I write the date; I can't specify enough why I don't care about what date it is, but why I do it anyway.
4. Other things I write:
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Names of people I meet. Congratulations; you are one step closer to never forgetting the name of anyone ever. Also when you want to think; "When did I last see bob", you can kinda look it up in a dumb - date-sorted list. (to be covered in my post about names – but its a lot easier to look it up 5 minutes later when you have it written down)
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Where I am/What event I am at. (nice to know what you go to sometimes)
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What time I got here or what time it started (if its a meeting)
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What time it ended (or what time I stopped writing things)
It's at this point that the rest of the things you write are kinda personal choices some of mine are:
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Interesting thoughts I have had
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Interesting quotes people say
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Action points that I want to do if I can't do them immediately.
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Shopping lists
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diagrams of what you are trying to say.
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Graphs you see.
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the general topic of conversation as it changes. (so far this is enough for me to remember the entire conversation and who was there and what they had to say about the matter)
Sexy.
That's right. I said it. Its sexy. There are occasional discussion events near to where I live; that I go to with a notepad. Am I better than the average dude who shows up to chat? no. But everyone knows me. The guy who takes notes. And damn they know I know what I am talking about. And damn they all wish they were me. You know how glasses became a geek-culture signal? Well this is too. Like no other. Want to signal being a sharp human who knows what's going down? Carry a notebook, and show it off to people.
The coordinators have said to me; "It makes me so happy to see someone taking notes, it really makes me feel like I am saying something useful". The least I can do is take notes.
Other notes about notebooks
The number of brilliant people I know who carry a book of some kind will far outweighs the number of people who don't. I don't usually trust the common opinion; but sometimes you just gotta go with what's right.
If it stops working; at least you tried it. If it works; you have evidence and can change the world in the future.
"I write in my phone". (sounds a lot like, "I could write notes in my phone") I hear this a lot. Especially in person while I am writing notes. Indeed you do. Which is why I am the one with a notebook out and at the end of talking to you I will actually have notes and you will not. If you are genuinely the kind of person with notes in their phone I commend you for doing something with technology that I cannot seem to have sorted out; but if you are like me; and a lot of other people who could always say they could take notes in their phone; but never do; or never look at those notes... Its time to fix this.
a quote from a friend - “I realized in my mid twenties that I would look like a complete badass in a decade, if I could point people to a shelf of my notebooks.” And I love this too.
A friend has suggested that flashcards are his brain; and notepads are not. I agree that flashcards have benefits. namely to do with organising things around, shuffling etc. It really depends on what notes you are taking. I quite like having a default chronology to things, but that might not work for you.
In our local Rationality Dojo’s we give away notebooks. For the marginal costs of a book of paper; we are making people’s lives better.
The big take away
Get a notebook; make notes; add value to your life.
Meta:
This post took 3 hours to write over a week
Please add your experiences if you work differently surrounding note taking.
Please fill out the survey of if you found this post helpful.
Lesswrong real time chat
This is a short post to say that I have started and am managing a Slack channel for lesswrong.
Slack has only an email-invite option which means that I need an email address for anyone who wants to join. Send me a PM with your email address if you are interested in joining.
There is a web interface and a mobile app that is better than google hangouts.
If you are interested in joining; consider this one requirement:
- You must be willing to be charitable in your conversations with your fellow lesswrongers.
To be clear; This means (including but not limited to);
- Steelman not strawman of discussion
- Respect of others
- patience
- an aim for productive conversations, to make progress on our lives.
- a brains trust for life-advice in all kinds of areas where, "outsource this decision to others" is an effective strategy.
- collaborative creation of further rationality content
- a safe space for friendly conversation on the internet (a nice place to hang out)
- A more coherent and stronger connected lesswrong
- Development of better ideas and strategies in how to personally improve the world.
- AI
- Film making
- Goals of lesswrong
- Human Relationships
- media
- parenting
- philosophy
- political talk
- programming
- real life
- Resources and links
- science
- travelling
- and some admin channels; the "welcome", "misc", and "RSS" from the lw site.
Edit - first week of October: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mub/open_thread_oct_5_oct_11_2015/csr3
Edit - 3rd week in october 2015: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mwt/open_thread_oct_26_nov_01_2015/cuq5
Edit - 3rd week in november 2015 http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mzz/open_thread_nov_23_nov_29_2015/cwyl
Less Wrong EBook Creator
I read a lot on my kindle and I noticed that some of the sequences aren’t available in book form. Also, the ones that are mostly only have the posts. I personally want them to also include some of the high ranking comments and summaries. So, that is why I wrote this tool to automatically create books from a set of posts. It creates the book based on the information you give it in an excel file. The excel file contains:
Post information
- Book name
- Sequence name
- Title
- Link
- Summary description
Sequence information
- Name
- Summary
Book information
- Name
- Summary
The only compulsory component is the link to the post.
I have used the tool to create books for Living Luminously, No-Nonsense Metaethics, Rationality: From AI to Zombies, Benito's Guide and more. You can see them in the examples folder in this github link. The tool just creates epub books you can use calibre or a similar tool to convert it to another format.
We Haven't Uploaded Worms
In theory you can upload someone's mind onto a computer, allowing them to live forever as a digital form of consciousness, just like in the Johnny Depp film Transcendence.
But it's not just science fiction. Sure, scientists aren't anywhere near close to achieving such feat with humans (and even if they could, the ethics would be pretty fraught), but now an international team of researchers have managed to do just that with the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans.
—Science Alert
Uploading an animal, even one as simple as c. elegans would be very impressive. Unfortunately, we're not there yet. What the people working on Open Worm have done instead is to build a working robot based on the c. elegans and show that it can do some things that the worm can do.
The c. elegans nematode has only 302 neurons, and each nematode has the same fixed pattern. We've known this pattern, or connectome, since 1986. [1] In a simple model, each neuron has a threshold and will fire if the weighted sum of its inputs is greater than that threshold. Which means knowing the connections isn't enough: we also need to know the weights and thresholds. Unfortunately, we haven't figured out a way to read these values off of real worms. Suzuki et. al. (2005) [2] ran a genetic algorithm to learn values for these parameters that would give a somewhat realistic worm and showed various wormlike behaviors in software. The recent stories about the Open Worm project have been for them doing something similar in hardware. [3]
To see why this isn't enough, consider that nematodes are capable of learning. Sasakura and Mori (2013) [5] provide a reasonable overview. For example, nematodes can learn that a certain temperature indicates food, and then seek out that temperature. They don't do this by growing new neurons or connections, they have to be updating their connection weights. All the existing worm simulations treat weights as fixed, which means they can't learn. They also don't read weights off of any individual worm, which means we can't talk about any specific worm as being uploaded.
If this doesn't count as uploading a worm, however, what would? Consider an experiment where someone trains one group of worms to respond to stimulus one way and another group to respond the other way. Both groups are then scanned and simulated on the computer. If the simulated worms responded to simulated stimulus the same way their physical versions had, that would be good progress. Additionally you would want to demonstrate that similar learning was possible in the simulated environment.
(In a 2011 post on what progress with nematodes might tell us about uploading humans I looked at some of this research before. Since then not much has changed with nematode simulation. Moore's law looks to be doing much worse in 2014 than it did in 2011, however, which makes the prospects for whole brain emulation substantially worse.)
I also posted this on my blog.
[1] The Structure of the Nervous System of the Nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, White et. al. (1986).
[2] A Model of Motor Control of the Nematode C. Elegans With Neuronal Circuits, Suzuki et. al. (2005).
[3] It looks like instead of learning weights Busbice just set them all to +1 (excitatory) and -1 (inhibitory). It's not clear to me how they knew which connections were which; my best guess is that they're using the "what happens to work" details from [2]. Their full writeup is [4].
[4] The Robotic Worm, Busbice (2014).
[5] Behavioral Plasticity, Learning, and Memory in C. Elegans, Sasakura and Mori (2013).
Taking the reins at MIRI
Hi all. In a few hours I'll be taking over as executive director at MIRI. The LessWrong community has played a key role in MIRI's history, and I hope to retain and build your support as (with more and more people joining the global conversation about long-term AI risks & benefits) MIRI moves towards the mainstream.
Below I've cross-posted my introductory post on the MIRI blog, which went live a few hours ago. The short version is: there are very exciting times ahead, and I'm honored to be here. Many of you already know me in person or through my blog posts, but for those of you who want to get to know me better, I'll be running an AMA on the effective altruism forum at 3PM Pacific on Thursday June 11th.
I extend to all of you my thanks and appreciation for the support that so many members of this community have given to MIRI throughout the years.
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