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CFAR in 2014: Continuing to climb out of the startup pit, heading toward a full prototype
In response to
Open thread, Dec. 29, 2014 - Jan 04, 2015
Cognitive Bias research gives us a long list of situations where System 1 may fail to give you the best answer, giving a biased answer instead. Therefore, learning about cognitive biases teaches one to notice if one is in a dangerous situation where they should "halt" one's System 1 and offload their decision making to the System 2. Naturally, the next question is, how to train one's System 1 and System 2 themselves?
How does one train one's System 1? If you spend a lot of time analyzing data in your field, you can develop a domain specific intuition. Is it possible to train your "general intuition" (if such thing exists) or your capability to develop domain-specific intuitions more quickly and more reliably? Mathematicians often talk about beauty, elegance as good guiding principles and importance having a good mathematical taste (e.g. Terence Tao briefly mentions it here). But why do some people have better taste than others? How do you train your taste? Is a good taste (or good taste for ideas) an example of intuition that is somewhat less domain specific? Or is it still too domain specific? By the way, is developing a good taste for art or music helpful for strenghtening your "general intuition" (if such things exists)? If so, a taste for what kind of art is the most helpful for aiding the development of the aforementioned "general intuition"?
Is System 1 simply a shorthand for "everything that isn't System 2" and intuition is a shorthand for " the ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason", thus you cannot train your System 1 in general, you can only train specific parts of it?
How to train your System 2? There is a famous quote by Alfred North Whitehead:
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
It seems that "finding better ways to organize your knowledge" is one way to train your System 2? Coincidentally, the quote also suggests that we improve our thinking by developing reliable ways to offload mental burden to System 1, therefore the quote is not, strictly speaking, just about System 2 (of course, concepts of "System 1" and "System 2" belong to a map, not a territory). What are other ways to train your System 2, besides the aforementioned "finding better ways to organize your knowledge" and finding ways to reliably offload some of the work to System 1? Developing axiomatic systems? Learning to use logic and Bayesian inference? Are there any others?
If you have some sort of decision-making process you do a lot that you expect is going to become a thing you build intuition around later, make sure you have the right feedback loops in place, so that you have something to help keep that intuition calibrated. (This also applies to processes you engineer for others.)
In response to
CFAR in 2014: Continuing to climb out of the startup pit, heading toward a full prototype
CFAR seems to many of us to be among the efforts most worth investing in. This isn’t because our present workshops are all that great. Rather, it is because, in terms of “saving throws” one can buy for a humanity that may be navigating tricky situations in an unknown future, improvements to thinking skill seem to be one of the strongest and most robust.
Why? You tend to be marketing your workshops to people who've already got significant training in much of Traditional Rationality. In my view, much of the world's irrationality comes from people who have not even heard of the basics or people whose resource constraints do not allow them to apply what they know, or both. In this model, broad improvements in very fundamental, schoolchild-level rationality education and the alleviation of poverty and time poverty are much stronger prospects for improving the world through prevention of Dumb Moves than giving semi-advanced cognitive self-improvement workshops to the Silicon Valley elite.
Mind, if what you're really trying to do is propagandize the kind of worldview that leads to taking MIRI seriously, you rather ought to come out and say that.
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CFAR in 2014: Continuing to climb out of the startup pit, heading toward a full prototype
I'm kind of curious; what do you think CFAR's objective is 5 years from now (assuming they get the data they want and it strongly supports the value of the workshops)?
In response to
Open thread, Dec. 22 - Dec. 28, 2014
I'm in the middle of a rationality crisis. I wish I had somebody to talk to, but I'm not close enough to any rationalists to ask for a personal chat when I keep thinking, "They have more important things to do!" and none of my close friends are rationalists.
You might check IRC - #lesswrong, maybe #slatestarcodex, someone is probably willing to help, and you might make a friend.
In response to
My experience of the recent CFAR workshop
Out of curiosity, thoughts on the Againstness class?
versus methods that instantly terminated the cow-brain
This triggered a question to bubble up in my brain.
How much time of pure wireheading bliss do you need to give to a cow brain in order to feel not guilty about eating steak?
I REALLY like this question, because I don't know how to approach it, and that's where learning happens.
So it's definitely less bad to grow cows with good life experiences than with bad life experiences, even if their ultimate destiny is being killed for food. It's kind of like asking if you'd prefer a punch in the face and a sandwich, or just a sandwich. Really easy decisions.
I think it'd be pretty suspicious if my moral calculus worked out in such a way that there was no version of maximally hedonistic existence for a cow that I could say that the cow didn't have a damned awesome life and that we should feel like monsters for allowing it to have existed at all.
That having been said, if you give me a choice between cows that have been re-engineered such that their meat is delicious even after they die of natural causes, and humans don't artificially shorten their lives, and they stand around having cowgasms all day - and a world where cows grow without brains - and a world where you grew steaks on bushes -
I think I'll pick the bush-world, or the brainless cow world, over the cowgasm one, but I'd almost certainly eat cow meat in all of them. My preference there doesn't have to do with cow-suffering. I suspect it has something to do with my incomplete evolution from one moral philosophy to another.
I'm kind of curious how others approach that question.
Certainly eggs are not likely to suffer at all.
It's typically the chickens laying the eggs that people are concerned about. And maybe to a lesser extent the male chickens of the chicken breed used for egg production. (Maybe you're already clear on that, but I have spoken to people who were confused by veganism's prohibition on eating animal products in addition to animals.)
They likely do not suffer in the same way people do.
It doesn't seem safe to assume that their suffering is subjectively less bad than our suffering. Maybe it's worse - maybe the experience of pain and fear is worse when you can only feel it and can't think about it. Either way, I don't see why you'd err on the side of 'It's an uncertain thing so lets keep doing what we're doing and diminish the potential harms when we can' rather than 'It's not that unlikely that we're torturing these things, we should stop in all ways that don't cost us much.'
But yes, creating vat-grown meat and/or pain-free animals should be a priority.
So, there's a heuristic that I think is a decent one, which is that less-conscious things have less potential suffering. I feel that if you had a suffer-o-meter and strapped it to the heads of paramecia, ants, centipedes, birds, mice, and people, they'd probably rank in approximately that order. I have some uncertainty in there, and I could be swayed to a different belief with evidence or an angle I had failed to consider, but I have a hard time imagining what those might be.
I think I buy into the notion that most-conscious doesn't strictly mean most-suffering, though - if there were a slightly less conscious, but much more anxious branch of humanoids out there, I think they'd almost certainly be capable of more suffering than humans.
In response to
Link: Rob Bensinger on Less Wrong and vegetarianism
All the work is done in the premises - which is a bad sign rhetorically, but at least a good sign deductively. If I thought cows were close enough to us that there was a 20% chance that hurting a cow was just as bad as hurting a human, I would definitely not want to eat cows.
Unfortunately for cows, I think there is an approximately 0% chance that hurting cows is (according to my values) just as bad as hurting humans. It's still bad - but its badness is some quite smaller number that is a function of my upbringing, cows' cognitive differences from me, and the lack of overriding game theoretic concerns as far as I can tell. I don't think of cows as "mysterious beings with some chance of being Sacred," I think of them as non-mysterious cows with some small amount of sacredness.
Well, how comparable are they, in your view?
Like, if you'd kill a cow for a 10,000 dollars (which could save a number of human lives), but not fifty million cows for 10,000 dollars, you evidently see some cost associated with cow-termination. If you, when choosing methods, could pick between methods that induced lots of pain, versus methods that instantly terminated the cow-brain, and have a strong preference toward the less-painful methods (assuming they're just as effective), then you clearly value cow-suffering to some degree.
The reason I went basically vegan is I realized I didn't have enough knowledge to run that calculation, but I was fairly confident that I was ethically okay with eating plants, sludges, and manufactured powders, and most probably the incidental suffering they create, while I learned about those topics.
I am basically with you on the notion that hurting a cow is better than hurting a person, and I think horse is the most delicious meat. I just don't eat it any-more. (I'd also personally kill some cows, even in relatively painful ways, in order to save a few people I don't know.)
I rather think there may be demand for a cheaper, less time dependent method of attending. It may be several seasons before they end up back in my country for example. Streaming/recording the whole thing and selling the video package seems like it could still get a lot of the benefits across. Their current strategy only really makes sense to me if they're still in the testing and refining stage.
You can always shoot someone an email and ask about the financial aid thing, and plan a trip stateside around a workshop if, with financial aid, it looks doable, and if after talking to someone, it looks like the workshop would predictably have enough value that you should do it now rather than when you have more time and money.
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So I had one of those typical mind fallacy things explode on me recently, and it's caused me to re-evaluate a whole lot of stuff.
Is there a list of high-impact questions people tend to fail to ask about themselves somewhere?