Comment author: Bryan-san 21 December 2015 08:08:43PM 1 point [-]

This is a perspective I hadn't seen mentioned before and helps me understand why a friend of mine gives low value to the goal-oriented rationality material I've mentioned to him.

Thank you very much for this post!

Comment author: fubarobfusco 21 December 2015 08:49:28PM 2 points [-]

It's worth noting that, from what I can tell at least (having not actually taken their courses), quite a bit of CFAR "rationality" training seems to deal with issues arising not directly from Bayesian math, but from characteristics of human minds and society.

Comment author: Bryan-san 19 December 2015 04:26:39PM 0 points [-]

What are the strongest arguments that you've seen against rationality?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 20 December 2015 09:08:13PM *  4 points [-]

Well, it depends on what you mean by "rationality". Here's something I posted in 2014, slightly revised:


If not rationality, then what?

LW presents epistemic and instrumental rationality as practical advice for humans, based closely on the mathematical model of Bayesian probability. This advice can be summed up in two maxims:

  1. Obtain a better model of the world by updating on the evidence of things unpredicted by your current model.
  2. Succeed at your given goals by using your (constantly updating) model to predict which actions will maximize success.

Or, alternately: Having correct beliefs is useful for humans achieving goals in the world, because correct beliefs enable correct predictions, and correct predictions enable goal-accomplishing actions. And the way to have correct beliefs is to update your beliefs when their predictions fail.

We can call these the rules of Bayes' world, the world in which updating and prediction are effective at accomplishing human goals. But Bayes' world is not the only imaginable world. What if we deny each of these premises and see what we get? Other than Bayes' world, which other worlds might we be living in?

To be clear, I'm not talking about alternatives to Bayesian probability as a mathematical or engineering tool. I'm talking about imaginable worlds in which Bayesian probability is not a good model for human knowledge and action.


Suppose that making correct predictions does not enable goal-accomplishing actions. We might call this Cassandra's world, the world of tragedy — in which those people who know best what the future will bring, are most incapable of doing anything about it.

In the world of heroic myth, it is not oracles (good predictors) but rather heroes and villains (strong-willed people) who create change in the world. Heroes and villains are people who possess great virtue or vice — strong-willed tendencies to face difficult challenges, or to do what would repulse others. Oracles possess the truth to arbitrary precision, but they accomplish nothing by it. Heroes and villains come to their predicted triumphs or fates not by believing and making use of prediction, but by ignoring or defying it.


Suppose that the path to success is not to update your model of the world, so much as to update your model of your self and goals. The facts of the external world are relatively close to our priors; not much updating is needed there — but our goals are not known to us initially. In fact, we may be thoroughly deceived about what our goals are, or what satisfying them would look like.

We might consider this to be Buddha's world, the world of contemplation — in which understanding the nature of the self is substantially more important to success than understanding the external world. In this world, when we choose actions that are unsatisfactory, it isn't so much because we are acting on faulty beliefs about the external world, but because we are pursuing goals that are illusory or empty of satisfaction.


There are other models as well, that could be extrapolated from denying other premises (explicit or implicit) of Bayes' world. Each of these models should relate prediction, action, and goals in different ways: We might imagine Lovecraft's world (knowledge causes suffering), Qoheleth's world (maybe similar to Buddha's), Job's world, or Nietzsche's world.

Each of these models of the world — Bayes' world, Cassandra's world, Buddha's world, and the others — does predict different outcomes. If we start out thinking that we are in Bayes' world, what evidence might suggest that we are actually in one of the others?

Comment author: ChristianKl 02 December 2015 10:37:47PM 1 point [-]

System I and System II seem to be very unwidely terms because of the numbers. People like Gleb try to find alternatives to use to reach "the masses". There a common tradition of expressing new concepts with Greek and Latin roots. Can anybody think of good names for System I and System II based on Greek or Latin?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 03 December 2015 05:01:31AM 0 points [-]

Subconscious and conscious cognition?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 02 December 2015 05:52:12PM 2 points [-]

Ambiguity isn't a unary function. It doesn't make sense to say "this sentence is ambiguous" without some context:

  • What's the social context in which the sentence is spoken? "I love you" from a child to a parent almost certainly doesn't mean the same thing as "I love you" from an adult to a lover. This isn't ambiguity; it's context dependence.
  • What are the likely (mis)interpretations? How distant are they from each other in meaning-space? Do those differences matter? "Go to the library and get me Moby-Dick" might leave the hearer unclear as to which library is meant (the college library? the public library? the main branch of the public library? the room in the house with lots of bookcases?) ... but maybe the speaker doesn't care about the difference — they just want their damn whale book.
  • Is the sentence intended to nail down one specific meaning when some hearers would prefer a different one? For some purposes, such as laws and rules, people want a very clear idea of what's being forbidden, even in a context where people have strong disagreements about what should be forbidden. See for instance the U.S. jurisprudence notions of the vagueness doctrine and the "chilling effect".
  • For that matter, what level of language skill does the speaker/writer expect from the hearer/reader, and how much care is the hearer/reader expected to apply? Some grammatical forms are harder to parse. There are a number of example sentences where introducing a comma or pause in the wrong place can completely change the sense of the sentence.

"Woman: Without her, man is nothing" / "Woman, without her man, is nothing".
"I helped my Uncle Jack off a horse" / "I helped my uncle jack off a horse".
"Unless a player has Book Burning deal six damage to him or her ..." / "Unless a player has Book Burning, deal six damage to him or her ..."

Comment author: ShardPhoenix 23 November 2015 11:16:36PM *  7 points [-]

What is the optimal amount of attention to pay to political news? I've been trying to cut down to reduce stress over things I can't control, but ignoring it entirely seems a little dangerous. For an extreme example, consider the Jews in Nazi Germany - I'd imagine those who kept an eye on what was going on were more likely to leave the country before the Holocaust. Of course something that bad is unlikely, but it seems like it could still be important to be aware of impactful new laws that are passed - eg anti-privacy laws, or internet piracy now much more heavily punishable, etc.

So what's the best way to keep up on things that might have an impact on one's life, without getting caught up in the back-and-forth of day-to-day politics?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 24 November 2015 08:42:17PM 9 points [-]

Some things to think about:

Are there actual political threats to you in your own polity (nation, state, etc.)? Do you belong to groups that there's a history of official repression or large-scale political violence against? Are there notable political voices or movements explicitly calling for the government to round you up, kill you, take away your citizenship or your children, etc.? (To be clear: An entertainer tweeting "kill all the lawyers" is not what I mean here.)

Are you engaged in fields of business or hobbies that are novel, scary, dangerous, or offensive to a lot of people in your polity, and that therefore might be subject to new regulation? This includes both things that you acknowledge as possibly harmful (say, working with poisonous chemicals that you take precautions against, but which the public might be exposed to) as well as things that you don't think are harmful, but which other people might disagree. (Examples: Internet; fossil fuels; drones; guns; gambling; recreational drugs; pornography)

Internationally — In the past two hundred years, how often has your country been invaded or conquered? How many civil wars, coups d'état, or failed wars of independence have there been; especially ones sponsored by foreign powers? How much of your country's border is disputed with neighboring nations?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 29 October 2015 09:31:40PM 4 points [-]

A word of warning: Conspiracy-theorists tend to think of themselves as members of "the cognitive elite" — the unusually well-informed, those who think clearly and skeptically, those who have broken free of brainwashing or consensus.

Comment author: Stefan_Schubert 27 October 2015 06:07:15PM 0 points [-]

Your criticism would be much more interesting if you pointed to concrete problems in my fact-checking/argument-checking.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 28 October 2015 12:13:49AM 0 points [-]

I wasn't asserting problems with your fact-checking; I was stating a limitation on the project of fact-checking in general.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 25 October 2015 10:06:16PM 0 points [-]

Awesome! I'm glad this is taking off so well.

Regarding getting players, though ... maybe connect it to some other medium besides the web site, such as IRC? Having the same game instance available on the web and IRC would be pretty awesome.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 23 October 2015 11:08:14PM 5 points [-]

In order to be fact-checked, a statement has to be truth-apt in the first place. That is, it has to be the sort of statement that is capable of being true or false.

A lot of political arguments aren't truth-apt; they amount to cheering ("Georgism, boo! Synarchism, yay!") as opposed to historical claims ("Countries that adopt goat control have seen their arson rate double") or even theoretical claims ("The erotic calculation problem predicts that college-educated adults will move out of states that ban vibrators").

Comment author: CronoDAS 12 September 2015 05:55:50PM *  6 points [-]

Waaait a sec.. how can this be true? This seems counterintuitive: the average US citizen would probably have less high-income jobs available to them if not less jobs overall as they have to compete with immigrants too now.

Lump-of-labor fallacy. The number of jobs in the economy is not fixed; the more people you have that are good at doing stuff, the more stuff gets done overall.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 13 September 2015 03:01:04AM 1 point [-]

Please fix your link.

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