Followup to:  Neural Categories

"If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?"  I remember seeing an actual argument get started on this subject—a fully naive argument that went nowhere near Berkeleyan subjectivism.  Just:

"It makes a sound, just like any other falling tree!"
"But how can there be a sound that no one hears?"

The standard rationalist view would be that the first person is speaking as if "sound" means acoustic vibrations in the air; the second person is speaking as if "sound" means an auditory experience in a brain.  If you ask "Are there acoustic vibrations?" or "Are there auditory experiences?", the answer is at once obvious.  And so the argument is really about the definition of the word "sound".

I think the standard analysis is essentially correct.  So let's accept that as a premise, and ask:  Why do people get into such an argument?  What's the underlying psychology?

A key idea of the heuristics and biases program is that mistakes are often more revealing of cognition than correct answers.  Getting into a heated dispute about whether, if a tree falls in a deserted forest, it makes a sound, is traditionally considered a mistake.

So what kind of mind design corresponds to that error?

"Human nature 101.  Once they've staked their identity on being part of the defiant elect who know the Hidden Truth, there's no way it'll occur to them that they're our catspaws." - Mysterious Conspirator A

This sentence sums up a very large category of human experience and motivation. Informally we talk about this all the time; formally it usually gets ignored in favor of a simple ladder model of status.

In the ladder model, status is a one-dimensional line from low to high. Every person occupies a certain rung on the ladder determined by other people's respect. When people take status-seeking actions, their goal is to to change other people's opinions of themselves and move up the ladder.

But many, maybe most human actions are counterproductive at moving up the status ladder. 9-11 Conspiracy Theories are a case in point. They're a quick and easy way to have most of society think you're stupid and crazy. So is serious interest in the paranormal or any extremist political or religious belief. So why do these stay popular?

You can have some fun with people whose anticipations get out of sync with what they believe they believe.

I was once at a dinner party, trying to explain to a man what I did for a living, when he said: "I don't believe Artificial Intelligence is possible because only God can make a soul."

At this point I must have been divinely inspired, because I instantly responded: "You mean if I can make an Artificial Intelligence, it proves your religion is false?"

Some of the comments in this blog have touched on the question of why we ought to seek truth.  (Thankfully not many have questioned what truth is.)  Our shaping motivation for configuring our thoughts to rationality, which determines whether a given configuration is "good" or "bad", comes from whyever we wanted to find truth in the first place.

It is written:  "The first virtue is curiosity."  Curiosity is one reason to seek truth, and it may not be the only one, but it has a special and admirable purity.  If your motive is curiosity, you will assign priority to questions according to how the questions, themselves, tickle your personal aesthetic sense.  A trickier challenge, with a greater probability of failure, may be worth more effort than a simpler one, just because it is more fun.

Over the last decades, new experiments have changed science's picture of the way we think - the ways we succeed or fail to obtain the truth, or fulfill our goals. The heuristics and biases program, in cognitive psychology, has exposed dozens of major flaws in human reasoning. Social psychology shows how we succeed or fail in groups. Probability theory and decision theory have given us new mathematical foundations for understanding minds.

Less Wrong is devoted to refining the art of human rationality - the art of thinking. The new math and science deserves to be applied to our daily lives, and heard in our public voices.

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