[LINK] Yudkowsky's Abridged Guide to Intelligent Characters
Some of you have likely seen this already, but for those of you who haven't, Eliezer recently finished a series of Tumblr posts on writing intelligent characters in fiction. It can be found at http://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/writing and is IMO worth a read.
One Year of Goodsearching
Followup to: Use Search Engines Early and Often
Last year, I posted about using search engines and particularly recommended GoodSearch, a site that donates one cent to a charity of your choice whenever you make a (Bing-powered) search via their site.
At the time, some seemed skeptical of this recommendation, and my post was actually downvoted-- people thought that I was plugging GoodSearch too hard without enough evidence for its quality. I now want to return to the topic with a more detailed report on my experience using GoodSearch for a year and how that has worked out for me.
What is GoodSearch?
GoodSearch is a site that donates one cent to a charity of your choice whenever you make a search using their (Bing-powered) service. You can set this search to operate in your browser just like any other.
GoodSearch for Charity
During a year of using GoodSearch, I raised $103.00 for MIRI through making searches. This number is not particularly huge in itself, but it is meaningful because this was basically "free money"-- money gained in exchange for doing things that I was already doing. In exchange for spending ~10 minutes reconfiguring my default searches and occasionally logging in to GoodSearch, I made 103 dollars for MIRI-- approximately $600/hour. As my current earning potential is less than $600/hour, I consider adopting GoodSearch a highly efficient method of donating to charity, at least for me.
It is possible that you make many fewer searches than I do, and thus that setting up GoodSearch will not be very effective for you at raising money. Indeed, I think this is at least somewhat likely, as last time I checked owever, there are two mitigating factors here:
First, you don't have to make all that many searches for GoodSearch to be a good idea. If you make a tenth of the searches I do in a year, you would still be earning around $60/hour for charity by configuring GoodSearch for ten minutes.
Second, I anticipate that, having created a GoodSearch account and configured my default settings to use GoodSearch, I have accomplished the bulk of this task, and that next year I will spend significantly less time setting up GoodSearch-- perhaps half that, if not less. This means that my projected returns on using GoodSearch next year are $1200/hour! If this holds true for you as well, even if setting up GoodSearch is marginal now, it could well be worth it later.
It is also of course possible that you will make many more searches than I do, and thus that setting up GoodSearch will be even more effective for you than it is for me. I think this is somewhat unlikely, as I consider myself rather good at using search engines and quick to use them to resolve problems, but I would love to be proven wrong.
GoodSearch for Personal Effectiveness
Perhaps more importantly, though, I found that using GoodSearch was a very effective way of getting me to search more often. I had previously identified not using search engines as often as I could as a weakness that was causing me to handle some matters inefficiently. In general, there are many situations where the value of information that can be obtained by using search engines is high, but one may not be inclined to search immediately.
For me, using GoodSearch solved this problem; while a single cent to MIRI for each search doesn't seem like much, it was enough to give me a little ping of happiness every time I searched for anything, which in turn was enough to reinforce my searching habit and take things to the next level. GoodSearch essentially created a success spiral that led to me using both search engines and the Internet itself much more effectively.
Disavantages of GoodSearch
GoodSearch has one notable disadvantage-- it is powered by Bing rather than by Google search. When I first tried GoodSearch, I expected search quality to be much worse. In practice, though, I found that my fears were overblown. GoodSearch results were completely fine in almost all cases, and in the few situations where it proved insufficient, I could easily retry a search in Google-- though often Google too lacked the information I was looking for.
Summary/tl;dr
After a year of using GoodSearch, I found it to be both an effective way to earn money for charity and an effective way to motivate myself to use search engines more often. I suggest that other users try using GoodSearch and seeing if it has similarly positive effects; the costs of trying this are very low and the potential upside is high.
A Day Without Defaults
Author's note: this post was written on Sunday, Oct. 19th. Its sequel will be written on Sunday, Oct. 27th.
Last night, I went to bed content with a fun and eventful weekend gone by. This morning, I woke up, took a shower, did my morning exercises, and began eat breakfast before making the commute up to work.
At the breakfast table, though, I was surprised to learn that it was Sunday, not Monday. I had misremembered what day it was and in fact had an entire day ahead of me with nothing on the agenda. At first, this wasn't very interesting, but then I started thinking. What to do with an entirely free day, without any real routine?
I realized that I didn't particularly know what to do, so I decided that I would simply live a day without defaults. At each moment of the day, I would act only in accordance with my curiosity and genuine interest. If I noticed myself becoming bored, disinterested, or otherwise less than enthused about what was going on, I would stop doing it.
What I found was quite surprising. I spent much less time doing routine activities like reading the news and browsing discussion boards, and much more time doing things that I've "always wanted to get around to"-- meditation, trying out a new exercise routine, even just spending some time walking around outside and relaxing in the sun.
Further, this seemed to actually make me more productive. When I sat down to get some work done, it was because I was legitimately interested in finishing my work and curious as to whether I could use a new method I had thought up in order to solve it. I was able to resolve something that's been annoying me for a while in much less time than I thought it would take.
By the end of the day, I started thinking "is there any reason that I don't spend every day like this?" As far as I can tell, there isn't really. I do have a few work tasks that I consider relatively uninteresting, but there are multiple solutions to that problem that I suspect I can implement relatively easily.
My plan is to spend the next week doing the same thing that I did today and then report back. I'm excited to let you all know what I find!
Strawman Yourself
One good way to ensure that your plans are robust is to strawman yourself. Look at your plan in the most critical, contemptuous light possible and come up with the obvious uncharitable insulting argument for why you will fail.
In many cases, the obvious uncharitable insulting argument will still be fundamentally correct.
If it is, your plan probably needs work. This technique seems to work not because it taps into some secret vault of wisdom (after all, making fun of things is easy), but because it is an elegant way to shift yourself into a critical mindset.
For instance, I recently came up with a complex plan to achieve one of my goals. Then I strawmanned myself; the strawman version of why this plan would fail was simply "large and complicated plans don't work." I thought about that for a moment, concluded "yep, large and complicated plans don't work," and came up with a simple, elegant plan to achieve the same ends.
You may ask "why didn't you just come up with a simple, elegant plan in the first place?" The answer is that elegance is hard. It's easier to add on special case after special case, not realizing how much complexity debt you've added. Strawmanning yourself is one way to safeguard against this risk, as well as many others.
Skills and Antiskills
One useful little concept that a friend and I have is that of the antiskill. Like a normal skill, an antiskill gives you both the ability and the affordance to do things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do. The difference between a skill and an antiskill is that a skill gives you the ability and affordance to do things that are positive on net, while an antiskill gives you the ability and affordance to do things that are negative on net.
For instance, my friend believes that dancing is often an antiskill, because it gives you an affordance to dance rather than have interesting conversations while at parties, and he considers having interesting conversations to be much more valuable than dancing-- therefore, knowing how to dance serves primarily to enable choices that are bad on net.
I disagree with the specific point in this case, but I nevertheless think it's a good example because it illustrates another key principle of skills and antiskills-- whether something is a skill or an antiskill is context-dependent. If dancing will largely prevent you from having interesting conversations, it may well be an antiskill-- but if you go to a lot of nightclubs where loud music makes conversation difficult, knowing how to dance seems very useful indeed!
Another example is the skill of knowing how to fix computers. In many respects this is very useful, and can indeed lead to a profitable career in IT. But-- as I'm sure many of you may have experienced-- having your friends and family know that you know how to fix computers can be very negative on net!
Overall, I find the skill/antiskill framework quite useful when it comes to navigating what sorts of skills, abilities, and knowledge I should acquire. Before choosing my next priority, I often pause to think:
- What affordances will learning this give me?
- In what contexts will those affordances be most relevant?
- Will this be positive or negative on net?
Using this framework has enabled me to discern strengths and weaknesses that I had previously not considered, and in some cases those strengths and weaknesses have proven decisive to my planning.
The Problem of "Win-More"
In Magic: the Gathering and other popular card games, advanced players have developed the notion of a "win-more" card. A "win-more" card is one that works very well, but only if you're already winning. In other words, it never helps turn a loss into a win, but it is very good at turning a win into a blowout. This type of card seems strong at first, but since these games usually do not use margin of victory scoring in tournaments, they end up being a trap-- instead of using cards that convert wins into blowouts, you want to use cards that convert losses into wins.
This concept is useful and important and you should never tell a new player about it, because it tends to make them worse at the game. Without a more experienced player's understanding of core concepts, it's easy to make mistakes and label cards that are actually good as being win-more.
This is an especially dangerous mistake to make because it's relatively uncommon for an outright bad card to seem like a win-more card; win-more cards are almost always cards that look really good at first. That means that if you end up being too wary of win-more cards, you're going to end up misclassifying good cards as bad, and that's an extremely dangerous mistake to make. Misclassifying bad cards as good is relatively easy to deal with, because you'll use them and see that they aren't good; misclassifying good cards as bad is much more dangerous, because you won't play them and therefore won't get the evidence you need to update your position.
I call this the "win-more problem." Concepts that suffer from the win-more problem are those that-- while certainly useful to an advanced user-- are misleading or net harmful to a less skillful person. Further, they are wrong or harmful in ways that are difficult to detect, because they screen off feedback loops that would otherwise allow someone to realize the mistake.
Worse than Worthless
There are things that are worthless-- that provide no value. There are also things that are worse than worthless-- things that provide negative value. I have found that people sometimes confuse the latter for the former, which can carry potentially dire consequences.
One simple example of this is in fencing. I once fenced with an opponent who put a bit of an unnecessary twirl on his blade when recovering from each parry. After our bout, one of the spectators pointed out that there wasn't any point to the twirls and that my opponent would improve by simply not doing them anymore. My opponent claimed that, even if the twirls were unnecessary, at worst they were merely an aesthetic preference that was useless but not actually harmful.
However, the observer explained that any unnecessary movement is harmful in fencing, because it spends time and energy that could be put to better use-- even if that use is just recovering a split second faster! [1]
During our bout, I indeed scored at least one touch because my opponent's twirling recovery was slower than a less flashy standard movement. That touch could well be the difference between victory and defeat; in a real sword fight, it could be the difference between life and death.
This isn't, of course, to say that everything unnecessary is damaging. There are many things that we can simply be indifferent towards. If I am about to go and fence a bout, the color of the shirt that I wear under my jacket is of no concern to me-- but if I had spent significant time before the bout debating over what shirt to wear instead of training, it would become a damaging detail rather than a meaningless one.
In other words, the real damage is dealt when something is not only unnecessary, but consumes resources that could instead be used for productive tasks. We see this relatively easily when it comes to matters of money, but when it comes to wastes of time and effort, many fail to make the inductive leap.
[1] Miyamoto Musashi agrees:
The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him. You must thoroughly research this.
Online vs. Personal Conversations
When I was younger, I thought that conversations in real life were much more likely to promote true beliefs and meaningful changes than conversations online, because people in real life were only willing/able to cite evidence they were actually confident in, while those online were able to easily search for arguments favoring their position.
While this is obviously wrong—the concept that people in real life only cite evidence they are justifiably confident in is comically false—I do think the dichotomy illustrated there is interesting. One thing I've noticed is that in general the "rigor" of discussions online is higher (in terms of citations, links to external content, etc.), but that conversations in real life seem still much more likely to actually change people's minds.
I have noticed this effect in both myself and others—what do you think is going on here, and how do you think we might circumvent it? If online discussions could be made more effective at causing people to actually change their minds, this could potentially prove extremely useful.
Stable and Unstable Risks
Related: Existential Risk, 9/26 is Petrov Day
Existential risks—risks that, in the words of Nick Bostrom, would "either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential," are a significant threat to the world as we know it. In fact, they may be one of the most pressing issues facing humanity today.
The likelihood of some risks may stay relatively constant over time—a basic view of asteroid impact is that there is a certain probability that a "killer asteroid" hits the Earth and that this probability is more or less the same every year. This is what I refer to as a "stable risk."
However, the likelihood of other existential risks seems to fluctuate, often quite dramatically. Many of these "unstable risks" are related to human activity.
For instance, the likelihood of a nuclear war at sufficient scale to be an existential threat seems contingent on various geopolitical factors that are difficult to predict in advance. That said, the likelihood of this risk has clearly changed throughout recent history. Nuclear war was obviously not an existential risk before nuclear weapons were invented, and was fairly clearly more of a risk during the Cuban Missile Crisis than it is today.
Many of these unstable, human-created risks seem based largely on advanced technology. Potential risks like gray goo rely on theorized technologies that have yet to be developed (and indeed may never be developed). While this is good news for the present day, it also means that we have to be vigilant for the emergence of potential new threats as human technology increases.
GiveWell's recent conversation with Carl Shulman contains some arguments as to why the risk of human extinction may be decreasing over time. However, it strikes me as perhaps more likely that the risk of human extinction is increasing over time—or at the very least becoming less stable—as technology increases the amount of power available to individuals and civilizations.
After all, the very concept of human-created unstable existential risks is a recent one. Even if Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, or Queen Victoria for some reason decided to destroy human civilization, it seems almost certain that they would fail, even given all the resources of their empires.
The same cannot be said for Kennedy or Khrushchev.
[Link] Bet Your Friends to Be More Right
This article does a good job of explaining how betting can be a useful rationality practice. An excerpt:
The interesting thing about this practice was that it made us both think very carefully about the accuracy of all of our statements. The most embarrassing thing ever was to say, "I bet you anything that I'll be on time..." and then be unwilling to back up the assertion with a bet. Failing to bet was an admission that you'd just said something that you had no real confidence in.
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