The Dice Room, Human Extinction, and Consistency of Bayesian Probability Theory
I'm sure that many of you here have read Quantum Computing Since Democritus. In the chapter on the anthropic principle the author presents the Dice Room scenario as a metaphor for human extinction. The Dice Room scenario is this:
1. You are in a world with a very, very large population (potentially unbounded.)
2. There is a madman who kidnaps 10 people and puts them in a room.
3. The madman rolls two dice. If they come up snake eyes (both ones) then he murders everyone.
4. Otherwise he releases everyone, then goes out and kidnaps 10 times as many people as before, and returns to step 3.
The question is this: if you are one of the people kidnapped at some point, what is your probability of dying? Assume you don't know how many rounds of kidnappings have preceded yours.
As a metaphor for human extinction, think of the population of this world as being all humans who ever have or ever may live, each batch of kidnap victims as a generation of humanity, and rolling snake eyes as an extinction event.
The book gives two arguments, which are both purported to be examples of Bayesian reasoning:
1. The "proximate risk" argument says that your probability of dying is just the prior probability that the madman rolls snake eyes for your batch of kidnap victims -- 1/36.
2. The "proportion murdered" argument says that about 9/10 of all people who ever go into the Dice Room die, so your probability of dying is about 9/10.
Obviously this is a problem. Different decompositions of a problem should give the same answer, as long as they're based on the same information.
I claim that the "proportion murdered" argument is wrong. Here's why. Let pi(t) be the prior probability that you are in batch t of kidnap victims. The proportion murdered argument relies on the property that pi(t) increases exponentially with t: pi(t+1) = 10 * pi(t). If the madman murders at step t, then your probability of being in batch t is
pi(t) / SUM(u: 1 <= u <= t: pi(u))
and, if pi(u+1) = 10 * pi(u) for all u < t, then this does indeed work out to about 9/10. But the values pi(t) must sum to 1; thus they cannot increase indefinitely, and in fact it must be that pi(t) -> 0 as t -> infinity. This is where the "proportion murdered" argument falls apart.
For a more detailed analysis, take a look at
http://bayesium.com/doomsday-and-the-dice-room-murders/
This forum has a lot of very smart people who would be well-qualified to comment on that analysis, and I would appreciate hearing your opinions.
Predicting Organizational Behavior
Can someone recommend a good introduction to the topic of organizational behavior? My interest is in descriptive rather than prescriptive models -- I'm interested in what is known about predicting the behavior of organizations, rather than guidance on what they should do to achieve their goals. This kind of prediction strikes me as something of substantial practical use, especially to business; being able to work out the plausible range of future actions of city hall, the state legislature, Congress, regulatory agencies, competitors in the marketplace, large customers, and important suppliers would be a valuable capability in making one's own plans.
Free Applied Instrumental Rationality Webinar
Dan Nuffer and I are putting together a free webinar that will go through the ideas in Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Life Decisions, combined with whatever else seems useful. The authors of this book include one of the pioneers of decision analysis.
Although they don't describe it as such, Smart Choices is really a manual for basic applied instrumental rationality. It's a systematic way of going about your decisions, applicable to either decision problems (you have a situation dumped in your lap that requires a response) or decision opportunities (proactively seeking out ways to further your goals.)
The webinar will be one-hour sessions once a week for however long it takes to go through the material. We're going to do the webinar on Google+ Hangouts, and we'll have a discussion forum for the webinar on our web site.
If you're interested, send me an email [kevin at ksvanhorn com] with 1) your preferred day/time(s), and 2) the day/times that are out of the question for you.
Google+ Hangouts has a limit of 10 people. Five of those slots are already filled, leaving 5 seats open, so don't wait too long to email me if this is something you're interested in.
For-Profit Rationality Training
As I've been reading through various articles and their comments on Less Wrong, I've noticed a theme that has appeared repeatedly: a frustration that we are not seeing more practical benefits from studying rationality. For example, Eliezer writes in A Sense that More Is Possible,
Why aren't "rationalists" surrounded by a visible aura of formidability? Why aren't they found at the top level of every elite selected on any basis that has anything to do with thought? Why do most "rationalists" just seem like ordinary people...
Yvain writes in Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great,
...I've gotten countless clarity-of-mind benefits from Overcoming Bias' x-rationality, but practical benefits? Aside from some peripheral disciplines, I can't think of any.
patrissimo wrote in a comment on another article,
Sorry, folks, but compared to the self-help/self-development community, Less Wrong is currently UTTERLY LOSING at self-improvement and life optimization.
These writers have also offered some suggestions for improving the situation. Eliezer writes,
Of this [question] there are several answers; but one of them, surely, is that they have received less systematic training of rationality in a less systematic context than a first-dan black belt gets in hitting people.
patrissimo describes what he thinks an effective rationality practice would look like.
- It is a group of people who gather in person to train specific skills.
- While there are some theoreticians of the art, most people participate by learning it and doing it, not theorizing about it.
- Thus the main focus is on local practice groups, along with the global coordination to maximize their effectiveness (marketing, branding, integration of knowledge, common infrastructure). As a result, it is driven by the needs of the learners [emphasis added].
- You have to sweat, but the result is you get stronger.
- You improve by learning from those better than you, competing with those at your level, and teaching those below you.
- It is run by a professional, or at least someone getting paid [emphasis added] for their hobby. The practicants receive personal benefit from their practice, in particular from the value-added of the coach, enough to pay for talented coaches.
Dan Nuffer and I have decided that it's time to stop talking and start doing. We are in the very early stages of creating a business to help people improve their lives by training them in instrumental rationality. We've done some preliminary market research to get an idea of where the opportunities might lie. In fact, this venture got started when, on a whim, I ran a poll on ask500people.com asking,
Would you pay $75 for an interactive online course teaching effective decision-making skills?
I got 299 responses in total. These are the numbers that responded with "likely" or "very likely":
- 23.4% (62) overall.
- 49% (49 of 100) of the respondents from India.
- 10.6% (21 of 199) of the respondents not from India.
- 9.0% (8 of 89) of the respondents from the U.S.
These numbers were much higher than I expected, especially the numbers from India, which still puzzle me. Googling around a bit, though, I found an instructor-led online decision-making course for $130, and a one-day decision-making workshop offered in the UK for £200 (over $350)... and the Google keyword tool returns a large number of search terms (800) related to "decision-making", many of them with a high number of monthly searches.
So it appears that there may be a market for training in effective decision-making -- something that could be the first step towards a more comprehensive training program in instrumental rationality. Some obvious market segments to consider are business decision makers, small business owners, and intelligent people of an analytical bent (e.g., the kind of people who find Less Wrong interesting). An important subset of this last group are INTJ personality types; I don't know if there is an effective way to find and market to specific Meyers-Briggs personality types, but I'm looking into it.
"Life coaching" is a proven business, and its growing popularity suggests the potential for a "decision coaching" service; in fact, helping people with big decisions is one of the things a life coach does. One life coach of 12 years described a typical client as age 35 to 55, who is "at a crossroads, must make a decision and is sick of choosing out of safety and fear." Life coaches working with individuals typically charge around $100 to $300 per hour. As far as I can tell, training in decision analysis / instrumental rationality is not commonly found among life coaches. Surely we can do better.
Can we do effective training online? patrissimo thinks that gathering in person is necessary, but I'm not so sure. His evidence is that "all the people who have replied to me so far saying they get useful rationality practice out of the LW community said the growth came through attending local meetups." To me this is weak evidence -- it seems to say more about the effectiveness of local meetups vs. just reading about rationality. In any event, it's worth testing whether online training can work, since
- not everyone can go to meetups,
- it should be easier to scale up, and
- not to put too fine a point on it, but online training is probably more profitable.
To conclude, one of the things an entrepreneur needs to do is "get out of the building" and talk to members of the target market. We're interested in hearing what you think. What ideas do you think would be most effective in training for instrumental rationality, and why? What would you personally want from a rationality training program? What kinds of products / services related to rationality training would you be interesting in buying?
Applied Rationality Practice
It's one thing to read about a subject, but one gains a deeper understanding by seeing it applied to real problems, and an even deeper understanding by applying it yourself. This applies in particular to the closely related subjects of rationality, cognitive biases, and decision theory. With this in mind, I'd like to propose that we create one or more discussion topics each devoted to discussing and analyzing one decision problem of one person, and see how all this theory we've been discussing can help. The person could be either a Less Wrong member or just an acquaintance of one of us.
I'll commit to actively participating myself. Does anyone want to put forth a problem to discuss?
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