Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 07 August 2011 11:03:21PM 3 points [-]

The concept you're trying to convey might become more obvious if you used thought bubbles instead of arrows. Have the humans imagine the artificial brain, and it appears; then have the artificial brain imagine a bigger version of itself, and it grows; and so forth. (This will involve more frames in a larger .gif, but I think it will make the process clearer.)

Comment author: omslin 07 August 2011 11:42:34PM 2 points [-]

Animated GIFs look unprofessional.

In response to comment by djcb on Crime and punishment
Comment author: prase 26 March 2011 06:10:46PM *  1 point [-]

It can be easily shown how criminality correlates with inequality directly. Let's for example compare the homicide rates (per 100 thousand inhabitatnts per year) in 15 most equal and 15 most inequal countries in the world (measured by Gini index):

Most equal (Gini between 24.7 and 29.2)

  1. Denmark 1.0
  2. Japan 1.0
  3. Sweden 0.89
  4. Czech Rep. 1.9
  5. Norway 0.60
  6. Slovakia 1.7
  7. Bosnia 1.8
  8. Finland 2.5
  9. Hungary 1.4
  10. Ukraine 5.4
  11. Germany 0.86
  12. Slovenia 0.55
  13. Croatia 1.7
  14. Austria 0.55
  15. Bulgaria 2.3

Most inequal (Gini between 74.3 and 53.8)

  1. Namibia 18
  2. Lesotho 37
  3. Sierra Leone 2.6
  4. Central African Rep. 30
  5. Botswana 12
  6. Bolivia 11
  7. Haiti 22
  8. Colombia 35
  9. Paraguay 12
  10. South Africa 34
  11. Brazil 22
  12. Panama 13
  13. Guatemala 52
  14. Chile 1.7
  15. Honduras 67

The data are from Wikipedia. There may be some caveats (e.g. some countries include attempted murders in the count while others don't), but the overall correlation is easily visible.

In response to comment by prase on Crime and punishment
Comment author: omslin 26 March 2011 11:16:29PM *  0 points [-]

In rich countries, there are strong correlations between income inequality and imprisonment rates (graph), and between income inequality and homicide rates (graph). As for selection bias, the authors of the graphs took the 50 richest countries over population 3 million for which data was available. Data sources here.

Comment author: omslin 12 March 2011 09:03:35PM *  3 points [-]

Yesterday as a creative activity I spent a couple hours making up tweets. It was actually really fun and cathartic! The last four had something to do with rationality:

I'm a politician and I'm not going to change my opinion because it'll make me look bad. So shut up.

Cached Selves

I'm a guy. I like that girl, so it's time to project my desires onto her and rapidly turn her off.

"Anti-game" is quite common and involves being excessively nice thereby signaling very low value. Related to how humans have difficulty modeling others (typical mind fallacy? women are pickier when choosing mates than men)

I'm a persuasive writer. Time to construct an excessively detailed but improbable scenario in order to convince you. It worked!

Related to conjunction fallacy. Inspired by my experiences: more detailed writing with imagery was more effective (perhaps because it seemed more high status)

  1. Do the research and thinking (Creativity and science). 2. Make the appealing case (Charisma). Can you switch between gears?

Hold Off on Proposing Solutions. What looks smart (the confident charisma) isn't necessarily the smart thing to do. Inspired by personal experiences where political discussions were charisma competitions.

My tweets were too abstract, lacked links to LW or Wikipedia, may have been too obvious and were seen by pretty much noone.

But it sure was fun, so I encourage people to explore Alexandros' suggestion.

Comment author: omslin 06 February 2011 06:09:26AM *  0 points [-]

Though potentially harmful to the LW community, such a post could be quite instrumental (especially given your scholarly style) for some, so I encourage you to write it. If deemed inappropriate for LW due to its negative externalities, the post can be placed on another site (or maybe in the discussion section?).

Comment author: RichardKennaway 16 January 2011 04:39:15PM *  -2 points [-]

Then the smart thing to do is to not sweat over it.

Speaking of which, this conversation has become a case in point.

Comment author: omslin 16 January 2011 05:46:00PM *  1 point [-]

Seems to me that Richard is roughly talking about instrumental rationality, while Konkvistador is roughly talking about epistemic rationality. Let's not quibble over the word rationality.

In response to Rational insanity
Comment author: CronoDAS 28 December 2010 05:13:36AM *  2 points [-]

I suspect that the recent attacks weren't planned, and were instead the result of some guy manning an artillery piece (or some guy in command of a guy manning an artillery piece) panicking and doing something stupid.

In response to comment by CronoDAS on Rational insanity
Comment author: omslin 28 December 2010 07:01:37AM *  3 points [-]

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, a US reconnaissance plane over Cuba was shot down by a Soviet missile without authorization from Moscow. This "stray" shot very nearly caused nuclear war. (For more examples of a lack of government control in the Cuban Missile Crisis see section VI on this outline. By the way, it would be interesting to analyze the plentiful existential risk irrationality during this Crisis. The Crisis tapes are now declassified.)

If the US and the USSR had trouble controlling their guns, it's likely the amateurish, heavily-armed North Korean state also does.

In response to Rational insanity
Comment author: JoshuaZ 27 December 2010 05:45:52AM 4 points [-]

This seems like a variant of the Overton Window.

In response to comment by JoshuaZ on Rational insanity
Comment author: omslin 27 December 2010 06:52:41AM *  4 points [-]

And more generally this seems to be an instance of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic. In this case the anchor is the present situation (North Korea bombing stuff), and South Korea is evaluating the acceptableness of a policy option. Change the anchor and - voila - the evaluation changes.

Taking advantage of an enemy's thinking flaws is one of the most effective ways a small organization can influence a larger opponent. Distractions and disruptions can prompt overreaction or under-reaction. In the case of 9/11 or WikiLeaks, possibly overreaction by the US government. In the case of North Korea, possibly under-reaction by South Korea.

In response to Rational insanity
Comment author: omslin 27 December 2010 06:29:47AM *  1 point [-]

Broken link; the tug-of-war link should be tug-of-war.

Edit: Link works for me now

Comment author: Torben 17 December 2010 06:36:08PM *  1 point [-]

[...] you could prove that (A => B) and (B => C) and (C => D) and (D => F) Justice would nod its head and agree, but then, when you turned to claim your coup de grace, A => F irrevocably, Justice would demur and revoke the axiom of transitivity, for Justice will not be told when F stands for freedom.

I think Justice really, really should let emself be told when F stands for freedom. It seems to me Assange is more or less saying that he will follow logic steps only as far as they lead to a conclusion he likes. Am I the only one reading him this way?

Transitivity is evoked when Justice imagines F and finding the dream a pleasurable one sets about gathering cushions to prop up their slumber.

This sounds like searching for arguments to a foregone conclusion.

Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors.

This reminds me of a guy, having lost an argument to me fatally, who resorted to saying, "consistency is overrated". He'd rather have two mutually exclusive ideas and acknowledge this as fact than change his mind.

Comment author: omslin 17 December 2010 09:50:26PM *  0 points [-]

you could prove that (A => B) and (B => C) and (C => D) and (D => F) Justice would nod its head and agree, but then, when you turned to claim your coup de grace, A => F irrevocably, Justice would demur and revoke the axiom of transitivity, for Justice will not be told when F stands for freedom.

I think Justice really, really should let emself be told when F stands for freedom.

Since we overestimate the strength of conjunctions, transitive chains may be weaker than they appear. So unless the issue is entirely clear-cut, it's reasonable for people to fail to accept A => F. (Of course, it is true that ideally a rational person would at least consider A => F and adjust probabilities accordingly.)

Transitivity is evoked when Justice imagines F and finding the dream a pleasurable one sets about gathering cushions to prop up their slumber.

This sounds like searching for arguments to a foregone conclusion.

True. But it also sounds like the gathering of evidence using emotional tags. Direct evidence, in some areas, overwhelmingly beats a transitive chain. So although the evidence is not being gathered evenhandedly by Justice, there is a justification for this manner of thinking. I do think the "gathering [of] cushions to prop up a slumber" is adaptive and a fair representation of how people think.

What I found interesting about this blog post is that a successful person, who has tried to persuade others of his political ideas, has identified models/strategies for persuasion which strongly mirror the LW posts I have read.

I suppose there are far superior guides to persuasion with actual empirical evidence. Admittedly, those are more appropriate for Less Wrong. You people probably already find LW resonances in much of what you read anyway.

"Irrationality in Argument"

1 omslin 17 December 2010 05:46AM

Here's a poetic blog post by Julian Assange (source). I found the first paragraph relevant:

27 Aug 2007 - Irrationality in Argument

The truth is not found on the page, but is a wayward sprite that bursts forth from the readers mind for reasons of its own. I once thought that the Truth was a set comprised of all the things that were true, and the big truth could be obtained by taking all its component propositions and evaluating them until nothing remained. I would approach my rhetorical battles as a logical reductionist, tearing down, atomizing, proving, disproving, discarding falsehoods and reassembling truths until the Truth was pure, golden and unarguable. But then, when truth matters most, when truth is the agent of freedom, I stood before Justice and with truth, lost freedom. Here was something fantastical, unbelievable and impossible, you could prove that (A => B) and (B => C) and (C => D) and (D => F) Justice would nod its head and agree, but then, when you turned to claim your coup de grace, A => F irrevocably, Justice would demur and revoke the axiom of transitivity, for Justice will not be told when F stands for freedom. Transitivity is evoked when Justice imagines F and finding the dream a pleasurable one sets about gathering cushions to prop up their slumber. Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors. So first, always pick your poetic metaphor, to make the reader want to believe, then the facts, and -- miracle! -- transitivity will descend from heaven, invoked as justification for prejudice.

Often we suffer to read, "But if we believe X then we'll have to...", or "If we believe X it will lead to...". This has no reflection on the veracity of X and so we see that outcomes are treated with more reverence than the Truth. It stings us, but natural selection has spun its ancestral yarns from physically realized outcomes, robustly eschewing the vapor thread of platonism as an abomination against the natural order, fit only for the gossip of monks and the page.

Yet just as we feel all hope is lost and we sink back into the miasma, back to the shadow world of ghosts and gods, a miracle arises; everywhere before the direction of self interest is known, people yearn to see where its compass points and then they hunger for truth with passion and beauty and insight. He loves me. He loves me not. Here then is the truth to set them free. Free from the manipulations and constraints of the mendacious. Free to choose their path, free to remove the ring from their noses, free to look up into the infinite voids and choose wonder over whatever gets them though. And before this feeling to cast blessings on the profits and prophets of truth, on the liberators and martyrs of truth, on the Voltaires, Galileos, and Principias of truth, on the Gutenburgs, Marconis and Internets of truth, on those serial killers of delusion, those brutal, driven and obsessed miners of reality, smashing, smashing, smashing every rotten edifice until all is ruins and the seeds of the new.

I've only read a few Less Wrong articles so far, but the first paragraph easily follows from my current models. Since explicit reasoning easily fails, people quite understandably refuse to accept arguments based on transitivity. So in order to be understood, one should carefully craft arguments one inferential step away from the audience's current mental state. A metaphor, because of all the ideas it simultaneously evokes, powerfully takes advantage of a brain's multiprocessing ability. That's why a metaphor can remove inferential steps and be an excellent way of bringing us to our senses and making us reconsider a vast network of cached knowledge.

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