Follow Standard Incentives
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Apr 25, 20185
query
304
1
61
EDIT: This was wrong.
The answer varies with the generating algorithm of the statement the guard makes.
In this example, he told you that you were not in one of the places you're not in (the Vulcan Desert). If he always does this, then the probability is 1/4; if you had been in the Vulcan Desert, he would have told you that you were not in one of the other three.
If he always tells you whether or not you're in the Vulcan Desert, then once you hear him say you're not your probability of being in the Vulcan Mountain is 1/3.
Definitely makes sense. A commonly cited example is women in an office workplace; what would be average assertiveness for a male is considered "bitchy", but they still suffer roughly the same "weak" penalties for non-assertiveness.
With the advice-giving aspect, some situations are likely coming from people not knowing what levers they're actually pulling. Adam tells David to move his "assertiveness" lever, but there's no affordance gap available for David by moving that lever -- he would actually have to move an "assertiveness + social skill W" lever which he doesn't have, but which feels like a single lever for Adam called "assertiveness". Not all situations are such; there's no "don't be a woman" or "don't be autistic lever". Sometimes there's some other solution by moving along a different dimension and sometimes there's not.
Feel similarly; since Facebook comments are a matter of public record, disputes and complaints on them are fully public and can have high social costs if unaddressed. I would not be worried about it in a small group chat among close friends.
I perceive several different ways something like this happens to me:
1. If I do something that strains my working memory, I'll have an experience of having a "cache miss". I'll reach for something, and it won't be there; I'll then attempt to pull it into memory again, but usually this is while trying to "juggle too many balls", and something else will often slip out. This feels like it requires effort/energy to keep going, and I have a desire to stop and relax and let my brain "fuzz over". Eventually I'll get a handle on an abstraction, verbal loop, or image that lets me hold it all at once.
2.... (read 521 more words →)
A note on this, which I definitely don't mean to apply to the specific situations you discuss (since I don't know enough about them):
If you give people stronger incentives to lie to you, more people will lie to you. If you give people strong enough incentives, even people who value truth highly will start lying to you. Sometimes they will do this by lying to themselves first, because that's what is necessary for them to successfully navigate the incentive gradient. This can be changed by their self-awareness and force of will, but some who do that change will find themselves in the unfortunate position of being worse-off for it.... (read more)
I think you're looking for Thurston's "On proof and progress in mathematics": https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236
I think I may agree with the status version of the anti-hypocrisy flinch. It's the epistemic version I was really wanting to argue against.
Ok yeah, I think my concern was mostly with the status version-- or rather that there's a general sensor that might combine those things, and the parts of that related to status and social management are really important, so you shouldn't just turn the sensor off and run things manually.
... That doesn't seem like treating it as being about epistemics to me. Why is it epistemically relevant? I think it's more like a naive mix of epistemics and status. Status norms in the back of your... (read more)
I will see if I can catch a fresh one in the wild and share it. I recognize your last paragraph as something I've experienced before, though, and I endorse the attempt to not let that grow into righteous indignation and annoyance without justification -- with that as the archetype, I think that's indeed a thing to try to improve.
Most examples that come to mind for me have to do with the person projecting identity, knowledge, or an aura of competence that I don't think is accurate. For instance holding someone else to a social standard that they don't meet, "I think person X has negative attribute Y" when... (read more)
As you say, there are certainly negative things that hypocrisy can be a signal of, but you recommend that we should just consider those things independently. I think trying to do this sounds really really hard. If we were perfect reasoners this wouldn't be a problem; the anti-hypocrisy norm should indeed just be the sum of those hidden signals. However, we're not; if you practice shutting down your automatic anti-hypocrisy norm, and replace it with a self-constructed non-automatic consideration of alternatives, then I think you'll do worse sometimes.
This has sort of a "valley of bad rationality" feel to me; I imagine trying to have legible, coherent thoughts about alternative... (read more)
P(vulcan mountain | you're not in vulcan desert) = 1/3
P(vulcan mountain | guard says "you're not in vulcan desert") = P(guard says "you're not in vulcan desert" | vulcan mountain) * P(vulcan mountain) / P(guard says "you're not in vulcan desert") = ((1/3) * (1/4)) / ((3/4) * (1/3)) = 1/3
Woops, you're right; nevermind! There are algorithms that do give different results, such as justinpombrio mentions above.