Previously: Generalizing From One Example

There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like?

Upon hearing this, my response was "How the stars was this actually a real debate? Of course we have mental imagery. Anyone who doesn't think we have mental imagery is either such a fanatical Behaviorist that she doubts the evidence of her own senses, or simply insane." Unfortunately, the professor was able to parade a long list of famous people who denied mental imagery, including some leading scientists of the era. And this was all before Behaviorism even existed.

The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images.

Summary: I do not have visual mental imagery. I want it. How do I get it? What exercises, if any, will help?

In further detail... Here's Francis Galton's Statistics of Mental Imagery paper. I'm not quite at the 3% level of completely unable to form mental images, but I'm close. In particular there are three times I have vivid, sharp mental imagery, and the existence of such times tells me I have the brain hardware to visualize. It's enough to let me know that I want it all the time. Unfortunately I don't know how to get it. And searching online has proven difficult and frustrating... for example this article is first of all about a different meaning of "visualize", it's talking about some kind of self-help motivational thingy, and second of all it starts by saying "How to Visualize: I want you to relax and close your eyes. Picture a hot, sunny day at the beach."

Full Stop. Halt, Catch Fire and Burn.

That's already too far. For those of us who don't visualize, practice definitely does not consist of pulling up mental images, playing with them in new ways, and expanding our imagination. I'm very good at imagination in some ways, but I lack that first ability to pull up a mental image. That's what I want to learn how to have!

Here is a description of what I can do, what I have tried, what I have learned, etc.

I see vivid visual mental imagery in 3 situations:

1. While dreaming. My recollection of dreams has that I see fairly vivid, sharp, whole-scene imagery.
2. Just before sleep. When I am in a certain almost-sleeping state, I can tell my mind to picture something - like an apple, or a horse - and I will often be able to see that thing vividly, briefly, and then it morphs into a scene. A beach with an ocean, or a pleasant clearing in a forest. If I try to alter the scene, like putting a beach towel and umbrella on the beach, the scene changes and morphs in some way but seemingly without regard to the changes I requested. Maybe my POV starts moving forward down a newly created path in the forest, for example.
3. During meditation. Sometimes I feel like I'm in exactly the same mental state during meditation as I am just before sleep, except without the tiredness. The imagery has the same characteristics in both situations.

The first four chapters of my MLP fanfiction are now online on fimfiction.net. Unlike Friendship Is Optimal (fim link), which focuses on how MLP might impact the trajectory of AI, or Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me (fim link), which focuses on how a rationalist might impact the trajectory of Equestria, I wanted to ask: what would the MLP Way look like? How would MLP impact rationality, and what would rationalist MLP look like?

This has been over a year in the making, off and on, and I've received significant help in writing it. In particular, I'd like to thank the pre-readers and editors who have helped polish it, and everyone who's shown interest; that has been a great help in motivating me to work on this rather than other projects.

There's much more to come; I should be able to maintain at least a chapter a week for the medium term, and hope to post more frequently than that. If you're interested in pre-reading / editing chapters to come, let me know!

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2871#comic

Beautiful, with a high emotional impact. A more poetical verison of EY's baseball bat metaphor.

Edit:

Link corrected, I apparently just copy-pasted and didn't notice I was linking to the main page.

• Eliezer Yudkowsky was once attacked by a Moebius strip. He beat it to death with the other side, non-violently.
• Inside Eliezer Yudkowsky's pineal gland is not an immortal soul, but another brain.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky's favorite food is printouts of Rice's theorem.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky's favorite fighting technique is a roundhouse dustspeck to the face.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky once brought peace to the Middle East from inside a freight container, through a straw.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky once held up a sheet of paper and said, "A blank map does not correspond to a blank territory". It was thus that the universe was created.
• If you dial Chaitin's Omega, you get Eliezer Yudkowsky on the phone.
• Unless otherwise specified, Eliezer Yudkowsky knows everything that he isn't telling you.
• Somewhere deep in the microtubules inside an out-of-the-way neuron somewhere in the basal ganglia of Eliezer Yudkowsky's brain, there is a little XML tag that says awesome.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky is the Muhammad Ali of one-boxing.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky is a 1400 year old avatar of the Aztec god Aixitl.
• The game of "Go" was abbreviated from "Go Home, For You Cannot Defeat Eliezer Yudkowsky".
• When Eliezer Yudkowsky gets bored, he pinches his mouth shut at the 1/3 and 2/3 points and pretends to be a General Systems Vehicle holding a conversation among itselves. On several occasions he has managed to fool bystanders.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky has a swiss army knife that has folded into it a corkscrew, a pair of scissors, an instance of AIXI which Eliezer once beat at tic tac toe, an identical swiss army knife, and Douglas Hofstadter.
• If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is not a fact about the phenomenon; it just means I am not Eliezer Yudkowsky.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky has no need for induction or deduction. He has perfected the undiluted master art of duction.
• There was no ice age. Eliezer Yudkowsky just persuaded the planet to sign up for cryonics.
• There is no spacetime symmetry. Eliezer Yudkowsky just sometimes holds the territory upside down, and he doesn't care.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky has no need for doctors. He has implemented a Universal Curing Machine in a system made out of five marbles, three pieces of plastic, and some of MacGyver's fingernail clippings.
• Before Bruce Schneier goes to sleep, he scans his computer for uploaded copies of Eliezer Yudkowsky.

If you know more Eliezer Yudkowsky facts, post them in the comments.

Link. Nothing surprising considering previous work on the subject, but a good reminder.

A study by three scientists in the American Political Science Review finds that voters are not competent at accurately evaluating incumbent performance and are easily swayed by rhetoric, unrelated circumstances and recent events.

Gregory Huber, Seth Hill, and Gabriel Lenz constructed a 32-round game where players received payments from a computer "allocator." The goal is to maximize the value of those payments.

Halfway through, at round sixteen, the player had to decide whether to get a new allocator or to stick with the old one.

The allocators pay out over a normal distribution based on a randomly selected mean. Getting a new allocator means that a new mean is selected. This was meant to simulate an election based on performance. 

The group ran three experiments where they changed some of the rules of the game in order to find out how voters could be manipulated or confused over performance. Essentially, how good were voters at accurately analyzing the performance of the "allocator?" 

• The first experiment merely alerted the player at round twelve that they would have the chance to pick a new allocator at round sixteen. This "election in November" reminder made the player weight recent performance in rounds 12-16 over earlier performance in rounds 1-12.

• The second experiment involved a lottery held at round eight or round sixteen. The payout was either -5000, 0, or 5000 tokens. The participant was told that the lottery was totally unrelated to the current allocator, but players still rewarded or punished their current allocator based on their lottery performance.

• The third experiment primed the player with a question right before the election. The question took an adapted form of either Ronald Reagan's "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" or John F. Kennedy's "The question you have to decide on November 8 is, is it good enough? Are you satisfied?" 

The conclusion: 

Participants overweight recent performance when made aware of the choice to retain an incumbent closer to election rather than distant from it (experiment 1), allowed unrelated events that affected their welfare to influence evaluations of incumbents (experiment 2), and were influenced by rhetoric to focus less on cumulative incumbent performance (experiment 3).

If you were ever wondering why Congress has a 95% incumbency rate despite an approval rating in the high teens, this study may be worth a read. 

I don't mean to claim that there should be a conflict.

Most likely the conflict arises because of many things, such as 1)Women having been ostracized for much of our society's existence 2)People failing at the is-ought problem, and committing the Naturalistic Fallacy 3)Lots of media articles saying unbelievably naïve evolutionary statements as scientific fact 4)Feminists as a group being defensive 5)Specially defensive when it comes to what is said to be natural. 6) General disregard by people, and politically engaged people (see The Blank Slate, by Steve Pinker) of the existence of a non Tabula Rasa nature. 7) Lack of patience of Evolutionary Psychologists to make peace and explain themselves for the things that journalists, not them, claimed.  and others...

But the fact is, the conflict arose. It has only bad consequences as far as I could see, such as people fighting over each other, breaking friendships, and prejudice of great intensity on both sides.

How to avoid this conflict?  Should someone write a treatise on Feminist Evolutionary Psychology?  Should we get Leda Cosmides to talk about women liberation? 

There are obviously no incompatibilities between reality and the moral claims of feminism. So whichever facts about evolutionary psychology are found to be true with the science's development, they should be made compatible. Compatibilism is possible.

But will the scientific community pull it off?

Related: Pinker Versus Spelke - The Science of Gender and Science

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html

David Buss and Cindy Meston - Why do Women Have Sex?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0sqg3EHm8

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/09/the_nanny_state_didnt_show_up.html

Saw this and I thought it went so well with Beyond the Reach of God and Blue and Green on Regulation that I just had to post it here. It definitely articulates some of the frustrations I've had with  people who break out in a rash of Libertarianism over one (on the surface) silly law being passed and reported on and then not:

A. Using the Principle of Charity to see what the opponent is really about. Even if it's silly, it shouldn't be *that* silly. See Policy Debates Should Not Appear to be One Sided.

B. Considering how it applies in the larger context. You should be free to buy big sodas but not [insert literally anything the government regulates here, which is a ton of stuff]. Why is this sillier than the other thing? See anything Less Wrong has written about the absurdity heuristic.

C. Thinking about your source of information, noting the feeling it's giving you, why it's giving you that feeling. Then realizing that it was specifically designed to give that feeling. If they did this, then dropping the line of thought or, deciding that they're so much smarter than the people in charge. *And then forgetting that the fact that they feel that was part of the plan of those who reported it, too.* Seriously, The Last Psychiatrist is great for that stuff.

In light of recent (and potential) events, I wanted to start a discussion here about a certain method of handling conflicts on this site's discussion threads, and hopefully form a consensus on when to use the measure described in the title.  Even if the discussion has no impact on site policy ("executive veto"), I hope administrators will at least clarify when such a measure will be used, and for what reason.

I also don't want to taint or "anchor" the discussion by offering hypothetical situations or arguments for one position or another.  Rather, I simply want to ask: Under what conditions should a specific poster, "Alice" be prohibited from replying directly to the arguments in a post/comment made by another poster, "Bob"?  (Note: this is referring specifically to replies to ideas and arguments Bob has advanced, not general comments about Bob the person, which should probably go under much closer scrutiny because of the risk of incivility.)

Please offer your ideas and thoughts here on when this measure should be used.

So, I were looking at this, and then suddenly this thing happened.

EDIT:

New version! I updated the link above to it as well. Added LOADS and LOADS of new content, although I'm not entirely sure if it's actually more fun (my guess is there's more total fun due to varity, but that it's more diluted).

I ended up working on this basically the entire day to day, and implemented practically all my ideas I have so far, except for some grammar issues that'd require disproportionately much work. So unless there are loads of suggestions or my brain comes up with lots of new ideas over the next few days, this may be the last version in a while and I may call it beta and ask for spell-check. Still alpha as of writing this thou.

Since there were some close calls already, I'll restate this explicitly: I'd be easier for everyone if there weren't any forks for at least a few more days, even ones just for spell-checking. After that/I move this to beta feel more than free to do whatever you want.

Thanks to everyone who commented! ^_^

old Source, old version, latest source

^{Credits: http://lesswrong.com/lw/d2w/cards_against_rationality/ , http://lesswrong.com/lw/9ki/shit_rationalists_say/ , various people commenting on this article with suggestions, random people on the bay12 forums that helped me with the engine this is a descendent from ages ago.}

This is based on a discussion in #lesswrong a few months back, and I am not sure how to resolve it.

Setup: suppose the world is populated by two groups of people, one just wants to be left alone (labeled Jews), the other group hates the first one with passion and want them dead (labeled Nazis). The second group is otherwise just as "good" as the first one (loves their relatives, their country and is known to be in general quite rational). They just can't help but hate the other guys (this condition is to forestall the objections like "Nazis ought to change their terminal values"). Maybe the shape of Jewish noses just creeps the hell out of them, or something. Let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that there is no changing that hatred.

Is it rational to exterminate the Jews to improve the Nazi's quality of life? Well, this seems like a silly question. Of course not! Now, what if there are many more Nazis than Jews? Is there a number large enough where exterminating Jews would be a net positive utility for the world? Umm... Not sure... I'd like to think that probably not, human life is sacred! What if some day their society invents immortality, then every death is like an extremely large (infinite?) negative utility!

Fine then, not exterminating. Just send them all to concentration camps, where they will suffer in misery and probably have a shorter lifespan than they would otherwise. This is not an ideal solutions from the Nazi point of view, but it makes them feel a little bit better. And now the utilities are unquestionably comparable, so if there are billions of Nazis and only a handful of Jews, the overall suffering decreases when the Jews are sent to the camps.

This logic is completely analogous to that in the dust specks vs torture discussions, only my "little XML labels", to quote Eliezer, make it more emotionally charged. Thus, if you are a utilitarian anti-specker, you ought to decide that, barring changing Nazi's terminal value of hating Jews, the rational behavior is to herd the Jews into concentration camps, or possibly even exterminate them, provided there are enough Nazi's in the world who benefit from it.

This is quite a repugnant conclusion, and I don't see a way of fixing it the way the original one is fixed (to paraphrase Eliezer, "only lives worth celebrating are worth creating").

EDIT: Thanks to CronoDAS for pointing out that this is known as the 1000 Sadists problem. Once I had this term, I found that lukeprog has mentioned it on his old blog.