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Privileging the Question

90 Qiaochu_Yuan 29 April 2013 06:30PM

Related to: Privileging the Hypothesis

Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.

-- Paul Graham

There's an old saying in the public opinion business: we can't tell people what to think, but we can tell them what to think about.

-- Doug Henwood

Many philosophers—particularly amateur philosophers, and ancient philosophers—share a dangerous instinct: If you give them a question, they try to answer it.

-- Eliezer Yudkowsky

Here are some political questions that seem to commonly get discussed in US media: should gay marriage be legal? Should Congress pass stricter gun control laws? Should immigration policy be tightened or relaxed? 

These are all examples of what I'll call privileged questions (if there's an existing term for this, let me know): questions that someone has unjustifiably brought to your attention in the same way that a privileged hypothesis unjustifiably gets brought to your attention. The questions above are probably not the most important questions we could be answering right now, even in politics (I'd guess that the economy is more important). Outside of politics, many LWers probably think "what can we do about existential risks?" is one of the most important questions to answer, or possibly "how do we optimize charity?" 

Why has the media privileged these questions? I'd guess that the media is incentivized to ask whatever questions will get them the most views. That's a very different goal from asking the most important questions, and is one reason to stop paying attention to the media. 

The problem with privileged questions is that you only have so much attention to spare. Attention paid to a question that has been privileged funges against attention you could be paying to better questions. Even worse, it may not feel from the inside like anything is wrong: you can apply all of the epistemic rationality in the world to answering a question like "should Congress pass stricter gun control laws?" and never once ask yourself where that question came from and whether there are better questions you could be answering instead.

I suspect this is a problem in academia too. Richard Hamming once gave a talk in which he related the following story:

Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, "Do you mind if I join you?" They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with!

Academics answer questions that have been privileged in various ways: perhaps the questions their advisor was interested in, or the questions they'll most easily be able to publish papers on. Neither of these are necessarily well-correlated with the most important questions. 

So far I've found one tool that helps combat the worst privileged questions, which is to ask the following counter-question:

What do I plan on doing with an answer to this question?

With the worst privileged questions I frequently find that the answer is "nothing," sometimes with the follow-up answer "signaling?" That's a bad sign. (Edit: but "nothing" is different from "I'm just curious," say in the context of an interesting mathematical or scientific question that isn't motivated by a practical concern. Intellectual curiosity can be a useful heuristic.)

(I've also found the above counter-question generally useful for dealing with questions. For example, it's one way to notice when a question should be dissolved, and asked of someone else it's one way to help both of you clarify what they actually want to know.)

Comments (282)

Recent updates to gwern.net (2012-2013)

61 gwern 18 March 2013 07:54PM

Previous: Recent updates to gwern.net (2011)

“But where shall wisdom be found? / And where is the place of understanding? / Man knoweth not the price thereof; neither is it found in the land of the living…for the price of wisdom is above rubies.”

As before, here is material I’ve worked on in the 477 days since my last update which LWers may find interesting. In roughly chronological & topical order, here are the major additions to gwern.net:

Transcribed or translated:

More technical:

Personal:

Comments (32)

Decision Theory FAQ

45 lukeprog 28 February 2013 02:15PM

Co-authored with crazy88. Please let us know when you find mistakes, and we'll fix them. Last updated 03-27-2013.

Contents:


1. What is decision theory?

Decision theory, also known as rational choice theory, concerns the study of preferences, uncertainties, and other issues related to making "optimal" or "rational" choices. It has been discussed by economists, psychologists, philosophers, mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists.

We can divide decision theory into three parts (Grant & Zandt 2009; Baron 2008). Normative decision theory studies what an ideal agent (a perfectly rational agent, with infinite computing power, etc.) would choose. Descriptive decision theory studies how non-ideal agents (e.g. humans) actually choose. Prescriptive decision theory studies how non-ideal agents can improve their decision-making (relative to the normative model) despite their imperfections.

For example, one's normative model might be expected utility theory, which says that a rational agent chooses the action with the highest expected utility. Replicated results in psychology describe humans repeatedly failing to maximize expected utility in particular, predictable ways: for example, they make some choices based not on potential future benefits but on irrelevant past efforts (the "sunk cost fallacy"). To help people avoid this error, some theorists prescribe some basic training in microeconomics, which has been shown to reduce the likelihood that humans will commit the sunk costs fallacy (Larrick et al. 1990). Thus, through a coordination of normative, descriptive, and prescriptive research we can help agents to succeed in life by acting more in accordance with the normative model than they otherwise would.

This FAQ focuses on normative decision theory. Good sources on descriptive and prescriptive decision theory include Stanovich (2010) and Hastie & Dawes (2009).

Two related fields beyond the scope of this FAQ are game theory and social choice theory. Game theory is the study of conflict and cooperation among multiple decision makers, and is thus sometimes called "interactive decision theory." Social choice theory is the study of making a collective decision by combining the preferences of multiple decision makers in various ways.

This FAQ draws heavily from two textbooks on decision theory: Resnik (1987) and Peterson (2009). It also draws from more recent results in decision theory, published in journals such as Synthese and Theory and Decision.

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Comments (455)

Need help with an MLP fanfiction with a transhumanist theme.

11 Salivanth 27 February 2013 11:57AM

 

EDIT: I am now taking arguments for alicornism. Alicornism being the placeholder term I've given to the stance that all ponies should be alicorns. Please PM me or post here if you have a good one, or an argument against one of anti-alicornism's strongest points: Overpopulation/over-use of resources, magical abuse/existential risk, or upheaval of the respect ponies have for their rulers due to their alicorn status. I would prefer general arguments for alicornism over counter-arguments if possible. Deathist / anti-alicornist arguments are still fine to post here.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure if this is worthy of a discussion post, but I figured, given the amount of people on LW who like My Little Pony, it would have at least as many potentially interested people as a regional meet-up thread would, so I figured I'd give it a shot. If this is too trivial or frivolous for LW, feel free to tell me and/or downvote, and I'll refrain from such threads in future. A place where I could go to find some help instead of the Discussion section would also be greatly appreciated in such a case.

So I had an idea for a one-shot or small novella, depending on how the plot developed, about an argument between Twilight and Celestia. Twilight finds out she's immortal now that she's an alicorn, and Twilight then decides that, given the standard anti-death concepts that immortality is good, death is bad, and so on, they should turn everyone who wants to be an alicorn into one.

The problem is, I'm having a very difficult time coming up with actual arguments for Celestia.

- Celestia herself is immortal, she's lived for well over a thousand years, and she isn't horrifically depressed, so clearly, immortal life is worth living and there's enough stuff to do with an extended lifespan.

- For the purposes of this fic, it's possible to turn anypony into an alicorn. I'm likely going to go with the idea that the spell can only be used a few times a year, but that's still enough to turn anyone who wants it into an alicorn within a couple of decades via exponentiation: The first targets can all be gifted unicorns who can be easily trained to use the magic.

- In most of the "Immortality sucks" fics I've read, the only real argument that immortality sucks is that you have to watch everyone else grow up and die. If a large majority of the population were turned alicorn, this wouldn't be a problem anymore.

- Nothing in canon suggests that there's any sort of religion in Equestria. Even in fanfics I've read, I've only read one fanfic where someone made up an afterlife that some ponies believed in, and in many more that I've read, Celestia's name is actually used in place of God in various sentences, like "Oh for Celestia's sake!" Thus, it's unlikely they'd believe in an afterlife: Both in canon and the majority of fanon, the closest thing to a God appears to be Celestia herself.

I've come up with arguments for Celestia by roleplaying the argument out by myself, but I haven't come up with anything that Twilight can't just shoot down, and I'd prefer if the argument wasn't just Celestia getting steamrolled, and I'd like to do this by strengthening Celestia's side, not weakening Twilight's.

Is the argument for deathism really that weak? I've read over the Harry vs. Dumbledore deathism argument in HPMOR several times looking for ideas, and IIRC Eliezer actually claimed he steel-manned Dumbledore's position, but I don't find anything Dumbledore says convincing in the slightest, and ended that chapter feeling that Harry was the clear winner in that debate, and that's with Dumbledore having access to arguments that Celestia doesn't, given that in the Potterverse, nobody actually knows what it's like to be immortal, and Dumbledore believes in an afterlife.

Some other arguments I've come up with for Celestia:

Argument: We can't just have a massive ruling class.

Response: There's no need for alicorns to be royalty. "Princess = Alicorn, Alicorn = Princess" is only something that law and tradition dictate: They can be changed. After all, Blueblood is a prince and not an alicorn, and it's certainly possible for an alicorn to NOT be royalty, if the princesses wanted.

Argument: Harder to keep the populace in line, if everyone has more power.

Response: Celestia's not exactly going around fighting criminals herself with her alicorn powers, so Celestia being much more powerful than others isn't necessary to keep the peace. If anything, an alicornified populace is MORE likely to be able to govern itself: Atm, a pegasus criminal can only be pursued effectively by about one-third of police officers, for example.

Argument: Overpopulation.

Response: One response to this is the idea that, starting a year or so from a royal edict, ponies who wish to be changed into alicorns aren't permitted to give birth more than once or twice. A broader response is that "overpopulation" isn't actually a reason to oppose alicornification, it's just a problem that has to be solved in order to do it. Saying "There'd be overpopulation" and then forgetting about the entire idea would be like Twilight saying that they didn't know how she was supposed to save the Crystal Empire from being banished again when she got given the task, and responding to this by saying "Oh well, guess that's it, we may as well pack up and go home." rather than trying to actually solve the problem. That said, this is the only truly legitimate argument I've come up with, an argument that requires real thought to fully defeat, rather than an argument that has an easy response leap to my mind.

Argument: Mortals wouldn't understand the consequence of their decision.

Response: Again, several arguments for this. Firstly, there's no reason to believe the alicorn transformation is irreversible, even if it's not currently known how to transform it back. Secondly, Celestia can already predict the consequences, and since she thinks HER life is worth living, clearly there's a solid chance that other ponies will have their lives worth living as well.

So, the questions to ask:

Are there good arguments for Celestia I haven't thought of?

Are the arguments I've already posited sufficient to not straw-man the lifeism position, and to allow for a reasonable argument?

EDIT: I am now taking arguments for alicornism. Alicornism being the placeholder term I've given to the stance that all ponies should be alicorns. Please PM me or post here if you have a good one, or an argument against one of anti-alicornism's strongest points: Overpopulation/over-use of resources, magical abuse/existential risk, or upheaval of the respect ponies have for their rulers due to their alicorn status. I would prefer general arguments for alicornism over counter-arguments if possible. Deathist / anti-alicornist arguments are still fine to post here.

 

Comments (74)

Case Study: the Death Note Script and Bayes

24 gwern 04 January 2013 04:33AM

"Who wrote the Death Note script?"

I give a history of the 2009 leaked script, discuss internal & external evidence for its authenticity including stylometrics; and then give a simple step-by-step Bayesian analysis of each point. We finish with high confidence in the script's authenticity, discussion of how this analysis was surprisingly enlightening, and what followup work the analysis suggests would be most valuable.

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Comments (43)

2012: Year in Review

40 Kaj_Sotala 03 January 2013 11:56AM

The beginning of a new year is a customary time to take a look back and consider what has happened during the last 12 months. And while the time for doing so is admittedly rather arbitrary - after all, "years" do not really exist in the universe, just in our heads - it is useful and fun to review one's accomplishments every now and then. And a time when everyone else is doing it gives us a nice Schelling point for joining in, so we can pretend that it's not quite that arbitrary.

So what might be some noteworthy things that happened on Less Wrong in 2012 that could be worth mentioning?

Site upgrades

First, I would like to say "thank you" to all the people working on keeping this site running and helping it make increasingly more awesome! This obviously includes pretty much everyone who comments, posts and writes here, but particularly also the folks at Trikeapps, and everyone who contributes updates to the site's codebase. There were several site upgrades in 2012, four of which were major enough to get separate announcements:

Less Wrong's new front page was rolled out in March, thanks to work by matt. One can easily access a number of site features from the brain graphic, and there's a convenient introduction under it, together with links to featured articles and recent promoted articles. Hopefully, this has made it easier for newcomers to get familiar with the site.

The "Best" sorting system for comments was introduced in July. The work was done by John Simon, and integrated by Wes. Whereas the old default sorting system, "Top", favored old comments that had already floated to the top and were thus more likely to get even more upvotes, "Best" attempts to give newer comments a fairer chance.

In August we got the ability to show parent comments on /comments. The work was done by John Simon, and integrated by wmoore. This change makes it far easier to grasp the context of things seen on the recent comments page, given that we now see the old comment that the new comments are replying to.

And finally, starting from September, we have been able to write comments that contain polls! Work on the code was originally began by jimrandomh, finished later by John Simon, and deployed by wmoore and matt. Although people had long been taking advantage of comment vote counts as a crude way of creating their own polls, this change makes things far easier.

Meetup booklet

In June, we published the How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup booklet, which I wrote together with lukeprog, and which got its graphical design from Stanislaw Boboryk. Numerous other people also helped, both by providing advice and by contributing pictures to it. In addition to general advice on running a meetup, it contains various games and exercises as well as case studies and examples from real meetup groups from around the world.

Index of original research

Starting from October, lukeprog has maintained a curated index of Less Wrong posts containing significant original research. It contains numerous posts, organized under categories such as general philosophy, decision theory / AI architectures / mathematical logic, ethics, and AI risk strategy. Last updated on December 17th, it now links to a total of 78 different posts.

Who are we?

In November and December, Yvain continued his hard work in holding the yearly survey. Among other interesting details, around 90% of us are male, 55% are from the USA, 41% are students and 31% are doing for-profit work. See the 2012 survey results for many more details.

Most popular posts of 2012

On LW, people tend to judge the popularity of a post by the number of upvotes that it has. But this only reflects the opinion of the registered users who care enough to vote. For purposes of this article, we were interested in finding out the posts that had made the biggest impact on the whole Internet. Although it's not a perfect measure either, we decided to measure popularity by the number of unique pageviews, as reported by Google Analytics.

Overall, in 2012 Less Wrong had over eight million unique pageviews and close to two million unique visitors (8,225,509 and 1,756,899, respectively). Of the posts that were written in 2012, the most popular ones were...

#10: Get Curious, in which lukeprog suggests that one of the most important rationality skills is being genuinely curious about things, instead of just jumping to the first answer that comes to your mind and leaving it at that. He suggests a three-step approach for actually becoming more curious: first, feel that you don't already know the answer, then start wanting to know the answer, and finally sprint headlong to reality. Together with a number of exercises intended to make you better at these steps, this article made a lot of folks curious about Less Wrong and caused people to sprint headlong to the post 10,850 times.

#9: Being curious about things means that you genuinely want to know the truth. That makes it useful to have a good grasp of The Useful Idea of Truth. This article by Eliezer Yudkowsky starts the Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners sequence by explaining what exactly it means for something to be "true". In order to avoid spoiling the article's "meditations" for anyone who hasn't read it yet, I will not attempt to summarize the answer. I'll only suggest that one definition for "truth" could be the correctness of the claim that this post was viewed 11,161 times.

#8: Having defined truth, we can move on to ask, what are numbers? And in what sense is "2 + 2 = 4" meaningful or true? Eliezer Yudkowsky's Logical Pinpointing attempts to answer this question, partially through the cute device of conversing with an imaginary logician who understands logic perfectly but has no grasp of numbers. As they converse, they define the rules according to which arithmetic works. I'm going to skip the obvious pun due to it being too obvious, and only say that this article was viewed 12,606 times.

#7: Now that we're curious and understand both the meaning of truth and of numbers, it stands to reason that we should Be Happier than before. Or maybe not, since Klevador's article does not actually mention "understand obscure philosophy" as a way of getting happier. What it does mention is a big list of other things that have been shown to increase happiness. We first get a list of brief recommendations a few sentences long, and then somewhat longer excerpts of the relevant literature. There's also a full list of references. Let's hope that the 14,178 views that this post got made someone happier.

#6: Getting into more controversial territory, lukeprog advises us to Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant. Philosophy is getting increasingly diseased and irrelevant, he argues, and the cure for that involves incorporating more actual science and rationality into the standard philosopher curriculum. If the discussion on Hacker News is any indication, this post got a lot of people incensed, which might help explain why it got 14,334 views.

#5: Now that we got started on calling whole disciplines diseased, let's look at Diseased disciplines: the strange case of the inverted chart. Morendil's post begins with a hypothetical example of numerous academics all citing a particular source, which doesn't actually contain the intended reference... and then the intended source doesn't actually have the data to back up its claim, either. But that's just a hypothetical example, right? Well, not really, which helped this post get 17,385 views.

#4: Interestingly, our fourth-most-popular post isn't actually an original contribution as such. Grognor's transcript of Richard Feynman on Why Questions discusses the nature of explanations, and the fact that there are some things which simply cannot be adequately explained in terms of pre-existing knowledge. Instead, one has to learn entirely new concepts in order to comprehend them. Hopefully, at least this much was understood on the 18,402 times that the post was viewed.

#3: From physics to neuroscience: kalla724's Attention control is critical for changing/increasing/altering motivation explores the effect of attention on neural plasticity, including the plasticity of motivation. It explains that paying attention to something can increase the amount of brain circuitry dedicated to processing that something, generally by repurposing nearby less-used circuitry. This also has practical applications, such as in helping to explain why Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works. That earned the post 21,136 views.

#2: I should be writing this post instead of browsing Facebook. Fortunately, lukeprog has a post titled My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination. Based on the equation of Motivation = (Expectancy * Value) / (Impulsiveness * Delay), the algorithm involves first noticing that you are procrastinating, then guessing which part of the motivation equation is causing you the most trouble, and then trying several methods for attacking that specific problem. I guess that a lot of people shared this on Facebook where other procrastinators saw it, because the article got 38,637 views.

#1: And finally... the most read 2012 article on the site was Yvain's The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world?, where he defined the noncentral fallacy as "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member." Which sounds pretty abstract, but the political examples in the post should make it clearer. The politics probably helped contribute to this post's achievement of 41,932 views.

Most popular all-time posts

In addition to looking at only the posts that were made in 2012, people might be interested in knowing which posts were the most viewed in 2012 overall. The top three ones were all written by lukeprog, and we can see that two of them were closely related to the top-scorers which were written last year.

How to be Happy is LW's run-away favorite article and was viewed more than every page on LW except the home page and the discussion homepage. That is, 228,747 times! The Best Textbooks on Every Subject comes as a distant second at 98,011 views. And the third one is How to Beat Procrastination, at 66,587 views.

So I guess the take-home message is: people want to be happier, smarter, and more productive. Let's keep becoming those things in 2013!

Comments (34)

Social status hacks from The Improv Wiki

40 lsparrish 21 March 2012 02:56AM

I can't remember how I found this, just that I was amazed at how rational and near-mode it is on a topic where most of the information one usually encounters is hopelessly far.

LessWrong wiki link on the same topic: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Status

The Improv Wiki

Status

Status is pecking order. The person who is lower in status defers to the person who is higher in status.

Status is party established by social position--e.g. boss and employee--but mainly by the way you interact. If you interact in a way that says you are not to be trifled with, the other person must adjust to you, then you are establishing high status. If you interact in a way that says you are willing to go along, you don't want responsibility, that's low status. A boss can play low status or high status. An employee can play low status or high status.

Status is established in every line and gesture, and changes continuously. Status is something that one character plays to another at a particular moment. If you convey that the other person must not cross you on what you're saying now, then you are playing high status to that person in that line. Your very next line might come out low status, as you suggest willingness to defer about something else.

If you analyze your most successful scenes, it's likely they involved several status changes between the players. Therefore, one path to great scenes is to intentionally change status. You can raise or lower your own status, or the status of the other player. The more subtly you can do this, the better the scene.

High-status behaviors

When walking, assuming that other people will get out of your path.

Making eye contact while speaking.

Not checking the other person's eyes for a reaction to what you said.

Having no visible reaction to what the other person said. (Imagine saying something to a typical Clint Eastwood character. You say something expecting a reaction, and you get--nothing.)

Speaking in complete sentences.

Interrupting before you know what you are going to say.

Spreading out your body to full comfort. Taking up a lot of space with your body.

Looking at the other person with your eyes somewhat down (head tilted back a bit to make this work), creating the feeling that you are a parent talking to a child.

Talking matter-of-factly about things that the other person finds displeasing or offensive.

Letting your body be vulnerable, exposing your neck and torso to the other person.

Moving comfortably and gracefully.

Keeping your hands away from your face.

Speaking authoritatively, with certainty.

Making decisions for a group; taking responsibility.

Giving or withholding permission.

Evaluating other people's work.

Speaking cryptically, not adjusting your speech to be easily understood by the other person (except that mumbling does not count). E.g. saying, "Chomper not right" with no explanation of what you mean or what you want the other person to do.

Being surrounded by an entourage, especially of people who are physically smaller than you.

A "high-status specialist" conveys in every word and gesture, "Don't come near me, I bite."

Low-status behaviors

When walking, moving out of other people's path.

Looking away from the other person's eyes.

Briefly checking the other person's eyes to see if they reacted positively to what you said.

Speaking in halting, incomplete sentences. Trailing off, editing your sentences as you got.

Sitting or standing uncomfortably in order to adjust to the other person and give them space. Pulling inward to give the other person more room. If you're tall, you might need to scrunch down a bit to indicate that you're not going to use your height against the other person.

Looking up toward the other person (head tilted forward a bit to make this work), creating the feeling that you are a child talking to a parent.

Dancing around your words (beating around the bush) when talking about something that will displease the other person.

Shouting as an attempt to intimidate the other person. This is low status because it suggests that you expect resistance.

Crouching your body as if to ward off a blow; protecting your face, neck, and torso.

Moving awkwardly or jerkily, with unnecessary movements.

Touching your face or head.

Avoiding making decisions for the group; avoiding responsibility.

Needing permission before you can act.

Adjusting the way you say something to help the other person understand; meeting the other person on their (cognitive) ground; explaining yourself. E.g. "Could you please adjust the chomper? That's the gadget on the kitchen counter immediately to the left of the toaster. If you just give it a slight rap on the top, that should adjust it."

A "low-status specialist" conveys in every word and gesture, "Please don't bite me, I'm not worth the trouble."

Raising another person's status

To raise another person's status is to establish them as high in the pecking order in your group (possibly just the two of you).

• Ask their permission to do something.
• Ask their opinion about something.
• Ask them for advice or help.
• Express gratitude for something they did.
• Apologize to them for something you did.
• Agree that they are right and you were wrong.
• Defer to their judgement without requiring proof.
• Address them with a fancy title or honorific (even "Mr." or "Sir" works very well).
• Downplay your own achievement or attribute in comparison to theirs. "Your wedding cake is so much whiter than mine."
• Do something incompetent in front of them and then apologize for it or act sheepish about it.
• Mention a failure or shortcoming of your own. "I was supposed to go to an audition today, but I was late. They said I was wrong for the part anyway."
• Compliment them in a way that suggests appreciation, not judgement. "Wow, what a beautiful cat you have!"
• Obey them unquestioningly.
• Back down in a conflict.
• Move out of their way, bow to them, lower yourself before them.
• Tip your hat to them.
• Lose to them at something competitive, like a game (or any comparison).
• Wait for them.
• Serve them; do manual labor for them.

Tip: Whenever you bring an audience member on stage, always raise their status, never lower it.

Lowering another person's status

To lower another person's status is to attack or discredit their right to be high in the pecking order. Another word for "lowering someone's status" is "humiliating them."

• Criticize something they did.
• Contradict them. Tell them they are wrong. Prove it with facts and logic.
• Correct them.
• Insult them.
• Give them unsolicited advice.
• Approve or disapprove of something they did or some attribute of theirs. "Your cat has both nose and ear points. That is acceptable." Anything that sets you up as the judge lowers their status, even "Nice work on the Milligan account, Joe."
• Shout at them.
• Tell them what to do.
• Ignore what they said and talk about something else, especially when they've said something that requires an answer. E.g. "Have you seen my socks?" "The train leaves in five minutes."
• One-up them. E.g. have a worse problem than the one they described, have a greater past achievement than theirs, have met a more famous celebrity, earn more money, do better than them at something they're good at, etc.
• Win: beat them at something competitive, like a game (or any comparison).
• Announce something good about yourself or something you did. "I went to an audition today, and I got the part!"
• Disregard their opinion. E.g. "You'd better not smoke while pumping gas, it's a fire hazard." Flick, light, puff, puff, pump, pump.
• Talk sarcastically to them.
• Make them wait for you.
• When they've fallen behind you, don't wait for them to catch up, just push on and get further out of sync.
• Disobey them.
• Violate their space.
• Beat them up. Beating them up verbally, not physically as in martial arts or how you learned UFC fighting in an gym, in front of other people, especially their wife, girlfriend, and/or children, is particularly status-lowering.
• In a conflict, make them back down.
• Taunt them. Tease them.

The basic status-lowering act

Laugh at them. (Not with them.)

The basic status-raising act

Be laughed at by them.

Second to that is laughing with them at someone else.

(Notice that those are primarily what comedians do.)

Note that behaviors that raise another person's status are not necessarily low-status behaviors, and behaviors that lower another person's status are not necessarily high-status behaviors. People at any status level raise and lower each other all the time. They can do so in ways that convey high or low status.

For example, shouting at someone lowers their status but is itself a low-status behavior.

Objects and environments also have high or low status, although this is seldom explored. So explore it. Make something cheap and inconsequential high status. (This fingernail clipping came from Graceland!) Or bring down the status of a high status item. (Casually toss a 2 carat diamond ring on your jewelry pile.)

Source: http://greenlightwiki.com/improv/Status
Retrieved 20 March 2012

Comments (39)

CFAR’s Inaugural Fundraising Drive

10 Dr_Manhattan 18 December 2012 01:19AM

http://appliedrationality.org/fundraising/

(interested in hearing how other donors frame allocation between SI and CFAR)

Comments (3)

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 17, chapter 86

9 Alsadius 17 December 2012 07:19AM

Edit: New thread posted here. 

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 86. The previous thread  has long passed 500 comments. 

There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.) 

The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag.  Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system.  Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.

As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

 

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Why you must maximize expected utility

18 Benja 13 December 2012 01:11AM

This post explains von Neumann-Morgenstern (VNM) axioms for decision theory, and what follows from them: that if you have a consistent direction in which you are trying to steer the future, you must be an expected utility maximizer. I'm writing this post in preparation for a sequence on updateless anthropics, but I'm hoping that it will also be independently useful.

The theorems of decision theory say that if you follow certain axioms, then your behavior is described by a utility function. (If you don't know what that means, I'll explain below.) So you should have a utility function! Except, why should you want to follow these axioms in the first place?

A couple of years ago, Eliezer explained how violating one of them can turn you into a money pump — how, at time 11:59, you will want to pay a penny to get option B instead of option A, and then at 12:01, you will want to pay a penny to switch back. Either that, or the game will have ended and the option won't have made a difference.

When I read that post, I was suitably impressed, but not completely convinced: I would certainly not want to behave one way if behaving differently always gave better results. But couldn't you avoid the problem by violating the axiom only in situations where it doesn't give anyone an opportunity to money-pump you? I'm not saying that would be elegant, but is there a reason it would be irrational?

It took me a while, but I have since come around to the view that you really must have a utility function, and really must behave in a way that maximizes the expectation of this function, on pain of stupidity (or at least that there are strong arguments in this direction). But I don't know any source that comes close to explaining the reason, the way I see it; hence, this post.

I'll use the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms, which assume probability theory as a foundation (unlike the Savage axioms, which actually imply that anyone following them has not only a utility function but also a probability distribution). I will assume that you already accept Bayesianism.

*

Epistemic rationality is about figuring out what's true; instrumental rationality is about steering the future where you want it to go. The way I see it, the axioms of decision theory tell you how to have a consistent direction in which you are trying to steer the future. If my choice at 12:01 depends on whether at 11:59 I had a chance to decide differently, then perhaps I won't ever be money-pumped; but if I want to save as many human lives as possible, and I must decide between different plans that have different probabilities of saving different numbers of people, then it starts to at least seem doubtful that which plan is better at 12:01 could genuinely depend on my opportunity to choose at 11:59.

So how do we formalize the notion of a coherent direction in which you can steer the future?

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