Comment author: Viliam_Bur 22 October 2014 06:20:35PM 3 points [-]

Good article! I would appreciate more examples from the real life.

Comment author: undermind 28 October 2014 12:17:26PM 0 points [-]

Thanks! :)

I know, and I also felt that was a weakness of this post. But examples of real life would be ways to beat the market, and if I knew how to beat the market, I'd be doing that, not writing about it.

Comment author: undermind 28 October 2014 12:57:55AM 11 points [-]

What impresses me is that this post not only argues persuasively for using LessWrong as social resource, but it has provided me with convenient links to many posts I otherwise would have missed that are pretty high-quality (both for choosing what to do with my life, and general quality).

Comment author: undermind 23 October 2014 10:20:38PM 47 points [-]

Survey done, including digit ratio. And I learned something new.

But not particularly confident in the accuracy of my measurement.

In response to Power and difficulty
Comment author: So8res 22 October 2014 08:47:10PM *  11 points [-]

Anything equally difficult should have equal payoff. Apparently. Clearly, this is not the world we live in.

[...]

(producing utility and its bastard cousin, money)

[...]

As instrumental rationalists, this is the territory we want to be in. We want to beat the market rate for turning effort into influence.

You are speaking my language. +1. I appreciate your style.

Reality is imbalanced. Video games and roleplaying games give people the impression that all options have pros and cons, and are roughly pretty equal: the Warrior is just about as powerful as the Wizard is just about as powerful as the Rogue. Real life doesn't work like this: intelligence and charisma are overpowered, and sometimes humanity finds exploits in the rules that let us send messages nigh-instantly around the world. (And when we do, reality doesn't fix the exploit; rather, society changes.)

I wish there was a table top game where everything was completely imbalanced and players are encouraged to break the mechanics as hard as they can (but be careful, because society at large may adopt whatever exploits are found, and the antagonists are trying to become really powerful too).

This begins to suggest the sunk cost fallacy may not really be a fallacy (sometimes).

I'm not sure I follow. Not all past costs are sunk, surely. But, in your example, if writing a second book gives you more influence than learning plumbing, then I don't see where the "sunk costs" (e.g. that you wrote a book once) come into the equation.

Comment author: undermind 22 October 2014 09:41:25PM *  1 point [-]

Yeah, that original phrase about sunk costs was pretty unsubstantiated. What I meant to say (which I've edited in) is that much of the time, past investments are not in fact sunk costs.

In response to Power and difficulty
Comment author: Princess_Stargirl 22 October 2014 05:01:16PM 10 points [-]

I don't nescessarily agree this happens in most media. Most superheros for example just have their powers for no reason (some "earn" them but most don't). In many stories if you are not born part-demon or a wizard you can never be something other than canonfodder. Even in stories where training is sueful people often get OP powers for no reason.

I actually think fiction overall presents being powerful as a two factor model. Hard work and unchangeable luck. In some domains the hard work dominates and in others the "genetic" stuff does. People randomly get very OP powers all the time in many anime (if you happen to eat a strong Logia or Lengendary Zoan fruit you are automatically very strong in One piece). the details might not match up but the two factor model is basically how skill works in the real world two. With the relative importance of the two factors differing per domain.

ec:

In harry Potter you cannot be "Strong" unless you are born a wizard. There is no getting around this. In the real world you cannot be a good mathematician with an IQ of 80. This is no way around this either.

Comment author: undermind 22 October 2014 08:53:39PM 2 points [-]

I guess I was trying to say that the hard work montage is one common narrative, but it is far from the only one.

And yes, there are inevitably constraints that get in the way of investing effort in any particular place, and correspondingly to gaining power by one particular means. But even when the path with the highest payoff is blocked, some of the remaining options will be more beneficial than others. For example, if someone has a low IQ but is strong, they could become a lumberjack, or they could become a henchman to their local supervillain.

In response to Power and difficulty
Comment author: undermind 22 October 2014 05:24:16AM *  6 points [-]

(My first post. I don't know if it's good enough for Main, but I thought I'd go for it. If you don't think so, move it and/or let me know.)

I would appreciate any feedback too!

Power and difficulty

21 undermind 22 October 2014 05:22AM

A specific bias that Lesswrongers may often get from fiction[1] is the idea that power is proportional to difficulty.  The more power something gives you, the harder it should be to get, right?

A mediocre student becomes a powerful mage through her terrible self-sacrifice and years of studying obscure scrolls. Even within the spells she can cast, the truly world-altering ones are those that demand the most laborious preparation, the most precise gestures, and the longest and most incomprehensible stream of syllables. A monk makes an arduous journey to ancient temples and learns secret techniques of spiritual oneness and/or martial asskickery, which require great dedication and self-knowledge. Otherwise, it would be cheating. The whole process of leveling up, of adding ever-increasing modifiers to die rolls, is based on the premise that power comes to those who do difficult things. And it's failsafe - no matter what you put your skill points in, you become better at something. It's a training montage, or a Hero's journey. As with other fictional evidence, these are not "just stories" -- they are powerful cultural narratives. This kind of narrative shapes moral choices[2] and identity. So where do we see this reflected in less obviously fictional contexts?

There's the rags-to-riches story -- the immigrant who came with nothing, but by dint of hard work, now owns a business. University engineering programs are notoriously tough, because you are gaining the ability to do a lot of things (and for signalling reasons). A writer got to where she is today because she wrote and revised and submitted and revised draft after draft after draft.

 

In every case, there is assumed to be a direct causal link between difficulty and power. Here, these are loosely defined. Roughly, "power" means "ability to have your way", and "difficulty" is "amount of work & sacrifice required." These can be translated into units of social influence - a.k.a money -- and investment, a.k.a. time, or money. In many cases, power is set by supply and demand -- nobody needs a wizard if they can all cast their own spells, and a doctor can command much higher prices if they're the only one in town. The power of royalty or other birthright follows a similar pattern - it's not "difficult", but it is scarce -- only a very few people have it, and it's close to impossible for others to get it.

Each individual gets to choose what difficult things they will try to do. Some will have longer or shorter payoffs, but each choice will have some return. And since power (partly) depends on everybody else's choices, neoclassical economics says that individuals' choices collectively determine a single market rate for the return on difficulty. So anything you do that's difficult should have the same payoff.

 

Anything equally difficult should have equal payoff. Apparently. Clearly, this is not the world we live in. Admittedly, there were some pretty questionable assumptions along the way, but it's almost-kind-of-reasonable to conclude that, if you just generalize from the fictional evidence. (Consider RPGs: They're designed to be balanced. Leveling up any class will get you to advance in power at a more-or-less equal rate.)

 

So how does reality differ from this fictional evidence? One direction is trivial: it's easy to find examples where what's difficult is not particularly powerful.

Writing a book is hard, and has a respectable payoff (depending on the quality of the book, publicity, etc.). Writing a book without using the letter "e", where the main character speaks only in palindromes, while typing in the dark with only your toes on a computer that's rigged to randomly switch letters around is much much more difficult, but other than perhaps gathering a small but freakishly devoted fanbase, it does not bring any more power/influence than writing any other book. It may be a sign that you are capable of more difficult things, and somebody may notice this and give you power, but this is indirect and unreliable. Similarly, writing a game in machine code or as a set of instructions for a Turing machine is certainly difficult, but also pretty dumb, and has no significant payoff beyond writing the game in a higher-level language. [Edit - thanks to TsviBT: This is assuming there already is a compiler and relevant modules. If you are first to create all of these, there might be quite a lot of benefit.]

On the other hand, some things are powerful, but not particularly difficult. On a purely physical level, this includes operating heavy machinery, or piloting drones. (I'm sure it's not easy, but the power output is immense). Conceptually, I think calculus comes in this category. It can provide a lot of insight into a lot of disparate phenomena (producing utility and its bastard cousin, money), but is not too much work to learn.

 

As instrumental rationalists, this is the territory we want to be in. We want to beat the market rate for turning effort into influence. So how do we do this?

This is a big, difficult question. I think it's a useful way to frame many of the goals of instrumental rationality. What major should I study? Is this relationship worthwhile? (Note: This may, if poorly applied, turn you into a terrible person. Don't apply it poorly.) What should I do in my spare time?

These questions are tough. But the examples of powerful-but-easy stuff suggest a useful principle: make use of what already exists. Calculus is powerful, but was only easy to learn because I'd already been learning math for a decade. Bulldozers are powerful, and the effort to get this power is minimal if all you have to do is climb in and drive. It's not so worthwhile, though, if you have to derive a design from first principles, mine the ore, invent metallurgy, make all the parts, and secure an oil supply first.

Similarly, if you're already a writer, writing a new book may gain you more influence than learning plumbing. And so on. This begins to suggest that we should not be too hasty to judge past investments as sunk costs. Your starting point matters in trying to find the closest available power boost. And as with any messy real-world problem, luck plays a major role, too.

 

Of course, there will always be some correlation between power and difficulty -- it's not that the classical economic view is wrong, there's just other factors at play. But to gain influence, you should in general be prepared to do difficult things. However, they should not be arbitrary difficult things -- they should be in areas you have specifically identified as having potential.

To make this more concrete, think of Methods!Harry. He strategically invests a lot of effort, usually at pretty good ratios -- the Gringotts money pump scheme, the True Patronus, his mixing of magic and science, and Partial Transfiguration.  Now that's some good fictional evidence.

 



[1] Any kind of fiction, but particularly fantasy, sci-fi, and neoclassical economics. All works of elegant beauty, with a more-or-less tenuous relationship to real life.

[2] Dehghani, M., Sachdeva, S., Ekhtiari, H., Gentner, D., Forbus, F. "The role of Cultural Narratives in Moral Decision Making." Proceedings of the 31th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 2009. 

 

 

Comment author: shminux 16 January 2014 01:49:19AM 5 points [-]

Upvoted before reading past the summary for sheer bravery.

Comment author: undermind 19 January 2014 09:55:51PM 1 point [-]

Upvoted before reading past the summary, but not really for bravery - more for sheer fun. Advocating "wrong" viewpoints, and coming up with counterintuitive solutions that nevertheless work, and in fact work better than conventional wisdom, is one of the best feelings I know.

Comment author: jimmy 16 January 2014 10:11:50AM *  25 points [-]

Anyone that know's me knows that I'm quite familiar with the dark arts. I've even used hypnosis to con Christians into Atheism a half dozen times. The tempting idea is that dark arts can be used for good - and that the ends justify the means. I've since changed my mind.

The thing is, even though I don't advocate dark arts for persuasion let alone rationality, I almost entirely agree with the actions you advocate. I just disagree strongly with the frame through which you look at them.

For example, I am heavily into what you call "changing terminal goals", however I disagree that I'm changing terminal goals. If I recognize that pursuing instrumental goal A for sake of "terminal" goal B is the best way to achieve goal B, I'll self modify in the way you describe. I'll also do that thing you frame as "being inconsistent" where I make sure to notice if chasing goal A is no longer the best way to achieve goal B, I self modify to stop chasing goal A. If you make sure to remember that step, goals are not sticky. You chase goal A "for its own sake" iff it is the best way to achieve goal B. That's what instrumental goals are.

The way I see it, the difference in motivation comes not from "terminal vs instrumental", but from how you're focusing your attention. In what you call "instrumental" mode, you aren't focusing solely on your instrumental goal. You're trying to work on your instrumental goal while you keep glancing over at your terminal goal. That's distracting, and of course it doesn't work well. If it's a long term goal of course you don't see immediate improvements - and so of course you lose motivation. What you call "hacking my goals to be terminal" I call "realizing at a gut level that in order to get what I want, I need to focus on this instrumental goal without expecting immediate results on my terminal goal"

But there are also downsides to allowing yourself to "fool yourself". In particular, through that frame, the thought is "it's false, but so what? It's useful!". That stops curiosity dead when you should be asking the question "if it's false, why is it so useful? Where's the mutual information that allows it to function as a control system?" and "what true beliefs do better?".

For example, your "nothing is beyond my grasp" belief. It's empowering, sure. Just because you recognize that it isn't technically true doesn't mean you should deprive yourself of that empowerment - of course. However, lying isn't necessary for that empowerment. The problem isn't that you believe you're defeat-able. The problem is that you fear failure. So instead of focusing on the task at hand, you keep glancing over at the possibility of failure when you should be keeping your eyes on the road. One of the big take home lessons from studying hypnotism is that It's always about direction of attention. Strip away the frames and motivations and look at where the attention is.

My version or your empowering belief is (to try to crudely translate into words) "I want to succeed. I might not, and if I don't, it will be truly disappointing. And that's okay. And even though I might fail, I might not and that would be truly amazing. So I'm going to throw myself at it without looking back". And my version is better. My version is more stable under assault.

My wrestling coach would spout the cliche "If you can't believe you'll win, you wont!". If I had bought into that, the moment reality slaps me in the face I'd lose grasp of my delusion and crumble. Instead, I laughed at the idea. I went into matches already accepting defeat and focusing on winning anyway - and it allowed me to win a few matches that no one thought I could possibly win.

Comment author: undermind 19 January 2014 09:51:42PM 9 points [-]

Please write your own article. This is worthy content, but thousand-word comments are an awful medium.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 17 January 2014 09:24:56AM 2 points [-]

I probably couldn't stop noticing that it was in fact one unlucky rabbit.

A rabbit's footprint, maybe.

Comment author: undermind 19 January 2014 09:47:39PM 2 points [-]

Not recommended with a Rabbi's foot, either.

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