All of curi's Comments + Replies

curi40

they're willing to accept ideas even before they've been explored in depth

People also reject ideas before they've been explored in depth. I've tried to discuss similar issues with LW before but the basic response was roughly "we like chaos where no one pays attention to whether an argument has ever been answered by anyone; we all just do our own thing with no attempt at comprehensiveness or organizing who does what; having organized leadership of any sort, or anyone who is responsible for anything, would be irrational" (plus some suggestions that I'm lo... (read more)

curi10

Anecdote time: after a long discussion about the existence of any form of induction , on a CR forum, someone eventually popped up who had asked KRP the very question, after bumping into him at a conference many years ago , and his reply was that it existed , but wasn't suitable for science.

Source?

curi10

What anyone else thinks? I am very familiar with popular CR since I used to hang out in the same forums as Curi. I've also read some if the great man's works.

Which forums? Under what name?

curi40

Li and Vitanyi write:

Can a thing be simple under one definition of simplicity and not simple under another? The contemporary philosopher Karl R. Popper (1902– 1994) has said that Occam’s razor is without sense, since there is no objective criterion for simplicity. Popper states that every such proposed criterion will necessarily be biased and subjective.

There's no citation. There's one Popper book in the references section, LScD, but it doesn't contain the string "occam" (case insensitive search).

I also searched a whole folder of many Popper books and ... (read more)

0Periergo
Try searching "parsimony" maybe? Another way to express Occam.
2Richard_Kennaway
Chapter 7 of LScD is about simplicity, but he does not express there the views that Li and Vitanyi attribute to him. Perhaps he said such things elsewhere, but in LScD he presents his view of simplicity as degree of falsifiability. The main difference I see between Popper and Li-Vitanyi is that Popper did not have the background to look for a mathematical formulation of his ideas.
curi10

Which section of the 850 page book contains a clear explanation of this? On initial review they seem to talk about hypotheses, for hundreds of pages, without trying to define them or explain what sorts of things do and do not qualify or how Solomonoff hypotheses do and do not match the common sense meaning of a hypothesis.

3Charlie Steiner
I'd rather frame this as good news. The good news is that if you want to learn about Solomonoff induction, the entire first half-and-a-bit of the book is a really excellent resource. It's like if someone directed you to a mountain of pennies. Yes, you aren't going to be able to take this mountain of pennies home anytime soon, and that might feel awkward, but it's not like you'd be materially better off if the mountain was smaller. If you just want the one-sentence answer, it's as above - "X or Y" is not a Turing machine. If you want to be able to look the whole edifice over on your own, though, it really will take 200+ pages of work (it took me about 3 months of reading on the train) - starting with prefix-free codes and Kolmogorov complexity, and moving on to sequence prediction and basic Solomonoff induction and the proofs of its nice properties. Then you can get more applied stuff like thinking about how to encode what you actually want to ask in terms of Solomonoff induction, minimum message length prediction and other bounds that hold even if you're not a hypercomputer, and the universal prior and the proofs that it retains the nice properties of basic Solomonoff induction.
curi10

Thanks. So "There are no black swans." is not a valid Solomonoff hypothesis? A hypothesis can't exclude things, only make positive predictions?

Is a hypothesis allowed to make partial predictions? E.g. predict some pixels or frames and leave others unspecified. If so, then you could "and" together two partial hypotheses and run into a similar math consistency problem, right? But the way you said it sounds like a valid hypothesis may be required to predict absolutely everything, which would prevent conjoining two hypotheses since they're already both complete and nothing more could be added.

3Pongo
Internally, the algorithm could work by ruling things out ("There are no black swans, so the world can't be X"), but it must still completely specify everything. This may be clearer once you have the answer your question, "What counts as a hypothesis for Solomonoff induction?": a halting program for some universal Turing machine. And the possible worlds are (in correspondence with) the elements of the space of possible outputs of that machine. So every "hypothesis" pins down everything exactly. You may have also read some stuff about the Minimum Message Length formalization of Occam's razor, and it may be affecting your intuitions. In this formalization, it's more natural to use logical operations for part of your message. That is, you could say something like "It's the list of all primes OR the list of all squares. Compressed data: first number is zero". Here, we've used a logical operation on the statement of the model, but it's made our lossless compression of the data longer. This is a meaningful thing to do in this formalization (whereas it's not really in Solomonoff induction), but the thing we ended up with is definitely not the message with the shortest length. That means it doesn't affect the prior because that's all about the minimum message length.
curi10

I have never sock puppeted at LW and I have never been banned at the LW website. You're just wrong and smearing me.

Please leave me alone.

0Periergo
Ok.
curi10

We're discussing social dynamics and rational conversations at http://curi.us/2363-discussion-with-gigahurt-from-less-wrong

curi20

past misbehaviors with sock puppets

What sock puppets?

-1Periergo
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LYGLPwwBtNH28qPud/open-letter-to-miri-tons-of-interesting-discussion?commentId=Cx8DBK6RqqqnMwAYa The duplicates you got banned for here no? It seems self evident, but I don't hold anything against you for that. fallibledupicates or w/e.
curi20

A place to start is considering what problems we're trying to solve.

Epistemology has problems like:

What is knowledge? How can new knowledge be created? What is an error? How can errors be corrected? How can disagreements between ideas be resolved? How do we learn? How can we use knowledge when making decisions? What should we do about incomplete information? Can we achieve infallible certainty (how?)? What is intelligence? How can observation be connected to thinking? Are all (good) ideas connected to observation or just some?

Are those the sorts of problem... (read more)

curi81

Hi, Deutsch was my mentor. I run the discussion forums where we've been continuously open to debate and questions since before LW existed. I'm also familiar with Solomonoff induction, Bayes, RAZ and HPMOR. Despite several attempts, I've been broadly unable to get (useful, clear) answers from the LW crowd about our questions and criticisms related to induction. But I remain interested in trying to resolve these disagreements and to sort out epistemological issues.

Are you interested in extended discussion about this, with a goal of reaching some conclusions ... (read more)

2ESRogs
Which discussion forums are you referring to?
9mako yass
I'm glad to hear from you. I had an interesting discussion about induction with my (critrat) friend Ella Hoeppner recently, I think we arrived at some things... I think it was... I stumbled on some quotes of DD (from this, which I should read in full at some point) criticizing, competently, the principle of induction (which is, roughly, "what was, will continue"). My stance is that it is indeed underspecified, but that Solomonoff induction pretty much provides the rest of the specification. Ella's response to solomonoff induction was "but it too is underspecified, because the programming language that it uses is arbitrary", I replied with "every language has a constant-sized interpreter specification so in the large they all end up giving values of similar sizes", but I don't really know how to back up there being some sort of reasonable upper bound to interpreter sizes, then we ran into the fact that there is no ultimate metaphysical foundation for semantics, why are we grounding semantics on a thing like turing machines? I just don't know. The most meta metalanguage always ends up being english, or worse, demonstration; show the learner some examples and they will figure out the rules without using any language at all, and people always seem reliant on receiving demonstrations at some point in their education. I think I left it at... it's easy for us to point at the category of languages are 'computerlike' and easy to implement with simple things like transistors, that is, for some reason, what we use as a bedrock. We just will. Maybe there is nothing below there. I can't see why we should expect there to be. We will just use what works. Alongside that, somewhat confusing the issue, there is another definition of induction; induction is whatever cognitive process takes a stream of observation of a phenomena and produces theories that are good for anticipating future observations. I suppose we could call that "theorizing", if the need were strong. I've heard
curi10

many motives ... mostly commonly to get money

If I threaten to do X unless you pay me, then the motive for making that threat is getting money. However, I don't get money for doing X. There are separate things involved (threat and action) with different motives.

curi70

I wrote a reply at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5ffPhqaLdrSajFe37/analyzing-blackmail-being-illegal-hanson-and-mowshowitz

I read only the initial overview at the top, did my own analysis, then read the rest to see if it'd change my mind.

Here are summaries of IMO the two most notable ideas from my analysis:

  1. Compare blackmail to this scenario: My neighbor is having a party this weekend. I threaten to play loud music (at whatever the max loudness is that's normally within my rights) to disrupt it unless he pays me $100. Compare to: I often play loud music

... (read more)
4RobinHanson
Your point #1 misses the whole norm violation element. The reason it hurts if others are told about an affair is that others disapprove. That isn't why loud music hurts.
curi10

I read the older, now-renamed book that I linked. The newer one has different authors. I saw it when searching and confirmed the right author for the one I read by searching old emails.

curi10

Do the PUAs really have a good model of an average human, or just a good model of a drunk woman who came to a nightclub wanting to get laid?

PUAs have evidence of efficacy. The best is hidden camera footage. The best footage that I’m aware of, in terms of confidence the girls aren’t actors, is Mystery’s VH1 show and the Cajun on Keys to the VIP. I believe RSD doesn’t use actors either and they have a lot of footage. I know some others have been caught faking footage.

My trusted friend bootcamped with Mystery and provided me with eyewitness accounts simila... (read more)

3Viliam
You made a lot of good points. As I said, my main problem is lack of practice, not theory. I will skim your forum, but probably that's it. Too bad geography doesn't allow the option of hanging out together, debating theory and practicing it. There is also a book called The Passion Paradox; is there a chance you have read both and confused them? (Or maybe existence of another book with the same name was the reason for renaming.) Speaking of PUA celebrities, Neil Strauss (approximately my age) is divorced after having one child. I have a happy family with two kids. Of course, different people optimize for different things, and sex is mostly not used for reproduction, but it still feels weird when I am more successful in family life and reproductively than a famous expert on sex and relationships. I mean, the main reason I became interested in PUA decades ago was fear that I might not be able to... well, have the type of life I have now... and somehow Neil Strauss, the famous PUA, does not (despite having many great skills that I don't have). This is related to the "overestimating the greener grass on the other side". I guess my only remaining hero is Athol Kay. But of course there are also other reasons to expand social skills, such as increasing my income, or increasing my impact on the world. Thanks for the debate!
curi30

Maybe another important thing is how your work is.... oriented. I mean, are you doing X to impress someone specific (which would signal lower status), or are you doing X to impress people in general but each of them individually is unimportant? A woman doing her make-up, a man in the gym, a professor recording their lesson... is okay if they do it for the "world in general"; but if you learned they are actually doing all this work to impress one specific person, that would kinda devalue it. This is also related to optionality: is the professor required to

... (read more)
3Viliam
I find this topic difficult to discuss, because as an (undiagnosed) aspie, I probably miss many obvious things about social behavior, which means that I work with incomplete data. If I find a counter-example to a hypothesis, that's probably useful, but if the hypothesis sounds plausible to me, that means little, because I can easily overlook quite obvious things. I am intellectually aware of the taboo against the "PUA/MRA/etc" cluster. My interpretation is that for a man, showing weakness is low-status, and empathy towards low-status men is also low-status, so discussing male-specific problems in empathetic way means burning your social karma like wildfire. (The socially sanctioned way to discuss male-specific problems is to be condescending and give obviously dysfunctional advice, thus enforcing the status quo. Enforcing status quo is obviously the thing high-status people approve of, and that is what ultimately matters, socially.) But I do not feel the taboo viscerally. I hope I gained enough politically-incorrect creds by writing this paragraph to make the following paragraphs not seem like an automatic dismissal of an inconvenient topic. The difficult thing about learning "how people function" is that, simply said, everyone lives in a bubble. Not only is the bubble shaped by our social class, profession, hobbies, but even by our beliefs, including our beliefs about "how people function". Which is, from epistemic perspective, a really fucked up situation. Like, for whatever reason, you create a hypothesis "most X are Y"; then you instinctively start noticing the X who are Y, and avoiding and filtering out of your perception the X who are not Y; then at the end of the day you collect all data your observed and conclude that, really, almost all X are Y. It doesn't always work like this, sometimes something pierces your bubble painfully enough to notice, but it happens often. And it's not just about your perception; if you believe that all X are Y, sometimes the X
curi00

gjm, going forward, I don't want you to comment on my posts, including this one.

2gjm
Noted. (I take it "this one" means this post rather than requesting that I not acknowledge having read this comment.) I don't 100% promise to comply (e.g., if I see you saying something importantly false and no one else comments on it, I might do so) but I'll leave your posts alone unless some need arises that trumps courtesy :-). Since in connection with this you publicly slandered me over on your website, I will add that I consider your analysis there of my motives and purposes to be extremely wrong.
curi30

Thanks for the reply. I think privacy is important and worth analyzing.

But I'm not convinced of your explanation. I have some initial objections.

I view LoLE as related to some other concepts such as reactivity and chasing. Chasing others (like seeking their attention) is low status, and reacting to others (more than they're reacting to you) is low status. Chasing and reacting are both types of effort. They don't strike me as privacy related. However, for LoLE only the appearance of effort counts (Chase's version), so to some approximation that means public... (read more)

3Viliam
Yes, and yes. I think that the content of the work matters, too. Like, if I think that university professors are high status, then watching a professor giving lectures is simply watching someone demonstrating high status. (And this is relative to my status, because if I am upper-class and I think of all people doing useful work - including professors - as losers, then watching the professor's lecture is in my eyes just confirmation of his low status.) Maybe another important thing is how your work is.... oriented. I mean, are you doing X to impress someone specific (which would signal lower status), or are you doing X to impress people in general but each of them individually is unimportant? A woman doing her make-up, a man in the gym, a professor recording their lesson... is okay if they do it for the "world in general"; but if you learned they are actually doing all this work to impress one specific person, that would kinda devalue it. This is also related to optionality: is the professor required to make the video? is the make-up required for the woman's job? By the way, status is not a dichotomy, so it's like: not having to make any effort > making an effort to impress the world in general > making an effort to impress a specific person. Also, the specific work is associated with some status, but doing that work well is relatively better than doing it poorly. So, publishing your work has two effects: admitting that you do X, and demonstrating that you are competent at X. And the privacy also impacts the perceived competence: can you watch the average lesson recorded by a hidden camera, or only the best examples the professor decided to share? Seems correct. "I spend 12 hours a day working on my hobby" sounds cool (unless the hobby is perceived as inherently uncool); "I spend 12 hours a day doing my job" sounds uncool (unless the job is perceived as inherently cool and enjoyable).
curi10

When there is no transparency about why people exit discussions, it allows for them to leave due to bias, dodging, bad reasons, etc., and it's not very provable. Your response is: they didn't explain that they left for bad reasons, so you (curi) can't really prove anything! Indeed. It's ambiguous. That's a large part of the problem.

I could go into detail about some of the specifics that I didn't reply to, explain why I think some of the things people wrote were low quality, argue my case, answer every question, etc. but I don't have a reasonable expectatio... (read more)

2philh
Right, so my very first comment in this thread pointed out a way you could collect evidence on this question. You can look for patterns. If a particular user has a habit of dropping out of threads when they seem to be "losing", then that's evidence that they're doing so to evade arguments and dodge questions. If LW users as a group have a habit of doing that, it's also evidence that that's a common reason people do it. But as far as I can tell you haven't looked for evidence like that, either for individual users or for LW as a whole. When I asked if we have this problem, you didn't point to patterns. You just pointed to individual instances of people stopping replying for unclear reasons. But there are plenty of reasons someone might stop replying. And so I still have to wonder: do we in practice have this problem on LW? Is it in fact common here for people to leave discussions to evade arguments and dodge questions? You've given me no reason to think it is. (Of course it would be super duper surprising if no one had ever done that. So perhaps we should be asking questions like "how often does it happen here, how bad is it when it happens, what does it trade off against, how much would it be worth to make a marginal improvement". Maybe your full post is more nuanced about things like that, but your description of the problem so far has seemed fairly... black-and-white? When remizidae pointed out that there were tradeoffs, you asked them if they could propose solutions. Whether they can propose solutions or not doesn't change the fact that there are tradeoffs. So far in this thread I haven't seen you acknowledge the tradeoffs.) Something I notice is that... so far, this subthread seems to have been entirely useless, and it's taking a lot more energy than most of the comments I write on LW. I'll still give one more response, but... This feels mean, and I don't like that, but it also feels like an important part of what's going on for me right now and relevant to
curi10

Yes I've found it's a major problem in practice, everywhere. I think most discussion interactions at LW end either at key moments or earlier. Hardly any make significant progress. The reasons they end early are rarely explained. Would examples help? There are multiple examples in this topic, e.g. remizidae dropped the discussion, as did G Gordon Worley III and Dagon.

note: i don't want to particularly blame or criticize them compared to the people who didn't write anything at all and would have done similarly well or worse. but discussion interactions like ... (read more)

2philh
The problem in question was This is a problem you plausibly have a solution for. I mean, I still haven't read this article and I probably won't, but I could believe that there are social engineering ways to avoid this problem, and I could believe you've identified one. "Tapping out in two" plausibly also suggests a way. But I'm not convinced we actually have this problem. No one in this thread has obviously done the problematic behaviour. We don't know why people stopped replying when they did, but there are surely explanations other than "trying to evade arguments and dodge questions". (To be precise, Gordon and remizidae haven't replied yet. I can't rule out that they intend to later, but it doesn't really matter.) ---------------------------------------- It seems to me that you're answering as if I'd asked about a different problem, the problem of "most discussions end without making any progress". I agree LW has that problem. (Less than most comparable places.) But I don't think you or I or anyone else has a plausible solution to it, though I do think there are marginal improvements to be made. I don't think simply taking these discussions further is particularly likely to help, at least not enough to justify the cost. ---------------------------------------- I note that in Dagon's thread, he currently has the last word - he announced that he intended to stop, but he also said other things in that comment, and you didn't reply to them. And I note that in this thread, remizidae asked "why is being busy not an adequate excuse?" and you haven't replied to that, either. (Or you replied with a question whichMy sense is that you're trying to hold people to standards you fall short of. ---------------------------------------- Limiting myself to two more replies in this thread.
curi10

I didn't quote you en masse. I didn't just dump all your posting history. I quoted some specific stuff related to my critical commentary. Did you even look?

3gjm
I had not looked, at that point; I took "mirrored" to mean taking copies of whole discussions, which would imply copying other people's writing en masse. I have looked, now. I agree that what you've put there so far is probably OK both legally and morally. My apologies for being a bit twitchy on this point; I should maybe explain for the benefit of other readers that the last time curi came to LW, he did take a whole pile of discussion from the LW slack and copy it en masse to the publicly-visible internet, which is one reason why I thought it plausible he might have done the same this time.
curi10

No. Quoting is not a copyright violation. And I won't have a discussion with you without being able to mirror it. Goodbye and no discussion I guess?

1gjm
Quoting is a copyright violation in every jurisdiction I know of, if it's done en masse. Evidence to the contrary, please?
curi10

This discussion was on Slack (which unfortunately hides all but the most recent messages unless you pay them, which LW doesn't).

Well, fortunately, I did save copies of those discussions. You could find them in the FI archives if you wanted to. (Not blaming you at all but I do think this is kinda funny and I don't regret my actions.)

FYI, full disclosure, on a related note, I have mirrored recent discussion from LW to my own website. Mostly my own writing but also some comments from other people who were discussing with me, including you. See e.g. http://... (read more)

2gjm
I think that attempting to discuss something as broad as "the basics of induction" might be problematic just because the topic is so broad. People mean a variety of different things by terms like "induction" or "inductivism" and there's a great danger of talking past one another. For instance, the sort of induction principle I would (tentatively) endorse doesn't at first glance look like an induction principle at all: it's something along the lines of "all else being equal, prefer simpler propositions". There are lots of ways to do something along those lines, some are better than others, I don't claim to know the One True Best Way to do it, but I think this is the right approach. This gets you something like induction because theories in which things change gratuitously tend to be more complex. But whether you would call me an inductivist, I don't know. I am fairly sure we don't disagree about everything in this area, and it's quite possible that our relevant disagreements are not best thought of as disagreements about induction, as opposed to disagreements about (say) inference or probability or explanation or simplicity that have consequences for what we think about induction. (My super-brief answers to your questions about induction, taking "induction" for this purpose to mean "the way I think we should use empirical evidence to arrive at generalized opinions": It's trying to solve the problem of how you discover things about the world that go beyond direct observations. "Solve" might be too strong a word, but it addresses it by giving a procedure that, if the world behaves in regular ways, will tend to move your beliefs into better correspondence with reality as you get more evidence. (It seems, so far, as if the world does behave in regular ways, but of course I am not taking that as anything like a deductive proof that this sort of procedure is correct; that would be circular.) You do it by (1) weighting your beliefs according to complexity in some fashion
3gjm
I also saved a copy of much of the Slack discussion. (Not all of it -- there was a lot -- but substantial chunks of the bits that involved me.) Somehow, I managed to save those discussions without posting other people's writing on the public internet without their consent. You do not have my permission (or I suspect anyone else's) to copy our writing on LW to your own website. Please remove it and commit to not doing it again. (If you won't, I suspect you might be heading for another ban.) (I haven't looked yet at the more substantive stuff in your comment. Will do shortly. But please stop with the copyright violations already. Sheesh.)
curi10

I'd be more interested in discussing Popper and Bayes stuff than your LoLE comments. Is there any literature which adequately explains your position on induction, which you would appreciate criticism of?

FYI I do not remember our past conversations in a way that I can connect any claims/arguments/etc to you individually. I also don't remember if our conversations ended by either of our choice or were still going when moderators suppressed my participation (slack ban with no warning for mirroring my conversations to my forum, allegedly violating privacy, as well as repeated moderator intervention to prevent me from posting to the LW1.0 website.)

2gjm
I do not know of any literature that I am confident says the exact same things about induction as I would. (There might well be some literature I would completely agree with; my opinions are not super-idiosyncratic. In this context, though, the relevant thing is probably what I think about what Popper thinks about induction, which is a much more specific topic, or even what I think about what you think about induction, equally specific but much less likely to be already addressed in the literature.) We had some discussion before about Popper's argument where -- this summary should not be taken too literally, since its main purpose is to identify the argument in question -- he gives a certain additive decomposition of Pr(A|B) and calls one of the addends "deductive support" and the other "inductive support"; he then proves that the "inductive support" is a negative number, and says that therefore induction is nonsense. (I think I looked at that argument in particular because you said you found it convincing.) I find many things about his argument unsatisfactory; the most important, and the one I focused on before, is that I think all the work is being done by the names he uses ("deductive support", "inductive support") and I don't think the names accurately correspond to anything in reality. That is: his mathematical calculations are fine, it's really true that s() = s() + s(), but there's no good reason for giving the two addends the names he does, and if you just called them "support term 1" and "support term 2" then no one would think that his argument offered anything remotely like a refutation of induction. He's implicitly assuming some proposition like "support term 2 is the best characterization of what empirical evidence B gives for A"; he gives no justification for anything like that, and without it his argument doesn't make any real contact with what he's trying to prove. This discussion was on Slack (which unfortunately hides all but the most recent mess
curi10

I hereby grant you and everyone else license to break social norms at me. (This is not a license to break rational norms, including rational moral norms, which coincide with social norms.) I propose trying this until I get bent out of shape once. I do have past experience with such things including on 4chan-like forums.

I agree with you about common cases.

What I don't see in your comment is a solution. Do you regard this as an important, open problem?

5gjm
I think "this" in your last sentence is underspecified. It is unfortunate that there are things that might be useful to say (because they convey potentially useful information) but that one usually can't or shouldn't because (1) they might cause offence or (2) they violate norms designed to reduce such offence-causing or (3) they would harm others' social status in a way we don't generally want people to be able to harm others' social status. One "could" solve that problem by radically changing human nature such that people no longer get easily offended and can no longer be manipulated into changing their social-status judgements in inappropriate ways. Of course "could" is in scare-quotes there because no plausible way of changing human nature in such a way is in sight. (And if there were, I don't think I would want to trust either you or me with the human-nature-changing apparatus.) Otherwise, I'm not sure what a solution to the problem might look like. People are offendable and manipulable, and if there's a way to design social norms to stop those buttons getting pushed excessively without sometimes preventing what might have been useful communication, I haven't seen any sign of it. And, as with the issue of wasting time on unproductive conversations / ending conversations prematurely, my feeling is that the problem you're focusing on is likely the wrong one because right now more harm is being done by rudeness and status-fights than by being unable to say otherwise-useful things that risk offending or status-fighting, and interventions that make those things more sayable will (in my view) likely do more harm than good. ---- Since you (more or less) asked for it, here is the brief version of my norm-breaking explanation of why I fear that discussions between us might be less fruitful than one would hope: 1. Our past discussions have not led anywhere useful; my perception (which I'm sure differs from yours) is that you have repeatedly attempted to switch from
curi20

I'm flexible. An option, which I think is hard but important, is what people want from a discussion partner and what sort of discussion partners are in shortage. I think our models of that are significantly different.

1curi
We're discussing social dynamics and rational conversations at http://curi.us/2363-discussion-with-gigahurt-from-less-wrong
curi20

Would you like to try to resolve one of our disagreements by discussion?

1gigahurt
That is okay with me, what do you want to discuss?
curi10

But if you reckon my comments are low-quality and I'm likely to bail prematurely, you'll have to decide for yourself whether that's a risk you want to take.

I have decided and I don't want to take that risk in this particular case.

But I believe I'm socially prohibited from saying so or explaining the analysis I used to reach that conclusion.

This is a significant issue for me because I have a similar judgment regarding most responses I receive here (and at most forums). But it's problematic to just not reply to most people while providing no explanation. ... (read more)

6gjm
LW is less constrained than most places by such social norms. However, to some extent those social norms are in place because breaking them tends to have bad results on net, and my experience is that a significant fraction of people who want to break them may think they are doing it to be frank and open and honest and discuss things rationally without letting social norms get in the way, but actually are being assholes in just the sort of way people who violate social norms usually are: they enjoy insulting people, or want to do it as a social-status move, or whatever. And a significant fraction of people who say they're happy for norms to be broken "at" them may think they are mature and sensible enough not to be needlessly offended when someone else says "I think you're pretty stupid" (or whatever), but actually get bent out of shape as soon as that happens. If it's any consolation, I have my own opinions about the likely outcome of such a discussion, some of which I too might be socially prohibited from expressing out loud :-).
curi10

Do you have any proposal for how to solve the problems of people being biased then leaving discussions at crucial moments to evade arguments and dodge questions, and there being no transparency about what's going on and no way for the error to get corrected?

2philh
Noticing patterns. If someone seems to be doing that a lot, we can point it out. This relies on the population being able to sustain reputations, but that feels like a prerequisite for intellectual discussion anyway, I think. Do you think this is a problem in practice on LW, and/or other places you visit? To the main article: I only skimmed, but my previous tapping out in two is relevant. I wouldn't want to impose it as a requirement on people though.
curi10

I was using rationality in the same way you normally do – about a process, not about best or optimal. I don't know why you read it otherwise.

curi10

https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rationality

Rationality is the art of thinking in ways that result in accurate beliefs and good decisions.

There are discussion ending methods which are compatible with this and others which aren't. The same goes for other rationality issues like finding out if you're mistaken, biases being found instead of hidden, etc. What is the type error?

Also I hereby grant you and everyone else unlimited license to give me advice.

3Gordon Seidoh Worley
Mmm, something like using "rational" to really mean "best" or "optimal". Rationality is about a process, not an outcome, even if it claims to make particular promises on the quality of the outcome.
curi10

Suppose hypothetically that the worldwide availability of this type of discussion was zero. Do you think that would be important or consequential?

2Dagon
I'm not sure what you're asking in this. Worldwide availability of a wide range of discussion types is currently available, but that's still only a tiny fraction of imaginable discussion-type space. I think there are plenty of mechanisms for individuals to choose whether they want to discuss something, and how and with whom, so it only takes a few to show the value of a given type, and if it turns out to be important or consequential, great! Note - I'm mostly done with this topic for now.
curi10

So are you on board with something like differentiating and labelling a particular type of discussion and using procedures along these lines for that type of discussion?

My assumed context, which I grant I underspecified, was intellectual discussion or discussion of ideas (though no doubt there is room to specify further). Stuff like LW comments are on a forum where substantive discussion and trying to seek the truth is, to some extent, the expected norm. I didn't intend this to apply to e.g. all small talk (though tbh I think people would benefit from applying norms like this much more widely, ).

2Dagon
I'm fine if you and someone else want to set ground rules and explicit expectations for some or all of your discussions. I don't expect to participate in such very often, but I'll gladly try it (if the rules are short and seem feasible; and I always reserve the right to exit when I no longer find value). I think there's need to specify further. LW is a good example - it's more focused on truth-seeking than most places, but that doesn't mean that other considerations are zero. And it doesn't create an obligation to engage on dimensions that we don't find interesting or valuable.
curi10

I'm glad that you seem to have largely understood me and also given a substantive response about your main concern. That is fairly atypical. I'm also glad that you agree that there are important issues in this general area.

I will agree to discuss to a length 3 impasse chain with you (rather than 5) if that'd solve the problem (I doubt it). I'd also prefer to discuss impasse chains and discussion ending issues (which I consider a very important topic) over the conjunction fallacy or law of least effort, but I'm open to either.

I think you're overestimating h... (read more)

2gjm
I think the whole "impasse chains" mechanism is unhelpful, and as you suspected I am not much more enthusiastic about using it with length 3 than with length 5. (Though if I were somehow required to have a discussion on those terms with either length 3 or length 5, I would indeed prefer length 3.) The example you link to is interesting, but to me it seems like a fine example of how your approach doesn't work well! Not just because in that case the discussion ended up getting terminated as unconstructive -- of course that is inevitable given why you linked to it at all. But: * The "impasse chain" concept didn't end up actually being useful. The other person did things you found unhelpful; you declared an "impasse"; and then every time he responded you just stonewalled him incremented your impasse count until it reached 5. * ... Even though the responses you reacted to in this way were (so it seems to me) clearly responsive to the things you said constituted an impasse; e.g., asking for examples of what you were wanting with the arithmetic-expression tree. * It's entirely possible that the discussion was never going to be productive and so ending it was a good idea -- but the particular complaints that provoked its ending seem strange to me. E.g., you asked him to "make a tree of 1-2+3" to see whether he understood the notion of tree you were using; while his first attempt was (1) wrong because he misread the formula and (2) garbled because he thought he could use indentation in a way that didn't actually work, what he subsequently did was perfectly reasonable, especially in the context of "idea trees". And while I don't think he explained what he was saying about externalities super-clearly, I think his placement of those two propositions in the tree was quite reasonable. So this has mostly served to confirm my initial opinion that having a discussion with some sort of impasse-chain-based rules for termination would not be any sort of improvement on (1) havin
curi10

This is my proposed approach for unilateral discussion ending: https://www.elliottemple.com/essays/debates-and-impasse-chains

I'd be interested if anyone has any other attempts at solving the same problem that could be used instead.

I am interested in discussion, but not one plagued by certain problems (summarized briefly above re arbitrarily ending discussions in the middle without explanation or resolution). If you will acknowledge the problems are a real concern, we can talk about potential rational ways to address them which aren't overly burdensome to a... (read more)

2gjm
So, to summarize the proposal behind that link: * an "impasse", here, is anything that stops the original discussion proceeding fruitfully; * when you encounter one, you should switch to discussing the impasse; * that discussion may also reach an impasse, which you deal with the same way; * it's OK to give up unilaterally when you accumulate enough impasses-while-dealing-with-impasses-while-dealing-with-impasses; * you propose that a good minimum would be a chain of five or more impasses. I think only a small minority of discussions are so important as to justify a commitment to continuing until the fifth chained impasse. I do agree that there's a genuine problem you're trying to solve with this stuff, but I think your cure is very much worse than the disease. My own feeling is that for all but the most important discussions nothing special is needed; if anything, I think there are bigger losses from people feeling unable to walk away from unproductive discussions than from people walking away when there was still useful progress to be made, and so I'd expect that measures to make it harder to walk away will on balance do more harm than good. (Not necessarily; perhaps there are things one could do that make premature walking-away harder but don't make not-premature walking-away harder. I don't know of any such things, and the phenomenon you alluded to earlier, that premature walking-away often feels like fully justified walking away to the person doing it, makes it harder to contrive them.) I also think that, in practice, if A thinks B is being a bozo then having made a commitment to continue discussion past that point often won't result in A continuing; they may well just leave despite the commitment. (And may be right to.) Or they may continue, but adding resentment at being obliged to keep arguing with a bozo to whatever other things made them want to leave, and the ensuing discussion is not very likely to be fruitful. I guess I haven't yet addressed o
curi10

What is your goal here? Do you want to find a point of disagreement and try seriously to discuss it persistently over time to a conclusion?

1glagidse
My point is that the statement *The Law of Least Effort Contributes to the Conjunction Fallacy* Is false. for the reasons mentioned above.
curi10

Re all your comments, do you want to attempt to debate these matters to a rational conclusion? I don't think we're going to reach a quick conclusion/agreement and I don't know if you're interested enough to make a serious effort at an organized, persistent-over-time discussion.

A common discussion failure case is something like someone decides (often around when they start losing the argument) that the other guy's messages are low quality and not worth engaging with further. Another is there are too many relevant tangents, so I’ll just stop discussing. I’d ... (read more)

4gjm
On the basis of past discussions with you, I suspect that when you say "debate these matters to a rational conclusion" you may mean something like "commit to never ever deciding that the discussion is no longer providing anyone with enough enlightenment to be worth the effort involved". And the answer is: no, I do not want to make any such commitment, and I don't think anyone ever should, because it amounts to undertaking to give a potentially limitless amount of time and effort to something of finite value. (I doubt that anyone else here will be willing to make such a commitment either. If that's truly something you require in order to have a discussion then I think that's functionally equivalent to not being interested in discussion. Of course you don't have to be interested in discussion! But in that case maybe you should say so up front.) My position on that methodological question has not changed appreciably since a previous discussion we had, though of course what you're wanting now is not necessarily the same as what you wanted then and so my opinion of what you want now might differ from my opinion about what you wanted then.
curi10

Did you read my previous linked posts, which this post is a followup to?

1glagidse
I've skimmed over it. But I guess I have not written down my thoughts on how the Conjecture fallacy relates to social behavior. If the following two statements are true: 1. The conjunction fallacy mistake is made mainly because people overly rely on system 1 thinking. 2. Complex social behavior, like deception requires system 2 thinking. Then the following statement is obviously false: 3. People make the conjecture fallacy mistake because of complex social behavioral reasons. I think statement 1 and 2 are true, therefore I think 3 is false. But because I think 3 is false does not mean I think that making the cojecture fallacy mistake has no social implications. Someone who knows the default heuristics programmed into humans has advantages over those that don't in social situations. People make the Conjecture fallacy mistake for the same reason as when they read the following question: “A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?” The first thought that enters your mind is $0.10 cents. That's your system 1 speaking. If you want to figure out the correct awnser you'll have to use your system 2. Does the fact that system 1 thinks "$0.10" have social implications? sure. Does system 1 think "$0.10" because of complex social reasons? I doubt it.
curi20

The similar naming is unfortunate. It's LoLE in the article I linked explaining it as well as in that author's book, but I'll think about disambiguating in the future.

curi10

Those things were covered both under conformity (e.g. sharing interests with a group, fitting in) and value (which lists knowledge, skills, etc.)

3Dagon
Ah, I see. The bullet-point format made it seem like you were focused on "appear to " and "signal that ", rather than underlying truth of connections with individuals. I see an important distinction between "try to fit in" and "do actually fit in".
curi10

LoLE isn't about conserving effort. It's about appearing to conserve effort and social dynamics. So a comment like

of course we conserve effort; what else would any living thing do?

shows a lack of understanding of LoLE. E.g. people put a lot of effort into doing their makeup instead of conserving that effort.

2gjm
In order to explain the conjunction fallacy (or other biases) LoLE is only any use if it does lead to actually conserving effort. (On the specific matter at hand; of course they may put effort into other things.) The alleged pattern is (unless I've badly misunderstood): * You ask me "which of these two things is more likely?" * If I think carefully through the options, I will see that it's more likely that Linda is a librarian simpliciter than that she's a feminist librarian. * But I don't do that, because I want to look like I'm doing everything effortlessly. * Instead I use some simple quick heuristic that lets me look effortless. * Unfortunately that leads me to the wrong answer. And in this sequence of events, it's essential that I actually do put in less effort. If instead I had some way of looking as if I'm making no effort while actually doing the careful thinking that would get me the right answer, then I would get the right answer. What am I missing here? [EDITED to add:] Also: if the question at hand is why psychologists don't appeal to the LoLE as an explanation for the conjunction fallacy, and the answer (as I suggest) is that they already have what looks like an obvious explanation in terms of actually conserving effort, then it doesn't really matter that much whether the LoLE involves actual effort-conservation or merely apparent effort-conservation, no?
2Matt Goldenberg
FWIW this is not how I learned it in psychology class. It was about humans not wanting to do things that took more energy.  Looks like it's called "principle of least effort" on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_effort I buy that there's another thing called Law of Least Effort that's about signaling, but maybe worth disambiguate by calling it "signaling low effort?"
curi10

Saying something "seems more off track" is not an argument criticizing some error in it.

0Periergo
I see now that I completely misunderstood you and was careless and did not think my response carefully. I apologize, this was lazy of me and I should do better.
curi10

We already have the law of least effort for extensive other reasons. It's already a major part of our culture, so we should apply the tools we have. I understand it wouldn't look that way to someone who is new to the issue, but try to see it from a different perspective. If you want to debate that, fine, but assuming contrary premises to mine is missing the point.

And as I said this is not the full explanation. It's a followup post. LoLE explains not doing math, being careless, etc. It helps reinforce stuff I already covered which explains the particular result more.

3gjm
It seems like you're saying that it's ... somehow improper to write something that implies doubt about your premises? (I don't think I'm assuming contrary premises to yours, though I don't see any particular reason why that would be a problem, but I am indeed not simply assuming that your premises are right.) If I've understood right, then I don't understand what problem you see. If not, then maybe you could explain what your objection actually is? I'm also not sure quite what those "extensive other reasons" are. You say "LoLE hasn’t been tested in a controlled, blinded scientific setting". You tell us that it's been extensively debated and has stood up to criticism in (what you don't quite say explicitly but I'm pretty sure is) the pickup-artist community. I don't think LW should adopt a norm of accepting things merely because someone tells us they have stood up to criticism among pickup artists. (Reason 1: it's just one smallish group of people; such groups can easily develop biases of many kinds, and it's not hard to imagine ways in which that could happen in that group in particular. Reason 2: we don't even know that LoLE has stood up to criticism in that community; all we know is that you say it has.) Imagine that someone comes here and writes an article about how some cognitive bias is explained by the Law Of X, which is well known among { Trotskyites | evangelical Christians | radical feminists | burglars }. I don't think it would be reasonable for that person to respond to criticism of the article by saying: "it's not appropriate to question the truth and applicability of the Law of X -- it's well established, as { Trotskyites | evangelical Christians | radical feminists | burglars } can attest". Why is this case different?
2gjm
What do you mean by "it's already a major part of our culture"? Specifically, do you mean (1) that conserving visible effort is a thing people do a lot in our culture (i.e., LoLE is right) or (2) that the idea that people conserve visible effort is well established in our culture (i.e., LoLE is well known)? (To me, "LoLE is a major part of our culture" means #2, but it sounds as if you may mean #1.)
curi10

People got post-research interviewed and asked to explain their answers. There were social feedback mechanisms. Even if there wasn't peer to peer social feedback, it was certainly possible to annoy the authority (researchers) who is giving you the questions (like annoying your teacher who gives you a test). The researchers want you to answer a particular way so people, reasonably, guess what that is, even if they don't already have that way highly internalized (as most people do).

This is how people have learned to deal with questions in general. And people... (read more)

curi30

Yeah, (poor) context isolation is is a recurring theme I've observed in my discussions and debates. Here's a typical scenario:

There's an original topic, X. Then we talk back and forth about it for a bit: C1, D1, C2, D2, C3, D3, C4, D4. The C messages are me and D is the other guy.

Then I write a reply, C5, about a specific detail in D4. Often I quote the exact thing I'm replying to or explain what I'm doing (e.g. a statement like "I disagree with A because B" where A was something said in D4.).

Then the person writes a reply (more of a non sequitur from my p... (read more)

curi10

He said, “Well, um, I guess we may have to agree to disagree on this.”

I [Yudkowsky] said: “No, we can’t, actually. There’s a theorem of rationality called Aumann’s Agreement Theorem which shows that no two rationalists can agree to disagree. If two people disagree with each other, at least one of them must be doing something wrong.”

...

Robert Aumann’s Agreement Theorem shows that honest Bayesians cannot agree to disagree

...

Regardless of our various disputes, we [Yudkowsky and Hanson] both agree that Aumann’s Agreement Theorem extends to imply th

... (read more)
1TAG
It is fully proven by the math, but it requires a set of stringent conditions about honesty and shared information which are unlikely to obtain in real world situations. As explained in the rationality article. Did you read it?
curi10

In this situation, it sounds like the problem is that improvement for the plant came at cost for the DCs

Why do you think so? Merely because they are complaining or for some other reason?

The DCs were unable to substantively identify any problem that was created for them. And they spent 9 months refusing to use measurements or evidence to address this matter, in addition to failing to explain any cause-and-effect logic about what the problem they're now facing is and how it was caused by the change in production. (And, on top of that, without quantifying ... (read more)

2Vaniver
The complaints are the smoke, but there's some hints elsewhere as well. Again, the letter-writer's telling of the first big meeting about it: Whose evaluations? My guess would be the people who are in charge of moving things around--the distribution centers--instead of the people who are in charge of making things--the plant manager, who is the writer of this letter. From my reading of this, it sounds like when they made the tradeoff they didn't get agreement that the new methodology required new standards, and that total freight dollars would be the judge instead of $/lb of freight. If they changed the metric to something like $ spent on freight / $ of product delivered to customers, they should have enough data to backcalculate the metric (so they can fairly use it going forward) and it should be focusing the relevant managers on something more relevant to the overall business. [A ratio is still not quite right--now that manager is opposed to many small transactions or heavy items, because the revenue ratio will go down even if total profit goes up--but it's still better than baking volume discounts in to someone's KPI!] ---- At this point, I read Eli's response, which takes a different tack on the tactical level (he knows more about how DCs get judged) but seems broadly the same to me on the strategic level. The DCs are complaining, and they might not know how to solve their problem or what it even is, but they are damn sure there is a problem. And so you apply ToC at the higher level and say "ok, time to invest my attention into the constraint that is now tight." A major component of ToC is that you need system-level thinking in order to solve system-level problems, because most of the effects of decisions are invisible instead of visible. How, then, could it possibly make sense to say "well, it's not in my area; I'm hitting my metrics!" or "well, they can't explain it, so clearly it's not real"? The letter-writer has an ability to see things other people
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