All of Shalmanese's Comments + Replies

Another failure of rationality is failing to understand the difference between investment goods and consumption goods. A $745,000 house may cost more to buy than a $710,000 house but you're also likely to be able to sell it for more as well. The "true" cost is not $35K, instead, it's a complex calculation of marginal mortgage payments, expected rise or fall of housing prices and cash flow considerations.

7brazil84
I agree 100%. When I was house hunting, the number one priority (besides living in a good school district) was to buy a house which would be easy to turn around and sell if necessary. If 95% of the houses in your town have 3+ bedrooms and 2+ bathrooms, you are arguably making a mistake if you save 5 or even 10 percent by buying a 2 bedroom house. Even if that's all you need. So the upshot is that people who want to be rational often need to factor in other peoples' preferences, whether rational or not. As Ambrose Bierce pointed out, fashion is the dictator whom the wise both ridicule and obey.
3gjm
Is it also a failure of rationality when one doesn't notice that someone else has already made all the points one's making? :-)

"Another example of attribution error: Why would Gimli think that Galadriel is beautiful?"

A waist:hip:thigh ratio between 0.6 & 0.8 & a highly symmetric fce.

A waist:hip:thigh ratio between 0.6 & 0.8 & a highly symmetric fce.

But she doesn't even have a beard!

"In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." GK Chesterton

OK, so my favorite man-with-a-hammer du jour is the "everyone does everything for selfish reasons" view of the world. If you give money to charity, you do it for the fuzzy feeling, not because you are altruistic.

What would you propose as the three factual claims to test this? I'm having a hard time figuring any that would be a useful discriminant.

Thinking about this a bit, it seems most useful to assert negative factual claims, ie: "X never happens".

OK, so my favorite man-with-a-hammer du jour is the "everyone does everything for selfish reasons" view of the world. If you give money to charity, you do it for the fuzzy feeling, not because you are altruistic.

That's not a disagreement about the nature of the world, it's a disagreement about the meaning of the word "altruistic".

No, it's not (only) experiential knowledge. It's about the basic framework through which you view the world. More experience isn't going to help if you keep on fitting it within the same, inaccurate model.

1LauraABJ
How do you posit the model is formed or updated if not through experience? The reason why your self of 10 years ago doesn't believe 'just be yourself' will work is that he hasn't experienced what actually happens yet, and everything you say is purely theoretical for him. Even giving examples of other people following your advice might not work, because those people are not him, and the idea that this will work for him is still theoretical. Now, if the population in question were picked to be as similar as possible to the subject, and the variable (being or not being one's self) was well defined and well controlled, then a good rationalist would indeed take the result seriously and not just say, "this advice is bullshit," though he still might be uncertain as to whether or not it would work for him.

If you think Christians are Christians (to pick an arbitrary example) because of time constraints, then you're in for a rude shock.

4AngryParsley
Actually, I do think the reason a lot of Christians are Christians is because it takes a lot of time for someone else to deconvert them. To deconvert a religious person with a high school education, you usually need to touch on a lot of topics: the scientific method, beliefs and evidence, anthropics, biology, evolution, the problem of evil, cosmology, reductionism, and cognitive biases. It takes time for people to explain and comprehend all these things.
1magfrump
Conjecture: the amount of time needed to escape the Christian paradigm is arbitrarily large (say, a year of concentrated effort) so Christians are Christians due to time constraints because they don't see being a Christian as an issue to put time into (reference to the post where Eliezer talked about robots lifting refrigerators and teacups or whatever goes here)

I'd be extremely suspicious that I'd stopped maturing if myself in 10 years could get along perfectly with myself of today. Take an informal poll of the people around you, I'll bet the vast majority of them would regard their past selves as frustratingly irritating because of all the missing advanced wisdom.

1wedrifid
I would be extremely depressed if I was unable to grasp a concept communicated by my near future self over the space of 6 hours.
1magfrump
I'd be interested to see how their age played into this. For example, I would expect that some college students who want to be teachers might find tweens decent company whereas others would be horrified at the prospect, and that 90 year olds might be sympathetic towards 80 year olds, whereas 30 year olds might more often regret drinking too much and studying too little in college. Although in large part that is propaganda to make the question interesting more than a solid prediction.
7Alicorn
Personally, I hope my future selves will have improved at getting along with people in general, even people who lack wisdom, and especially if they have privileged knowledge of the contents of the other person's head.

I think the difference here is that science is still operating under the same conceptual framework as it was 100 years ago. As a result, scientists between different eras can put themselves into each others heads and come to mutual agreement.

Sufficiently advanced wisdom to me has always been a challenging of the very framing of the problem itself.

Note: The converse is not true. Not all bullshit looks like advanced wisdom.

0wedrifid
Does more advanced wisdom look like bullshit than bullshit looks like advanced wisdom? I doubt it. Bullshit is selected for appearances.

Huh? That is not at all what I read from Scott Aaronson on this and I don't see how your interpretation can be supported upon a close reading.

My interpretation about this is that people who are smugly contrarion suffer from their own rationality bias that leads them to a higher likelihood of truth but at the cost of a much, much higher variance.

Sure, the smug contrarians taught to wash our hands between surgery & discovered America, but they were also the ones who ushered in the French Revolution, the Cambodian Genocide & the Zimbabwe Land Reforms.

3MichaelVassar
Huh? America? By being smart? Ditto land reform.
3Paul Crowley
re "higher likelihood of truth" - the great majority of contrarians are crazy and wrong.

The first person who understood nutrition didn't start on a perfect diet from day 1. Dieting is hard and we're still not very much closer to figuring out effective strategies of subverting our harmful evolutionary preferences. Rebasing ethics is at least as difficult so have some patience while it gets figured out.

1byrnema
I think I agree that morality might need tweaking from what evolution gave us. With dieting, the aim is to eat in a healthier way. What would the aim be with adjusting morality?

Perhaps. Could you unsimplify it for me? I don't really see where they are being less than clear in their descriptions.

0wedrifid
The speaker personally chooses not to lie and cheat (or, one hopes, murder). He doesn't claim that humans don't have programming that encourages such behaviours at times, he claims that humans are programmed to have morality, which can involve suppressing other programming. We having names that we use to moralize and disapprove of lies, cheating and murder is somewhat of an indicator that humans do have impulses that push them in that direction. Morals are also culturally dependent. In some cases it would be considered immoral not to commit what we would describe as 'murder'. The closest male relative of a victim is considered morally obligated to avenge him. Our culture (or perhaps 'cultures' given that my culture doesn't care about tips) calls this 'murder' and disapproves even though most people would have some degree of empathy for the motive. That is, *they expect the killer to be programmed to want to commit such a murder". As for cheating and stealing: the speaker allegedly personally does neither. But does he lock his car or leave his keys in the ignition?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCL63d66frs

"I do not lie, I do not cheat and believe it or not, all because that is what I CHOOSE. I know right from wrong. It is in the best interests of Humankind to 'get along'. If we all killed each other off then we wouldn't be able to carry on generation after generation. Killing each other and doing harm goes against all of Evolution!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx1yXvcT2kw

As an aside, it's much harder to find text references to this than video links.

3Vladimir_Nesov
The first item (Dawkins) is about causal explanation for why people are often nice, saying that religious upbringing has very little to do with the way people actually act, that the way people actually act got determined by evolution, and of course this common origin applies to atheists in the same way. See Human universal. The item doesn't argue that you should be nice because of evolution; that is a cached pattern for religion that argues along the lines of you having to be nice because a certain book says so.
3wedrifid

It's easy: not tipping gives you an extra 18% of your dining out budget that you can spend on hookers & blow.

Better minds that I have talked about the quest for purpose in the absense of faith and I choose deliberately not to endorse any particular moral goal in this piece. selfish utilitarianism (is this really any different from hedonism?) is a good a goal as any although it's not one I personally choose as a moral end goal.

The crux of the argument is not about how you should act but you how you should fight your own moral revulsion when deciding how you should act.

1byrnema
For me, your comments are more about 'debasing language' than rebasing ethics. Your word choices are distracting. ... I feel something like mild moral revulsion to the words, 'dick', 'hookers' and 'blow'.
0[anonymous]
For me, this posts and its comments are more about 'debasing language' than rebasing ethics. Your word choices are distracting. I feel something like mild moral revulsion to the words, 'dick', 'hookers' and 'blow'.
1Richard_Kennaway
But you did. You said that people should fight against the moral impulse to do good to strangers at their own expense, and strive to ignore their moral revulsion at ill-treating strangers. You are advocating it, but not choosing to follow it yourself?
5wedrifid
'Fight' (action) is preceded by 'should'.

I deliberately chose an innocuous example so as to not overly trip the discussion into the specifics of the example itself. I'm not going to talk about some of the more extreme examples of what this would imply until other people do.

You're correct in that modifying tipping behavior by itself would probably not be worth being a dick about in the same way that just switching to low fat milk is probably not worth absorbing all of our science of nutrition & dieting about. You have to be able to see the cumulative effects of a complete rebasing before you c... (read more)

2Blueberry
I assume the point is to then use the money you save in the most moral way possible. If you're a utilitarian, this would then mean spending it in the way that creates the highest utility. An ethical hedonist might spend it on "hookers and blow". If you have a more relational view of ethics, the most moral way to use it is to tip in the first place, though. The extreme would be to create a huge business empire based on poor-quality products, like, I don't know, a buggy operating system or something. Break the law at every turn as long as you can get away with it, commit numerous antitrust violations, take open standards and slightly modify them so nothing else is compatible with your company's products. Then take all your profits and set up a charitable foundation, and donate billions to, I don't know, improve global health or something.
8Richard_Kennaway
Looking out in the world, I don't see a lot of rationalists of the type who inhabit this board, period. But now we're talking about rationality instead of morality. Why? To summarise what you have said: 1. There's no morality. 2. People should act in their own material self-interest, without regard to anyone else's welfare, except as a means to that main end. 3. Money to spend on hookers and blow is an example of the self-interest that should outweigh tipping waitresses. 4. But you're not advocating any moral system. 5. You don't choose this system yourself, oh no. 6. But anyone who did wouldn't say so. 7. Find the lady. ("I'm not going to talk about some of the more extreme examples of what this would imply until other people do.") 8. Rationalists are losers. 9. Of course, rooting out your moral feelings doesn't guarantee money, power, fame, a happy marriage, and achievement, nudge, nudge. 10. Moralists are losers consoling themselves with warm fuzzies. Can someone suggest a rationalist equivalent of Retro me, Satana?

That helps me understand where the evolution reference comes from and how the tip fits in, but I still don't understand where you get your preference.

Most people would like to be richer, more powerful, and more admired, and it may be that their morality is keeping them from that. But most people would probably also like to be more moral, more compassionate, and contribute more to society, and their desire for material success is keeping them from that. Moral choices are a trade-off between these two desires.

Like all trade-offs, which option to choose depen... (read more)

That may or may not be so but I'm going by what leading atheists claim. The only reason I finally wrote this was because I just got back from a screening of Collapse where Hitchens was espousing some Brotherhood of Man nonsense while weaseling out of directly confronting the issue of why secular morality looks suspiciously like christian morality warmed over.

0wedrifid
I don't believe you. Leading atheists don't say that. Perhaps they said something else similar and you oversimplified their meaning?

Not tipping when the social expectation is not to tip is no big deal. But not tipping when it's culturally expected of you is being a dick and that's what I'm talking about.

2Morendil
I'll stand behind my suggestion that you move here for a while. Even a short stay can be enlightening. When I eat out while staying in the US, which happens every so often, "tipping" consists of writing an amount of money on top of the check amount, which nearly always I pay by credit card. Therefore, there is social interaction with the waiter after I've decided how much to tip. This is an effective deterrent against violating the cultural norm, and no moral calculation enters into it; I don't enjoy being glared at by strangers, I mostly prefer my interactions to follow the expected script, so I tip. I suppose things might be different if you pay in cash, but I can see other ways that things could be structured so as to enforce the norm: other diners can look at you and see whether you're leaving a tip, for instance. The specific case of tipping sounds as if it might be empirically testable: if you place people in situations where they are guaranteed to have zero further interaction with the waiter, and made aware of that fact, would they still leave a tip ?

Wasn't there a post here a while back that talked about how anyone positing a confidence of 0.999 on something non-trivial was most likely to be suffering from their own cognitive biases?

my somewhat admittedly sketchy reasoning:

I go to the University of Washington where there is considerable interest in the case. Of the people who have only been marginally involved in the case, most believe that Amanda Knox is innocent. Of the people who are interested in the case, many believe she is guilty. There's an obvious hometown effect here which biases towards innocence so I'm assuming those who look into the case are taking that into account when and still reach a guilty verdict.

Therefore, I assign a 70% probability to Amanda Knox being guilty (+ or - 30%).

7imaxwell
Given the information you're going on, that's not a bad estimate. Actually reading on the case may change your opinion dramatically, though; why not try it?

When you encounter a road block, you don't need to give up. You can simply emulate each other's intuitions and proceed with as a provisional argument (assuming your world view is true...).

As far as rationality is concerned, it's achieving the place of what I call "rational ignorance". An awareness of the limits of your rationality and how you overestimate how rational you are:

http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/the-ego-dilemma/

In every debate I've heard of, the pro-evolution people believe that the evolution side soundly thrashed the creation side and the pro-creation people believe that the creation side thrashed the evolution side.

This subjectivity over even who won makes debates eminently pointless for convincing anyone of anything.

"All models are wrong, some are useful" - George Box

1Furcas
If model X is more useful than model Y, it's probably because model X is closer to the truth than model Y. "All models are wrong" only means that 100% certainty is impossible.

The bias is that we don't even notice things that occured once. How important is there that we have a moon? That we have a continent that spans east-west? That the K-T impact happened exactly when it did?

There could be a hundred other crucial factors which we never even noticed because nobody thought they were important to the development of civilization.

0taw
East-west continent span seems irrelevant, at least for modern civilization, as it was on its way all the way from Upper Paleolithic up to something reasonably civilized in Central America too, independently, up to the point when we broke their isolation.

Our observations are biased because anything that occurs multiple times is very easy to see but something that occurs only once could be completely missed as an essential step towards civilization because we assume it was inevitable.

0taw
Where's the bias? * If something occurred once after long time while it could it seems unlikely. * If something occurred soon after prerequisites were met it seems likely. * If something occurred multiple times independently it seems likely. 1 and 3 seem obviously true. There are multiple trials separated either by geography or time, and they have enough failures / successes to make our intuitions right. Anthropic principle doesn't get involved here in any way. If agriculture was invented 5 times independently it couldn't have possibly be the limiting unlikely step. 2 might be luck - something might have been extremely unlikely but just have happened (by anthropic principle). But anthropic principle doesn't really give any reasons why it should have happened quickly. Of course it's extremely naive to consider (like Robin's paper) time as a series of independent trials - maybe it was unlikely as in prerequisites were just in place, and it was either fast or never. That's why I seriously doubt physics-inspired modeling of such events.

There is no rational argument against quantum suicide and the truth of it easily tested. The longer you live without knowing about quantum suicide, the less optimal your life will turn out. At the same time, you cannot look to anyone else's success as social proof for you to do it, you have to be the first.

0DanielLC
I believe personal identity is an illusion. Given that, quantum suicide, as it is normally given, clearly wouldn't work. You could do something similar by ending the universe if it's suboptimal, and getting something good by the anthropic principle, but you have to take into account that there's a lot of observer-moment-probability-density before it starts branching and you start destroying it, so you have to take that into account.
0Manfred
Aside from the nice rational argument "I assign large negative utility to dying, and the expected chance of dying if I blow myself up is very high, so I assign negative expected utility to blowing myself up." Utility functions are over the state of the world.
0nero
wouldn't the fact that you would indirectly observe the spin by the effect of the gun, collapse the probability wave?
1JGWeissman
If anything like Robin's Mangled Worlds theory is true, quantum suicide would be a bad idea. You would end up living only in worlds of small measure that get mangled by worlds with larger measure in which you are dead.
9John_Maxwell
If you think you're going to have a net positive impact on the world, it makes sense to be present in all the Everett branches you can.
2gurgeh
I don't know if this is a common counter-argument or not, but you have to be very careful with your suicide, so that the next most likely outcome is not to give you horrible permanent injuries. It seems to me that if the whole multi-universe theory is correct, then at the end of your life, the next most likely outcome to death is another painful last gasp. And another. And so forth.. Also, many people include the happiness of others in their utility function and a quantum suicide would do harm to your friends and family.

I object to your assertion that football players are paid disproportionate salaries relative to other fields. What does the average football player make? It's tricky to answer because it depends on who you regard as a football player. If you include everyone in the minor leagues, everyone playing college football, every high school quarterback who seriously considered a footballing career, then the average is quite low because the majority of "football players" make $0.

The reason why top footballers are paid enormous sums of money is because lots... (read more)