Sure.
It's rather against the point of the article to start talking about the above examples of privileged questions...
Even so, it's worth noting that immigration policy is a rare, important question with first-order welfare effects. Relaxing border fences creates a free lunch in the same way that donating to the Against Malaria Foundation creates a free lunch. It costs on the order of $7 million to save an additional American life, but on the order of $2500 to save a life if you're willing to consider non-Americans.
By contrast, most of politics consists of ...
"Fairness" depends entirely on what you condition on. Conditional on the hare being better at racing, you could say it's fair that the hare wins. But why does the hare get to be better at racing in the first place?
Debates about what is and isn't fair are best framed as debates over what to condition on, because that's where most of the disagreement lies. (As is the case here, I suppose).
This is much better than my moral.
I will run the risk of overanalyzing: Faced with a big wide world and no initial idea of what is true or false, people naturally gravitate toward artificial constraints on what they should be allowed to believe. This reduces the feeling of crippling uncertainty and makes the task of reasoning much simpler, and since an artificial constraint can be anything, they can even paint themselves a nice rosy picture in which to live. But ultimately it restricts their ability to align their beliefs with the truth. However comforting their illusions may be at firs...
"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.
-Kafka, A Little Fable
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.
Moral: Just because the superior agent knows what is best for you and could give you flawless advice, doesn't mean it will not prefer to consume you for your component atoms!
Joe Pyne was a confrontational talk show host and amputee, which I say for reasons that will become clear. For reasons that will never become clear, he actually thought it was a good idea to get into a zing-fight with Frank Zappa, his guest of the day. As soon as Zappa had been seated, the following exchange took place:
Pyne: I guess your long hair makes you a girl.
Zappa: I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.
Of course this would imply that Pyne is not a featherless biped.
Source: Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
I've always thought there should be a version where the hare gets eaten by a fox halfway through the race, while the tortoise plods along safely inside its armored mobile home.
That is true. But there are also such things as holding another person at gunpoint and ordering them to do something. It doesn't make them the same person as you. Their preferences are different even if they seem to behave in your interest.
And in either case, you are technically not deciding the other person's behavior. You are merely realigning their incentives. They still choose for themselves what is the best response to their situation. There is no muscle now-you can flex to directly make tomorrow-you lift his finger, even if you can concoct some...
We can't jettison hyperbolic discounting if it actually describes the relationship between today-me and tomorrow-me's preferences. If today-me and tomorrow-me do have different preferences, there is nothing in the theory to say which one is "right." They simply disagree. Yet each may be well-modeled as a rational agent.
The default fact of the universe is that you aren't the same agent today as tomorrow. An "agent" is a single entity with one set of preferences who makes unified decisions for himself, but today-you can't make decisio...
Another alternative is to provide doctors with a simple, easy-to-use program called Dr. Bayes. The program would take as input: the doctor's initial estimate of the chance the patient has the disorder (taking into account whatever the doctor knows about various risk factors) the false positive and false negative rates of a test.
The program would spit out the probability of having the disorder given positive and negative test results.
Obviously there are already tools on the internet that will implement Bayes theorem for you. But maybe it could be sold ...
thanks, PPV is exactly what I'm after.
The alternative to giving a doctor positive & negative predictive values for each maternal age is to give false positive & negative rates for the test plus the prevalence rate for each maternal age. Not much difference in terms of the information load.
One concern I didn't consider before is that many doctors would probably resist reporting PPV's to their patients because they are currently recommending tests that, if they actually admitted the PPV's, would look ridiculous! (e.g. breast cancer screening).
"False positive rate" and "False negative rate" have strict definitions and presumably it is standard to report these numbers as an outcome of clinical trials. Could we similarly define a rigid term to describe the probability of having a disorder given a positive test result, and require that to be reported right along with false positive rates?
Seems worth an honest try, though it might be too hard to define it in such a way as to forestall weaseling.
Only one out of 21 obstetricians could estimate the probability that an unborn child had Down syndrome given a positive test
Say the doctor knows false positive/negative rates of the test, and also the overall probability of Down syndrome, but doesn't know how to combine these into the probability of Down syndrome given a positive test result.
Okay, so to the extent that it's possible, why doesn't someone just tell them the results of the Bayesian updating in advance? I assume a doctor is told the false positive and negative rates of a test. But what matt...
...Closeness in the experiment was reasonably literal but may also be interpreted in terms of identification with the torturer. If the church is doing the torturing then the especially religious may be more likely to think the tortured are guilty. If the state is doing the torturing then the especially patriotic (close to their country) may be more likely to think that the tortured/killed/jailed/abused are guilty. That part is fairly obvious but note the second less obvious implication–the worse the victim is treated the more the religious/patriotic will bel
I dislike this quote because it obscures the true nature of the dilemma, namely the tension between individual and collective action. Being "not in one's right mind" is a red herring in this context. Each individual action can be perfectly sensible for the individual, while still leading to a socially terrible outcome.
The real problem is not that some genius invents nuclear weapons and then idiotically decides to incite global nuclear war, "shooting from the hip" to his own detriment. The real problem is that incentives can be alig...
This post, by its contents and tone, seems to really emphasize the downside of signaling. So let me play the other side.
Enabling signaling can add or subtract a huge amount of value from what would happen without signaling. You can tweak your initial example to get a "rat race" outcome where everyone, including the stupid people, sends a costly signal that ends up being completely uninformative (since everyone sends it). But you can also make it prohibitively mentally painful for stupid people to go to college, versus neutral or even enjoyable...
This sounds awesome. It would be really cool if you could configure it so that identifying biases actually helps you to win by some tangible measure. For example, if figuring out a bias just meant that person stopped playing with bias (instead of drawing a new bias), figuring out biases would be instrumental in winning. The parameters could be tweaked of course (if people typically figure out the biases quickly, you could make it so they redraw biases several times). Or you could link drawing additional biases with the drawing of epidemic cards?
I have ...
Luke, I thought this was a good post for the following reasons.
(1) Not everything needs to be an argument to persuade. Sometimes it's useful to invest your limited resources in better illuminating your position instead of illuminating how we ought to arrive at your position. Many LWers already respect your opinions, and it's sometimes useful to simply know what they are.
The charitable reading of this post is not that it's an attempted argument via cherry-picked examples that support your feeling of hopefulness. Instead I read it as an attempt to commu...
wedrifid, RIGHT. Sorry, got a little sloppy.
By "TDT reasoning" -- I know, I know -- I have been meaning Desrtopa's use of "TDT reasoning," which seems to be like TDT + [assumption that everyone else is using TDT].
I shouldn't say that TDT is irrelevant, but really that it is a needless generalization in this context. I meant that Desrtopa's invocation of TDT was irrelevant, in that it did nothing to fix the commons problem that we were initially discussing without mention of TDT.
It seems like this is an example of, at best, a domain on which decisionmaking could use TDT. No one is denying that people could use TDT, though. I was hoping for you to demonstrate an example where people actually seem to be behaving in accordance with TDT. (It is not enough to just argue that people reason fairly similarly in certain domains).
"Isomorphic" is a strong word. Let me know if you have a better example.
Anyway let me go back to this from your previous comment:
...Tragedies of commons are not universally unresolvable....Simply saying
Later, when I cease identifying with my past self too much, I would admit (at least to myself) that I have changed my opinion.
I think the default is that people change specific opinions more in response to the tactful debate style you're identifying, but are less likely to ever notice that they have in fact changed their opinion. I think explicitly noticing one's wrongness on specific issues can be really beneficial in making a person less convinced of their rightness more globally, and therefore more willing to change their mind in general. My questi...
I'd like to say yes, but I don't really know. Am I way off-base here?
Probably the most realistic answer is that I would sometimes believe it, and sometimes not. If not often enough, it's not worth it. It's too bad there aren't more people weighing in on these comments because I'd like to know how the community thinks my priorities should be set. In any case you've been around for longer so you probably know better than I.
human decisionmaking is isomorphic to TDT in some domains
Maybe it would help if you gave me an example of what you have in mind here.
prase, I really sympathize with that comment. I will be the first to admit that forcing people to concede their incorrectness is typically not the best way of getting them to agree on the truth. See for example this comment.
BUT! On this site we sort of have TWO goals when we argue, truth-seeking and meta-truth-seeking. Yes, we are trying to get closer to the truth on particular topics. But we're also trying to make ourselves better at arguing and reasoning in general. We are trying to step back and notice what we're doing, and correct flaws when they ...
Unfortunately that response did not convince me that I'm misunderstanding your position.
If people are not using a TDT decision rule, then your original explicit use of TDT reasoning was irrelevant and I don't know why you would have invoked it at all unless you thought it was actually relevant. And you continue to imply at least a weaker form of that reasoning.
No one is disputing that there is correlation between people's decisions. The problem is that correlation does not imply that TDT reasoning works! A little bit of correlation does not imply that T...
Desrtopa, can we be careful with it means to be "different" from other agents? Without being careful, we might reach for any old intuitive metric. But it's not enough to be mentally similar to other agents across just any metric. For your reasoning to work, they have to be executing the same decision rule. That's the metric that matters here.
Suppose we start out identical but NOT reasoning as per TDT -- we defect in the prisoner's dilemma, say -- but then you read some LW and modify your decision rule so that when deciding what to do, you ima...
To me, this comment basically concedes that you're wrong but attempts to disguise it in a face-saving way. If you could have said that people should be informing themselves at the socially optimal level, as you've been implying with your TDT arguments above, you would have. Instead, you backed off and said that people ought to be informing themselves at least a little.
Just to be sure, let me rewrite your claim precisely, in the sense you must mean it given your supposed continued disagreement:
...In general I think that a personal policy of not informing o
I agree. Desrtopa is taking Eliezer's barbarians post too far for a number of reasons.
1) Eliezer's decision theory is at the least controversial which means many people here may not agree with it.
2) Even if they agree with it, it doesn't mean they have attained rationality in Eliezer's sense.
3) Even if they have attained this sort of rationality, we are but a small community, and the rest of the world is still not going to cooperate with us. Our attempts to cooperate with them will be impotent.
Desrtopa: Just because it upholds an ideal of rationality that...
Exactly, it IS the tragedy of the commons, but that supports my point, not yours. It may be good for society if people are more informed about global warming, but society isn't what makes decisions. Individuals make decisions, and it's not in the average individual's interest to expend valuable resources learning more about global warming if it's going to have no real effect on the quality of their own life.
Whether you think it's an individual's "job" or not to do what's socially optimal, is completely besides the point here. The fact is they ...
Wait a sec. Global warming can be important for everyday life without it being important that any given individual know about it for everyday life. In the same way that matters of politics have tremendous bearing on our lives, yet the average person might rationally be ignorant about politics since he can't have any real effect on politics. I think that's the spirit in which thomblake means it's a political matter. For most of us, the earth will get warmer or it won't, and it doesn't affect how much we are willing to pay for tomatoes at the grocery sto...
I took the survey too. I would strongly recommend changing the Singularity question to read:
"If you don't think a Singularity will ever happen, write N for Never"
Or something like that. The fraction of people who think Never with high probability is really interesting! You don't want to lump them in with the people who don't have an opinion.
If the goal is intellectual progress, those who disagree should aim not for name-calling but for honest counterargument.
and
DH7: Improve the Argument, then Refute Its Central Point...if you're interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents' arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you [also] must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse."
I would add that the goal of intellectual progress sometimes extends beyond you-the-rationalist, to the (potentially less than rati...
As we evaluate predictions for accuracy, one thing we should all be hyper-aware of is that predictions can affect behavior. It is always at least a little bit suspect to evaluate a prediction simply for accuracy, when its goal might very well have been more than accuracy.
If I bet you $100 on even odds that I'm going to lose 10 lbs this month, it doesn't necessarily indicate that I think the probability of it happening is > 50%. Perhaps this bet increases the probability of it happening from 10% to 40%, and maybe that 30% increase in probability is w...
I really enjoyed this article. I took a few sittings to read it, but I liked the continuous format.
Let me just make a general comment on the tone here:
But really, shouldn't it have been obvious all along that humans are irrational? Perhaps it is, to everyone but neoclassical economists and Aristoteleans. (Okay, enough teasing...)
Teasing per se is fine, but this happens to reinforce a popular sentiment which I find misleading. Everyone likes to point out the differences between standard economic assumptions and actual human behavior. Pitted against ot...
There are commenters who note that the use of "ey" and other gender neutral pronouns hurts their head. You may understand this and still use "ey" as part of a larger attempt to accustom people to language that is ultimately more convenient, even if it's worse in the short run. Which is a perfect example of what I was going to say:
When you do your harm minimization calculation, you really need to include the entire path over time, and not just the snapshot. It is often true that hurting people today makes them stronger in the future, ...
Big agents can be more coherent than small agents, because they have more resources to spend on coherence.
Yes. Coherence, and persuasiveness.
The individual that argues against whatever political lobby is quick to point out that the lobby gets its way not because it is right, but rather because it has reason to scream louder than the dispersed masses who would oppose it. But indeed, the very arguments the lobby crafts are likely to be more compelling to the masses, because it has the resources to make them so.
The lobby screams louder and better than smaller agents, as far as convincing people goes.
okay. I still suspect I disagree with whatever you mean by mere "figures of speech," but this rational truthseeker does not have infinite time or energy.
in any case, thank you for a productive and civil exchange.
Fair. Let me be precise too. I read your original statement as saying that numbers will never add meaning beyond what a vague figure of speech would, i.e. if you say "I strongly believe this" you cannot make your position more clear by attaching a number. That I disagree with. To me it seems clear that:
i) "Common-sense conclusions and beliefs" are held with varying levels of precision. ii) Often even these beliefs are held with a level of precision that can be best described with a number. (Best=most succinctly, least misinterpret...
Again, meaningless is a very strong word, and it does not make your case easy. You seem to be suggesting that NO number, however imprecise, has any place here, and so you do not get to refute me by saying that I have to embrace arbitrary precision.
In any case, if you offer me some bets with more significant digits in the odds, my choices will reveal the cutoff to more significant digits. Wherever it may be, there will still be some bets I will and won't take, and the number reflects that, which means it carries very real meaning.
Now, maybe I will hold th...
I tell you I believe X with 54% certainty. Who knows, that number could have been generated in a completely bogus way. But however I got here, this is where I am. There are bets about X that I will and won't take, and guess what, that's my cutoff probability right there. And by the way, now I have communicated to you where I am, in a way that does not further compound the error.
Meaningless is a very strong word.
In the face of such uncertainty, it could feel natural to take shelter in the idea of "inherent vagueness"...but this is reality, and we place our bets with real dollars and cents, and all the uncertainty in the world collapses to a number in the face of the expectation operator.
For people who are embedded in a social structure, it can be costly to step outside of it. Many people will justifiably choose monogamy simply because, given the equilibrium we're in, it is the best move for them...even IF they would prefer a world of polyamory or some other alternative.
To go off topic for a moment, the same could also be said of religious belief. I know the people here feel a special allegiance to the truth, and that's wonderful, but if we lived in 12th century europe it might not be worth rejecting religion even if we saw through it....
You shouldn't take this post as a dismissal of intuition, just a reminder that intution is not magically reliable. Generally, intuition is a way of saying, "I sense similarities between this problem and other ones I have worked on. Before I work on this problem, I have some expectation about the answer." And often your expectation will be right, so it's not something to throw away. You just need to have the right degree of confidence in it.
Often one has worked through the argument before and remembers the conclusion but not the actual steps ...
Anonymous; quoted for instance in The Manager's Dilemma