This is the great case against hypocrisy, that hypocrisy allows us to act contrary to our ideals, and at times our ideals could have prevented holocausts. I suppose on the other side of the ledger must go the various "social graces" where hypocrisy supposedly smooths social interactions and lets us save face. Is there a way to weigh these two sides against each other, or is there a way to distinguish them, so we could have the good hypocrisy without excessive risk of the bad slipping in too?
Hypocrisy is a protection against bad ideals as well as an impediment to achieving good ideals.
I assume that what you are referring to are some of the laws encountered in the Old Testament, which were part of a legal structure designed to apply to the Israelite nation (and no one else, point of interest). From a Judaism perspective, the law is supposed to apply only to Jews - those who are part of the religion and the race.
Yes, because murder and genocide make perfect sense as long as you restrict them to a particular place and time! And there are such things as "races" and it makes sense for them to be units of moral analysis. And obviously "she must marry her rapist" (Deuteronomy 22:28-29) is a totally sensible rule for an ancient culture, and neither the Greeks nor the Chinese had figured out anything even remotely better by that time period. Yes, obviously, it was totally fair for Moses to be talking about slaughtering the Amalekites (and their children, and their cattle; Deuteronomy 20:16-17) at the same time in history when Demosthenes and Epicurus were debating about the proper form of democratic government. And no one today takes those ideas seriously, and certainly there aren't millions of Americans who use passages from Leviticus (18:22 and ...
When did Tyler say that overcoming bias is not important? Are you talking about this post here: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/08/how-important-i.html
He says it's not the most important thing in the world, not that it's not important. So, is your reading of Cowen biased? Or did I miss something?
J, that's Tyler quoting a summary of Hanson, not Tyler himself.
Robin, I think it'd be pretty silly to trade off social graces against the Inquisition, especially when some creative thinking could devise alternative social graces.
Seriously, we're trading off social graces against what?
In all human history, every great leap forward has been driven by a new clarity of thought. Except for a few natural catastrophes, every great woe has been driven by a stupidity. Our last enemy is ourselves; and this is a war, and we are soldiers.
Amazing quote.
Summary: if they can make you believe absurdities, they can make you commit atrocities.
"In my opinion, this is Establishment writing (Mao and Stalin as the "bad guys") only problematic to me because the strength against challenges of your presented ideas nontransparently rest on power alignment, rather than just their accuracy of modeling apparent reality and devising solutions to challenges we face."
Don't you love post modernists? their rhetoric is frankly baffling to common sense (what they would term a mental power-structure - I'm not sure even they understand what it is their writing half the time)
Its obviously been long since humanity had to strive for objectivity and earnest disinterest because human bias was creating so much suffering in the world.
There isn't much known about Hopefully Anonymous, but I'm fairly certain he does not consider himself a post-modernist.
So let us be absolutely clear that where there is human evil in the world, where there is cruelty and torture and deliberate murder, there are biases enshrouding it. Where people of clear sight oppose these biases, the concealed evil fights back.Funny, I seem to recall some leading anti-bias advocates promoting torture right here on this blog. Apparently one can be comfortably against bias and for torture without losing a moment's sleep about it.
mtraven - To be against bias is not the same as to be without bias, so even if we were to grant that James is "comfortably against bias and for torture without losing a moment's sleep", that would not constitute a counterexample to Eliezer's claim that "where there is...torture...there are biases enshrouding it."
"persist as subjective conscious entities. What actions that the 4 of us take will maximize our persistence odds? I think every ideal should be subordinated to that."
I'm not entirely sure I know what that means, but it SOUNDS like "each of us wants to be different -- it's more important than anything else that we be different from each other."
If my reading is correct, I fail to see why I would want to consider that my overriding priority. Particularly in placing over, say, the truth.
And Eliezer, it just keeps getting better and better....
Flynn, response on my blog within the next ten minutes ("being different" isn't what I mean).
Why would a near-total egoist hope to be anonymous? :-)
HA, replied on your blog. Sorry about the confusion.
I feel you exaggerate the case here Eliezer. Overcoming bias will not solve all the problems in the world. There's even a chance it could make them worst. Let's look at hypocrisy, for instance:
This is the great case against hypocrisy, that hypocrisy allows us to act contrary to our ideals, and at times our ideals could have prevented holocausts. I suppose on the other side of the ledger must go the various "social graces" where hypocrisy supposedly smooths social interactions and lets us save face. Is there a way to weigh these two sides against each other, or is there a way to distinguish them, so we could have the good hypocrisy without excessive risk of the bad slipping in too?
There's a huge positive chunk of hypocrisy that we're missing there - hypocrisy allows us to have ideals higher than we can (and do) attain in our actions. It can have a tremendously aspirational effect. The phrase "all men are created equal" was written by rich, white slaveowners. Eliezer feels that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have written the same phrase, and set all their slaves free. I fear that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have kept their slaves and instead...
There's a huge positive chunk of hypocrisy that we're missing there - hypocrisy allows us to have ideals higher than we can (and do) attain in our actions. It can have a tremendously aspirational effect. The phrase "all men are created equal" was written by rich, white slaveowners. Eliezer feels that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have written the same phrase, and set all their slaves free. I fear that if hypocrisy had been banned, they would have kept their slaves and instead written "all rich, white men are created equal". And future progress would have been ruled out.
Ah, now there's a powerful argument.
But at the same time, if hypocrisy had not decreased, we would still have rich white slaveowners.
It should be assumed by default that when I talk about the benefits of overcoming bias, I am talking about the sort of human being who comes into existence when they set out to overcome their own biases by acts of mental will and training. Not, necessarily, the sort of entity that you get if you do neurosurgery on a human; nor the sort of entity that would have evolved if deception and self-deception had not been part of the ancestral environment.
The sort...
I regret that I have to disagree with the post, even though I am a great fan of Orwell.
Stalin and Hitler did not suffer from lack of clarity. They knew exactly what they were doing, knew why they were doing it, and were glad of the outcome. More logic and better writing would simply have helped them be even more effectively evil. Teaching clear thinking is important; but it will not stop evil people from having evil intentions or acting evil. Evil emerges from the heart and soul, not the head. Intellectuals who supported, and support, Lenin, Stali...
Stalin and Hitler did not suffer from lack of clarity. They knew exactly what they were doing
Yes, hypocrisy is not the problem with them.
Intellectuals who supported, and support, Lenin, […], and so forth, knew what they doing.
No, I don't think that they did or do! Orwell was writing to intellectuals who were in denial about what Stalin was doing and why. Here is where hypocrisy causes problems.
Eliezer, you seem to say that trying to reduce hypocrisy is good for people who are trying to overcome their biases. That seems a tautology, and doesn't seem that related to the issue you seemed to raise in the post, which is whether hypocrisy in society tends to promote holocausts.
"Helping people to open their eyes and see human suffering, raising children to be compassionate, will do far more to get rid of the Hitlers and Castros than logic and writing classes."
'Cause no one ever thought that Che Guivera or Lenin were acting out of a compassionate desire to end suffering. Nobody EVER claimed that.
Confucius on the Rectification of Names written some 2500 years ago.
"Tzu-lu asked 'If the Lord of Wei entrusts the government to you, what will you do first?"
"Correct names, surely!" the Master said.
"How can you stray so far from the point! What would that correct?"
"Tzu-lu, you are a boor. On matters of which he is ignorant a gentleman expresses no opinion. If names are incorrect, it is impossible to speak. When it is impossible to speak, work is not done. When work is not done, society breaks down and punishment is ...
Eliezer, you seem to say that trying to reduce hypocrisy is good for people who are trying to overcome their biases. That seems a tautology...
"The sort of human being who makes a continual effort to overcome hypocrisy, and who manages to do so, will probably set the slaves free." I don't quite see how this is tautological...
Stalin and Hitler did not suffer from lack of clarity.
Hitler certainly did. Stalin... maybe not, I don't know his case in as much detail. But it is their followers, and the rest of the world, who they managed to confuse. This is what Orwell opposed. He was not speaking to Stalin, but to the people who tried to excuse Stalin.
Helping people to open their eyes and see human suffering, raising children to be compassionate, will do far more to get rid of the Hitlers and Castros than logic and writing classes.
I'm supposed to applaud now, right?
Opening eyes is what I do. It's a lot more complicated than telling your kids, "Suffering is bad, m'kay?"
There's a long, long distance between being told by your parents not to murder, and learning how to actually see a "murder" taking place rather than an "alternative justice process". Morality without logic will be flushed down a toilet by self-deception.
There's a long, long distance between being told by your parents not to murder, and learning how to actually see a "murder" taking place rather than an "alternative justice process".
Or an ordinary justice process, for that matter.
David Brin has a nice analysis in his book The Transparent Society of what makes open societies work so well (no doubt distilled from others). Essentially it is the freedom to criticize and hold accountable that keeps powerful institutions honest and effective. While most people do not care or dare enough there are enough "antibodies" in a healthy open society to maintain it, even when the "antibodies" themselves may not always be entirely sane (there is a kind of social "peer review" going on here among the criticisms).
Muddle...
Eliezer, do you see the distance between how you are discussing this topic and how Anders is? Invoking "Good and Evil", with Stalin and Mao (losers of conflicts with the anglosphere?) being "evil" seems to me to me to be an appropriation of the overcomingbias space more so than a good faith effort to intelligently expand that space. Anders approach in general and in this post in particular serves as a good contrast, in my opinion.
In my post here you can find links to defenses of Stalin and Mao. They do not deny that both killed a huge amount of people, or that a great many of those people were completely innocent and it was tragic that they were killed. The author instead states that Stalin and Mao gave enough benefits to people, who had previously been faced with even worse rule, that those unfortunate deaths should be viewed as cons outweighed by the pros. I can't do an effective job of presenting his case (for one thing I completely disagree with it and think the two were among ...
While Eliezer and I may be approaching the topic differently, I think we have very much the same aim. My approach will however never produce anything worthy to go into anybody's quote file.
Anders & TGGP, Response on my blog within 10 minutes (so as not to flood overcomingbias with posts).
How come this blog won't remember my info? I keep clicking that damn checkbox to no effect.
I read Orwell's essay last night. Quite impressive, but I didn't immediately understand some of his criticisms. I did later on, and would like to share.
One thing that I had a revelation about is this pair of equivalent passages:
"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to th...
I think the recent 1984 quotes are close to encouraging generalization from fictional evidence. Bias and totalitarianism are not more connected because Orwell wrote a work of fiction connecting them; you may understand this on a gut level, but many readers probably don't. If there's a duty to make history available, isn't there a converse duty to make fiction unavailable?
Anyway, here are my thoughts on whether it's a good idea to choose bias.
The rules of the game are much different when you have bad faith, as in totalitarian societies, as opposed to comparing Democrats vs Republicans. Or are they?
steven, your criticism is valid only if Eliezer used the passage from 1984 in some way that properly requires that it actually have happened. It is not at all clear that he did so. For example, if he used it as a way to illustrate a point, clarifying his meaning, then it was not improperly used. If he used it as evidence of Orwell's own well-thought-out views on the subject, then again, it was not improperly used. There are many ways to use fiction that are not improper.
"For example, if he used it as a way to illustrate a point, clarifying his meaning, then it was not improperly used. If he used it as evidence of Orwell's own well-thought-out views on the subject, then again, it was not improperly used. There are many ways to use fiction that are not improper."
What his intentions were doesn't matter; what matters is the expected reaction of the audience, which in this case is going to see a vivid example supporting Eliezer's claim that human evil sets out to muddle thinking. This happens to be true, but it doesn...
Copy of my post defending Stalin and Mao from Hopeanon.
Hello, my defense of Stalin and Mao are simple and the links can be found here on the Entitled To an Opinion blog. My argument is simple. Stalin saved far more lives than he took. In fact, Czarism was three times more deadly on a per capita basis than the average for the Stalin years. Plus, Stalin set a world record for the fastest doubling of life expectancy in any land. This amazing feat was only broken by Mao in 1976. Therefore, based on those records, I hold that Stalin and Mao were two of the grea...
This is a pretty interesting discussion. While the overall topic of this blog is the worthwhileness of overcoming bias, I think how that relates to "evil" is a pretty important facet of what we should talk about. Some of the comments on this post reminded me of a passage from a novel (a fantasy novel if you must know) on the nature of evil. I found it to be very profound and I think everyone here might find it sort of interesting. You'll have to excuse the use of some of the plot specific names, the beginning of each chapter of the book opens wit...
Clear thinking is a necessary but insufficient condition for avoiding evil. Eichmann is a paradigmatic case of local rationality in the pursuit of evil ends. And right here on this blog, we see proudly rational thinkers advocating what most normal people would think of as evil, namely the employment of torture as a judicial punishment. I've argued against them, but perhaps my arguments aren't any good. Maybe it is more rational to apply shocks to the genitals or waterboarding than to lock someone in a cell. Maybe we don't have anything better than instinctive revulsion to keep us from evil. In which case, we should not be overcoming our biases, but listening closely to them.
mtraven, You're ignoring concepts like inquiring empirically whether situationally employed torture can reduce net torture in the world. I brought it up in the torture thread and I think every commenter ignored the concept. Also, I'm unconvinced that the desire to label indivuduals as "good" and "evil" comes from a good faith attempt to accurately model reality, or even optimally solve existential challenges we face. It seems to come more from a desire to use morality to create status heirarchies, although in some cases it could also cr...
HA, that's exactly the sort of argument I'm talking about. It is too easy to convince oneself by some bit of reasoning that doing an evil act is OK -- maybe it reduces some other evil, maybe it gets rid of the Jews who you have convinced yourself are a source of evil. Maybe you can convince yourself that implementing some torture will reduce the total amount of suffering in the world. I would be extremely dubious. Reasoning from first principles about practical affairs is extremely unreliable, and has to be augmented with heuristics, intuition, and gut ...
Tiiba, I've always considered this bible quote
"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
to be a paradigm of bad writing. The nasty trick it exemplifies is using a paradox to get one up on the reader without committing to a specific meaning.
If the race is not to the swift, who does win? The lucky? Contrast two aphorisms "the race is to the sw...
"Pro-torture and anti-torture factions will have to fight it out politically, just as the pro- and anti-homosexuality factions do. Which side are you on?"
haha, that reads as deliberate bait to me. Presenting 2 options as if they're the only options seems to be preying on a dualistic/binary bias common in most people, and that I think stems from our primate roots. That sentence reads like it could be lifted from a George W. Bush speech, that type that's widely mocked for performing a lack of nuance.
When we think in ways that hide the consequences of our actions, there's no way we can make good choices based on consequences.
But when that isn't blurred we still might disagree about the choices. So if you don't think DDT affects songbirds you're likely to think DDT is entirely a good thing. But even when you know, you might decide that perfect fruits are more important than birds.
Moral choices aren't inevitable when you understand the facts, but without the facts it's even harder.
There's often a conflict between immediate things and distant implication....
J Thomas, I really like your last paragraph "Still, sometimes the language is central. When we say the US military is in iraq "protecting iraqis", it might work better to reduce the level of abstraction and say we're there "killing people and blowing things up". Or maybe we're "killing people that we think are about to kill the ones we don't want killed". When we say "train the iraqi army" we might say "train selected iraqis to kill people and blow things up under our direction". The clearer we say what we're doing, the easier it might get to create a better strategy."
I'm sure TGGP will agree with my request to you: Start a blog!
that reads as deliberate bait to me. Presenting 2 options as if they're the only options seems to be preying on a dualistic/binary bias common in most people, and that I think stems from our primate roots.
Everything we do stems from our primate roots. I don't know you well enough to deliberately bait you, but using that expression (which comes from ) is meant to signify that at some point, when dealing with politics, you have to stop spouting hot air, choose which side of an issue you are on, and fight for it. That attitude seems somewhat antithetical to ...
Whoops, messed up a link there, was supposed to read: comes from an old union song. The link is to my own blog where I am basically taking the opposing view, that forced-side-choosing is bad, in many circumstances. But I did say I was contrarian...
mtraven, my position is pretty transparent. I want to persist as a subjective conscious entity, forever, and everything else is subsidiary to that. To the degree torture (of myself or others) maximizes my persistence odds, then I perceive it to be in my interest to welcome it. To the degree torture (of myself or others) reduces my persistence odds, I oppose it.
To the degree you mtraven would place opposing torture over your own persistence as a subjective conscious entity is perhaps a triumph of meme over a subjective conscious individual, in my opinion.
Al...
mtraven, I'm not sure what it means to be "objective, apolitical" but I certainly hope that when issues arise here people here are willing to set aside what they think they know enough to imagine being uncertain and then trying to evaluate which way the evidence and analysis leans.
I'm puzzled, as usual, but perhaps more so: this post has helped clarify the lack of clarity in my understanding of "bias" as the word is used here. You see, I don't in general see an a priori distinction between "bias" and other kinds of heuristics; we are talking about computational shortcuts, ways to save on reasoning, and all of them go wrong sometimes. I'm glad to have scope insensitivity pointed out to me, and having seen the discussion on this blog may even keep me from some error at some time, but my reasoning will always be inc...
HA, you may have your personal single life goal worked out but I'm not sure why the rest of us should be interested. My goal is emphatically not persisting my subjective reality as far forward in time as possible, let alone yours. I have other people I care about, I probably care more about the quality of my life than quantity, I do have memes that I place a great deal of value on. Most other normal people feel the same way, I suspect.,
Robin, what evidence has been brought forth to support the proposition that torture may be a good idea? I have cited boo...
Carl Sagan (I think) said we should be open-minded, but not so open that our brains fall out. It's even more important when discussing issues as morally fraught as torture, that we don't open our minds so far that our souls fall out.
Well said.
"Carl Sagan (I think) said we should be open-minded, but not so open that our brains fall out. It's even more important when discussing issues as morally fraught as torture, that we don't open our minds so far that our souls fall out.
Well said.
Posted by: Eliezer Yudkowsky | September 16, 2007 at 06:07 PM"
What does that even mean? The quote and concept seem to distract from empirical inquiry and rational problem solving, rather than add to them. I'm not sure I see it as different in kind from "If it doesn't fit, then you must acquit."
HA, this is not the forum for it but perhaps somewhere else you might explain where you stand.
The way US law used to work, you or anybody else got to torture whenever you thought it was a good idea, and then you could expect to stand trial. If the police thought you did the right thing they might choose not to investigate, if the DA thought you did the right thing he might not prosecute, if the grand jury thought you did the right thing they might not continue, if the jury thought you did the right thing they might not convict, if the judge thought you did...
Tom Myers,
I think the convention on this blog, among the small set of people who have such a precise definition, is that not every heuristic is a bias, that only heuristics whose errors are worth overcoming should be called biases. I don't like this usage. For one thing, it's really hard to know the cost of overcoming particular biases. It's easy to look at an isolated experiment and say: here's a procedure that would have been better, but that doesn't cover cost of actually changing your behavior to look out for this kind of error.
Also, there are other ...
mtraven, do you really believe in the existence of the soul, or are you just using it because it is in common usage? At my blog I was thinking of writing a post whose title began "Thank god", then remembered I had already declared I was an agnotheist, and then considered "Thank goodness", but remembered I didn't believe in objective good either.
Do not take my rhetorical flourishes overly literally. We may be meat machines without an inhabiting ghost, but that doesn't mean that "soul" doesn't have meaningful connotations. In this context, it (roughly) means "our deep-seated representations of ourselves, and others, and morality, and our ability to empathize with others." It means that a rationality that only considers your own personal ends (as HA seems to advocate) is deficient. It means that people who blithely talk about torture as an option probably haven't spent too much...
Tom and Douglas, I'd take "bias" to mean something like "common feature of human thinking that gives us predictably wrong answers". Some biases might (for any given person) not be worth correcting, if correcting them requires sustained effort and similar effort could be more effective if deployed to other ends. I don't see why whether something's a "bias" should depend on whether it's the result of a heuristic operating out of the regime it was designed for, or on whether we can correct it.
I have the feeling that the term &quo...
Mtravern,
In my opinion you're preying on bias to achieve status advantage for yourself/posting name. But I don't think it will be as effective a social strategy in this overcomingbias medium as it would be in the general population.
Hopefully Anon, I can't imagine what great status or survival advantages you think I'm going to get by posting here. If I was interested in advancing my status I'd pick better activities than flaming pseudonymously on blogs, you may be sure.
But in a way you are right, but trivially. Presumably everybody who posts here or otherwise engages in human communication has, at some level, an underlying motive of increasing their status. Everybody hopes to make themselves look good. I don't see how my postings differ from anybody else's in this regard.
mtravern,
I'll have a response up to your post on my blog within 10 minutes.
getting out of touch with your basic humanity
I am a homo sapien, therefore my characteristics are human. Perhaps I should wonder why you have an inhuman bias against torture, but of course that is human as well.
Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto
Douglas, with regard to systematic but unexplained errors, would you agree that we can (usually) describe these as due to unidentified heuristics? I'm feeling very unsure about that, but I would like to have some fairly concrete way of thinking about this blog's subject matter, and at least this way it's something I've taught. :-) I'm not about to insist that all thought can be modeled with symbol-processing. It may even be that the most fundamental errors are those that arise without any symbol-processing -- I've just been reading a dog-trainer's book whi...
Tom Myers,
Systematic but unexplained: sure, most errors are probably due to heuristics, but I'm not sure that's a useful statement. A number of posts here have been so specific, they don't seem like useful starting points for searching for heuristics.
Cost:
Most people don't seem to have sufficiently clear goals to make sense of whether something benefits or costs them, let alone balancing the two.
People live normal lives by not thinking too much about things, so it shouldn't be so surprising that they don't think in psych experiments in which it is ofte...
Douglas Knight: for me, thinking of "bias" (as used on this blog) as a result of heuristic processing is moderately useful 'cos (a) mainly, it just gives a general framework, a set of very concrete metaphors and therefore heuristics (and therefore biases) that I've worked with over the years; (b) it suggests that the problem of bias can be ameliorated but not solved, because you'll never get perfect heuristics and you'll never be able to do all the computing that's required to do without heuristics; (c) ah, well, I forget what (c) was gonna be. B...
You probably won't go far wrong if you assume I agree with you on the points I don't respond to. I probably shouldn't have talked about them in the first place.
overcoming heuristics:
If we know a bias is caused by a heuristic, then we should use that heuristic less. But articulating a meta-heuristic about when to use it is very different implementing that meta-heuristic. Human minds aren't eurisko that can dial up the strength on heuristics. Even if we implement a heuristic, as in Kahneman's planning anecdote, and get more accurate information, we may simp...
I guess we're not disagreeing about much, at this point, though I think that you're basically more optimistic than I, and this might cause us to form different conceptions of the "overcoming bias" enterprise. I agree that we're not Eurisko (and suddenly I'm remembering Lenat's talk at IJCAI-77, explaining AM's fixed-heuristics problem that then led him to Eurisko...I was a graduate student) but my feeling is that we don't in general even have the choice of using a given heuristic less: we don't in general have the choice of becoming a less initia...
:The German text of the taped police examination, each page corrected and approved by EIchmann, constitutes a veritable gold mine for a psychologist - provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny. Some of the comedy cannot be conveyed in English, because it lies in Eichmann's heroic fight with the Germna language, which invariably defeats him. It is funny when he speaks, passim, of "winged words" (geflugelte Worte, a Gemran colloquialism of famous quotes from the classics) when we means s...
Clearly, Winston was just an actor, and O'Brien was being tested by a researcher at Miniluv, whose name was Stanley Milgram.
I find it eerie how intellectually close O'Brien's mindset is to that of the pure Post-Modernist of today (for the purpose of comparison, we will disregard the fact that the word 'pure' in relation to post-modernism is an oxymoron). If a meteor smashed through a roof, someone then cleaned up the mess and patched a hole in the roof, then erased the memories of those in proximity at the time, then the meteor never fell. This is exactly how O'Brien deals with Winston's refusal to depart from the bare physicality of arithmetic on the fingers; the key similar...
New Speak always chilled me. To limit the abilities of population by limiting their vocabulary seems like a sneaky and underhanded thing to do that should never be attempted by any government. Needless to say the idea of 1984 being real freaks me out.
I really dislike this post. It is essentially propaganda. It claims (without providing any kind of evidence based assessment!) that all the good things in human history are the result of rational thinking, while all the bad things in human history are the result of stupidity. I think that's quite clearly false.
First, most deaths in human history could not have been avoided, only delayed at best. No one person could have created an industrial society on their own, no matter how clever they might have been. If Da Vinci couldn't save the world and stop death,...
Overcoming bias in itself will be useless if there would be people with the power to decide what is bias and what is not.
Just as the fight against extremism (or racism, intolerance, etc.) can be skewed if there are people with enough political power to decide the exact meanings of these terms.
You don't think how the mind works is important? You don't think the mind's systematic malfunctions are important? Do you think the Inquisition would have tortured witches, if all were ideal Bayesians?
begging the question
From epistemic rationality how can one infer a particular route for instrumental rationality? I can’t think of any way since there are unaccounted for variables independent of rationality skills, like the complexity of one’s values (there’s a sequence post on this, too!)
...In all human history, every great leap forward has been dr
Woes and leaps forward can be intertwined. Peter the Great deliberately sent many workers (not to mention soldiers) to certain deaths to build St. Petersburg and fleet to win over Charles XII of Sweden. Nor was he ever hypocritical about it - he was strict enough to witness executions and not care. But in the end Peter's actions do seem like a leap forward. No hypocrisy, no stupidity, but huge woes.
Orwell is frequently cited by both the left and right as the most clear-headed social critic of the millennium. But he is not a corrective to muddle-headedness. He was, indeed pretty muddle-headed himself. His early works, Down and Out, and The Road to Wigan Pier, were, he later admitted, largely fictionalized, lavishly embellished accounts of his adventures among the exploited and desperately poor. The conditions he described were not untrue, but they were dramatized. He entered the Spanish Civil War on the highly romanticized left and quickly became disi...
George Orwell saw the descent of the civilized world into totalitarianism, the conversion or corruption of one country after another; the boot stamping on a human face, forever, and remember that it is forever. You were born too late to remember a time when the rise of totalitarianism seemed unstoppable, when one country after another fell to secret police and the thunderous knock at midnight, while the professors of free universities hailed the Soviet Union’s purges as progress. It feels as alien to you as fiction; it is hard for you to take seriously. Because, in your branch of time, the Berlin Wall fell. And if Orwell’s name is not carved into one of those stones, it should be.
Orwell saw the destiny of the human species, and he put forth a convulsive effort to wrench it off its path. Orwell’s weapon was clear writing. Orwell knew that muddled language is muddled thinking; he knew that human evil and muddled thinking intertwine like conjugate strands of DNA:1
Orwell was clear on the goal of his clarity:
To make our stupidity obvious, even to ourselves—this is the heart of Overcoming Bias.
Evil sneaks, hidden, through the unlit shadows of the mind. We look back with the clarity of history, and weep to remember the planned famines of Stalin and Mao, which killed tens of millions. We call this evil, because it was done by deliberate human intent to inflict pain and death upon innocent human beings. We call this evil, because of the revulsion that we feel against it, looking back with the clarity of history. For perpetrators of evil to avoid its natural opposition, the revulsion must remain latent. Clarity must be avoided at any cost. Even as humans of clear sight tend to oppose the evil that they see; so too does human evil, wherever it exists, set out to muddle thinking.
1984 sets this forth starkly: Orwell’s ultimate villains are cutters and airbrushers of photographs (based on historical cutting and airbrushing in the Soviet Union). At the peak of all darkness in the Ministry of Love, O’Brien tortures Winston to admit that two plus two equals five:2
I am continually aghast at apparently intelligent folks—such as Robin Hanson’s colleague Tyler Cowen—who don’t think that overcoming bias is important.3 This is your mind we’re talking about. Your human intelligence. It separates you from an orangutan. It built this world. You don’t think how the mind works is important? You don’t think the mind’s systematic malfunctions are important? Do you think the Inquisition would have tortured witches, if all were ideal Bayesians?
Tyler Cowen apparently feels that overcoming bias is just as biased as bias: “I view Robin’s blog as exemplifying bias, and indeed showing that bias can be very useful.” I hope this is only the result of thinking too abstractly while trying to sound clever. Does Tyler seriously think that scope insensitivity to the value of human life is on the same level with trying to create plans that will really save as many lives as possible?
Orwell was forced to fight a similar attitude—that to admit to any distinction is youthful naiveté:
Maybe overcoming bias doesn’t look quite exciting enough, if it’s framed as a struggle against mere accidental mistakes. Maybe it’s harder to get excited if there isn’t some clear evil to oppose. So let us be absolutely clear that where there is human evil in the world, where there is cruelty and torture and deliberate murder, there are biases enshrouding it. Where people of clear sight oppose these biases, the concealed evil fights back. The truth does have enemies. If Overcoming Bias were a newsletter in the old Soviet Union, every poster and commenter of Overcoming Bias would have been shipped off to labor camps.
In all human history, every great leap forward has been driven by a new clarity of thought. Except for a few natural catastrophes, every great woe has been driven by a stupidity. Our last enemy is ourselves; and this is a war, and we are soldiers.
1George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon, 1946.
2George Orwell, 1984 (Signet Classic, 1950).
3See Tyler Cowen, “How Important is Overcoming Bias?,” Marginal Revolution (blog), 2007, http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/08/how-important-i.html.