I am not an island. There are a few good ways to set up a life of bounded bias or a rational decision about whether or not to engage in bias. I am a social creature and as such am acutely aware that most of my decisions are made as a mix of peer pressure, groupthink, discussions with friends, unconscious reasoning and whatever media I may have managed to digest in the past few hours. I have several friends, one of whom is a dedicated rationalist but a genuinely kind person, his name is Steve I have given him these instructions..::please give me unsolicited advice and interrupt me if you see me doing something stupid or immoral but only if you think I could emotionally cope with the reasons why my action was immoral:: I have another friend he's something of a spiritualist and currently some form of wiccan something or other. His name is Dave, also a kind person and he has explicit instructions. ::Please give me unsolicited advice and help me out if I seem to be unhappy Give me the course of action you think would make me happiest so long as it doesn't conflict with what Steve has told me to do. When I have to get a good think on about something I call steve and dave separately, then...
Perhaps I am just contrarian in nature, but I took issue with several parts of her reasoning.
"What you're saying is tantamount to saying that you want to fuck me. So why shouldn't I react with revulsion precisely as though you'd said the latter?"
The real question is why should she react with revulsion if he said he wanted to fuck her? The revulsion is a response to the tone of the message, not to the implications one can draw from it. After all, she can conclude with >75% certainty that any male wants to fuck her. Why doesn't she show revulsion simply upon discovering that someone is male? Or even upon finding out that the world population is larger than previously thought, because that implies that there are more men who want to fuck her? Clearly she is smart enough to have resolved this paradox on her own, and posing it to him in this situation is simply being verbally aggressive.
"For my face is merely a reflection of my intellect. I can no more leave fingernails unchewed when I contemplate the nature of rationality than grin convincingly when miserable."
She seems to be claiming that her confrontational behavior and unsocial values are insepara...
"believing you're happy" and "in fact happy" strike me as distinctions without distinction. How are they falsifiable?
What if self-deception helps us be happy? What if just running out and overcoming bias will make us - gasp! - unhappy?
You are aware, I'm sure, of studies that connect depression and freedom from bias, notably overconfidence in one's ability to control outcome.
You've already given one answer: to deliberately choose to believe what our best judgement tells us isn't so would be lunacy. Many people are psychologically able to fool themselves subtly, but fewer are able to deliberately, knowingly fool themselves.
Another answer is that even though depression leads to freedom from some biases and illusions, the converse doesn't seem to apply. Overcoming bias doesn't seem to lead to depression. I don't get the impression that a disproportionate number of people on this list are depressed. In my own experience, losing illusions doesn't make me feel depressed. Even if the illusion promised something desirable, I think what I have usually felt was more like intellectual relief, "So that's why (whatever was promised) never seemed to work."
Depression is specifically linked to reducing overconfidence. People more accurately assess their own abilities (and perhaps others' abilities as well). I'm not aware that it's linked to decreasing other biases.
"How happy is the moron: / He doesn't give a damn. / I wish I were a moron. / -- My God, perhaps I am!"
Or, in other words, wanting to be stupid is itself a form of stupidity.
I'm pleased to say that, through a great deal of study and practice, I have learned how to unlearn things that I know. This is called skepticism. A key to it is the ability to imagine plausible alternatives to whatever is believed. Descartes is famous for developing this idea, although he was constrained by his society from completely embracing it. Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus developed this idea, but their community was persecuted and destroyed by the Christians, too.
Skepticism is not opposed to rationality, but neither does it accept that a rationally der...
This thing about depressed people being unbiased makes no sense to me. Maybe they're not overconfident, but aren't they underconfident instead? I'd find it pretty surprising if a mental illness was correlated with common sense.
Anyway, perhaps the key to being rational and happy is suppressing not facts, but fear of them. No, you can't have a pony. Get over it.
Tiiba: "makes no sense" and "would be surprising" are very different things, and the former is excessive for the claim about depressed people. The level of confidence that's optimal for making correct predictions about the world could be much lower than the level that's optimal for living a happy life. Do you have some way of knowing that it isn't?
(Let me forestall one argument against by remarking that evolution is not in the business of maximizing our happiness.)
Um, there are readers of this blog, and there are people who enjoy the "happiness of stupidity" (which is not the same as just having a low IQ; it involves other personality traits as well). I don't think there's much overlap between those two groups. But they are far from being the only two groups in the world, and there is no dichotomy between them.
My understanding is that happiness is a product of biochemistry and neuroanatomy, and doesn't have to inherently correlate with any knowledge, experience, or heuristic.
Does having an explanatory style personality (ie delusional optimism) lead to reduced rates of depression and increased happiness?
http://www.psych.nyu.edu/oettingen/OETTINGEN1995EXPLANATORY.PDF
"Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen."
Have you talked to any religious people lately? "Oh, the tornado ripped my neighbors house off the foundations, but we were spared. I guess God was looking out for us!"
Could anyone say that without willfully blinding themselves? Do they really think they are better people than their neighbors, and that God moved the tornado away from their house? Yet you hear stuff like this all the time. And I think they really believe it.
The ability t...
Surely, true wisdom would be second-order rationality, choosing when to be rational. ... You can't know the consequences of being biased, until you have already debiased yourself. And then it is too late for self-deception. The other alternative is to choose blindly to remain biased, without any clear idea of the consequences. This is ... willful stupidity.
This isn't quite fair. While it is true that you couldn't know the detailed consequences of being biased, you could make a rational judgment under uncertainty, given what you do know. And it should b...
While it is true that you couldn't know the detailed consequences of being biased, you could make a rational judgment under uncertainty, given what you do know.
Yes, but for it to be a rational judgment under uncertainty, you would have to take into account the unknown unknowns, some of which may be Black Swans (where rare events accounts for a significant fraction of the total weight), plus such well-known biases as overconfidence and optimism. Think of all that worrying you'll have to do... maybe you should just relax...
My own life experience suggests th...
State legitimacy is similarly based on such self deception, whether it uses the traditional "'cos God says so" approach, or the more modern, "'cos we won a popularity contest." idea: in neither circumstance is there any real reason why people in general should act as if the state has the right to make laws and manage people, and yet it does, apparently to the general good unless you happen to be a radical libertarian.
Surely this is the same as the happiness case: by having most people in a nation sharing the delusional belief in the legitimacy of the state, the nation as a whole benefits.
Eliezer, we are in essence talking about a value of info calculation. Yes, such a calculated info value rises with rare important things you might know if you had the info. But even so it is not guaranteed that info will be worth the cost. Similarly, it is not guaranteed that our choosing to avoid bias will be worth the costs.
It seems to me simpler to just say that given our purposes we judge better overcoming our biases to in fact be cost-effective on the topics we emphasize here. The strongest argument for that seems to me that we emphasize topics where our evolved judgments about when we can safely be biased are the least likely to be reliable guides to social, as opposed to personal, value.
...you will think to yourself, "And now, I will irrationally believe that I will win the lottery, in order to make myself happy." But we do not have such direct control over our beliefs. You cannot make yourself believe the sky is green by an act of will.
In my experience, this is not true.
My father was a dentist, and when I was 7 he learned hypnosis to use to anesthetise his patients. Of course he practiced on me while he was learning. (As it turned out, he did successful anesthesia with it for a few years before people started spreading stories that hypnosis was dangerous mind-control and he quit.)
With posthypnotic suggestion people can easily believe things that they have no reason to believe, remember things they did not experience, and ignore their senses up to a point. I've done it. It all feels real.
I learned to hypnotise people a little, and I learned how to do it on myself. It certainly can be done. You do have that control over your beliefs, if you're willing to use it.
Which is not to say it's a good idea. IME the main time it's useful to make yourself believe something is when you have nothing to lose by burning your bridges, when you lose everything anyway if...
False memories are horrifyingly easy to induce. Here is a Scientific American story on the subject from 1997, and here is a scary story from an ex-Scientologist about how to induce false memories using Scientology auditing. "Up to this day, I intellectually know that this story was a fiction written by a friend of mine, but still I have it in vivid memory, as if I was the very person that had experienced it. I actually can't differentiate this memory from any other of my real memories, it still is as valid in my mind as any other memory I have."
Human memories are untrustworthy. This leads to a philosophical dilemma about whether or not to trust your memory, and how much, and what you're supposed to use if you can't trust your memory.
"Evolution has favored a species that buys lottery tickets."
It's (statistically) bad for the individual but good for the species. Although even buying lottery tickets -or the other natural equivalents is probably deoptimized behavior. I imagine there's some bayesian optimized approach for a species and the spectrum of risk taking its members would engage in. In contrast I suspect our species performs functionally rather than optimally.
Forgive me, Master Eliezer, for I have sinned.
I have come to realize that inside my mind is not merely self-delusion, but a full-blown case of doublethink. There are two mutually exclusive statements that I simutaneously hold to be unquestionably true. Here they are:
1) I should not cause suffering to others. 2) Only my own happiness really matters.
I can even explain this doublethink. I am naturally selfish, but society makes me be good. I could try to believe that only I matter, and do good things only for the show, but that strategy doesn't work for most ...
"Evolution has favored a species that buys lottery tickets."
It's (statistically) bad for the individual but good for the species.
This is a group selection argument. (If you don't know what that means, it's something that biologists use to scare their children.) Evolution does not operate on species. It operates on individuals. Genes that are statistically bad for individuals drop out of the gene pool no matter what they do for the species.
This is an ancient and thoroughly discredited idea. See George Williams's "Adaptation and Natural Selection."
Eliezer, I mentioned behaviors/biases that are statistically bad for the individual, not genes. Also, I'm interested in your take on the idea that the existence of humans with a range of different biases can be good for other humans, even if it's not optimal from the perspective of the person with the bias.
"When I read about context insensitivity, I wondered if that's really a bias, or just apathy masquerading as concern. I'd probably give the same amount to save five birds as I would to save Atlantis from sinking. Both are social acts."
I want to clarify. I do believe in context insensitivity, but think indifference was also a factor in the donation case.
Genes that are bad for many of the individuals that carry them but that have large jackpots can be selected. As for how you tell whether the occasional large jackpot makes up for the common failure, it takes a long time to tell.
With lotteries you can judge by the house. They're in business to make money, they have wealth that they got from previous lotteries, it makes sense the odds are against you in the longterm. But that reasoning doesn't work in general.
Human beings who see jackpot events happen will sometimes gamble for long times without winning a ja...
Eliezer, do you concede that there is no difference between "believing you're happy" and "really being happy"?
HA, I was surprised you stumbled into that one. A good introductory example of how evolution does not optimize at the species but at the gene-level can be found here. It is by Richard Dawkins, who is also known for the term "meme", which is an idea that can be analyzed like a gene. Unless the meme that buying lottery tickets is a good idea is beneficial for those that hold it, we should not expect it to become prevalen...
Eliezer, do you concede that there is no difference between "believing you're happy" and "really being happy"?
No. There is a difference between believing you love your stepchildren and loving your stepchildren, between believing you're deeply upset about rainforests and being deeply upset about rainforests, and between believing you're happy and being happy.
As soon as you turn happiness into an obligatory sign of spiritual health, a sign of virtue, people will naturally tend to overestimate their happiness.
Falsifiable difference? Put 'em in an fMRI or use other physiological indicators.
Unless the meme that {buying lottery tickets is a good idea} is beneficial for those that hold it, we should not expect it to become prevalent even it if benefits the species.
But it is prevalent. And on average people lose money at it, while the occasionaly winners tend not to do well.
So it's natural to suppose that the meme for buying lottery tickets is a perversion of some other functional meme.
Here's a way that lotteries could be functional after all for people in extended families. If you sacrifice and save and start to build up a little capital, you m...
"Evolution does not operate on species. It operates on individuals. Genes that are statistically bad for individuals drop out of the gene pool no matter what they do for the species."
Imagine a gene that caused 9/10 of the humans who have it to be twice as fertility and attractiveness as the population that did not have it, while 1/10 of the humans who have it can't reproduce at all. This would be a gene that would serve the species (i.e. the portion of the species that had it), even though it would harm some individuals. Notice that the inability...
Imagine a gene that caused 9/10 of the humans who have it to be twice as fertility and attractiveness as the population that did not have it, while 1/10 of the humans who have it can't reproduce at all.
this is means that the allele (genetic variant) increase fitness by a factor of 1.8. this is not a "species level" benefit in anything but a tautological way. higher levels of selection or dynamic processes are only interesting if they can not be reduced down to a lower level. e.g., you can increase the fitness of the group by simply increasing t...
This is an ancient and thoroughly discredited idea. See George Williams's "Adaptation and Natural Selection."
i am generally skeptical of group selectionist arguments, but we are probably on the cusp of a renaissance in this area. it will be spearheaded by e.o. wilson, who has always been a "believer," but who now believes that group selection (or at least multi-level selection) has the empirical and analytical firepower to make a comeback. i am cautiously skeptical, but in the interests of honesty i think that "ancient and thorou...
Imagine a gene that caused 9/10 of the humans who have it to be twice as fertility and attractiveness as the population that did not have it, while 1/10 of the humans who have it can't reproduce at all.
btw. you don't have to imagine. sickle cell is like this. a proportion of the population gets increased benefit from having the gene, and a proportion gets decreased benefit, in the ratio of heterozygotes (those who carry one sickle cell allele and one normal) and homozogytes (those who carry two alleles), i.e., 2pq:q^2. that's not species selection, it's standard balancing selection upon one gene.
What's wrong with group selection? All you need is for the benefit to the individual of being in a group in which trait X is sufficiently common to be sufficiently bigger than the benefit of not having trait X in the individual... or am I confused?
Doug, what's wrong with group selection is mostly that selection at the individual level works so much faster. If something's harmful to individuals, it's likely to have been wiped out by individual-level selection before it gets the chance to help the group.
It's possible to concoct scenarios where group-level effects win. For instance: some allele has no effect at all when heterozygous, but when homozygous it causes its bearer to become astonishingly altruistic. By the time there's much incidence of homozygosity in any given community, the chances are tha...
Doug S, G has given a good explanation (except possibly the last sentence which is debatable.) I'll explain again: Selection happens when genes increase in frequency compared to other genes. Since genes always happen inside individuals, a gene that causes its individuals to leave fewer offspring in the population will be selected against, regardless of what it does for the population as a whole.
A gene that results in good stuff for the population but that doesn't result in its own carriers increasing more than others won't increase in the population even t...
James Bach, if something has a frequency above 1% and has high fitness costs to those that hold it, it is probably pathogenic rather than genetic. You can find more on that from Greg Cochran at the bottom of this page.
You know, back in the old days, before I jumped on the Lesswrong train, I would say I willed myself into believing in God. Because whether he existed or not didn't change empirical conclusions: the world could have been created five minutes ago, intelligent design could have happened etc. etc.
But doing that made me angst and feel uneasy and there was something nagging at me. You know, those beliefs hurt, but it hurt even harder to get them out. I fought every inch for them. But when I lost, it was a relief, it felt like I had won.
As far as I can tell, the weakness of the article is that it assumes one is deciding for oneself. One could decide to help others become irrational (on some issues) if you rationally decide it is best for them.
As far as I can tell, the weakness of the article is that it assumes one is deciding for oneself. One could decide to help others become irrational (on some issues) if you rationally decide it is best for them.
I'm through with truth.
I never had a scientific intuition. In college, I once saw a physics demonstration with a cathode ray tube -- moving a magnet bent the beam of light that showed the path of the electrons. I had never seen electrons before and it occurred to me that I had never really believed in the equations in my physics book; I knew they were the right answers to give on tests, but I wouldn't have expected to see them work.
I'm also missing the ability to estimate. Draw a line on a sheet of paper; put a dot where 75% is. Then check if you got ...
Overestimating my driving skills is obviously bad. But how about this scenario of the possibility of happiness destroyed by the truth?
Suppose, on the final day of exams, on the last exam, you think you’ve done poorly. In fact, you only got 1 in 10 questions completely right. On the other 9, you hope you’d get at least a bit of partial credit. On the other hand, all 4 of your friends (in the class of 50) think they’ve done poorly. Maybe there will be a curve? In fact, if the final exam curve is good enough, you might even get an A for the course.
The grade g...
This is the peculiar blindness of rationalists. Everywhere you look, you can see people denying reality, and yet rationalists talk like it can't be done.
Winston, after being tortured, eventually could see 5 fingers where there were only 4. Most people are much more malleable than that. They already had a preference for believing what they're told to believe. You can see it everywhere you look.
Even if you ignore the daily evidence of your senses, just as a matter of the evolutionary pressure of centuries of ideological terror and executions, shouldn't we ex...
Since this is the featured article thingy of today I'm commenting, maybe someone will see this and want to engage this argument or agree and make sure that the smart guys in lab coats see it.
By the time you realize you have a choice, there is no choice. You cannot unsee what you see. The other way is closed.
For now. But once we control neuroscience really well, this entire can of worms gets opened up again. Perhaps Brave New World would be a more appropriate dystopia to reference than 1984, because in that world they actually DO believe what the gove...
"You might even believe you were happy and self-deceived; but you would not in fact be happy and self-deceived."
As far as I've got this happiness thing figured out, you're it when you believe you are, and you're not when you believe you're not. There is, in fact, not necessarily a correlation between how happy a person should be, and how happy they feel. Feelings don't have to correspond to reality. One can consciously choose to no longer be bothered by something and just be happy instead. For me at least, with a little effort, it works. And it can be validated just as easily, just by stating that my sole utility function is to be happy. The human brain is a lotus-eater machine.
The 30-year-old me who was terrified of death would have given belief in an afterlife as an exception to this. The 45-year-old me is a member of cryonics provider Alcor.
Well, when you have "Homosexuals in the Basement", and the Nazi officer rings at your door, you had better make yourself believe you don't have them. What is, precisely, the difference between this deep-immersion roleplay, and genuine self-delusion, for all practical purposes? This is not a rhethorical question.
Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen. Second-order rationality implies that at some point, you will think to yourself, "And now, I will irrationally believe that I will win the lottery, in order to make myself happy." But we do not have such direct control over our beliefs.
We routinely generate a swath of irrational beliefs, spawned e.g. by deep seated biological biases such as "That girl I just met, she is so special, I will love and cherish her forever and ever." You notice...
This immediately brings to mind the old adage about it being better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. I'd imagine, from the pig's point of view, that the loftiest height of piggy happiness was not terribly dissimilar from the baseline level of piggy contentment, so equating "happiness" to "contentment" would not be an inexcusable breach of piggy logic. Indeed, we humans pretty much have to infer this state of affairs when considering animal wellbeing ("appearance of sociobiological contentment approximates happine...
I had the happiness of stupidity once. While younger I edged into the valley and recoiled. I believe I even made a conscious choice and enforced it through various means. It was a good time over about two years, and it was unsustainable. I made the mistake of continuing to gain knowledge about human nature, I kept my curiosity and my fascination with how things worked and thus was my ignorance doomed. I dipped deep into the valley and eventually found this place, where I (hopefully) hit critical mass of bootstrap.
If I had stayed in that bubble of wilful ig...
Isn't love a "happiness of stupidity" to some degree? It defies rationality, and the odds of it lasting aren't good statistically. Should you believe in it, then?
While you can't fool your logical brain, if you want to have a false belief to make you happy, you don't need to anyway. The brain is compartmentalized and often doesn't update what you feel intuitively true, or what you base your actions on, just because you learned a fact. This sentence: "You can't know the consequences of being biased, until you have already debiased yourself" strikes me as most hard to believe. Reading about a bias and considering its consequences, esp. in an academic mindframe does NOT debias you. That requires applying it t...
The happiness of stupidity is not closed to me. By the time I've made 1 rational decision (by whatever metric one wants to use) I'll have made 100 irrational ones. Stupidity and irrationality is built into the very way I operate.
I am primarily composed stupid and irrational beliefs and I am continually creating more.
You don't choose to be irrational, that's the default position.
Rationality is a limited precious resource that you use to diagnose and fix problems within the irrational milieu of systems and subsystems that make up your mind.
Second order r...
What if self-deception helps us be happy? What if just running out and overcoming bias will make us—gasp!—unhappy? Surely, true wisdom would be second-order rationality, choosing when to be rational. That way you can decide which cognitive biases should govern you, to maximize your happiness.
Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen.
Second-order rationality implies that at some point, you will think to yourself, "And now, I will irrationally believe that I will win the lottery, in order to make myself happy." But we do not have such direct control over our beliefs. You cannot make yourself believe the sky is green by an act of will. You might be able to believe you believed it—though I have just made that more difficult for you by pointing out the difference. (You're welcome!) You might even believe you were happy and self-deceived; but you would not in fact be happy and self-deceived.
For second-order rationality to be genuinely rational, you would first need a good model of reality, to extrapolate the consequences of rationality and irrationality. If you then chose to be first-order irrational, you would need to forget this accurate view. And then forget the act of forgetting. I don't mean to commit the logical fallacy of generalizing from fictional evidence, but I think Orwell did a good job of extrapolating where this path leads.
You can't know the consequences of being biased, until you have already debiased yourself. And then it is too late for self-deception.
The other alternative is to choose blindly to remain biased, without any clear idea of the consequences. This is not second-order rationality. It is willful stupidity.
Be irrationally optimistic about your driving skills, and you will be happily unconcerned where others sweat and fear. You won't have to put up with the inconvenience of a seatbelt. You will be happily unconcerned for a day, a week, a year. Then CRASH, and spend the rest of your life wishing you could scratch the itch in your phantom limb. Or paralyzed from the neck down. Or dead. It's not inevitable, but it's possible; how probable is it? You can't make that tradeoff rationally unless you know your real driving skills, so you can figure out how much danger you're placing yourself in. You can't make that tradeoff rationally unless you know about biases like neglect of probability.
No matter how many days go by in blissful ignorance, it only takes a single mistake to undo a human life, to outweigh every penny you picked up from the railroad tracks of stupidity.
One of chief pieces of advice I give to aspiring rationalists is "Don't try to be clever." And, "Listen to those quiet, nagging doubts." If you don't know, you don't know what you don't know, you don't know how much you don't know, and you don't know how much you needed to know.
There is no second-order rationality. There is only a blind leap into what may or may not be a flaming lava pit. Once you know, it will be too late for blindness.
But people neglect this, because they do not know what they do not know. Unknown unknowns are not available. They do not focus on the blank area on the map, but treat it as if it corresponded to a blank territory. When they consider leaping blindly, they check their memory for dangers, and find no flaming lava pits in the blank map. Why not leap?
Been there. Tried that. Got burned. Don't try to be clever.
I once said to a friend that I suspected the happiness of stupidity was greatly overrated. And she shook her head seriously, and said, "No, it's not; it's really not."
Maybe there are stupid happy people out there. Maybe they are happier than you are. And life isn't fair, and you won't become happier by being jealous of what you can't have. I suspect the vast majority of Overcoming Bias readers could not achieve the "happiness of stupidity" if they tried. That way is closed to you. You can never achieve that degree of ignorance, you cannot forget what you know, you cannot unsee what you see.
The happiness of stupidity is closed to you. You will never have it short of actual brain damage, and maybe not even then. You should wonder, I think, whether the happiness of stupidity is optimal—if it is the most happiness that a human can aspire to—but it matters not. That way is closed to you, if it was ever open.
All that is left to you now, is to aspire to such happiness as a rationalist can achieve. I think it may prove greater, in the end. There are bounded paths and open-ended paths; plateaus on which to laze, and mountains to climb; and if climbing takes more effort, still the mountain rises higher in the end.
Also there is more to life than happiness; and other happinesses than your own may be at stake in your decisions.
But that is moot. By the time you realize you have a choice, there is no choice. You cannot unsee what you see. The other way is closed.