Wei_Dai writes “I wonder if I’m missing something important by not playing chess.”
I am a somewhat decent chess player[*] and a reasonable Go player (3 dan, barely, at last rated tournament a few years ago). If you’re inclined to thinking about cognition itself, and about questions like the value of heuristics and approximations that only work sometimes, such games are great sources of examples. In some cases, the strong players have already thinking along those lines for more than a century, though using a different vocabulary. E.g., Go concepts like aji and thickness seem strongly related to Less Wrong discussions of the relative value of conjunctive and disjunctive plans.
There might also be some rationalist value in learning at the gut level that we’re not on the primordial savannah any more by putting a thousand or so hours or more into at least one discipline where you can be utterly unmistakably crushed by someone who scores a zero on the usual societal/hindbrain tags for seriousness (like a bored 9 year old Ukrainian who obliterates you in the first round of the tournament on the way to finishing the tournament undefeated with a rating provisionally revised to 5 dan:-).
That said, I think you will probably get much more bang for your rationalist-wins-the-world buck from studying other things. In particular, I’d nominate (1) math along the usual engineering-ish main sequence (calculus, linear algebra, Fourier analysis, probability, statistics) and (2) computer programming. History and microeconomics-writ-large are also strong candidates. So it’s not particularly worth studying chess or go beyond the point where you just find it fun for its own sake.
[*] highwater mark approximately 60 seconds before I abandoned my experiment with playing chess somewhat seriously: forced threefold repetition against a 2050ish-rated player who happened to be tournament director of the local chess club minitournament, who had told me earlier that I could stop recording when my clock fell below 5 minutes, and who ruled upon my 3-fold repetition that it didn’t count as a draw because the game was not being recorded
Empirically, we have more impressive instrumental rationalists, such as Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowen and Demis Hassabis coming from the much smaller field of chess than from the much larger field of math (where I think there’s only James Simmons). There’s also Watizkin, who seems very interesting. It seems to me that math emphasizes excess rigor and a number of other elements which constitute the instrumental rationality equivalent of anti-epistemology, and possibly also that the way in which it is taught emphasizes learning concepts prior to the questions that motivated their creation, which never happens in games. Fischer was probably more insane than any famous insane mathematician I can think of though, and Kasparov does claim the following http://www.new-tradition.org/view-garry-kasparov.php though given his Soviet education, e.g. education in a system which actually did teach a blatantly false version of history, this is more understandable.
At the elite PhD level, the mathematical community encourages a level of rigor, and the analytical philosophy community a level of pseudo-rigor that may even qualify as epistemic anti-epistemology for the typical student, (hence the anomalous number of theists in those fields relative to other high-IQ fields) but the people who are recognized as the best in those fields are probably matched only by the best physicists (as a group) in epistemic rationality. Certainly those fields reward epistemic rationality like no others.
Poker, MtG, Go, etc have good instrumental track records compared to math but bad ones compared to chess IMHO.
BTW, I feel instrumental rationality guilt at writing a blog comment that few people are likely to read. I’d love it if someone were to incorporate this and their thoughts about it into a top level post.
Empirically, we have more impressive instrumental rationalists, such as Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowen and Demis Hassabis coming from the much smaller field of chess than from the much larger field of math (where I think there’s only James Simmons)
Am I missing something? Is Tyler Cowen famous for something other than being a moderately high-status academic economist with a blog? Otherwise, why are you more impressed with him than with leading academic mathematicians, such as Terence Tao?
Tyler has a regular New York Times column and is part of society in a way that no mathematician I know of is. He can influence influential people in a way that Terry can’t. He also very clearly has a life that is optimized to meet his values. Terry does what lots of other people do, he just does a hundred times more of it moderately better than they would.
Once again, apparent disagreement on this point seems to me to be an instance of academics and those with academic aspirations simply not seeing status other than academic status. Not doing so is part of their training of course, but it leads to a very confused picture of the world.
He also very clearly has a life that is optimized to meet his values
That is every bit as true of Terry as Tyler, and probably more so: Tyler would probably like to be Larry Summers, Milton Friedman, or Paul Krugman, while Terry Tao is pretty much exactly who Terry Tao wants to be.
My interpretation of the disagreement is different: an unwarranted assumption on the part of some that those with academic high status would really prefer something else, but are willing to “settle” for academia; as opposed to academia simply being the best place society currently offers for their values to be pursued. (And yes, academia is “part of society”.) I would argue that any picture of the world on which “instrumental rationality” is synonymous with “financial/political success” is more confused than mine.
As for influence, see the USQ affair. Terry Tao can influence when he wants. I’m sure he could get a NY Times column (or certainly a LA Times column) if he wanted one.
I just doubt that you are correct, about the Times column or anything else above.
Academia, and especially math, seems to me to exist to not be part of society, to be literally descended from monastic orders, etc. It indoctrinates people to claim what you are saying, and even believe it, but people’s values are pretty objective and not so measurable by such claims.
How impactful was his involvement in the USQ affair?
Terry may have more fun than Tyler, since he’s smarter and can access more fun, but I think it’s VERY unlikely that after spending a year like Tyler does he’d go back to his life.
Financial/political success isn’t ‘instrumental rationality’. Maslow’s ‘self-actualization’ is. Tyler and Terry both do pretty well in that respect, but in my assessment, not comparably well.
Terry may have more fun than Tyler, since he’s smarter and can access more fun, but I think it’s VERY unlikely that after spending a year like Tyler does he’d go back to his life.
Even if that was true (and I think komponisto is more likely to be correct here), I’m not sure it would support your conclusion, since Terry might also not want to go back to his life after being wireheaded for a year but that doesn’t mean not wanting to be wireheaded is a miscalculation.
Overall I’m surprised that you are so confident about what goals/values other people would have if they didn’t miscalculate, when I’m not even sure what goals/values I should have. If you think you have some real insights that others are missing, you probably need to give a systematic explanation to bridge the inferential gaps, instead of arguing via these comments.
The short version is that I can observe the gradient of change in people’s values and I see what look like clear attractors.
Also, if learning is central to fun, the activities that maximize rate of learning have a good prior on being most fun. Hyperspecialization pulls away from such activities, while cultivating basic competence in and awareness of domains with evolutionary support maximizes speed of learning. Cross-disciplinary insight can even make this the best way to maximize effectiveness in a specialized discipline, simply by developing new neural regions which offer hardware support for concrete metaphors.
The long version is that I think I have a very detailed and basically correct model of human psychology. By basically correct, I largely mean wrong, e.g. good enough that it can and does make wrong predictions and be partially falsified and incrementally refined through the creation of high generality mechanisms to correct specific errors. This is, as opposed to most psychological theories, which aren’t even wrong.
The short version is that I can observe the gradient of change in people’s values and I see what look like clear attractors.
I don’t get it. Putting one’s entire life into abstract pursuits like math is also an attractor. Why do you think that one is a miscalculation, while other attractors represent true values?
The long version is that I think I have a very detailed and basically correct model of human psychology.
What is this model? Is it your own invention, and if so, have you written it down somewhere, or are you expecting people to take you at your word?
Attractors which lead to people being unable or afraid to attempt other activities are much less credible as values than those which leave one with many options.
This is strictly analogous to Aristotle’s claim that intellectual pursuits were best, as is clear because they are chosen by almost everyone who appreciates them and other sorts of activity. He’s right, but its broad personal development with a strong focus on intellectual pursuits of a polymathic nature which seems to actually be chosen by those who can choose it, reliably.
I expect people who are used to interacting with me to take it at my word that it is periodically falsified on details and revised. The closest that’s been written down is in Lakoff, but his model isn’t that far off.
Also—Terence Tao has pretty broad interests already within mathematics.
And I’m starting to suspect that the category “mathematics” is like the category “single-celled organisms.” It’s a convenient notation to lump together a class of objects that most humans ignore, but that are intrinsically much more variable than all the other objects that are more salient to most humans’ lives. Two single-celled organisms can be more different from each other than you are from an oak tree. Commutative algebra and non-commutative algebra can be more different, separated by a wider gulf of background knowledge, than genetics and economics. (That’s a little hyperbolic but I think some statements of that kind are actually true.)
So I think people with broad mathematical interests are really more “polymathic” than we tend to realize from the outside. Math is diverse. Terence Tao may in fact be more of a polymath than Tyler Cowen, if we’re talking about expertise in radically varied fields that are rarely studied together by one person.
The caveat is that lots of categories are like the category “single-celled organisms,” from what I can tell. I would guess that you are familiar with mathematics, so you can look at math and go “wow, there are so many sub-fields. Other fields aren’t like that!” Meanwhile someone familiar with biology might think “wow, there’s so much to study within biology; math doesn’t seem like that!”
Edit: on the other hand I could be wrong—if you’re not particularly familiar with mathematics research compared to biology research my story is inaccurate.
Attractors which lead to people being unable or afraid to attempt other activities are much less credible as values than those which leave one with many options.
I think I see what you’re saying here. Attractors that are irreversible dead ends are more likely to represent miscalculations. But still, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that some people really like working on abstract math, really value academic status, and/or have a large comparative advantage in doing math, and therefore for them going into math is a rational choice. Furthermore, it seems likely that such people would be more concentrated among the top mathematicians.
I think your other argument is that according to your model of human psychology, most people would find it more fun to be a polymath than to specialize in one area. That makes some sense to me, but obviously it’s hard to put a lot of credence in it without seeing some strong empirical evidence.
Based on these two arguments, it seems to me there’s a reasonable chance that Terrance Tao went into math by mistake, but your level of confidence still seems unjustified. Did I miss anything else?
I’m sure that there are many people who really like abstract math. Your right about my claim about polymaths. My best guess is that Tao was right to go into math but would be best served by staying in math but broadening his focus somewhat now. The fact that he doesn’t seem to be driven by any particular problem strengthens it, but I’m still not all that confident of it. I’m a lot more confident that he should put a bit of effort into becoming a multimillionaire in a small part of his spare time, simply by selling very expensive consulting services, and less effort into housekeeping, driving his own car, and whatever else he spends his time on other than math, but it’s possible to me that he has done so and possible that he has relatives and/or friends who would envy him and make it a net loss.
One can simply see if people produce less or different stuff after tenure as one measure.
So the claim is that anybody who could become a polymath, does? And that people who specialize narrowly do so because they lack the capacity to be broader?
I don’t know how you would look at someone who works in a specialized area and conclude that he could, or couldn’t, have been a polymath if he had tried. One imperfect proxy, I guess, would be if our specialist has well-developed skills outside his profession. Are mathematicians below average in outside skills, compared to the amount of focus needed for their work? I’ve known or encountered a sizable minority who could have been musicians or writers instead; I have the anecdotal impression that mathematicians don’t do too badly on that score. Of course, mathematicians do tend to be less casually conversant with non-math stuff than average.
Or maybe you’re talking about something different. Maybe the capacity to be a polymath is not just plenty of innate abilities at different things, but the will and desire to set up a self-designed, varied life instead of a fixed one. Some people with varied abilities choose to give up all their skills but one; some people refuse, and insist on blending or simultaneously using their different skills. In that case, it’s probably even harder to test the “capacity to be a polymath,” because it seems kind of tautological—but I would instinctively agree that very specialized people probably don’t have it.
The long version is that I think I have a very detailed and basically correct model of human psychology. By basically correct, I largely mean wrong, e.g. good enough that it can and does make wrong predictions and be partially falsified and incrementally refined through the creation of high generality mechanisms to correct specific errors. This is, as opposed to most psychological theories, which aren’t even wrong.
I you have this you have a near-obligation to publish it outside of forum comments section :)
Likewise, I doubt that you are correct when you write:
it’s VERY unlikely that after spending a year like Tyler does he’d go back to his life.
Think about what this entails: you’re essentially saying that the fact that Terry Tao spends his time solving math problems rather than hobnobbing with east-coast social and policy elites is the result of a miscalculation on his part with regard to his own values. As opposed to a selection effect where Tao happens to be in the small group of people who actually do prefer math to schmoozing and affecting government policy.
Now I do find it plausible that there exists a class of people for whom what you say is true—that there are successful mathematicians who in their heart of hearts would rather be the Jim Simons of today than the Jim Simons of the 1970s, or even today’s Terry Tao. But for your claim to be true as stated, there would essentially have to exist nobody in the entire human population with the opposite preference (because if there were, Tao, Wiles, etc. would surely be among them), and given the psychological diversity of our species this strikes me as absurd.
As for monastic orders, that’s exactly where I would want to be if I had to live in the Middle Ages. You may say that they were “outside of society”, but the fact is that most of the people we remember today from that period were monks. (The others being kings and popes.)
You’re positing a very strong selection mechanism connecting math interest with math jobs. I’m sure Terry likes solving math problems, but miscalculations like that are the norm, not the exception, in human affairs.
I’d rather be a monk than a peasant too, but I’d much rather be Chaucer, and I think that most monks would too. The difference between monks and professors is that one works a LOT harder to become a professor. If you are going to work that hard, you may as well make something of yourself.
Financial/political success isn’t ‘instrumental rationality’. Maslow’s ‘self-actualization’ is.
Undoubtedly so, but based on your comments, I’d say you might be suffering from a too narrow and perhaps also somewhat biased view of the different modes of self-actualization. By this I mean that you’re not taking into account the full scope of the potential modes, and you’re also underestimating the differences in the optimal modes for people of different personalities.
In my opinion, you’re also underestimating some downsides of being a senior member of the modern-day academic nomenklatura (and especially one who is not at its top tier), particularly those that are more pronounced the further a field is from the exactness and meritocracy that is least imperfectly embodied by math. Though you’ve probably met more concrete people from this social class than me, so your judgment may in fact be more accurate than mine.
I think I account for varied personalities well, but treat supposed personality differences which are basically the fear of doing things not in accordance with an established identity as bad motivations and see those as accounting for a significant fraction of supposed personality differences though not for the majority.
I’m confused about “In my opinion, you’re also underestimating some downsides of being a senior member of the modern-day academic nomenklatura ”. What makes you say that?
I’m confused about “In my opinion, you’re also underestimating some downsides of being a senior member of the modern-day academic nomenklatura ”. What makes you say that?
Basically, I have in mind the required level of conformity with the respectable opinion. This is admittedly somewhat speculative on my part since I have neither personal experience nor close friends in such positions, but it seems to me that the standards of conformity expected from a public intellectual with prestigious academic and media affiliations have nowadays reached a level where it’s doubtful whether a genuinely curious and open mind can satisfy them without a great deal of self-censorship and possibly also dishonesty about one’s true beliefs. This seems to me like a significant barrier to true self-actualization by any reasonable definition of the term. Clearly, assuming the problem exists, it will be worse the further one’s interests are from strictly technical and non-ideological topics.
Perhaps it will be clearer if I illustrate it with a more extreme example. Imaging you were an elite member of some intellectual profession in the former U.S.S.R. -- would you rather be a mathematician or an economist? As a mathematician, you could do all the mathematics you liked, with only some rare and minimal lip-service to the system; as an economist, on the other hand, you would have to constantly mold your views according to a reigning ideology clearly remote from reality. Now of course, the modern-day Western world is far from even late-period U.S.S.R., but the difference is in my opinion one of degree, not essence. The position of a high-status intellectual still comes with very severe restrictions on your intellectual freedom.
I’m not sure that the situation of graduate students today in most academic fields is better than that of late period USSR academics. Tenured academics have it much better, but by that far into one’s career most real interest has already been squeezed out.
If people can’t think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
He has also formulated your other ideas (i.e. polymathism) as I interpret it of planning life in a bottom-up manner of improving flexibility and options, rather than top-down from a precise end goal (which extreme specialization would suggest).
That might be part of it, but I am pretty sure Vassar also refers to the fact that a lot of young men with the ambition and curiosity to do better spend the vast majority of their time getting more skilled at their strongest skill because that is what they perceive as the optimal path to economic security and status and the fact that academics are encouraged in this severely non-optimal path (in part because it is convenient for academic institutions and advantageous for ambitious academic bureaucrats to divide human knowledge into specialties and subspecialties).
If these young men could relax more and not worry so much about their own status and economic security, they would tend to heed more their natural human sense of curiosity or their more playful social impulses (including perhaps altruism), which are probably all better guides to what to learn next than the desire to advance in the academic status hierarchy. In other words, a burning desire for status, particularly status that comes from a reputation for having some refined skill or expertise, is not as reliable a guide to self-actualization as it was in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Well, that might not always be true: for example, not working towards the right kind of status can prevent one from having access to the kind of friends and mentors who can best help one to learn. But it is certainly true that a lot of young men (and perhaps women, too, but I tend to think that the fear of social disapproval is a bigger problem there) do not take advantage of the social opportunities for learning that they already have (and limit their educations in other ways) out of a fear of not having enough status or income out of not having a good enough reputation for skill or expertise.
I don’t have enough data to compare such gaming outcomes very well, but I’ll pass on something that I thought was funny and perhaps containing enough truth to be thought-provoking (from Aaron Brown’s The Poker Face of Wall Street): “National bridge champion and hedge fund manager Josh Parker explained the nuances of serious high school games players to me. The chess player did well in school, had no friends, got 800s on his SATs, and did well at a top college. The poker and backgammon set (one crowd in the 1970s) did badly in school, had tons of friends, aced their SATs, and were stars at good colleges. The bridge players flunked out of high school, had no friends, aced their SATs, and went on to drop out of top colleges. In the 1980s, we all ended up trading options together.”
Also, FWIW, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are apparently in the bridge camp, though I dunno whether they played in high school.
I’ve never become friends with any of the dozens of people with whom I’ve played chess in person (see below for why the qualifier “in person” is relevant) excepting one high-school classmate. A chess player is pretty much forced to suppress any natural human cooperative instincts like reciprocal altruism, instincts that are probably very important in the establishment of friendships. Also, sharing small pleasures seems important in starting friendships, and in chess the pleasure of one party coincides with pain in the other party.
Also, since the early 1990s anyone logging on to the Free Internet Chess Server can with an expected wait of less than a minute be matched up with another chess player of whatever skill level (more precisely, Elo rating, which is calculated automatically by the server) one desires. There is no need to remember the identity of who one has previously played against (although doing so will tend to increase one’s rating a little since individual players have styles that can be learned and exploited in the game).
Of course there could well be some exaggeration for dramatic effect there—as David Friedman likes to say, one should be skeptical of any account which might survive on its literary or entertainment value alone. But it’s not any sort of logical impossibility. In Dallas near UTD (which had a strong well-funded chess team which contributed some of the strong coffeehouse players) ca. 2002 I was able to play dozens of coffeehouse games against strangers and casual acquaintances. One can also play in tournaments and in open-to-all clubs. Perhaps one could even play grudge matches against people one dislikes. Also today one can play an enormous number of strangers online, and even in the 1970s people played postal chess.
I didn’t mention bridge because I think of it as a game people take up later in life and transfer skills to, not as a game people learn as kids and transfer skills from. I could easily be wrong about this.
I don’t suppose you’ve considered having a blog? It would increase the odds of what you write getting seen.
Would the love of pure math for its purity count as part of the anti-epistemic epistomology?
More generally, the subject of anti-epistomology (ideas so bad that they’re crippling) seems worth exploring, especially if it’s grounded in knowledge about the ways people actually think rather than guessing about the mistakes that people one disagrees with must be making. (Not a swipe at you—I’m thinking more about the way atheists seem to overestimate how irrational religious people are.)
I don’t know if I’ve got enough for a top level post there, but I’ll seriously consider it. Meanwhile, if anyone else has ideas about anti-epistolomology, please write about it.
I found it quite good, and parts of it sound much like Waitzkin. He talks a lot about psychology, self-control and management of (one’s own) computational resources, all of which should be quite useful for instrumental rationality.
Wei_Dai writes “I wonder if I’m missing something important by not playing chess.”
I am a somewhat decent chess player[*] and a reasonable Go player (3 dan, barely, at last rated tournament a few years ago). If you’re inclined to thinking about cognition itself, and about questions like the value of heuristics and approximations that only work sometimes, such games are great sources of examples. In some cases, the strong players have already thinking along those lines for more than a century, though using a different vocabulary. E.g., Go concepts like aji and thickness seem strongly related to Less Wrong discussions of the relative value of conjunctive and disjunctive plans.
There might also be some rationalist value in learning at the gut level that we’re not on the primordial savannah any more by putting a thousand or so hours or more into at least one discipline where you can be utterly unmistakably crushed by someone who scores a zero on the usual societal/hindbrain tags for seriousness (like a bored 9 year old Ukrainian who obliterates you in the first round of the tournament on the way to finishing the tournament undefeated with a rating provisionally revised to 5 dan:-).
That said, I think you will probably get much more bang for your rationalist-wins-the-world buck from studying other things. In particular, I’d nominate (1) math along the usual engineering-ish main sequence (calculus, linear algebra, Fourier analysis, probability, statistics) and (2) computer programming. History and microeconomics-writ-large are also strong candidates. So it’s not particularly worth studying chess or go beyond the point where you just find it fun for its own sake.
[*] highwater mark approximately 60 seconds before I abandoned my experiment with playing chess somewhat seriously: forced threefold repetition against a 2050ish-rated player who happened to be tournament director of the local chess club minitournament, who had told me earlier that I could stop recording when my clock fell below 5 minutes, and who ruled upon my 3-fold repetition that it didn’t count as a draw because the game was not being recorded
Empirically, we have more impressive instrumental rationalists, such as Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowen and Demis Hassabis coming from the much smaller field of chess than from the much larger field of math (where I think there’s only James Simmons). There’s also Watizkin, who seems very interesting. It seems to me that math emphasizes excess rigor and a number of other elements which constitute the instrumental rationality equivalent of anti-epistemology, and possibly also that the way in which it is taught emphasizes learning concepts prior to the questions that motivated their creation, which never happens in games. Fischer was probably more insane than any famous insane mathematician I can think of though, and Kasparov does claim the following http://www.new-tradition.org/view-garry-kasparov.php though given his Soviet education, e.g. education in a system which actually did teach a blatantly false version of history, this is more understandable.
At the elite PhD level, the mathematical community encourages a level of rigor, and the analytical philosophy community a level of pseudo-rigor that may even qualify as epistemic anti-epistemology for the typical student, (hence the anomalous number of theists in those fields relative to other high-IQ fields) but the people who are recognized as the best in those fields are probably matched only by the best physicists (as a group) in epistemic rationality. Certainly those fields reward epistemic rationality like no others.
Poker, MtG, Go, etc have good instrumental track records compared to math but bad ones compared to chess IMHO.
BTW, I feel instrumental rationality guilt at writing a blog comment that few people are likely to read. I’d love it if someone were to incorporate this and their thoughts about it into a top level post.
Am I missing something? Is Tyler Cowen famous for something other than being a moderately high-status academic economist with a blog? Otherwise, why are you more impressed with him than with leading academic mathematicians, such as Terence Tao?
Tyler has a regular New York Times column and is part of society in a way that no mathematician I know of is. He can influence influential people in a way that Terry can’t. He also very clearly has a life that is optimized to meet his values. Terry does what lots of other people do, he just does a hundred times more of it moderately better than they would.
Once again, apparent disagreement on this point seems to me to be an instance of academics and those with academic aspirations simply not seeing status other than academic status. Not doing so is part of their training of course, but it leads to a very confused picture of the world.
That is every bit as true of Terry as Tyler, and probably more so: Tyler would probably like to be Larry Summers, Milton Friedman, or Paul Krugman, while Terry Tao is pretty much exactly who Terry Tao wants to be.
My interpretation of the disagreement is different: an unwarranted assumption on the part of some that those with academic high status would really prefer something else, but are willing to “settle” for academia; as opposed to academia simply being the best place society currently offers for their values to be pursued. (And yes, academia is “part of society”.) I would argue that any picture of the world on which “instrumental rationality” is synonymous with “financial/political success” is more confused than mine.
As for influence, see the USQ affair. Terry Tao can influence when he wants. I’m sure he could get a NY Times column (or certainly a LA Times column) if he wanted one.
I just doubt that you are correct, about the Times column or anything else above.
Academia, and especially math, seems to me to exist to not be part of society, to be literally descended from monastic orders, etc. It indoctrinates people to claim what you are saying, and even believe it, but people’s values are pretty objective and not so measurable by such claims.
How impactful was his involvement in the USQ affair?
Terry may have more fun than Tyler, since he’s smarter and can access more fun, but I think it’s VERY unlikely that after spending a year like Tyler does he’d go back to his life.
Financial/political success isn’t ‘instrumental rationality’. Maslow’s ‘self-actualization’ is. Tyler and Terry both do pretty well in that respect, but in my assessment, not comparably well.
Even if that was true (and I think komponisto is more likely to be correct here), I’m not sure it would support your conclusion, since Terry might also not want to go back to his life after being wireheaded for a year but that doesn’t mean not wanting to be wireheaded is a miscalculation.
Overall I’m surprised that you are so confident about what goals/values other people would have if they didn’t miscalculate, when I’m not even sure what goals/values I should have. If you think you have some real insights that others are missing, you probably need to give a systematic explanation to bridge the inferential gaps, instead of arguing via these comments.
The short version is that I can observe the gradient of change in people’s values and I see what look like clear attractors.
Also, if learning is central to fun, the activities that maximize rate of learning have a good prior on being most fun. Hyperspecialization pulls away from such activities, while cultivating basic competence in and awareness of domains with evolutionary support maximizes speed of learning. Cross-disciplinary insight can even make this the best way to maximize effectiveness in a specialized discipline, simply by developing new neural regions which offer hardware support for concrete metaphors.
The long version is that I think I have a very detailed and basically correct model of human psychology. By basically correct, I largely mean wrong, e.g. good enough that it can and does make wrong predictions and be partially falsified and incrementally refined through the creation of high generality mechanisms to correct specific errors. This is, as opposed to most psychological theories, which aren’t even wrong.
I don’t get it. Putting one’s entire life into abstract pursuits like math is also an attractor. Why do you think that one is a miscalculation, while other attractors represent true values?
What is this model? Is it your own invention, and if so, have you written it down somewhere, or are you expecting people to take you at your word?
Attractors which lead to people being unable or afraid to attempt other activities are much less credible as values than those which leave one with many options.
This is strictly analogous to Aristotle’s claim that intellectual pursuits were best, as is clear because they are chosen by almost everyone who appreciates them and other sorts of activity. He’s right, but its broad personal development with a strong focus on intellectual pursuits of a polymathic nature which seems to actually be chosen by those who can choose it, reliably.
I expect people who are used to interacting with me to take it at my word that it is periodically falsified on details and revised. The closest that’s been written down is in Lakoff, but his model isn’t that far off.
Also—Terence Tao has pretty broad interests already within mathematics.
And I’m starting to suspect that the category “mathematics” is like the category “single-celled organisms.” It’s a convenient notation to lump together a class of objects that most humans ignore, but that are intrinsically much more variable than all the other objects that are more salient to most humans’ lives. Two single-celled organisms can be more different from each other than you are from an oak tree. Commutative algebra and non-commutative algebra can be more different, separated by a wider gulf of background knowledge, than genetics and economics. (That’s a little hyperbolic but I think some statements of that kind are actually true.)
So I think people with broad mathematical interests are really more “polymathic” than we tend to realize from the outside. Math is diverse. Terence Tao may in fact be more of a polymath than Tyler Cowen, if we’re talking about expertise in radically varied fields that are rarely studied together by one person.
The caveat is that lots of categories are like the category “single-celled organisms,” from what I can tell. I would guess that you are familiar with mathematics, so you can look at math and go “wow, there are so many sub-fields. Other fields aren’t like that!” Meanwhile someone familiar with biology might think “wow, there’s so much to study within biology; math doesn’t seem like that!”
Edit: on the other hand I could be wrong—if you’re not particularly familiar with mathematics research compared to biology research my story is inaccurate.
I think I see what you’re saying here. Attractors that are irreversible dead ends are more likely to represent miscalculations. But still, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that some people really like working on abstract math, really value academic status, and/or have a large comparative advantage in doing math, and therefore for them going into math is a rational choice. Furthermore, it seems likely that such people would be more concentrated among the top mathematicians.
I think your other argument is that according to your model of human psychology, most people would find it more fun to be a polymath than to specialize in one area. That makes some sense to me, but obviously it’s hard to put a lot of credence in it without seeing some strong empirical evidence.
Based on these two arguments, it seems to me there’s a reasonable chance that Terrance Tao went into math by mistake, but your level of confidence still seems unjustified. Did I miss anything else?
I’m sure that there are many people who really like abstract math. Your right about my claim about polymaths. My best guess is that Tao was right to go into math but would be best served by staying in math but broadening his focus somewhat now. The fact that he doesn’t seem to be driven by any particular problem strengthens it, but I’m still not all that confident of it. I’m a lot more confident that he should put a bit of effort into becoming a multimillionaire in a small part of his spare time, simply by selling very expensive consulting services, and less effort into housekeeping, driving his own car, and whatever else he spends his time on other than math, but it’s possible to me that he has done so and possible that he has relatives and/or friends who would envy him and make it a net loss.
One can simply see if people produce less or different stuff after tenure as one measure.
So the claim is that anybody who could become a polymath, does? And that people who specialize narrowly do so because they lack the capacity to be broader?
I don’t know how you would look at someone who works in a specialized area and conclude that he could, or couldn’t, have been a polymath if he had tried. One imperfect proxy, I guess, would be if our specialist has well-developed skills outside his profession. Are mathematicians below average in outside skills, compared to the amount of focus needed for their work? I’ve known or encountered a sizable minority who could have been musicians or writers instead; I have the anecdotal impression that mathematicians don’t do too badly on that score. Of course, mathematicians do tend to be less casually conversant with non-math stuff than average.
Or maybe you’re talking about something different. Maybe the capacity to be a polymath is not just plenty of innate abilities at different things, but the will and desire to set up a self-designed, varied life instead of a fixed one. Some people with varied abilities choose to give up all their skills but one; some people refuse, and insist on blending or simultaneously using their different skills. In that case, it’s probably even harder to test the “capacity to be a polymath,” because it seems kind of tautological—but I would instinctively agree that very specialized people probably don’t have it.
By can I mean see themselves as having the option, that’s all.
I you have this you have a near-obligation to publish it outside of forum comments section :)
What are those attractors?
Likewise, I doubt that you are correct when you write:
Think about what this entails: you’re essentially saying that the fact that Terry Tao spends his time solving math problems rather than hobnobbing with east-coast social and policy elites is the result of a miscalculation on his part with regard to his own values. As opposed to a selection effect where Tao happens to be in the small group of people who actually do prefer math to schmoozing and affecting government policy.
Now I do find it plausible that there exists a class of people for whom what you say is true—that there are successful mathematicians who in their heart of hearts would rather be the Jim Simons of today than the Jim Simons of the 1970s, or even today’s Terry Tao. But for your claim to be true as stated, there would essentially have to exist nobody in the entire human population with the opposite preference (because if there were, Tao, Wiles, etc. would surely be among them), and given the psychological diversity of our species this strikes me as absurd.
As for monastic orders, that’s exactly where I would want to be if I had to live in the Middle Ages. You may say that they were “outside of society”, but the fact is that most of the people we remember today from that period were monks. (The others being kings and popes.)
You’re positing a very strong selection mechanism connecting math interest with math jobs. I’m sure Terry likes solving math problems, but miscalculations like that are the norm, not the exception, in human affairs.
I’d rather be a monk than a peasant too, but I’d much rather be Chaucer, and I think that most monks would too. The difference between monks and professors is that one works a LOT harder to become a professor. If you are going to work that hard, you may as well make something of yourself.
MichaelVassar:
Undoubtedly so, but based on your comments, I’d say you might be suffering from a too narrow and perhaps also somewhat biased view of the different modes of self-actualization. By this I mean that you’re not taking into account the full scope of the potential modes, and you’re also underestimating the differences in the optimal modes for people of different personalities.
In my opinion, you’re also underestimating some downsides of being a senior member of the modern-day academic nomenklatura (and especially one who is not at its top tier), particularly those that are more pronounced the further a field is from the exactness and meritocracy that is least imperfectly embodied by math. Though you’ve probably met more concrete people from this social class than me, so your judgment may in fact be more accurate than mine.
I think I account for varied personalities well, but treat supposed personality differences which are basically the fear of doing things not in accordance with an established identity as bad motivations and see those as accounting for a significant fraction of supposed personality differences though not for the majority.
I’m confused about “In my opinion, you’re also underestimating some downsides of being a senior member of the modern-day academic nomenklatura ”. What makes you say that?
MichaelVassar:
Basically, I have in mind the required level of conformity with the respectable opinion. This is admittedly somewhat speculative on my part since I have neither personal experience nor close friends in such positions, but it seems to me that the standards of conformity expected from a public intellectual with prestigious academic and media affiliations have nowadays reached a level where it’s doubtful whether a genuinely curious and open mind can satisfy them without a great deal of self-censorship and possibly also dishonesty about one’s true beliefs. This seems to me like a significant barrier to true self-actualization by any reasonable definition of the term. Clearly, assuming the problem exists, it will be worse the further one’s interests are from strictly technical and non-ideological topics.
Perhaps it will be clearer if I illustrate it with a more extreme example. Imaging you were an elite member of some intellectual profession in the former U.S.S.R. -- would you rather be a mathematician or an economist? As a mathematician, you could do all the mathematics you liked, with only some rare and minimal lip-service to the system; as an economist, on the other hand, you would have to constantly mold your views according to a reigning ideology clearly remote from reality. Now of course, the modern-day Western world is far from even late-period U.S.S.R., but the difference is in my opinion one of degree, not essence. The position of a high-status intellectual still comes with very severe restrictions on your intellectual freedom.
I’m not sure that the situation of graduate students today in most academic fields is better than that of late period USSR academics. Tenured academics have it much better, but by that far into one’s career most real interest has already been squeezed out.
Is this akin to Paul Graham’s
He has also formulated your other ideas (i.e. polymathism) as I interpret it of planning life in a bottom-up manner of improving flexibility and options, rather than top-down from a precise end goal (which extreme specialization would suggest).
That might be part of it, but I am pretty sure Vassar also refers to the fact that a lot of young men with the ambition and curiosity to do better spend the vast majority of their time getting more skilled at their strongest skill because that is what they perceive as the optimal path to economic security and status and the fact that academics are encouraged in this severely non-optimal path (in part because it is convenient for academic institutions and advantageous for ambitious academic bureaucrats to divide human knowledge into specialties and subspecialties).
If these young men could relax more and not worry so much about their own status and economic security, they would tend to heed more their natural human sense of curiosity or their more playful social impulses (including perhaps altruism), which are probably all better guides to what to learn next than the desire to advance in the academic status hierarchy. In other words, a burning desire for status, particularly status that comes from a reputation for having some refined skill or expertise, is not as reliable a guide to self-actualization as it was in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Well, that might not always be true: for example, not working towards the right kind of status can prevent one from having access to the kind of friends and mentors who can best help one to learn. But it is certainly true that a lot of young men (and perhaps women, too, but I tend to think that the fear of social disapproval is a bigger problem there) do not take advantage of the social opportunities for learning that they already have (and limit their educations in other ways) out of a fear of not having enough status or income out of not having a good enough reputation for skill or expertise.
Agreed again.
Yes.
I don’t have enough data to compare such gaming outcomes very well, but I’ll pass on something that I thought was funny and perhaps containing enough truth to be thought-provoking (from Aaron Brown’s The Poker Face of Wall Street): “National bridge champion and hedge fund manager Josh Parker explained the nuances of serious high school games players to me. The chess player did well in school, had no friends, got 800s on his SATs, and did well at a top college. The poker and backgammon set (one crowd in the 1970s) did badly in school, had tons of friends, aced their SATs, and were stars at good colleges. The bridge players flunked out of high school, had no friends, aced their SATs, and went on to drop out of top colleges. In the 1980s, we all ended up trading options together.”
Also, FWIW, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are apparently in the bridge camp, though I dunno whether they played in high school.
Who do the chess and bridge players play bridge and chess with if they don’t have friends?
I’ve never become friends with any of the dozens of people with whom I’ve played chess in person (see below for why the qualifier “in person” is relevant) excepting one high-school classmate. A chess player is pretty much forced to suppress any natural human cooperative instincts like reciprocal altruism, instincts that are probably very important in the establishment of friendships. Also, sharing small pleasures seems important in starting friendships, and in chess the pleasure of one party coincides with pain in the other party.
Also, since the early 1990s anyone logging on to the Free Internet Chess Server can with an expected wait of less than a minute be matched up with another chess player of whatever skill level (more precisely, Elo rating, which is calculated automatically by the server) one desires. There is no need to remember the identity of who one has previously played against (although doing so will tend to increase one’s rating a little since individual players have styles that can be learned and exploited in the game).
Of course there could well be some exaggeration for dramatic effect there—as David Friedman likes to say, one should be skeptical of any account which might survive on its literary or entertainment value alone. But it’s not any sort of logical impossibility. In Dallas near UTD (which had a strong well-funded chess team which contributed some of the strong coffeehouse players) ca. 2002 I was able to play dozens of coffeehouse games against strangers and casual acquaintances. One can also play in tournaments and in open-to-all clubs. Perhaps one could even play grudge matches against people one dislikes. Also today one can play an enormous number of strangers online, and even in the 1970s people played postal chess.
I didn’t mention bridge because I think of it as a game people take up later in life and transfer skills to, not as a game people learn as kids and transfer skills from. I could easily be wrong about this.
Other members of the chess and bridge clubs.
I don’t suppose you’ve considered having a blog? It would increase the odds of what you write getting seen.
Would the love of pure math for its purity count as part of the anti-epistemic epistomology?
More generally, the subject of anti-epistomology (ideas so bad that they’re crippling) seems worth exploring, especially if it’s grounded in knowledge about the ways people actually think rather than guessing about the mistakes that people one disagrees with must be making. (Not a swipe at you—I’m thinking more about the way atheists seem to overestimate how irrational religious people are.)
I don’t know if I’ve got enough for a top level post there, but I’ll seriously consider it. Meanwhile, if anyone else has ideas about anti-epistolomology, please write about it.
He wrote a book specifically about transference of chess training to instrumental rationality
http://amzn.to/eYiTaS
I found it quite good, and parts of it sound much like Waitzkin. He talks a lot about psychology, self-control and management of (one’s own) computational resources, all of which should be quite useful for instrumental rationality.