I wish I could recommend a skepticism, empiricism, and rationality promoting institute. Unfortunately I am not aware of an organization which does not suffer from the flaws I identified above.
It seems to me that CFAR engages into empiricism. They are trying to teach various different ways to make people more rational and they are willing to listen to the results and change teaching content and methods.
Is your main objection against them that till now they haven’t published any papers?
It seems to me that CFAR engages into empiricism. They are trying to teach various different ways to make people more rational and they are willing to listen to the results and change teaching content and methods.
How do they measure whether they are actually making people more rational?
There are hundreds, maybe thousands self-help/personal development groups in the world. From the secular ones (e.g. Landmark, which is in some ways the spiritual ancestor of CFAR), to traditional religions, to mumbo jumbo new age stuff. From the “outside view”, how can I distinguish CFAR from these ones?
How do they measure whether they are actually making people more rational?
I think they did a bit of polling but I’m no good person to speak about the details. I haven’t attended one of their courses yet.
From the “outside view”, how can I distinguish CFAR from these ones?
A core difference is that CFAR intends to publish papers in the future that show effectiveness of techniques.
The others that you listed don’t. I also understand that doing work to getting techniques into a form were you can test them well in a study takes time.
In a lot of New Age frameworks there the belief that everything happens as it’s supposed to be. If a person get’s ill the day after a workshop, it’s because they are processing negative emotions or karma.
You can’t do any science when you assume that any possible outcome of an experiment is by definition a good outcome and the challenge is about trusting that it’s a good outcome.
The importance of trusting the process is also a core feature of traditional religion. If your prayer doesn’t seem to be working, it’s just because you don’t understand how god moves in mysterious ways.
Trust isn’t inherently bad but it prevents scientific learning.
I don’t know Landmarks position on trust and skepticism.
Landmark does practices like creating an expectation that participants invite guests to the Evening Session that I’m uncomfortable with. The might be effective recruiting tools but they feel culty.
Is it correct to compare CFAR with religions and mumbo jumbo?
I think it is. CFAR could be just a more sophisticated type of mumbo jumbo tailored to appeal materialists. Just because they are not talking about gods or universal quantum consciousness it doesn’t mean that their approach is any more grounded in evidence. Maybe it is, but I would like to see some replicable study about it. I’m not going to give them a free pass because they display the correct tribal insignia.
Just because they are not talking about gods or universal quantum consciousness it doesn’t mean that their approach is any more grounded in evidence.
This comment confuses the heck out of me. Of course that’s not why their approach is any more grounded in evidence, the fact that the particular brand of self-help they’re peddling is specifically about rationality which is itself to a large degree about what is grounded in evidence is why the methods they’re promoting are grounded in evidence.
Maybe it is, but I would like to see some replicable study about it.
What are you looking for, exactly? The cognitive biases that CFAR teaches about and tries to help mitigate have been well known in social psychology and cognitive science for decades.
If you’re worried that trying to tackle these kinds of biases could actually makes things worse, then yes, we know that knowing about biases can hurt people, and obviously that’s something CFAR tries to avoid. If you’re worried that trying to improve rationality isn’t actually a particularly effective form of self-help, then yes, we know that extreme rationality isn’t that great, and trying to find improvements that result in real practical benefits is part of what CFAR tries to do. But the fact that they’re specifically approaching areas of self-improvement that come from well documented to be genuinely real-world phenomena like cognitive biases makes them clearly significantly different to those that are centred around less sound ideas, for example, gods or universal quantum consciousness. Or at least, I would have thought so anyway.
I think what V_V is saying is: show me the evidence.
Show me the evidence that CFAR workshop participants make better decisions after the workshop than they do before.
Show me the evidence that the impact of CFAR instruction has higher expected humanitarian benefit dollar-for-dollar than an equivalent donation to SENS, or pick-your-favorite-charity.
Show me the evidence that the impact of CFAR instruction has higher expected humanitarian benefit dollar-for-dollar than an equivalent donation to SENS, or pick-your-favorite-charity.
I don’t think they do, but I don’t think we were comparing CFAR to SENS or other effective altruist endorsed charities, I was contesting the claim that CFAR was comparable to religions and mumbo jumbo:
Is it correct to compare CFAR with religions and mumbo jumbo?
I think it is.
I mean, they’re literally basing their curricula on cognitive science. If you look at their FAQ, they give examples of the kinds of scientifically grounded, evidence based methods they use for improving rationality:
While research on cognitive biases has been booming for decades, we’ve spent more time identifying biases than coming up with ways to evade them.
There are a handful of simple techniques that have been repeatedly shown to help people make better decisions. “Consider the opposite” is a name for the habit of asking oneself, “Is there any reason why my initial view might be wrong?” That simple, general habit has been shown to be useful in combating a wide variety of biases, including overconfidence, hindsight biases, confirmation bias, and anchoring effects [see Arkes, 1991; Arkes, Fault, Guilmette, & Hart, 1988; Koehler, 1994; Koriat, Lichtenstein, & Fischhoff, 1980; Larrick, 2004; Mussweiler, Strack, & Pfeiffer, 2000]
Most of us sometimes fall prey to the planning fallacy, where we underestimate the amount of time it’s going to take us to complete a project. But one strategy that’s been shown to work, and which we teach in our workshops, is “reference class forecasting,” which entails asking yourself how it’s taken you, or people you know, to complete similar tasks. [see Buehler, Griffin, & Ross (2002)
A third technique which has strong empirical backing (though it is not typically classified under “de-biasing” research”) is cognitive therapy, which has successfully improved participants’ depression and anxiety by the use of rational thinking habits like asking oneself, “What evidence do I have for that assumption?” Cognitive therapy in particular is an encouraging demonstration that simple rational thinking techniques can become automatic and regularly used, to great effect.
So I just don’t know where someone can be coming from when they suggest that CFAR’s methods are comparably grounded in evidence to religion and mumbo jumbo, when they’re literally grounding their methods on evidence as a rule and religion and mumbo jumbo are grounded on other things, like universal quantum consciousness and gods.
What are you looking for, exactly? The cognitive biases that CFAR teaches about and tries to help mitigate have been well known in social psychology and cognitive science for decades.
It’s also well known in cognitive science that mitigating biases is hard. Having studies that prove that CFAR interventions work is important for the long term.
Keith Stanovich (who’s a CFAR advisor) got a million dollar (or $999,376 to be exact) from the John Templeton Foundation to create a rationality quotient test that measures rationality in the same way we have tests for IQ.
If CFAR workshops work to increase the rationality of their participants, that score should go up.
trying to find improvements that result in real practical benefits is part of what CFAR tries to do.
The fact that you try doesn’t mean that you succeed and various people in the personal development field also try to find improvements that result in real practical benefits.
But the fact that they’re specifically approaching areas of self-improvement that come from well documented to be genuinely real-world phenomena like cognitive biases makes them clearly significantly different to those that are centred around less sound ideas, for example, gods or universal quantum consciousness.
In Willpower psychology professor Roy Baumeister makes the argument that the God idea is useful for raising Willpower.
Mormons have been found to look healtier.
It’s only misleading if you take it out of context.
I do argue in this thread that CFAR is a promising organisation. I didn’t say that CFAR is bad because they haven’t provided this proof.
I wanted to illustrate that meaningful proof of effectiveness is possible and should happen in the next years.
The fact that CFAR is unable to do this till now because of unavailability of the test doesn’t mean that there’s proof that CFAR manages to raise rationality.
I also don’t know the exact relationship between Stanovich and CFAR and to what extend his involvement in CFAR is more than having his name on the CFAR advisor page.
Giving CFAR participants a bunch of questions that he considers to be potentially usefully for measuring rationality could be part of his effort to develop a rationality test.
The text being publically available isn’t a necessary condition for a version of the text being used inside CFAR.
So I know less about CFAR than I do the other two sponsors of the site. There is in my mind some unfortunate guilt by association given partially shared leadership & advisor structure, but I would not want to unfairly prejudice an organization for that reason alone.
However there are some worrying signs which is why I feel justified in saying something at least in a comment, with the hope that someone might prove me wrong. CFAR used donated funds to pay for Yudkowsky’s time in writing HPMoR. It is an enjoyable piece of fiction, and I do not object to the reasoning they gave for funding his writing. But it is a piece of fiction whose main illustrative character suffers from exactly the flaw that I talked about above, in spades. It is my understanding also that Yudkowsky is working on a rationality textbook for release by CFAR (not the sequences which was released by MIRI). I have not seen any draft of this work, but Yudkowsky is currently 0 for 2 on this issue, so I’m not holding my breath. And given that further donations to CFAR are likely to pay for the completion of this work which has a cringe-inducing Bayesian prior, I would be hesitant to endorse them. That and, as you said, publications have been sparse or non-existent.
But I know very little other than that about CFAR and I remain open to having my mind changed.
As Chief Financial Officer for CFAR, I can say all the following with some authority:
CFAR used donated funds to pay for Yudkowsky’s time in writing HPMoR.
Absolutely false. To my knowledge we have never paid Eliezer anything. Our records indicate that he has never been an employee or contractor for us, and that matches my memory. I don’t know for sure how he earned a living while writing HPMOR, but at a guess it was as an employed researcher for MIRI.
It is my understanding also that Yudkowsky is working on a rationality textbook for release by CFAR (not the sequences which was released by MIRI).
I’m not aware of whether Eliezer is writing a rationality textbook. If he is, it’s definitely not with any agreement on CFAR’s part to release it, and we’re definitely not paying him right now whether he’s working on a textbook or not.
And given that further donations to CFAR are likely to pay for the completion of this work…
Not a single penny of CFAR donations go into paying Eliezer.
I cannot with authority promise that will never happen. I want to be clear that I’m making no such promise on CFAR’s behalf.
But we have no plans to pay him for anything to the best of my knowledge as the person in charge of CFAR’s books and financial matters.
So the source of the confusion is the Author’s notes to HPMoR. Eliezer promotes both CFAR and MIRI workshops and donation drives, and is ambiguous about his full employment status—it’s clear that he’s a researcher at MIRI, but if was ever explicitly mentioned who was paying for his rationality work, I missed it. Googling “CFAR site:hpmor.com″ does show that on http://hpmor.com/applied-rationality/, a page I never read he discloses not having a financial relationship with CFAR. But he notes many times elsewhere that “his employer” has been paying for him to write a rationality textbook, and at times given him paid sabbaticals to finish writing HPMOR because he was able to convince his employer that it was in their interest to fund his fiction writing.
As I said I can understand the argument that it would be beneficial to an organization like CFAR to have as fun and interesting an introduction to rationality as HPMOR is, ignoring for a moment the flaws in this particular work I pointed out elsewhere. It makes very little sense for MIRI to do so—I would frankly be concerned about them losing their non-profit status as a result, as writing rationality textbooks let alone harry potter fanfics is so, so far outside of MIRI’s mission.
But anyway, it appears that I assumed it was CFAR employing him, not MIRI. I wonder if I was alone in this assumption.
EDIT: To be clear, MIRI and CFAR have shared history—CFAR is an offshoot of MIRI, and both organizations have shared offices and staff in the past. You staff page lists Eliezer Yudkowsky as a “Curriculum Consultant” and specifically mentions his work on HPMOR. I’ll take your word that none of it was done with CFAR funding, but that’s not the expectation a reasonable person might have from your very own website. If you want to distance yourself from HPMOR you might want to correct that.
To be clear, I can understand where your impression came from. I don’t blame you. I spoke up purely to crush a rumor and clarify the situation.
I’ll take your word that none of it was done with CFAR funding, but that’s not the expectation a reasonable person might have from your very own website. If you want to distance yourself from HPMOR you might want to correct that.
That’s a good point. I’ll definitely consider it.
We’re not trying to distance ourselves from HPMOR, by the way. We think it’s useful, and it does cause a lot of people to show interest in CFAR.
But I agree, as a nonprofit it might be a good idea for us to be clearer about whom we are and are not paying. I’ll definitely think about how to approach that.
But it is a piece of fiction whose main illustrative character suffers from exactly the flaw that I talked about above, in spades.
I was pleasantly surprised by empiricism in HPMOR.
It starts out with Harry’s father believing that there’s no way magic can exist, his mother believing it does and then Harry advocating using the empiric method to find out.
Harry runs experiments to find out about the inheritance of magic.
He runs experiments where he varies various factors to find out when a spell works with Hermione.
You have exhausted all of the examples that I can recall from the entire series. That’s what’s wrong.
The rest of the time Harry thinks up a clever explanation, and once the explanation is clever enough to solve all the odd constraints placed on it, (1) he stops looking for other explanations, and (2) he doesn’t check to see if he is actually right.
Nominally, Harry is supposed to have learned his lesson in his first failed experimentation in magic with Hermoine. But in reality and in relation to the overarching plot, there was very little experimentation and much more “that’s so clever it must be true!” type thinking.
“That’s so clever it must be true!” basically sums up the sequence’s justification for many-worlds, to tie us back to the original complaint in the OP.
The rest of the time Harry thinks up a clever explanation, and once the explanation is clever enough to solve all the odd constraints placed on it, (1) he stops looking for other explanations, and (2) he doesn’t check to see if he is actually right.
Hariezer decides in this chapter that comed-tea MUST work by causing you to drink it right before something spit-take worthy happens. The tea predicts the humor, and then magics you into drinking it. Of course, he does no experiments to test this hypothesis at all (ironic that just a few chapters ago he lecture Hermione about only doing 1 experiment to test her idea).
Here is the thing about science, step 0 needs to be make sure you’re trying to explain a real phenomena. Hariezer knows this, he tells the story of N-rays earlier in the chapter, but completely fails to understand the point.
Hariezer and Draco have decided, based on one anecdote (the founders of Hogwarts were the best wizards ever, supposedly) that wizards are weaker today than in the past. The first thing they should do is find out if wizards are actually getting weaker. After all, the two most dangerous dark wizards ever were both recent, Grindelwald and Voldemort. Dumbledore is no slouch. Even four students were able to make the marauders map just one generation before Harry. (Incidentally, this is exactly where neoreactionaries often go wrong- they assume things are getting worse without actually checking, and then create elaborate explanations for non-existent facts).
Anyway, for the purposes of the story, I’m sure it’ll turn out that wizards are getting weaker, because Yudkoswky wrote it. But this would have been a great chance to teach an actually useful lesson, and it would make the N-ray story told earlier a useful example, and not a random factoid.
Using literally the exact same logic that Intelligent Design proponents use (and doing exactly 0 experiments), Hariezer decides while thinking over breakfast:
Some intelligent engineer, then, had created the Source of Magic, and told it to pay attention to a particular DNA marker.
The obvious next thought was that this had something to do with “Atlantis”.
Here is Hariezer’s response to the gateway to the afterlife:
That doesn’t even sound like an interesting fraud,“ Harry said, his voice calmer now that there was nothing there to make him hope, or make him angry for having hopes dashed. “Someone built a stone archway, made a little black rippling surface between it that Vanished anything it touched, and enchanted it to whisper to people and hypnotize them.”
Do you see how incurious Hariezer is? If someone told me there was a LITERAL GATEWAY TO THE AFTERLIFE I’d want to see it. I’d want to test it, see it. Can we try to record and amplify the whispers? Are things being said?
No surprise, then, that the wizarding world lived in a conceptual universe bounded—not by fundamental laws of magic that nobody even knew—but just by the surface rules of known Charms and enchantments…Even if Harry’s first guess had been mistaken, one way or another it was still inconceivable that the fundamental laws of the universe contained a special case for human lips shaping the phrase ‘Wingardium Leviosa’. …What were theultimate possibilities of invention, if the underlying laws of the universe permitted an eleven-year-old with a stick to violate almost every constraint in the Muggle version of physics?
You know what would be awesome? IF YOU GOT AROUND TO DOING SOME EXPERIMENTS AND EXPLORING THIS IDEA. The absolute essence of science is NOT asking these questions, it’s deciding to try to find out the fucking answers! You can’t be content to just wonder about things, you have to put the work in! Hariezer’s wonderment never gets past the stoned-college-kid wondering aloud and into ACTUAL exploration, and its getting really frustrating.
arry had set the alarm upon his mechanical watch to tell him when it was lunchtime, since he couldn’t actually look at his wrist, being invisible and all that. It raised the question of how his eyeglasses worked while he was wearing the Cloak. For that matter the Law of the Excluded Middle seemed to imply that either the rhodopsin complexes in his retina were absorbing photons and transducing them to neural spikes, or alternatively, those photons were going straight through his body and out the other side, but not both. It really did seem increasingly likely that invisibility cloaks let you see outward while being invisible yourself because, on some fundamental level, that was how the caster had—not wanted—but implicitly believed—that invisibility should work.
This would be an excellent fucking question to explore, maybe via some experiments. But no. I’ve totally given up on this story exploring the magic world in any detail at all. Anyway, Hariezer skips straight from “I wonder how this works” to “it must work this way, how could we exploit it”
Still in the woods, Hariezer encounters a centaur who tries to kill him, because he divines that Hariezer is going to make all the stars die.
There are some standard anti-astrology arguments, which again seems to be fighting the actual situation because the centaurs successfully use astrology to divine things.
We get this:
“Cometary orbits are also set thousands of years in advance so they shouldn’t correlate much to current events. And the light of the stars takes years to travel from the stars to Earth, and the stars don’t move much at all, not visibly. So the obvious hypothesis is that centaurs have a native magical talent for Divination which you just, well, project onto the night sky.”
There are so, so many other hypothesis Hariezer. Maybe starlight has a magical component that waxes and wanes as stars align into different magical symbols or some such. The HPMOR scientific method:
observation → generate 1 hypothesis → assume you are right → it turns out that you are right.
Using literally the exact same logic that Intelligent Design proponents use (and doing exactly 0 experiments), Hariezer decides while thinking over breakfast:
Some intelligent engineer, then, had created the Source of Magic, and told it to pay attention to a particular DNA marker.
The obvious next thought was that this had something to do with “Atlantis”.
How is this ‘literally the exact same logic that ID proponents use?’ Creationists fallacize away the concept of natural selection, but I don’t see how Harry is being unreasonable, given what he knows about the universe.
He’s saying “I don’t understand how magic could have come into being, it must have been invented by somebody.” When in fact there could be dozens of other alternative theories.
I’ll give you one that took me only three seconds to think up: the method for using magic isn’t a delusion of the caster as Harry thought, but a mass delusion of all wizards everywhere. E.g. confounding every wizard in existence, or at least some threshold to think that Fixus Everthingus was a real spell would make it work. Maybe all it would have take to get his experiments with Hermoine to work is to confound himself as well, making it a double-blind experiment as it really should have been.
His argument here really is exactly the same as an intelligent designer: “magic is too complicated and arbitrary to be the result of some physical process.”
His argument here really is exactly the same as an intelligent designer: “magic is too complicated and arbitrary to be the result of some physical process.”
He actually does kind of address that, by pointing out that there are only two known processes that produce purposeful effects:
There were only two known causes of purposeful complexity. Natural selection, which produced things like butterflies. And intelligent engineering, which produced things like cars.
Magic didn’t seem like something that had self-replicated into existence. Spells were purposefully complicated, but not, like a butterfly, complicated for the purpose of making copies of themselves. Spells were complicated for the purpose of serving their user, like a car.
Some intelligent engineer, then, had created the Source of Magic, and told it to pay attention to a particular DNA marker.
So, yeah, I disagree strongly that the two arguments are “exactly the same”. That’s the sort of thing you say more for emphasis than for its being true.
An intelligent designer says “I have exhausted every possible hypothesis, there must be a god creator behind it all” when in fact there was at least one perfectly plausible hypothosis (natural selection) which he failed to thoroughly consider.
Harry says essentially “I have exhausted every possible hypothesis—natural selection and intelligent design—and there must be an Atlantean engineer behind it all” when in fact there were other perfectly plausible arguments such as the coordinated belief of a quorum of wizardkind explanation that I gave.
That doesn’t address the question of why magic exists (not to mention it falls afoul of Occam’s Razor). You seem to be answering a completely different question.
You may be right, but it is still more parsimonious than your idea (which requires some genuinely bizarre mechanism, far more than it being a self-delusion).
Not really. You’ve seen the movie Sphere, or read the book? Magic could be similar: the source of magic is a wish-granting device that makes whatever someone with wizard gene think of, actually happen. Of course this is incredibly dangerous—all I have to do is shout “don’t think of the Apocalypse!” in a room of wizards and watch the world end. So early wizards like Merlin interdicted by using their magic to implant false memories into the entire wizarding population to provide a sort of basic set of safety rules—magic requires wands, enchantments have to be said correctly with the right hand motion, creating new spells requires herculean effort, etc. None of that would be true, but the presence of other wizards in the world thinking it were true would be enough to make the wish-granting device enforce the rules anyway.
I think you’re missing the point of the Many Worlds posts in the Sequences. I’ll link to my response here.
Regarding HPMoR, Eliezer would agree that Harry’s success rate is absurdly unrealistic (even for a story about witchcraft and wizardry). He wrote about this point in the essay “Level 2 Intelligent Characters”:
In the real world, everything is harder than it is for characters in stories; clever insights are less likely to be true and clever strategems are overwhelmingly less likely to work. In real life, I have to try literally ten good ideas before one of them works at all, often putting in years of effort before giving up or succeeding. Yes, I’ve been known to pull off implausible tricks like “Write a Harry Potter fanfiction good enough to recruit International Mathematical Olympiad gold medalists” but that’s not the only implausible-sounding thing I’ve ever tried to do. You just don’t hear as much about the clever ideas that didn’t work, over the many years I’ve been trying weird and nonweird ways to get my task done.
In fiction you as the author can decide that the bright ideas do work, being careful to accompany this by an appropriate amount of sweat and pain and unintended consequence so that the reader feels the character has earned it. You cannot evade the curse of building your story out of clever ideas that would be far less likely to work in real life, not just because you have no way to test the ideas to find the ones that actually work, but because in real life we’re talking about a 10:1 ratio of failures to successes. We get to see Harry fail once in Ch. 22, because I felt like I had to make the point about clever ideas not always working. A more realistic story with eight more failed ideas passing before Harry’s first original discovery in Ch. 28 would not have been fun to read, or write.
I would agree with you, however, that HPMoR lets Harry intuit the right answer on the first guess too much. I would much prefer that the book prioritize pedagogy over literary directness, and in any case I have a taste for stories that meander and hit a lot of dead ends. (Though I’ll grant that this is an idiosyncratic taste on my part.)
As a last resort, I think HPMoR could just have told us, in narration, about a bunch of times Harry failed, before describing in more detail the time he succeeded. A few sentences like this scattered throughout the story could at least reduce the message to system 2 that rationalist plans should consistently succeed, even if the different amounts of vividness mean that it still won’t get through to system 1. But this is a band-aid; the deeper solution is just to find lots of interesting lessons and new developments you can tell about while Harry fails in various ways, so you aren’t just reciting a litany of undifferentiated failures.
There’s a difference between succeeding too often and succeeding despite not testing his ideas. The problem isn’t having too many failed ideas, the problem is that testing is how one rules out a failed idea, so he seems unreasonably lucky in the sense that his refusal to test has unreasonably few consequences.
That’s an anti-example. He had a theory for how time turners could be used in a clever way to perform computation. His first experiment actually confirmed the consistent-timeline theory of time turners, but revealed the problem domain to be much larger than he had considered. Rather than construct a more rigorous and tightly controlled experiment to get at the underlying nature of timeline selection, he got spooked and walked away. It became a lesson in anti-empiricism: some things you just don’t investigate.
Harry get’s things right through being smart.
That’s exactly the problem. Rationalists get things right by relying on reality being consistent, not any particular smartness. You could be a total numbnut but still be good at checking other people’s theories against reality and do better than the smartest guy in the world who thinks his ideas are too clever to be wrong.
So Harry got things right by relying on reality being consistent, until the very end, when reality turned out to be even more consistent than he could have thought. I think it is the most valuable lesson from HPMoR.
Except that it is a piece of fiction. Harry got things right because the author wrote it that way. In reality Harry acting the way Harry did would have been more likely to settle on a clever-sounding theory which he never tested until it was too late and which turned out to be hopelessly wrong and got him killed. But that’s not how Yudkowsky chose to write the story.
It seems to me that CFAR engages into empiricism. They are trying to teach various different ways to make people more rational and they are willing to listen to the results and change teaching content and methods.
Is your main objection against them that till now they haven’t published any papers?
How do they measure whether they are actually making people more rational?
There are hundreds, maybe thousands self-help/personal development groups in the world. From the secular ones (e.g. Landmark, which is in some ways the spiritual ancestor of CFAR), to traditional religions, to mumbo jumbo new age stuff. From the “outside view”, how can I distinguish CFAR from these ones?
I think they did a bit of polling but I’m no good person to speak about the details. I haven’t attended one of their courses yet.
A core difference is that CFAR intends to publish papers in the future that show effectiveness of techniques. The others that you listed don’t. I also understand that doing work to getting techniques into a form were you can test them well in a study takes time.
In a lot of New Age frameworks there the belief that everything happens as it’s supposed to be. If a person get’s ill the day after a workshop, it’s because they are processing negative emotions or karma. You can’t do any science when you assume that any possible outcome of an experiment is by definition a good outcome and the challenge is about trusting that it’s a good outcome.
The importance of trusting the process is also a core feature of traditional religion. If your prayer doesn’t seem to be working, it’s just because you don’t understand how god moves in mysterious ways. Trust isn’t inherently bad but it prevents scientific learning.
I don’t know Landmarks position on trust and skepticism.
Landmark does practices like creating an expectation that participants invite guests to the Evening Session that I’m uncomfortable with. The might be effective recruiting tools but they feel culty.
I think it is. CFAR could be just a more sophisticated type of mumbo jumbo tailored to appeal materialists. Just because they are not talking about gods or universal quantum consciousness it doesn’t mean that their approach is any more grounded in evidence.
Maybe it is, but I would like to see some replicable study about it. I’m not going to give them a free pass because they display the correct tribal insignia.
This comment confuses the heck out of me. Of course that’s not why their approach is any more grounded in evidence, the fact that the particular brand of self-help they’re peddling is specifically about rationality which is itself to a large degree about what is grounded in evidence is why the methods they’re promoting are grounded in evidence.
What are you looking for, exactly? The cognitive biases that CFAR teaches about and tries to help mitigate have been well known in social psychology and cognitive science for decades.
If you’re worried that trying to tackle these kinds of biases could actually makes things worse, then yes, we know that knowing about biases can hurt people, and obviously that’s something CFAR tries to avoid. If you’re worried that trying to improve rationality isn’t actually a particularly effective form of self-help, then yes, we know that extreme rationality isn’t that great, and trying to find improvements that result in real practical benefits is part of what CFAR tries to do. But the fact that they’re specifically approaching areas of self-improvement that come from well documented to be genuinely real-world phenomena like cognitive biases makes them clearly significantly different to those that are centred around less sound ideas, for example, gods or universal quantum consciousness. Or at least, I would have thought so anyway.
I think what V_V is saying is: show me the evidence.
Show me the evidence that CFAR workshop participants make better decisions after the workshop than they do before.
Show me the evidence that the impact of CFAR instruction has higher expected humanitarian benefit dollar-for-dollar than an equivalent donation to SENS, or pick-your-favorite-charity.
I don’t think they do, but I don’t think we were comparing CFAR to SENS or other effective altruist endorsed charities, I was contesting the claim that CFAR was comparable to religions and mumbo jumbo:
I mean, they’re literally basing their curricula on cognitive science. If you look at their FAQ, they give examples of the kinds of scientifically grounded, evidence based methods they use for improving rationality:
So I just don’t know where someone can be coming from when they suggest that CFAR’s methods are comparably grounded in evidence to religion and mumbo jumbo, when they’re literally grounding their methods on evidence as a rule and religion and mumbo jumbo are grounded on other things, like universal quantum consciousness and gods.
It’s also well known in cognitive science that mitigating biases is hard. Having studies that prove that CFAR interventions work is important for the long term.
Keith Stanovich (who’s a CFAR advisor) got a million dollar (or $999,376 to be exact) from the John Templeton Foundation to create a rationality quotient test that measures rationality in the same way we have tests for IQ.
If CFAR workshops work to increase the rationality of their participants, that score should go up.
The fact that you try doesn’t mean that you succeed and various people in the personal development field also try to find improvements that result in real practical benefits.
In Willpower psychology professor Roy Baumeister makes the argument that the God idea is useful for raising Willpower. Mormons have been found to look healtier.
That is an extremely misleading sentence. CFAR cannot give Stanovich’s test to their students because the test does not yet exist.
It’s only misleading if you take it out of context.
I do argue in this thread that CFAR is a promising organisation. I didn’t say that CFAR is bad because they haven’t provided this proof.
I wanted to illustrate that meaningful proof of effectiveness is possible and should happen in the next years.
The fact that CFAR is unable to do this till now because of unavailability of the test doesn’t mean that there’s proof that CFAR manages to raise rationality.
I also don’t know the exact relationship between Stanovich and CFAR and to what extend his involvement in CFAR is more than having his name on the CFAR advisor page. Giving CFAR participants a bunch of questions that he considers to be potentially usefully for measuring rationality could be part of his effort to develop a rationality test.
The text being publically available isn’t a necessary condition for a version of the text being used inside CFAR.
So I know less about CFAR than I do the other two sponsors of the site. There is in my mind some unfortunate guilt by association given partially shared leadership & advisor structure, but I would not want to unfairly prejudice an organization for that reason alone.
However there are some worrying signs which is why I feel justified in saying something at least in a comment, with the hope that someone might prove me wrong. CFAR used donated funds to pay for Yudkowsky’s time in writing HPMoR. It is an enjoyable piece of fiction, and I do not object to the reasoning they gave for funding his writing. But it is a piece of fiction whose main illustrative character suffers from exactly the flaw that I talked about above, in spades. It is my understanding also that Yudkowsky is working on a rationality textbook for release by CFAR (not the sequences which was released by MIRI). I have not seen any draft of this work, but Yudkowsky is currently 0 for 2 on this issue, so I’m not holding my breath. And given that further donations to CFAR are likely to pay for the completion of this work which has a cringe-inducing Bayesian prior, I would be hesitant to endorse them. That and, as you said, publications have been sparse or non-existent.
But I know very little other than that about CFAR and I remain open to having my mind changed.
As Chief Financial Officer for CFAR, I can say all the following with some authority:
Absolutely false. To my knowledge we have never paid Eliezer anything. Our records indicate that he has never been an employee or contractor for us, and that matches my memory. I don’t know for sure how he earned a living while writing HPMOR, but at a guess it was as an employed researcher for MIRI.
I’m not aware of whether Eliezer is writing a rationality textbook. If he is, it’s definitely not with any agreement on CFAR’s part to release it, and we’re definitely not paying him right now whether he’s working on a textbook or not.
Not a single penny of CFAR donations go into paying Eliezer.
I cannot with authority promise that will never happen. I want to be clear that I’m making no such promise on CFAR’s behalf.
But we have no plans to pay him for anything to the best of my knowledge as the person in charge of CFAR’s books and financial matters.
Thank you for correcting me on this.
So the source of the confusion is the Author’s notes to HPMoR. Eliezer promotes both CFAR and MIRI workshops and donation drives, and is ambiguous about his full employment status—it’s clear that he’s a researcher at MIRI, but if was ever explicitly mentioned who was paying for his rationality work, I missed it. Googling “CFAR site:hpmor.com″ does show that on http://hpmor.com/applied-rationality/, a page I never read he discloses not having a financial relationship with CFAR. But he notes many times elsewhere that “his employer” has been paying for him to write a rationality textbook, and at times given him paid sabbaticals to finish writing HPMOR because he was able to convince his employer that it was in their interest to fund his fiction writing.
As I said I can understand the argument that it would be beneficial to an organization like CFAR to have as fun and interesting an introduction to rationality as HPMOR is, ignoring for a moment the flaws in this particular work I pointed out elsewhere. It makes very little sense for MIRI to do so—I would frankly be concerned about them losing their non-profit status as a result, as writing rationality textbooks let alone harry potter fanfics is so, so far outside of MIRI’s mission.
But anyway, it appears that I assumed it was CFAR employing him, not MIRI. I wonder if I was alone in this assumption.
EDIT: To be clear, MIRI and CFAR have shared history—CFAR is an offshoot of MIRI, and both organizations have shared offices and staff in the past. You staff page lists Eliezer Yudkowsky as a “Curriculum Consultant” and specifically mentions his work on HPMOR. I’ll take your word that none of it was done with CFAR funding, but that’s not the expectation a reasonable person might have from your very own website. If you want to distance yourself from HPMOR you might want to correct that.
To be clear, I can understand where your impression came from. I don’t blame you. I spoke up purely to crush a rumor and clarify the situation.
That’s a good point. I’ll definitely consider it.
We’re not trying to distance ourselves from HPMOR, by the way. We think it’s useful, and it does cause a lot of people to show interest in CFAR.
But I agree, as a nonprofit it might be a good idea for us to be clearer about whom we are and are not paying. I’ll definitely think about how to approach that.
I was pleasantly surprised by empiricism in HPMOR.
It starts out with Harry’s father believing that there’s no way magic can exist, his mother believing it does and then Harry advocating using the empiric method to find out. Harry runs experiments to find out about the inheritance of magic. He runs experiments where he varies various factors to find out when a spell works with Hermione.
What’s wrong with that kind of empiricism?
You have exhausted all of the examples that I can recall from the entire series. That’s what’s wrong.
The rest of the time Harry thinks up a clever explanation, and once the explanation is clever enough to solve all the odd constraints placed on it, (1) he stops looking for other explanations, and (2) he doesn’t check to see if he is actually right.
Nominally, Harry is supposed to have learned his lesson in his first failed experimentation in magic with Hermoine. But in reality and in relation to the overarching plot, there was very little experimentation and much more “that’s so clever it must be true!” type thinking.
“That’s so clever it must be true!” basically sums up the sequence’s justification for many-worlds, to tie us back to the original complaint in the OP.
Examples:
Comed-tea in ch. 14
Wizards losing their power in chap. 22
Atlantis in chap. 24
Gateway to the after life in chap. 39:
Laws of magic in chap. 85:
Vision and the invisibility cloak in chap. 95:
Centaurs and astrology in chap. 101
How is this ‘literally the exact same logic that ID proponents use?’ Creationists fallacize away the concept of natural selection, but I don’t see how Harry is being unreasonable, given what he knows about the universe.
He’s saying “I don’t understand how magic could have come into being, it must have been invented by somebody.” When in fact there could be dozens of other alternative theories.
I’ll give you one that took me only three seconds to think up: the method for using magic isn’t a delusion of the caster as Harry thought, but a mass delusion of all wizards everywhere. E.g. confounding every wizard in existence, or at least some threshold to think that Fixus Everthingus was a real spell would make it work. Maybe all it would have take to get his experiments with Hermoine to work is to confound himself as well, making it a double-blind experiment as it really should have been.
His argument here really is exactly the same as an intelligent designer: “magic is too complicated and arbitrary to be the result of some physical process.”
He actually does kind of address that, by pointing out that there are only two known processes that produce purposeful effects:
So, yeah, I disagree strongly that the two arguments are “exactly the same”. That’s the sort of thing you say more for emphasis than for its being true.
I stand by my claim that they are the same.
An intelligent designer says “I have exhausted every possible hypothesis, there must be a god creator behind it all” when in fact there was at least one perfectly plausible hypothosis (natural selection) which he failed to thoroughly consider.
Harry says essentially “I have exhausted every possible hypothesis—natural selection and intelligent design—and there must be an Atlantean engineer behind it all” when in fact there were other perfectly plausible arguments such as the coordinated belief of a quorum of wizardkind explanation that I gave.
That doesn’t address the question of why magic exists (not to mention it falls afoul of Occam’s Razor). You seem to be answering a completely different question.
The question in the story and in this thread was “why purposeful complexity?” not “why magic?”
Your proposal is equally complex, if not more. What’s causing the hallucinations?
You may be right, but it is still more parsimonious than your idea (which requires some genuinely bizarre mechanism, far more than it being a self-delusion).
Not really. You’ve seen the movie Sphere, or read the book? Magic could be similar: the source of magic is a wish-granting device that makes whatever someone with wizard gene think of, actually happen. Of course this is incredibly dangerous—all I have to do is shout “don’t think of the Apocalypse!” in a room of wizards and watch the world end. So early wizards like Merlin interdicted by using their magic to implant false memories into the entire wizarding population to provide a sort of basic set of safety rules—magic requires wands, enchantments have to be said correctly with the right hand motion, creating new spells requires herculean effort, etc. None of that would be true, but the presence of other wizards in the world thinking it were true would be enough to make the wish-granting device enforce the rules anyway.
I think you’re missing the point of the Many Worlds posts in the Sequences. I’ll link to my response here.
Regarding HPMoR, Eliezer would agree that Harry’s success rate is absurdly unrealistic (even for a story about witchcraft and wizardry). He wrote about this point in the essay “Level 2 Intelligent Characters”:
I would agree with you, however, that HPMoR lets Harry intuit the right answer on the first guess too much. I would much prefer that the book prioritize pedagogy over literary directness, and in any case I have a taste for stories that meander and hit a lot of dead ends. (Though I’ll grant that this is an idiosyncratic taste on my part.)
As a last resort, I think HPMoR could just have told us, in narration, about a bunch of times Harry failed, before describing in more detail the time he succeeded. A few sentences like this scattered throughout the story could at least reduce the message to system 2 that rationalist plans should consistently succeed, even if the different amounts of vividness mean that it still won’t get through to system 1. But this is a band-aid; the deeper solution is just to find lots of interesting lessons and new developments you can tell about while Harry fails in various ways, so you aren’t just reciting a litany of undifferentiated failures.
There’s a difference between succeeding too often and succeeding despite not testing his ideas. The problem isn’t having too many failed ideas, the problem is that testing is how one rules out a failed idea, so he seems unreasonably lucky in the sense that his refusal to test has unreasonably few consequences.
Without rereading I can recall experiment with time tuners where Harry finds out “Don’t mess with time”.
But what might be missing is a detailed exploration of “learning from mistakes”. Harry get’s things right through being smart.
That’s an anti-example. He had a theory for how time turners could be used in a clever way to perform computation. His first experiment actually confirmed the consistent-timeline theory of time turners, but revealed the problem domain to be much larger than he had considered. Rather than construct a more rigorous and tightly controlled experiment to get at the underlying nature of timeline selection, he got spooked and walked away. It became a lesson in anti-empiricism: some things you just don’t investigate.
That’s exactly the problem. Rationalists get things right by relying on reality being consistent, not any particular smartness. You could be a total numbnut but still be good at checking other people’s theories against reality and do better than the smartest guy in the world who thinks his ideas are too clever to be wrong.
So Harry got things right by relying on reality being consistent, until the very end, when reality turned out to be even more consistent than he could have thought. I think it is the most valuable lesson from HPMoR.
Except that it is a piece of fiction. Harry got things right because the author wrote it that way. In reality Harry acting the way Harry did would have been more likely to settle on a clever-sounding theory which he never tested until it was too late and which turned out to be hopelessly wrong and got him killed. But that’s not how Yudkowsky chose to write the story.
I agree. Still, even if Harry died, my point would still stand.