Can I get your analysis of my “spouse cheating and what I know about it” example? I’ve understood your position on utility functions as stated in other branches; I’m curious as to how you would interpret my claim to have preferences over both states of reality and beliefs about reality in this fairly concrete and non-hypothetical case.
Can I get your analysis of my “spouse cheating and what I know about it” example? I’ve understood your position on utility functions as stated in other branches; I’m curious as to how you would interpret my claim to have preferences over both states of reality and beliefs about reality in this fairly concrete and non-hypothetical case.
My point is that your entire argument consists of pointing to the map and claiming it’s the territory. In the cases where reality and your belief conflict, you won’t know that’s the case. Your behavior will be exactly the same, either way, so the distinction is moot.
When you are trying to imagine, “my spouse is cheating and I think she isn’t”, you aren’t imagining that situation… you are actually imagining yourself perceiving that to be the case. That is, your map contains the idea of being deceived, and that this is an example of being deceived, and it is therefore bad.
None of that had anything to do with the reality over which you claim to be expressing a preference, because if it were the reality, you would not know you were being deceived.
This is just one neat little example of systemic bias in the systems we use to represent and reflect on preferences. They are designed to react to perceived circumstances, rather than to produce consistent reasoning about how things ought to be. So if you ever imagine that they are “about” reality, outside the relatively-narrow range of the here-and-now moment, you are on the path to error.
And just as errors accumulate in Newtonian physics as you approach the speed of light, so too do reasoning errors tend to accumulate as you turn your reasoning towards (abstract) self-reflection.
When you are trying to imagine, “my spouse is cheating and I think she isn’t”, you aren’t imagining that situation… you are actually imagining yourself perceiving that to be the case. That is, your map contains the idea of being deceived, and that this is an example of being deceived, and it is therefore bad.
Sure.
None of that had anything to do with the reality over which you claim to be expressing a preference, because if it were the reality, you would not know you were being deceived.
No. My imagination encompasses the fact that if it were the reality, I would not know I was being deceived. I know what my emotional state would be—it would be the same as it is now. That’s easy to get.
What it really comes down to is that saying that my preference ordering is “my spouse cheats and I find out” > “my spouse cheats and I believe my spouse never cheats” is equivalent to saying that if I am not sure (say 50% probability), I will seek out more information. I’m not sure how such a decision could be justified without considering that my preferences are over both the map and the territory.
ETA: Reading over what you’ve written in other branches, I’d like to point out a preference for not being deceived even if you will never realize it isn’t an error—it’s prima facie evidence that human preferences are over the territory as well as the map. That may not be the most useful way of thinking about it from a mindhacking perspective, but I don’t think it’s actually wrong.
I’d like to point out a preference for not being deceived even if you will never realize it isn’t an error—it’s prima facie evidence that human preferences are over the territory as well as the map.
That preference is not universal, which to me makes it absolutely part of the map. And it’s not just the fictional evidence of Cypher wanting to go back in the Matrix and forget, guys routinely pay women for various forms of fantasy fulfillment, willingly suspending disbelief in order to be deceived.
Not enough? How about the experimental philosophers who re-ran the virtual world thought experiment until they found that people’s decision about living in a fantasy world that they’d think was real, was heavily dependent upon whether they 1) had already been living in the fantasy, 2) whether their experience of life would significantly change, and 3) whether their friends and loved ones were also in the fantasy world.
If anything, those stats should be quite convincing that it’s philosophers and extreme rationalists who have a pathological fear of deception, rather than a inbuilt human preference for actually knowing the truth… and that most likely, if we have an inbuilt preference against deception, it’s probably aimed at obtaining social consensus rather than finding truth.
All that having been said, I will concede that there perhaps you could find some irreducible microkernel of “map” that actually corresponds to “territory”. I just don’t think it makes sense (on the understanding-people side) to worry about it. If you’re trying to understand what people want or how they’ll behave, the territory is absolutely the LAST place you should be looking. (Since the distinctions they’re using, and the meanings they attach to those distinctions, are 100% in the map.)
That preference is not universal, which to me makes it absolutely part of the map.
I don’t see how it supposed to follow from the fact that not everyone prefers not-being-decieved, that those who claim to prefer not-being-deceived must be wrong about their own preferences. Could you explain why you seem to think it does?
The claim others are defending here (as I understand it) is not that everyone’s preferences are really over the territory; merely that some people’s are. Pointing out that some people’s preferences aren’t about the territory isn’t a counterargument to that claim.
I don’t see how it supposed to follow from the fact that not everyone prefers not-being-decieved, that those who claim to prefer not-being-deceived must be wrong about their own preferences.
I’m saying that the preferences point to the map because your entire experience of reality is in the map—you can’t experience reality directly. The comments about people’s differences in not-being-deceived were just making the point that that preference is more about consensus reality than reality reaity. In truth, we all care about our model of reality, which we labeled reality and think is reality, but is actually not.
The comments about people’s differences in not-being-deceived were just making the point that that preference is more about consensus reality than reality reaity [sic].
I’m afraid I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. It seems to me like you’re just repeating your conclusion over and over again using different words, which unfortunately doesn’t constitute an argument. Maybe to you it seems like we’re doing the same thing, I don’t know.
Alternatively, maybe we’re still talking past each other for the reasons suggested here (which everyone seemed to agree with at the time.) In which case, I wonder why we’re still having this conversation at all, and apologise for my part in pointlessly extending it. ;)
Alternatively, maybe we’re still talking past each other for the reasons suggested here (which everyone seemed to agree with at the time.) In which case, I wonder why we’re still having this conversation at all, and apologise for my part in pointlessly extending it.
It’s probably because I replied to an unclosed subthread, causing an unintended resurrection. Also, at one point Vladimir Nesov did some resurrection too, and there have also been comments by Cyan and Saturn that kept things going.
Anyway, yes, as you said, we already agreed we are talking about different things, so let’s stop now. ;-)
If you agree that you are just talking about a different thing, and given that “utility” is a term understood to mean different thing from what you were talking about, kindly stop using that term for your separate concept to avoid unnecessary confusion and stop arguing about the sound of fallen tree.
1) Why would people differ so much? Even concrete preferences don’t get reversed, magical mutants don’t exist.
2) Even if you only care about your map, you still care about your map as a part of the territory, otherwise you make the next step and declare that you don’t care about state of your brain either, you only care about caring itself, at which point you disappear in a “puff!” of metaphysical confusion. It’s pretty much inevitable.
Even if you only care about your map, you still care about your map as a part of the territory,
...a “territory” that exists only in your brain, since you cannot directly perceive or operate upon the real territory.
otherwise you make the next step and declare that you don’t care about state of your brain either, you only care about caring itself, at which point you disappear in a “puff!” of metaphysical confusion.
...and note too, that all of this modeling is taking place in a brain. When you point to something and label it “reality”, you are pointing to a portion of your map. It is not, and cannot be the actual territory. It doesn’t matter how many times you try to say, “but no, I mean real reality”, because the only thing you have to represent that idea with is your brain.
It is still the idea of reality, a model of reality, that exists in your map.
Yes, the map is represented physically within the territory. The map “runs on” a platform made of territory, just as “you” run on a platform made of map. All I am saying is, “you” cannot access the territory directly, because your platform is made of map, just as the map’s platform is made of territory. Everything we perceive or think or imagine is therefore map… including the portion of the map we refer to as the territory.
We want our preferences to point to the territory, but they cannot do so in actual reality. We have the illusion that they can, because we have the same representative freedom as an artist drawing a picture of hands drawing each other—we can easily represent paradoxical and unreal things within the surface of the map.
(I remember reading at one point a tutorial in General Semantics that illustrated this point much better than I am doing, but sadly I cannot seem to find it at the moment.)
We want our preferences to point to the territory, but they cannot do so in actual reality.
There’s a distinction to be made between the fact that our knowledge about whether our preferences are satisfied is map-bound and the assertion that our preferences only take the map into account.
If you are operating under an assumption that nobody agrees with, you are wasting anyone’s time (assumption: map is about the map, territory be damned), as the argument never goes anywhere. As a compromise, compose your best argument as a top-level post (but only if you expect to convince at least someone).
That’s why I don’t understand you—I dropped this particular subthread for that very reason, but Cyan asked a second time for a reply. Otherwise, I’d have not said anything else in this particular subthread.
You could still write a meta-reply, taking that problem into account. The root of the disagreement can be stated in one line, and a succinct statement of at the moment unresolvable disagreement is resolution of an argument.
You could still write a meta-reply, taking that problem into account. The root of the disagreement can be stated in one line, and a succinct statement of at the moment unresolvable disagreement is resolution of an argument.
To be honest, I have not perceived anyone I’m speaking with to be treating this as an unresolvable conflict, besides you. Most of the other people have been saying things I perceive to mean, “I agree with such-and-such, but I am confused why you think that about this other case”, or “Ah, we are talking about different things in this area—how would you apply it to the thing I mean?”
You are the only one who appears to be simply stating dogma back at me, without seeking to understand where our maps do or do not overlap. (I’m not very quick on the OB URL citations, but ISTM that everything I’m saying about maps is consistent with EY’s models of reductionism, and with observable facts about how brains operate.)
You appear to have a pattern of responding to my descriptions of things (as I perceive them in my map, of course) as if they were attacks on your preferred prescriptions for how reality should be (in your map). It’s natural that this would lead to an impasse, since I am not actually disputing your opinions, and you are not actually objecting to my facts. Hence, we talk past each other.
(Btw, when I say “facts”, I mean “statements intended to be about actual conditions”, not “truths”. All models are false, but some are more useful than others.)
I’m just trying to be decisive in identifying the potential flaming patterns in the discussion. I could debate the specifics, but given my prior experience in debating stuff with you, and given the topics that could be debated in these last instances, I predict that the discussion won’t lead anywhere, and so I skip the debate and simply state my position, to avoid unnecessary text.
One way of stopping recurring thematic or person-driven flame wars (that kill Internet communities) is to require the sides to implement decent write-ups of their positions: even without reaching agreement, at some point there remains nothing to be said, and so the endless cycle of active mutual misunderstanding gets successfully broken.
I’m just trying to be decisive in identifying the potential flaming patterns in the discussion. I could debate the specifics, but given my prior experience in debating stuff with you, and given the topics that could be debated in these last instances, I predict that the discussion won’t lead anywhere, and so I skip the debate and simply state my position, to avoid unnecessary text.
I don’t understand how that’s supposed to work. If you don’t expect it to lead anywhere, why bother saying anything at all?
I’m registering the disagreement, and inviting you to sort the issue out for yourself, through reconsidering your position in response to apparent disagreement, or through engaging into a more constructive form of discussion.
I’m registering the disagreement, and inviting you to sort the issue out for yourself, through reconsidering your position in response to apparent disagreement, or through engaging into a more constructive form of discussion.
This appears to be a one-way street. If applied consistently, it would seem that your first step would be to reconsider your position in response to apparent disagreement… or that I should reply by registering my disagreement—which implicitly I’d have already done.
Or, better yet, you would begin (as other people usually do) by starting the “more constructive form of discussion”, i.e., raising specific objections or asking specific questions to determine where the differences in our maps lie.
Can I get your analysis of my “spouse cheating and what I know about it” example? I’ve understood your position on utility functions as stated in other branches; I’m curious as to how you would interpret my claim to have preferences over both states of reality and beliefs about reality in this fairly concrete and non-hypothetical case.
My point is that your entire argument consists of pointing to the map and claiming it’s the territory. In the cases where reality and your belief conflict, you won’t know that’s the case. Your behavior will be exactly the same, either way, so the distinction is moot.
When you are trying to imagine, “my spouse is cheating and I think she isn’t”, you aren’t imagining that situation… you are actually imagining yourself perceiving that to be the case. That is, your map contains the idea of being deceived, and that this is an example of being deceived, and it is therefore bad.
None of that had anything to do with the reality over which you claim to be expressing a preference, because if it were the reality, you would not know you were being deceived.
This is just one neat little example of systemic bias in the systems we use to represent and reflect on preferences. They are designed to react to perceived circumstances, rather than to produce consistent reasoning about how things ought to be. So if you ever imagine that they are “about” reality, outside the relatively-narrow range of the here-and-now moment, you are on the path to error.
And just as errors accumulate in Newtonian physics as you approach the speed of light, so too do reasoning errors tend to accumulate as you turn your reasoning towards (abstract) self-reflection.
Sure.
No. My imagination encompasses the fact that if it were the reality, I would not know I was being deceived. I know what my emotional state would be—it would be the same as it is now. That’s easy to get.
What it really comes down to is that saying that my preference ordering is “my spouse cheats and I find out” > “my spouse cheats and I believe my spouse never cheats” is equivalent to saying that if I am not sure (say 50% probability), I will seek out more information. I’m not sure how such a decision could be justified without considering that my preferences are over both the map and the territory.
ETA: Reading over what you’ve written in other branches, I’d like to point out a preference for not being deceived even if you will never realize it isn’t an error—it’s prima facie evidence that human preferences are over the territory as well as the map. That may not be the most useful way of thinking about it from a mindhacking perspective, but I don’t think it’s actually wrong.
That preference is not universal, which to me makes it absolutely part of the map. And it’s not just the fictional evidence of Cypher wanting to go back in the Matrix and forget, guys routinely pay women for various forms of fantasy fulfillment, willingly suspending disbelief in order to be deceived.
Not enough? How about the experimental philosophers who re-ran the virtual world thought experiment until they found that people’s decision about living in a fantasy world that they’d think was real, was heavily dependent upon whether they 1) had already been living in the fantasy, 2) whether their experience of life would significantly change, and 3) whether their friends and loved ones were also in the fantasy world.
If anything, those stats should be quite convincing that it’s philosophers and extreme rationalists who have a pathological fear of deception, rather than a inbuilt human preference for actually knowing the truth… and that most likely, if we have an inbuilt preference against deception, it’s probably aimed at obtaining social consensus rather than finding truth.
All that having been said, I will concede that there perhaps you could find some irreducible microkernel of “map” that actually corresponds to “territory”. I just don’t think it makes sense (on the understanding-people side) to worry about it. If you’re trying to understand what people want or how they’ll behave, the territory is absolutely the LAST place you should be looking. (Since the distinctions they’re using, and the meanings they attach to those distinctions, are 100% in the map.)
I don’t see how it supposed to follow from the fact that not everyone prefers not-being-decieved, that those who claim to prefer not-being-deceived must be wrong about their own preferences. Could you explain why you seem to think it does?
The claim others are defending here (as I understand it) is not that everyone’s preferences are really over the territory; merely that some people’s are. Pointing out that some people’s preferences aren’t about the territory isn’t a counterargument to that claim.
I’m saying that the preferences point to the map because your entire experience of reality is in the map—you can’t experience reality directly. The comments about people’s differences in not-being-deceived were just making the point that that preference is more about consensus reality than reality reaity. In truth, we all care about our model of reality, which we labeled reality and think is reality, but is actually not.
I’m afraid I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. It seems to me like you’re just repeating your conclusion over and over again using different words, which unfortunately doesn’t constitute an argument. Maybe to you it seems like we’re doing the same thing, I don’t know.
Alternatively, maybe we’re still talking past each other for the reasons suggested here (which everyone seemed to agree with at the time.) In which case, I wonder why we’re still having this conversation at all, and apologise for my part in pointlessly extending it. ;)
It’s probably because I replied to an unclosed subthread, causing an unintended resurrection. Also, at one point Vladimir Nesov did some resurrection too, and there have also been comments by Cyan and Saturn that kept things going.
Anyway, yes, as you said, we already agreed we are talking about different things, so let’s stop now. ;-)
If you agree that you are just talking about a different thing, and given that “utility” is a term understood to mean different thing from what you were talking about, kindly stop using that term for your separate concept to avoid unnecessary confusion and stop arguing about the sound of fallen tree.
Yay!
1) Why would people differ so much? Even concrete preferences don’t get reversed, magical mutants don’t exist.
2) Even if you only care about your map, you still care about your map as a part of the territory, otherwise you make the next step and declare that you don’t care about state of your brain either, you only care about caring itself, at which point you disappear in a “puff!” of metaphysical confusion. It’s pretty much inevitable.
...a “territory” that exists only in your brain, since you cannot directly perceive or operate upon the real territory.
...and note too, that all of this modeling is taking place in a brain. When you point to something and label it “reality”, you are pointing to a portion of your map. It is not, and cannot be the actual territory. It doesn’t matter how many times you try to say, “but no, I mean real reality”, because the only thing you have to represent that idea with is your brain.
It is still the idea of reality, a model of reality, that exists in your map.
Yes, the map is represented physically within the territory. The map “runs on” a platform made of territory, just as “you” run on a platform made of map. All I am saying is, “you” cannot access the territory directly, because your platform is made of map, just as the map’s platform is made of territory. Everything we perceive or think or imagine is therefore map… including the portion of the map we refer to as the territory.
We want our preferences to point to the territory, but they cannot do so in actual reality. We have the illusion that they can, because we have the same representative freedom as an artist drawing a picture of hands drawing each other—we can easily represent paradoxical and unreal things within the surface of the map.
(I remember reading at one point a tutorial in General Semantics that illustrated this point much better than I am doing, but sadly I cannot seem to find it at the moment.)
There’s a distinction to be made between the fact that our knowledge about whether our preferences are satisfied is map-bound and the assertion that our preferences only take the map into account.
You’ve just ignored Cyan’s counterexample, and presented a few of your own that support your point of view.
I answered it here, actually.
Write up your argument, make a top post, refer to it if it’s convincing. But guerilla arguing is evil: many words and low signal-to-noise.
I don’t understand you.
If you are operating under an assumption that nobody agrees with, you are wasting anyone’s time (assumption: map is about the map, territory be damned), as the argument never goes anywhere. As a compromise, compose your best argument as a top-level post (but only if you expect to convince at least someone).
That’s why I don’t understand you—I dropped this particular subthread for that very reason, but Cyan asked a second time for a reply. Otherwise, I’d have not said anything else in this particular subthread.
You could still write a meta-reply, taking that problem into account. The root of the disagreement can be stated in one line, and a succinct statement of at the moment unresolvable disagreement is resolution of an argument.
To be honest, I have not perceived anyone I’m speaking with to be treating this as an unresolvable conflict, besides you. Most of the other people have been saying things I perceive to mean, “I agree with such-and-such, but I am confused why you think that about this other case”, or “Ah, we are talking about different things in this area—how would you apply it to the thing I mean?”
You are the only one who appears to be simply stating dogma back at me, without seeking to understand where our maps do or do not overlap. (I’m not very quick on the OB URL citations, but ISTM that everything I’m saying about maps is consistent with EY’s models of reductionism, and with observable facts about how brains operate.)
You appear to have a pattern of responding to my descriptions of things (as I perceive them in my map, of course) as if they were attacks on your preferred prescriptions for how reality should be (in your map). It’s natural that this would lead to an impasse, since I am not actually disputing your opinions, and you are not actually objecting to my facts. Hence, we talk past each other.
(Btw, when I say “facts”, I mean “statements intended to be about actual conditions”, not “truths”. All models are false, but some are more useful than others.)
I’m just trying to be decisive in identifying the potential flaming patterns in the discussion. I could debate the specifics, but given my prior experience in debating stuff with you, and given the topics that could be debated in these last instances, I predict that the discussion won’t lead anywhere, and so I skip the debate and simply state my position, to avoid unnecessary text.
One way of stopping recurring thematic or person-driven flame wars (that kill Internet communities) is to require the sides to implement decent write-ups of their positions: even without reaching agreement, at some point there remains nothing to be said, and so the endless cycle of active mutual misunderstanding gets successfully broken.
I don’t understand how that’s supposed to work. If you don’t expect it to lead anywhere, why bother saying anything at all?
I’m registering the disagreement, and inviting you to sort the issue out for yourself, through reconsidering your position in response to apparent disagreement, or through engaging into a more constructive form of discussion.
This appears to be a one-way street. If applied consistently, it would seem that your first step would be to reconsider your position in response to apparent disagreement… or that I should reply by registering my disagreement—which implicitly I’d have already done.
Or, better yet, you would begin (as other people usually do) by starting the “more constructive form of discussion”, i.e., raising specific objections or asking specific questions to determine where the differences in our maps lie.