BenAlbahari

Karma: 707

BenAlbahari 5 May 2011 10:41 UTC
48 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: SIAI—An Examination
I have an image of Eliezer queued up in a coffee shop, guiltily eyeing up the assortment of immodestly priced sugary treats. The reptilian parts of his brain have commandeered the more recently evolved parts of his brain into fervently computing the hedonic calculus of an action that other, more foolish types, might misclassify as a sordid instance of discretionary spending. Caught staring into the glaze of a particularly sinful muffin, he now faces a crucial choice. A cognitive bias, thought to have been eradicated from his brain before the SIAI was founded, seizes its moment. “I’ll take the triple chocolate muffin thank you” Eliezer blurts out. “Are you sure?” the barista asks. “Well I can’t be 100% sure. But the future of intergalactic civilizations may very well depend on it!”
What links here?
- Rain's comment on Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI) by HoldenKarnofsky (12 May 2012 0:29 UTC; 4 points)

BenAlbahari 16 Feb 2011 20:21 UTC
32 points
0
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields

I guess the moral is “Don’t trust anyone but a mathematician”?

Safety in numbers? ;)

Perhaps it’s useful to distinguish between the frontier of science vs. established science. One should expect the frontier to be rather shaky and full of disagreements, before the winning theories have had time to be thoroughly tested and become part of our scientific bedrock. There was a time after all when it was rational for a layperson to remain rather neutral with respect to Einstein’s views on space and time. The heuristic of “is this science established / uncontroversial amongst experts?” is perhaps so boring we forget it, but it’s one of the most useful ones we have.

BenAlbahari 1 Jun 2010 22:28 UTC
28 points
on: Rationality quotes: June 2010

I know that most men — not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems — can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.

— Leo Tolstoy, 1896 (excerpt from “What Is Art?”)

BenAlbahari 16 Mar 2010 2:09 UTC
28 points
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Undiscriminating Skepticism
Don’t forget the biggest of them all: “questioning our raison d’etre”; i.e. we debated the value of rationality, whilst remaining civil and keeping the discussion meaningful. For comparison, imagine suggesting that “tennis isn’t all that great” on a tennis forum.

BenAlbahari 8 May 2011 10:39 UTC
26 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The 5-Second Level

Sigh.

A 5-second method (that I employ to varying levels of success) is whenever I feel the frustration of a failed interaction, I question how it might have been made more successful by me, regardless of whose “fault” it was. Your “sigh” reaction comes across as expressing the sentiment “It’s your fault for not getting me. Didn’t you read what I wrote? It’s so obvious”. But could you have expressed your ideas almost as easily without generating confusion in the first place? If so, maybe your reaction would be instead along the lines of “Oh that’s interesting. I thought it was obvious but I guess I can see how that might have generated confusion. Perhaps I could...”.

FWIW I actually really like the central idea in this post, and arguably too many of the comments have been side-tracked by digressions on moralizing. However, my hunch is that you probably could have easily gotten the message across AND avoided this confusion. My own specific suggestion here is that stipulative definitions are semantic booby traps, so if possible avoid them. Why introduce a stipulative definition for “moralize” when a less loaded phrase like “suspended judgement” could work? My head hurts reading these comments trying to figure out how each person is using the term “moralize” and I now have to think twice when reading the term on LW, including even your old posts. This is an unnecessary cognitive burden. In any case, my final note here would be to consider that you’d be lucky if your target audience for your upcoming book(s) was anywhere near as sharp as wedrifid. So if he’s confused, that’s a valuable signal.

BenAlbahari 23 Mar 2010 1:56 UTC
25 points
on: Understanding your understanding
There could be an interesting parallel here with “levels of misunderstanding”. Perhaps it could help explain how difficult it is for a homeopathist or creationist to change their mind once they’ve hit the “engtangled truths” or “truly part of you” stages.

BenAlbahari 15 Feb 2011 14:26 UTC
24 points
0
on: Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields
To evaluate a contrarian claim, it helps to break down the contentious issue into its contentious sub-issues. For example, contrarians deny that global warming is caused primarily by humans, an issue which can be broken down into the following sub-issues:

Have solar cycles significantly affected earth’s recent climate?
Does cosmic radiation significantly affect earth’s climate?
Has earth’s orbit significantly affected its recent climate?
Does atmospheric CO2 cause significant global warming?
Do negative feedback loops mostly cushion the effect of atmospheric CO2 increases?
Are recent climatic changes consistent with the AGW hypothesis?
Is it possible to accurately predict climate?
Have climate models made good predictions so far?
Are the causes of climate change well understood?
Has CO2 passively lagged temperature in past climates?
Are climate records (of temperature, CO2, etc.) reliable?
Is the Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis falsifiable?
Does unpredictable weather imply unpredictable climate?

It’s much easier to assess the liklihood of a position once you’ve assessed the liklihood of each of its supporting positions. In this particular case, I found that the contrarians made a very weak case indeed.
What links here?
- waveman's comment on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields by Vladimir_M (28 Nov 2014 8:25 UTC; 0 points)

BenAlbahari 21 Mar 2010 14:20 UTC
23 points
on: The scourge of perverse-mindedness
You only included the last sentence of Dawkins’ quote. Here’s the full quote:

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

The universe is perverse. You have to learn to love it in spite of that.

Great Product. Lousy Marketing.

BenAlbahari28 Feb 2010 9:33 UTC

18 points

71 comments2 min readLW link

BenAlbahari 8 Jan 2010 23:22 UTC
16 points
on: TakeOnIt: Database of Expert Opinions
I’d like to explain more about the motivation behind TakeOnIt. The ultimate goal is to be able to predict peoples’ opinions. It started with the ordinary observation that during a discussion with someone, you can rapidly form a picture of their world view. Specifically, the more opinions that a person divulges to you, the more accurately you can predict all the other opinions of that person. It then occurred to me—could a computer predict many opinions a person has based on a small subset of their opinions?

While we don’t like to be “put in a box”, the statistical reality is that many of our opinions are a predictable function of other opinions that we have. For example, if someone has the opinion that the Theory of Evolution is false, we can predict that they are far more likely to believe in God, and more likely to be in favor of banning abortion. If someone believes in homeopathy, they are far more likely to believe in a host of other alternative medicines, and even more generally, less likely to have opinions of a scientific nature.

With this in mind, let’s turn to a common problem: we want to form an opinion on a topic outside of our domain expertise. Consider how we form an opinion on Global Warming. We might attempt to familiarize ourselves with the facts and arguments, but it’s terribly time-inefficient, and is akin to becoming a doctor to fix one’s own medical conditions. So instead we outsource our opinion: we will believe what the experts tell us. But which ones? There are respectable experts on both sides of the debate. Now, there are many more climatologists who believe Global Warming is caused by humans, but why trust the consensus? Let’s imagine that your opinions on a wide range of issues resonated very well with climatologists with the minority opinion, and conflicted badly with climatologists with the majority opinion. Who would you believe? Of course you’d side with the minority. We trust the opinions of others whose opinions overlap with our own. In the case that we trust our own rationality this is the rational thing to do.

With respect to Global Warming, we will believe in the experts who have opinions that most overlap with our opinions. Reciprocally, we would expect such experts to believe us, in a domain that they knew little about but where we were the experts.

Here’s a specific example in the Global Warming debate. Roy Spencer (see http://www.takeonit.com/expert/238.aspx on TakeOnIt), a leading skeptical climatologist:

1) does not believe humans cause global warming
2) does not believe in evolution
3) does believe in the cosmological argument

The fact that I disagree with him on ‘2’ and ‘3’, where I have a reasonable understanding of the issues, make me less likely to trust his opinion on ‘1’, where I have a poorer understanding of the issue. This however is just one tiny example. The purpose of creating a database of opinions is ultimately to elevate this process from an anecdotal one to a statistical one. I want a system that can predict what I should believe, given what I already believe, before I even believe it!

I contacted Eliezer after reading his excellent post on the Correct Contrarian Cluster and realizing we were looking at a very similar problem.
What links here?

BenAlbahari 16 May 2010 18:11 UTC
15 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: The Social Coprocessor Model

So if I’m with a bunch of people from my class … and none of us have any major conflict of interest...

If you were a character in a sitcom I was writing, I’d have your dream girl walk in just as you were saying that.

BenAlbahari 22 Apr 2011 2:33 UTC
12 points
in reply to: BenAlbahari’s comment on: Official Less Wrong Redesign: Call for Suggestions
Nomination: Common Sense Atheism.

BenAlbahari 10 Apr 2010 2:27 UTC
12 points
in reply to: sketerpot’s comment on: Ureshiku Naritai

Unless you count things like “on top of stalagmites” as sitting methods.

From Blackadder:

Aunt: ‘Chair’? You have chairs in your house?
Edmund: Oh, yes.
Aunt: [slaps him twice] Wicked child!!! Chairs are an invention of Satan! In our house, Nathaniel sits on a spike!
Edmund: …and yourself...?
Aunt: I sit on Nathaniel—two spikes would be an extravagance.

BenAlbahari 22 Mar 2010 10:01 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: The scourge of perverse-mindedness
Yes, but that assumes this difference is favorable to your hypothesis. David Foster Wallace from “Consider The Lobster”:

Lobsters do not, on the other hand, appear to have the equipment for making or absorbing natural opioids like endorphins and enkephalins, which are what more advanced nervous systems use to try to handle intense pain. From this fact, though, one could conclude either that lobsters are maybe even more vulnerable to pain, since they lack mammalian nervous systems’ built-in analgesia, or, instead, that the absence of natural opioids implies an absence of the really intense pain-sensations that natural opioids are designed to mitigate. I for one can detect a marked upswing in mood as I contemplate this latter possibility...

The entire article is here and that particular passage is here. And later:

Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience. To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference; and it may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering.

BenAlbahari 16 Feb 2010 3:17 UTC
11 points
on: You’re Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof
While I loved this essay, I felt uncomfortable with the vagueness with which the group of “AGW Skeptics” was defined. If we define that group loosely to include every AGW skeptic, then there are obviously rationality impoverished reasons AGW skeptics have for their beliefs, but the same is true for AGW believers. Attacking strawmen gets us nowhere.

A worthy attack on AGW skeptics should be directed at the leading skeptics who have expertise in climatology. They are making very specific scientific claims, such as:
1. Negative feedback loops in the atmosphere will mostly cushion atmospheric CO2 increases.
2. Fluctuations in cosmic radiation have been the main driver of warming in the 20th century.
These claims—while I think we have good scientific evidence against them—are not obviously unreasonable. What is unreasonable is the insinuation in the essay that skeptics who are professional climatologists deny the claim “we know from physics that [CO2 is] a greenhouse gas”. They don’t—the real issue that the professionals debate is whether the addition of greenhouse gases will cause a positive or negative feedback (without a positive feedback, the warming from increased CO2 levels is tolerable). The answer to that question requires much more subtle reasoning, and even with the aid of numerous state-of-the-art computer models, the variance in projections is still wide enough to warrant caution in our predictions. To liken an AGW skeptic to a creationist is unjustified, and I mean that in the deepest possible way, i.e. I’d be far more comfortable betting my money in a prediction market to support evolution than to support AGW.

Global Warming Debate:
http://www.takeonit.com/question/5.aspx

Woo!

BenAlbahari21 Feb 2010 8:19 UTC

10 points

59 comments1 min readLW link

BenAlbahari 2 May 2011 17:21 UTC
10 points
on: On Being Okay with the Truth
While I’m inclined to agree with the conclusion, this post is perhaps a little guilty of generalizing from one example—the paragraphs building up the case for the conclusion are all “I...” yet when we get to the conclusion it’s suddenly “We humans...”. Maybe some people can’t handle the truth. Or maybe we can handle the truth under certain conditions that so far have applied to you.

P.S. I compiled a bunch of quotes from experts/influential people for the questions Can we handle the truth? and Is self-deception a fault?.

BenAlbahari 25 Apr 2011 0:02 UTC
10 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience

Speaking of the yellow banana, people do a lot of filling in with color.

One of Dennett’s points is the misleading notion that our mind “fills in”. In the case of vision, our brain doesn’t “paint in” missing visual data, such as the area in our field of vision not captured by our fovea. Our brains simply lack epistemic hunger for such information in order to perform the tasks that they need to.

I’ve noticed that this account potentially explains how color works in my dreams. My dreams aren’t even black and white—the visual aspects are mostly just forms. However, if the color has meaning or emotion, it’s there. I recently had a dream where I looked up at the sky, and the moon was huge and black, moving in a rapid arc across the sky then suddenly diving into the Earth causing an apocalyptic wave of dirt to head towards me. The vivid blackness was present, because it meant something to me emotionally. The houses, in comparison, merely had form, but no color. In any case, it seems that the question “Do we dream in color?” can’t be answered adequately if using a “filling in” model of the mind.

BenAlbahari 18 Mar 2010 21:27 UTC
10 points
on: Sequential Organization of Thinking: “Six Thinking Hats”
The six thinking hats can be a bit daunting at first. Consider just two hats:

Person A comes up with a new idea and is really enthusiastic about it. Before the idea is even slightly fleshed out, Person B immediately comes up with every possible reason why the idea won’t work. Person A gets demoralized, and doesn’t want to talk to Person B. Person B doesn’t understand why their generous dollop of objective criticism has been rejected. Not a productive collaboration!

Using De Bono’s terminology, Person A had the green (“new ideas”) hat on, and Person B had the black (“critical thinking”) hat on. A more productive strategy would be for both Person A and Person B to spend the first few minutes with a green hat on, and then both flip to the black hat. By having at least one person consciously steer and direct the thinking process, people avoid talking at cross-purposes, the conversational flow is improved, and a better outcome is reached.

To some extent we all naturally adjust our mindset according to context. If you’re giving a eulogy you know it demands something resembling more of a yellow hat mindset (“positive thinking”), rather than the black hat (“critical thinking”). So in a sense there’s nothing new about the idea of wearing different hats. I think perhaps the biggest value De Bono adds is to elevate what’s often an instinctive process to a conscious one.

BenAlbahari 7 May 2011 12:57 UTC
9 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: The 5-Second Level

people who identify as rationalists they seem to moralize slightly less than average

Really? The LW website attracts aspergers types and apparently morality is stuff aspergers people like.

BenAlbahari

Great Product. Lousy Mar­ket­ing.

Woo!

Great Product. Lousy Marketing.