bentarm

Karma: 1,809

bentarm 12 Mar 2009 23:34 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: Vladimir_Golovin’s comment on: Raising the Sanity Waterline
I’d second that. In fact, I think that knowing about evolution is probably a necessary prerequisite to being a rational atheist. Even Dawkins admits that it would have been pretty difficult not to believe in God before there was a plausible naturalist explanation for the complexity of life.

Of course, it’s possible to know that there is a plausible naturalist explanation without really understanding the nuts and bolts of how it works (I’d probably put myself in that category), but maybe it really does help to hammer home the point if you really understand that The Creator wasn’t necessary to make life, what exactly is He for?

bentarm 13 Mar 2009 3:48 UTC
2 points
on: Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale
As a previous poster has said, the absurdity heuristic works very well indeed—if something seems absurd to me, I need a lot of evidence before I’ll believe it. As Hume said:

“no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.”

If someone claims that a talking snake is the reason for every bad thing that anyone has ever done, they’re going to have to provide some evidence that this is the case. If they claim that people are related to monkeys (which seems inherently less absurd to me, but I’m probably biased by the fact that it’s true), then they’re also going to have to provide some evidence, and whatever the extraordinary claim, the evidence is going to have to be enough to shift my belief from “that’s absurd” to “oh, I guess that’s true then”.

On the other hand, having written that I guess it’s more likely that the Absurdity Heuristic is more specific, and is the tendency to stick our fingers in our ears, say “that’s absurd, la la la”, and refuse to listen to any evidence to the contrary. I suppose this is a heuristic that people might use, and might be useful (in ruling out hypotheses which aren’t worth spending time falsifying), but as you say, does have its dangers. It’s not clear how to avoid the danger of ruling out an hypothesis which is absurd but true while getting the benefits of ruling out hypotheses which are simply absurd, but the heuristic still has its uses (perhaps some threshold of absurdity, some “suspension of absurdity” for certain types of proposition?)

bentarm 13 Mar 2009 4:02 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Rational Defense of Irrational Beliefs
“But at most one religion can be true. Therefore, all other religions are false.”

This is the single biggest reason why I can’t understand why anyone believing any specific religion. Dawkin’s classic response when asked “What if you’re wrong?” is simply to repeat the question.

The question religious people should ask themselves is this: of all of the thousands of religions there have been in human history, what is the probability that you just happened to be born in a family who just happened to believe in what just happens to be the correct interpretation of what just happens to be the specific version of what just happens to be the only holy book which gets you into heaven?

This point is made more valid by the fact that almost all religions are very clear that they are an exclusive club—if you pick the wrong religion (or even the wrong denomination within a religion) you don’t get Eternal Life.

bentarm 13 Mar 2009 4:09 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale
“Many (most? all?) Christians believe the snake was really Satan,”

Without meaning to nitpick, what percentage of people who call themselves Christians do you think actually believe this? I’m pretty sure most of my Christian friends don’t believe that any of Genesis is literally true. They probably also don’t believe that a man can survive for 3 days in the belly of a whale, or that donkeys talk (Numbers 22: 26-30). I’m not really sure how this is relevant here, except that maybe I’m trying to say that a talking snake is just so damned absurd that even people who say they believe it don’t actually believe it.

bentarm 14 Mar 2009 21:24 UTC
50 points
on: The Least Convenient Possible World
There are real life examples where reality has turned out to be the “least convenient of possible worlds”. I have spent many hours arguing with people who insist that there are no significant gender differences (beyond the obvious), and are convinced that to assert otherwise is morally reprehensible.

They have spent so long arguing that such differences do not exist, and this is the reason that sexism is wrong, that their morality just can’t cope with a world in which this turns out not to be true. There are many similar politically charged issues—Pinker discusses quite a few in the Blank Slate—where people aren’t wiling to listen to arguments about factual issues because they believe they have moral consequences.

The problem, of course—and I realise this is the main point of this post—is that if your morality is contingent on empirical issues where you might turn out to be wrong, you have to accept the consequences. If you believe that sexism is wrong because there are no heritable gender differences, you have to be willing to accept that if these differences do turn out to exist then you’ll say sexism is ok.

This is probably a test you should apply to all of your moral beliefs—if it just so happens that I’m wrong about the factual issue on which I’m basing my belief is wrong, will really I be willing to change my mind?

bentarm 15 Mar 2009 1:26 UTC
3 points
on: The Skeptic’s Trilemma
I agree with most of this, the problem is I’m not sure how useful it actually is:

“There’s a big difference between dismissing that whole Lost Continent of Atlantis story, and prematurely dismissing it.”

Well, sure, but we need some way of deciding when our dismissal is premature. I mentioned this in the comments on Talking Snakes as well… there is certainly some room for the absurdity heuristic—my time is valuable, I can’t evaluate the evidence for every crank claim in the world (I know several academics who could easily spend their entire lives checking “proofs” that P=NP if they did this). I have to reject some of them out of hand—the issue is: which ones?

If someone tells me they’ve built a perpetual motion machine in the back garden from tin cans and elastic bands, I’m not going to waste even 10 minutes of my life trying to replicate it. The real issue is where we draw the line between claims which are too absurd to bother looking at the evidence for and those we should take the time out to evaluate, you don’t seem to have said anything yet that will help us to make that decision (perhaps you’re getting there).

bentarm 15 Mar 2009 12:36 UTC
24 points
on: The Skeptic’s Trilemma
I agree with most of this, but I think you’re skipping a really important issue:

“There’s a big difference between dismissing that whole Lost Continent of Atlantis story, and prematurely dismissing it.”

Well, sure, but we need some way of deciding when our dismissal is premature. I mentioned this in the comments on Talking Snakes as well… there is certainly some room for the absurdity heuristic—my time is valuable, I can’t evaluate the evidence for every crank claim in the world (I know several academics who could easily spend their entire lives checking “proofs” that P=NP if they did this). I have to reject some of them out of hand—the issue is: which ones?

If someone tells me they’ve built a perpetual motion machine in the back garden from tin cans and elastic bands, I’m not going to waste even 10 minutes of my life trying to replicate it. If Steven Hawking tells me he’s built one, I’ll at least give the matter some consideration. The real issue is where we draw the line between claims which are too absurd to bother looking at the evidence for and those we should take the time out to evaluate, you don’t seem to have said anything yet that will help us to make that decision (perhaps you’re getting there).

bentarm 15 Mar 2009 12:43 UTC
14 points
in reply to: Marshall’s comment on: Really Extreme Altruism
“The man in the story is obvioulsy ill.”

Are you living in “The Least Convenient of Possible Worlds”? It is surely conceivable that the man rationally considered his alternatives, and decided that the best thing he could do for the world was to kill himself and give the money from the life insurance policy to charity. Sure, it’s also possible that he was ill, and then the story changes, but that’s not what the story says. Or do you think thought experiments are inherently irresponsible?

bentarm 16 Mar 2009 3:47 UTC
6 points
on: 3 Levels of Rationality Verification
I’m not sure if this has already been said, but does the “biases” literature not already contain a lot of perfectly good (although probably overly game-able) rationality tests? Just pick an experiment at random from Tversky and Kahneman and see how well the people in the school do.

Of course, there is a problem of people learning how to do some of these tests, but I’m pretty sure there are some that could be reworked so that they’re pretty damned hard to pass even if you’re well-acquainted with the literature. I’m thinking particularly those where half of the subjects are asked a different question to the other half, and the results compared—e.g., tests for the Lake Wobegon effect, for Social Attribution Bias, etc.

bentarm 16 Mar 2009 23:14 UTC
7 points
on: Science vs. art

All you can do in science is discover something before anyone else discovers it

I’m not sure there isn’t an equivalent of this in the art world. Ok, no-one else would have created exactly the same piece of art as you, but is that what’s really imporant? All you can do in, say, literature, is write a book that people read instead of some other book. Given that no-one is ever going to read every book, see every play or listen to every song, the marginal value of your artwork to the world is not how much people enjoy it (or how valuable it is in whatever sense you think art is valuable), but how much people enjoy it (how valuable it is) compared to their second best work already available.

bentarm 17 Mar 2009 0:09 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Baughn’s comment on: The Tragedy of the Anticommons
There is a suggestion in this article about how prices for patents could be set by the market without the anti-competitive downsides of current patent law. Like most of Landsburg’s stuff, I’m not sure I agree with all of it, there are some flaws which seem likely to undermine the main case, but it’s certainly not a ridiculous suggestion.

bentarm 17 Mar 2009 1:32 UTC
12 points
on: The “Spot the Fakes” Test
This seems to be almost the inverse of the My Favourite Liar technique (I initially thought this post was going to be about the suggestion given in this comment that respected posters on this site adopt that technique as a test of the group’s rationality). The issue here, of course, is that you would intersperse some “plausible lies” into your lectures and no-one would be able to tell the difference.

This brings together so many of the ideas from Eliezer’s rationality series that I’m struggling to decide which post to link to (probably this one is most relevant).

If your justifications for your beliefs are indistinguishable from fake justifications for false beliefs, they are worthless to a truth-seeker. Any body of knowledge which can’t pass the “Spot the Fakes” Test is no knowledge at all.

(I can’t resist linking to this in this context)

bentarm 17 Mar 2009 13:18 UTC
1 point
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Science vs. art
In that case, I guess the answer would be “no, but I expect them to place the same sort of value on knowledge as they do on art (in addition to the obvious instrumental value of knowledge)”. I like reading new proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem in much the same way I like seeing new artwork by Sandro Del Prete. I’m not sure if I’m agreeing or disagreeing with you here—I think I’m mostly saying that I’m not really sure what “intrinsic” value means.

An elegant proof of the Riemman Hypothesis that forms spontaneously in the Andromeda Galaxy has no value to me, any more than a sequel to Mostly Harmless that forms spontaneously in the Andromeda Galaxy, but either would have value if there were people around to enjoy them

Actually, I feel the best response might be “taboo ‘instrinsic’ and ‘instrumental’”.

bentarm 18 Mar 2009 11:59 UTC
3 points
in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: Never Leave Your Room

This seems plausibly more reliable than either “avoid all outside influences” (and >hope your uninfluenced decisions are best) or “expose yourself to particular >random priming” (and hope that a randomly influenced decision is best or >harmless).

Given that we don’t seem to have much idea what input is likely to prime us to think about what (if I see the letters ‘ABC’, do I think about US broadcasters, childhood education or matrix multiplication?), it seems unlikely that ‘Avoid all outside influences’ is a plausible strategy. Is there really going to be nothing in my room which affects my judgment on matters of importance? Indeed, even if I lock myself in a dark room, maybe this primes me to think about ghost stories, or astronomy, or photography? I think wherever you are, you’re probably subjecting yourself to some priming effects.

Given that it’s pretty hard to avoid all stimuli, I think the ‘average your guesses’ technique might well be necessary—think about your decision in as many contexts as possible and average your conclusions—if not, you’ll never know what influences are lurking in your supposedly neutral environment.

bentarm 22 Mar 2009 22:24 UTC
2 points
on: When Truth Isn’t Enough
There’s an old quote that poor people are crazy and rich people eccentric… I’m sure someone can come up with a third word to fill in the trio.

I think this technique is often useful in arguments, and I imagine most people here use it to some extent. A reasonable summary of “YSITTBIDWTCIYSTEIWEWITTAW”, is “true, but so what?” (although we might need something with a less aggressive connotation...). Although this may be part of the “Dark Arts”, it’s often very unnerving when you’re arguing with someone when they accept without question factual statements you were all set to have to defend to the hilt.

I’m well-off, you’re wealthy, they’re ultra-rich.

bentarm 22 Mar 2009 22:33 UTC
6 points
on: Don’t Revere The Bearer Of Good Info
Is the idea here to counsel us against some sort of halo effect? Eliezer Yudkowsky has told me a lot of interesting things about heuristics and biases, and about how intelligence works, but I shouldn’t let this affect my judgement too much if he recommends a movie?

Or is it more than that—just that I should be careful when reading anything by Eliezer, and take into account the fact that I’m probably slightly too inclined to trust it, because I’ve liked what came before? Because then of course, we have the issue that I should be more likely to trust an author who is usually right—and this just says that I should be careful not to trust them too much more.

bentarm 23 Mar 2009 16:57 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: I’m confused. Could someone help?

Using monetary prizes bigger than the value of all the wealth of the planet is the cause of the confusion.

I don’t think it is. The cause of the confusion is just that the sums are wrong (and the conclusion is wrong). Replace the opening statement with “I’m Bill Gates, I’m offering you a bet—the cost to take the bet is $1, the prize for winning is $58 billion. The odds of winning are 1 in 57.99999 billion”.

Now we’re no longer talking about unrealistic amounts of money, but it still isn’t good bet for Bill to offer, because it’s expected value is negative. You do need to invoke the fact that wealth is finite to explain why martingales) don’t work, but this “system” isn’t nearly as complicated as a martingale.
What links here?
- bentarm's comment on Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features by Eliezer Yudkowsky (23 Mar 2009 17:02 UTC; 2 points)

bentarm 23 Mar 2009 17:02 UTC
2 points
on: Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features
Not sure if this is already fixable, but I tried to post a link to the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system) in this comment, and the sofware reads the close bracket in the url as closing the bracket around the url (if you know what I mean...) is there a way around this? Or are there too few urls containing close-parentheses for it to be worth bothering about?

Edit: - looks like the same thing happened again!

bentarm 23 Mar 2009 17:08 UTC
4 points
on: Individual Rationality Is a Matter of Life and Death
It seems that car driving is just about the best example where some good group rationality is much more important than individual rationality. Imagine a world where everyone can drive a car just as well as Michael Schumacher, but they can’t agree to drive on the same side of the road and stop at traffic lights.

Sure, individual rationality can be useful, but it’s much more effective inside the right institutions.

bentarm 23 Mar 2009 17:18 UTC
6 points
on: Playing Video Games In Shuffle Mode
One thing that might be helpful is if there were a list of tags somewhere (if this already exists, I can’t find it), and if posters could agree on canonical forms of tags. e.g., Anna Salamon’s post on “Cached Selves” is the only post with the tag “standard_biases”, but it’s certainly not the only standard biases post there has been on LW.