emr

Poli­ti­cal top­ics at­tract par­ti­ci­pants in­clined to use the norms of main­stream poli­ti­cal de­bate, risk­ing a tip­ping point to lower qual­ity discussion

• emr 9 Jan 2015 21:35 UTC

  25 points

  on: The Im­por­tance of Sidekicks

  I’m trying to understand why I have a strong aversive reaction to this sort of discussion. If I’m honest, I feel worried that people who identity as “sidekicks” risk being exploited by those who identity as “heroes”. A healthy community will tend to discourage this sort of taxonomy in various ways in order to avoid the risk of abuse, but the core members of the rationality movement seem to not recognize the social necessity of doing this.

  And yet the response is not “maybe invoking the hero archetype at every possible opportunity is a bad idea”, but rather doubling down on the idea that the leading figures of our movements should be modeled as genuine Lord-of-the-rings heroes. And since not everyone can bring themselves to believe that they are Frodo, we decide that invoking another high-fantasy archetype is the right solution?!

• emr 11 Jan 2015 5:11 UTC

  22 points

  in reply to: Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) ’s comment on: The Im­por­tance of Sidekicks

  You can’t be the sidekick of a hero anymore than you can be the student of an enlightened spiritual guru, or the patient of witchdoctor. If you go looking for a hero, who do you think you will find?

  There is no chance that a Frodo-style hero exists, and that you’ve correctly identified one (versus an admirable non-hero or a fool or a charlatan), and that the hero needs the help of a sidekick to function as a hero (versus someone they can hire, or the support of standard social relationships) and that a genuine hero is going to be like “why yes I am a hero please quit your nursing job and be my (first? second? third?) sidekick in order to marginally increase my odds of saving the world”.

  The danger is to those people who can recognize that they themselves are not gurus, witchdoctors, heroes, perfect rationalists or ubermensch-programmer-super-geniuses-saving-the-world, but still believe that there are large and identifiable classes of people out there who actually are. And who then feel that the only way to have a non-shameful standing relative to their largely imaginary peers to find one to team up with!

  That said, my critique is more against the notion that there is a special class of heroes waiting to be paired up with sidekicks than against the value of “sidekick” role. I feel that I’m deeply sympathetic to the heart of what you’ve said. A more constructive take that tries to avoid the problems that concern me might be:

  The desire to be useful and serve others is present in both roles. If anything, the narrative “hero” in (mainstream, modern, Western) culture is someone who makes themselves a deeper servant to more people at greater personal cost. There is a sacrificial theme to our hero-stories, going back at least to early Christianity.

  Human undertakings are always deeply cooperative. Those who are higher up in a hierarchy of influence function in a large way as the servants of those below. As a nurse, you serve the patients you care for. The people who organize your work (assign shifts and tasks) mostly act to help you do your job better. And so the teacher serves the students; and the general serves the soldiers. Who are the heroes and who are the sidekicks? Something has gone awry if a community thinks that the arrow of agency points in a single direction.

  An occupation like nursing has as much a heroic aspect as a leadership role has an aspect of service (to the people the leader is coordinating).

  Once you split out status-seeking motivations, the psychological difference between those who want to be heroes and those who want to be sidekicks is probably not about wanting to useful overall, but about the specific manner in which a person wants their usefulness to be manifested: Aspiring heroes want broad and diffuse usefulness, and aspiring sidekicks want concrete and individually-manifested usefulness. As always, it’s can be pretty hard to figure out which approach is more valuable. There are plausible reasons, relating to the status concerns, to think that contributions of sidekicks are undervalued.

  I don’t really identity with either role, so I’m curious if my attempt to explain the psychological difference (heroes help in a diffuse/​general/​far way and sidekicks help in a specific/​concrete/​near way) seems reasonable to those who identify more with each role.

• emr 26 Jan 2015 4:48 UTC

  20 points

  in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015

  Basic game theory: Nash equilibriums and the idea of evolutionary game theory.

  An unbelievable number of human problems map onto the property that a particular Nash equilibrium or evolutionarily stable strategy isn’t guaranteed to be socially desirable (or even Pareto-efficient, or even when compared only to other Nash equilibrium).

  Likewise, you really can’t do non-trivial consequentialist reasoning without accounting for the impact of your proposed strategy on the strategies of other agents.

  Once you’ve seen the patterns, you can avoid painstakingly deriving or arguing for the general picture over and over again, which probably consumes about a third of all policy and ethics debate. And more critically, you can avoid missing the importance of interlocking strategies in cases where it does matter: Another third of public debate is reserved for wondering why people are acting in the way that the actions of other people encourage them to act; or for helpfully suggesting that some group should move unilaterally along a moral gradient, and then blindly assuming that this will lead to a happier equilibrium once everything adjusts.

• emr 17 Jan 2015 20:58 UTC

  20 points

  in reply to: Daniel_Burfoot’s comment on: … And Every­one Loses Their Minds

  During the initial coverage of the ebola outbreak, there were several comparisons to the malaria death toll, with the conclusion that paying so much attention to the (much, much smaller) death toll from ebola was irrational. This was wrong, because the ebola outbreak was undergoing exponential growth, and so the early death toll had huge importance as evidence about the long-term growth rate, and because arresting the exponential process in the early stages might be very cost effective. At the time, there were credible predictions that we might see 1.5 million cases in a relatively small region (with perhaps .75 million deaths), compared to a rate of 0.5 million global deaths from malaria. Thankfully, these predictions now look unlikely, but it is very much rational to care about possible early evidence for something that might be on track for substantial growth.

An ex­am­ple and dis­cus­sion of ex­ten­sion neglect

• emr 2 Feb 2015 17:06 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 2 - Feb 8, 2015

  All the advice on resisting video games and the like (internet blockers, social support) has been on using tricks of one sort or another to restrict the act, not the desire.

  Some advice is about substitution, i.e. you identify the emotional need driving a stubborn behavior, and find a more approved behavior than satisfies the same need.

• emr 22 Dec 2014 19:21 UTC

  15 points

  on: How to deal with Santa Claus?

  Unless you’re using the myth to manipulate behavior (“better be good or Santa won’t bring you any presents!”), the stakes are very low.

  Somewhat seriously: Isn’t the Santa myth a great opportunity for a child to learn that they will be misled by authority figures for ambiguous cultural reasons?

• emr 5 Feb 2015 3:40 UTC

  14 points

  on: Don’t es­ti­mate your cre­ative in­tel­li­gence by your crit­i­cal intelligence

  Maps and territories. A noisy signal can still be understood, and the marginal cost of suppressing noise can become steep. Even mathematical proofs are often first communicated in a logically correct but “noisy” form, and simplified later.

  I struggle with over-qualifying, to the point where my writing takes too long or is too hard for other people to understand. I actually wonder if prolific writers are selected for a certain lack of guilt, whereas I often feel like a scrupulous person, almost guilty for not addressing every little subtlety.

  The collapse into the trivial is usually good news! The trivial is just the accurately concise, which depends on the power of your background knowledge. I’m a huge fan of SlateStarCodex, but sometimes I reach the end of a 10,000 word essay and wonder “Why did he just say APPLY META-LEVEL RATIONALITY CONCEPT TO TOPIC X?”, but that’s only trivial if you share the right background, while his audience is very broad.

• emr 2 Mar 2015 20:43 UTC

  13 points

  on: Open thread, Mar. 2 - Mar. 8, 2015

  Woody Allen on time discounting and path-dependent preferences:

  In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people’s home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!

  The rationality gloss is that a naive model of discounting future events implies a preference for ordering experiences by decreasing utility. But often this ordering is quite unappealing!

  A related example (attributed to Gregory Bateson):

  If the hangover preceded the binge, drunkenness would be considered a virtue and not a vice.

• emr 10 Feb 2015 2:40 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015

  Conversly, if you’d pay much more than this, you are absurdly risk averse: Here’s a pdf of a classic paper by Rabin: Risk Aversion and Expected-Utility Theory: A Calibration Theorem

  Abstract:

  Within the expected-utility framework, the only explanation for risk aversion is that the utility function for wealth is concave: A person has lower marginal utility for additional wealth when she is wealthy than when she is poor. This paper provides a theorem showing that expected-utility theory is an utterly implausible explanation for apprecia- ble risk aversion over modest stakes: Within expected-utility theory, for any concave utility function, even very little risk aversion over modest stakes implies an absurd degree of risk aversion over large stakes. Illustrative calibrations are provided

• emr 14 Jan 2015 4:16 UTC

  13 points

  on: Open thread, Jan. 12 - Jan. 18, 2015

  Languages create selections effects that influence our perceptions of other nations.

  Most notably, the prevalence of English as a second language means that more people outside of the Anglo-sphere have access to a wide range of Anglo-sphere media and conversation partners, whereas countries that mostly speak English will have a more filtered selection of international sources. For example, there are more people in Slovakia who can read major US newspapers than people in the US who can read major Slovakian newspapers.

  A second class of effects occur on the scale of individuals. Second-language use may stem from a direct ancestral link, as in the case of immigration. Second-language use is sometimes related to higher levels of education. Finally, individual interest can influence the choice of acquired second-languages.

  I’m curious how this model seems to people living in non-English countries.

  As a monolingual, it does seem clear that I’m getting a very filtered sampling of the residents of foreign countries, even relative to all the normal filtering that happens in communication. I frequently catch myself thinking “How can country X be so dysfunctional? All the people I’ve every met from X are highly-skilled immigrants and people who choose to hang out on the same English-language science and philosophy forums as me!”. The dysfunction of an English-speaking country never puzzles me, since I’ve met far too many of the residents :)

• emr 10 Feb 2015 3:04 UTC

  11 points

  on: Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015

  Why people find it emotionally difficult to keep secrets?

  The dynamic shows up very early in childhood (search for “google: louise ck secret”), it can involve self-sacrifice (confessing to a crime), and people find it relieving to share secrets even in completely anonymous and impersonal ways (“google: the confession bear meme”).

• emr 10 Feb 2015 2:47 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: SodaPopinski’s comment on: Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015

  Also consider risks from future technology. For example, we might be able to “deanonymize” various public data records.

• emr 19 Jan 2015 18:06 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Plasmon’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015

  Frame attempts to limit the use of encryption as unilateral disarmament, and name specific threats.

  As in, if the government “has your password”, how sure are you that your password isn’t eventually going to be stolen by Chinese government hackers? Putin? Estonian scammers? Terrorists? Your ex-partner? And you know that your allies over in (Germany, United States, Israel, France) are going to get their hands on it too, right? And have you thought about when (hated political party) gets voted into power 5 years from now?

  A second good framing is used by the ACLU representative in the Guardian article: You won’t be able to use technologies X Y and Z, and you’ll fall behind other countries technologically and economically.

• emr 16 Jan 2015 18:26 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Je suis Charlie

  I can’t add much to the other comments.

  In this case, I actually hadn’t heard about the false flag conspiracy theories. I was thinking about the less extreme tendency of the foreign press to see the occurrence of blasphemy as being secretly orchestrated by Western governments, who them deny involvement and claim that they are just supporting the spontaneous actions of their citizens. My theory is that this will seem more plausible to people living in areas with more state control over the press.

  For example, there was an American preacher who burned some Korans. The view from within the United States was this man was a low-status Southern Evangelical stereotype, a headache to the government, and a visible annoyance to the high-status people who really do love insulting Islam but were somehow stuck defending this guy instead of some more charismatic blasphemer. In the Islamic press, this guy was a practically a CIA agent/​preacher of the Official American Church acting on Presidential orders, probably working with Israel to further some foreign policy aim. Because if he really was a headache to the government, why wasn’t he already in jail?

• emr 27 Feb 2015 5:30 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: If you can see the box, you can open the box

  Not because we have a specific “heretic burning” sense receptor, but because the parts of the brain containing the idea of burning the heretics were connected by neural pathways to the pleasure centers, just like all associations are created.

  There is almost certainly hardware support for punishment behavior, albeit that which can be executed with very little high level conceptual understanding, as you note. Even more, it doesn’t always require a “belief that X is right”: It can simply happen, when everyone else is throwing stones, that a person may throw stones too, and the high level belief of person that they are “trying to do the right thing” is formed after the behavior has already happened, or in (hardware-embedded) anticipation of a hypothetical future demand to justify their behavior.

• emr 22 Dec 2014 19:36 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 22 - Dec. 28, 2014

  Can you give some more background?

  Stuff like: What occupation? Do you have a goal or application already in mind? Are there any programming-related things you can think of right now that seem fun, (writing a video game, a program to play chess, solving math puzzles, doing data analysis, etc)?

• emr 27 Mar 2015 15:59 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Poli­ti­cal top­ics at­tract par­ti­ci­pants in­clined to use the norms of main­stream poli­ti­cal de­bate, risk­ing a tip­ping point to lower qual­ity discussion

  I’m a bit curious what prompted you to post this?

  Well, I think it’s true, interesting, and useful :)

  The argument is a specific case of a more general form (explaining changing group dynamics by selection into the group, driven by the norms of the group, but without the norms necessarily causing a direct change to any individual’s behavior) which I think is a powerful pattern to understand. But like a lot of social dynamics, explicitly pointing it out can be tricky, because it can make the speaker seem snooty or Machiavellian or tactless, and because it can insult large classes of people, possibly including current group members. I felt that LW is one of the few places where I could voice this type of argument and get a charitable reception (after all, I’m indirectly insulting everyone who likes to talk politics, which is most people, including me :P)

  To be clear: I don’t think lesswrong is currently being hurt by this dynamic. But I do see periodic comments criticizing the use of only internal risks (mind-killing ourselves) as the justification for avoiding political topics. I’m sympathetic to some of these critiques, and I wanted to promote a reason to avoiding political topics that didn’t imply that mind-killing susceptibility was somehow an insurmountable problem for individuals.

  What links here?

  • emr's comment on Poli­ti­cal top­ics at­tract par­ti­ci­pants in­clined to use the norms of main­stream poli­ti­cal de­bate, risk­ing a tip­ping point to lower qual­ity discussion by emr (27 Mar 2015 16:04 UTC; 2 points)

• emr 2 Feb 2015 23:50 UTC

  8 points

  on: Open Thread, Feb. 2 - Feb 8, 2015

  A thought about heritability and malleability:

  The heritability of height has increased, because the nutritional environment has become more uniform. To be very specific, “more equal” means both that people have more similar sets of options, and that they exercise similar preferences among these options.

  This is interesting, because the increased heritability has coincided exactly with an increased importance of environmental factors from a decision making standpoint. In other words, a contemporary parent picking from {underfeed kids, don’t underfeed kids} can exert more influence over the absolute height of their children than a parent with only the option to underfeed. Of course, modern parents overwhelming opt for the same choice. At the same time, these parent don’t have much influence on the relative height advantage of their child, given a uniformity in options and preferences in the population.

  This can happen whenever options and preferences are aligned in a population. For example, no matter how heritable a positive trait is, it will usually be trivial to influence it … in a downward direction. So if you’re looking at a twin study on something like subjective well-being, I’ve found it clarifying to explicitly note the options and preference available to the population. I’m currently reading up on positive psychology, and I keep seeing, even from domain experts, statements like, “X percentage of your happiness is genetically determined”, as if the population they studied were picking actions at random.