gjm

Karma: 28,189

Hi. I’m Gareth McCaughan. I’ve been a consistent reader and occasional commenter since the Overcoming Bias days. My LW username is “gjm” (not “Gjm” despite the wiki software’s preference for that capitalization). Elsewehere I generally go by one of “g”, “gjm”, or “gjm11”. The URL listed here is for my website and blog, neither of which has been substantially updated in about the last four years. I live near Cambridge (UK) and work for a small technology company in Cambridge. My business cards say “mathematician” but in practice my work is a mixture of simulation, data analysis, algorithm design, software development, problem-solving, and whatever random engineering no one else is doing. I am married and have a daughter born in mid-2006. The best way to contact me is by email: firstname dot lastname at pobox dot com. I am happy to be emailed out of the blue by interesting people. If you are an LW regular you are probably an interesting person in the relevant sense even if you think you aren’t.

If you’re wondering why some of my old posts and comments are at surprisingly negative scores, it’s because for some time I was the favourite target of old-LW’s resident neoreactionary troll, sockpuppeteer and mass-downvoter.

gjm 8 Aug 2022 11:24 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Most Ivy-smart students aren’t at Ivy-tier schools
it would be interesting to look at some populations of high achievers in fields that depend on brainpower and see what fraction of them are people who went to Ivy-tier universities. (As a fraction of those who were in the US immediately before university, say.)
That would measure some (unfortunately hard to disentangle) combination of (1) what fraction of very smart people go to those universities and (2) how much going to one of those universities helps with later success.
(But I suspect that doing this in a way that has any chance of actually telling us anything useful might be a lot of hard work. In any case, I don’t intend to try to do it.)

gjm 8 Aug 2022 1:13 UTC
8 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Careful with Caching
No, famously the two hardest problems are cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

gjm 2 Aug 2022 23:30 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Againstness
I think something is badly wrong with the terminology here.
At one point “againstness” appears to be a label for the state of SNS-dominance and its consequences:
Have you ever found yourself incensed in the middle of an argument because the other party had the audacity to make a good point? [...] This is againstness—many of us find that we tend to make certain sorts of decisions when we’re upset or high-strung [...]
Elsewhere, “againstness” appears instead to be a label for the techniques proposed here for mitigating the downsides of SNS-dominance:
The Againstness technique is the tip of what we hope will prove to be a very large iceberg
and
The two main skills that the Againstness technique seeks to impart are: [… 1: more awareness, 2: more ability to adjust SNS/PSNS balance]
and later on in the space of a single paragraph it’s first the name of the teaching programme and the name of a cognitive mistake:
Over time, the Againstness course has shifted away from a pure focus on the mind-body connection [...] we’d like to make two observations about metacognitive blindspots in general (of which the againstness mistake is just one specific example) [...]
Furthermore, there is another thing being discussed for which “againstness” would be a pretty good name, namely the structure of the SNS and PSNS acting against each other.
I think the intention is that (1) “againstness” is a term for what SNS-dominance does, because it sets you up to pit yourself against whatever dangers or foes might be around, and then (2) “the Againstness course” is the CFAR thing that tries to tell you about SNS-dominance and how to deal with it, and then (3) “the Againstness technique” is the thing that is taught in the Againstness course. But the end result of this is that “againstness” ends up meaning two almost-opposite things. Which I guess is kinda appropriate in a way, but it doesn’t exactly bring clarity.
I think this material would be nontrivially improved by distinguishing between (1) SNS-dominance and its effects, (2) the model of SNS and PSNS and all that presented here, (3) the general idea of being able to notice SNS-dominance and do something to calm it down when appropriate, and (4) the specific techniques for doing that presented here. At least some of these should have catchy names. Maybe “againstness” should be one of those names. But it shouldn’t be all of them.
Perhaps (1) is “againstness”, (2) doesn’t need a name, (3) is something like “againstness control” and (4) is something like “body awareness”.
(And perhaps there also needs to be terminology for the broader-context ideas about metacognitive blindspots. Or maybe not, depending on how well developed the ideas actually are.)

gjm 28 Jul 2022 17:14 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benjamin J’s comment on: Can someone show the error in my reasoning here that seems to show something about the limits of AI?
You say that the program is meant to be executed. But then you say it is meant to be “halted or left or transcended”. If you do those things then you are not executing the program any more. You might be doing something _better_ than executing it, but in any case you are doing something _different_.
It seems like you are saying (1) that a human being can execute the program but then halt/leave/transcend it, and (2) that a computer cannot. But this is only true if you (1) allow “execute” to be used in a metaphorical sense when talking about what the human being does but (2) don’t allow it to be so used when talking about what the computer does.
It is perfectly possible for a computer to “execute” code in a way that allows it to stop when (for instance) it notices certain kinds of lack of progress. I gave a simple example elsewhere in this thread. So it isn’t at all true that humans can execute code while retaining some ability to stop doing so but computers can’t; computers can do that too.
Computers can’t (at present) execute code while understanding what English-language comments in the code say and acting accordingly because computers don’t yet understand English very well. It could turn out that this is because for some reason understanding human language is impossible for merely-computational systems, but I see no reason to think so and you haven’t offered any.
Of course if you take your code, turn it into an executable program, and make that the program the computer is executing then it will loop for ever. A human being won’t do that because you don’t have any way to make a program the program the human is executing. (Fortunately, perhaps.) This isn’t a difference between what humans can do and what computers can do, it’s a difference between how you use the term “execute” when talking about humans and when talking about computers.
Your “much better demonstration” still does not demonstrate anything, at least not in the sense of conveying anything useful to my mind.
I am not sure exactly what you mean by “state”, but a machine-language program consisting of a single instruction saying “branch to the same address this instruction is at” doesn’t loop “between two states” in any useful sense. When executing this loop, the computer’s program counter always has the same value, all its registers keep the same value, and the contents of memory do not change.

gjm 28 Jul 2022 9:56 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benjamin J’s comment on: Can someone show the error in my reasoning here that seems to show something about the limits of AI?
I have said this several times and you simply haven’t engaged with it at all, so this is my last attempt.
If you are computational like a literal computer, it does imply blindly executing it. that is what a computer would do, just execute the loop.
This is just flatly false. Of course blindly executing the code is one thing a literal computer can do when faced with it, but there are others, such as translating it into directly-machine-executable instructions, or checking it for certain classes of bugs, or counting the words in it, or executing it while watching for easily-spotted infinite loops.
The fact that human beings looking at the code don’t blindly execute it tells you nothing about whether human beings are computational.
It is still not clear to me whether your argument is that because humans reading the code do something smarter than executing it blindly, therefore they are doing something non-computational, therefore AI-running-on-a-computer can’t do what humans do. Maybe it’s something else. But if it’s something else, you haven’t successfully made clear to me (or, so far as I can tell, to any other readers) exactly what that is. The OP promised, in so many words, “a clearly structured argument”, but it does not contain a clearly structured argument.

gjm 27 Jul 2022 16:49 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benjamin J’s comment on: Can someone show the error in my reasoning here that seems to show something about the limits of AI?
You didn’t say to blindly execute it. But you did (unless I misunderstood, in which case please do correct me) repeatedly imply that being “computational” implies blindly executing it.
A comment saying “this loop can only be exited non-computationally” does not oblige a person or program looking at the code to either loop infinitely or be non-computational, any more than a comment saying “this loop can only be exited on paying gjm a million dollars” obliges a person or program looking at the code to either loop infinitely or give me a pile of money.
Obviously there is no necessary logical connection between whether I think you are thinking clearly and whether you actually are; people make mistakes sometimes. But many people, when told “I think you are not thinking clearly” will consider the possibility that they are (1) actually not thinking clearly and/or (2) not communicating their meaning clearly. I was hoping you might do that.

gjm 27 Jul 2022 5:49 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benjamin J’s comment on: Can someone show the error in my reasoning here that seems to show something about the limits of AI?
If “the program” is your thing with GOTO START and nothing else, then sure, something that executes “the program” will loop. This doesn’t say anything at all about the general capabilities of a program thinking about programs. If your goal is to say something about “the limits of AI” then you have to address those general capabilities.
The halting problem is not solvable in general by computers. Nor, so far as anyone knows, is it solvable in general by people. Many particular cases of the halting problem, such as your trivial infinite loops, are extremely solvable by simple software (and also by humans).
Analysing a program rather than blindly executing it is not “ignoring logic”. And even actually ignoring logic does not imply not being computational “underneath”.
I’m sorry to be increasingly blunt, but I do not think you are thinking clearly about this stuff at all, and I think you have persuaded yourself that your muddle is actually insight, as a result of which you are not listening when others try to explain what you are muddled about.

gjm 26 Jul 2022 19:44 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benjamin J’s comment on: Can someone show the error in my reasoning here that seems to show something about the limits of AI?
Maybe you intend for your program to be “transcended uncomputationally”, but so far as I can tell it is perfectly possible that when reading it I instead transcended it computationally, and I haven’t seen any argument from you that that couldn’t be so. Unless you are indeed arguing that the only thing one can do “computationally” to analyse a program is to execute it blindly, which as I have said a few times now is simply flatly untrue.
You do not need to remind me that the bit saying “meta” is a comment, not a program. I did understand that. (I have the impression that you think people here are stupid because we don’t come to the same conclusions as you do about computation. You should consider other possibilities.)
If the comment is intended only to be a comment, why then I simply disagree that it elucidates anything. It’s just a bunch of baseless assertions and so far as I can tell they are false. They don’t become any truer or any more insightful just because you put them inside a comment. You could equally well just have said “consider an infinite loop; it can only be exited noncomputationally”. Which, for reasons I have already given a few times, is completely false.
Of course it’s conceivable to me that I might not in fact be doing something computable. Maybe I am really thinking not with my brain but with some magical immaterial soul. Maybe the laws of physics are not at all what I think they are and my brain is doing some tricks that go beyond what any Turing machine could do. I don’t claim that I definitely am computable. Only that so far as I know I am, and that your arguments so far have given absolutely zero reason to think otherwise.
I cannot conceive of “being a computer” if you mean e.g. being a present-day PC. I don’t see what is supposed to be difficult about conceiving of “being a computer” in the sense of “embodying some in-principle-computable process”.
(I don’t put much weight on what’s “conceivable”, anyway. It might turn out that the real nature of the world is something I don’t have a big enough mind to conceive. Or I might think I can conceive something that actually turns out to have subtle internal contradictions that I haven’t noticed. Whether something “can be conceived” has little to do with whether it’s how things actually are, or even a way things could actually be.)
I agree that if you present some reasoning and I ignore it then I am not having a useful discussion with you about that reasoning. But that’s not what I was saying I might be doing, when I said maybe I was doing what you call “meta-ignoring”. The thing I was ignoring is not any sort of reasoning that you have presented.
Your last paragraph, which apparently “is the whole point”, seems to me to consist entirely of muddle. I can “execute the instruction” if I want to, though I won’t because I don’t want to be in an infinite loop. I can understand the program, see what it does, and decide not to execute it because I can already tell what it will do; that can be done purely computationally and compilers do pretty much this thousands of times every day. If it turns out that my mind is non-computational then clearly it can also be analysed non-computationally by doing whatever my mind does. None of this tells us anything about “the limits of AI”. And none of this means that to “execute it correctly” requires anything uncomputational; in fact, I would say that “executing it correctly” just means running the infinite loop and if you do something else then what you are doing is not executing it at all.

gjm 26 Jul 2022 19:18 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benjamin J’s comment on: Can someone show the error in my reasoning here that seems to show something about the limits of AI?
Suppose i write a computer program that does this:
- It reads the text of a program written in your language with “START:” and “GOTO START” and so forth.
- It translates that program into some easy-to-execute representation.
- It executes it, step by step.
- As it executes it, it monitors the internal state of the execution and looks to see if the program ever gets into the exact same state that it has recently been in.
- If so, it stops with a message saying “I detected an unproductive infinite loop.”
This is completely computational. More than that, it’s easy to implement. And what will it do when presented with the program in the comment I’m replying to? Why, it will start executing that loop … and then leave it when it discovers that it’s an infinite loop that isn’t changing anything as it runs.
So no, it is not really really really true that “this kind of loop cannot be left computationally”. I just showed you one way in which it might be left computationally. No magic is required.
It is, indeed, true by definition that a correctly working computer follows the instructions. Provided by “the instructions” you mean its actual program as opposed to whatever programs it might find itself analysing.
If my brain were (literally or as-good-as) following a program that included a trivial infinite loop like that, I would be catatonic. It follows that my brain is not in fact following a program that includes such a trivial infinite loop. So what? How does that tell us anything about the nature of my brain, or minds in general, or computation in general?

gjm 26 Jul 2022 10:29 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The incomputability of the human brain
You are making the same very fundamental mistake here as in your other more recent post.
Processing something program-like computationally is not at all the same thing as blindly executing it.
The busy beaver function is not computable. Therefore I cannot reason about it by computing all its values, if I am implemented on a computable substrate. But that doesn’t mean I cannot reason about it at all. (And when I think about the busy beaver function, I am not in fact computing all its values, or indeed any of them.)
Optimizing compilers—which are well understood technology and run on real computers all the time—reason about code and can do things like working out that some bit of code is an infinite loop. (There are plenty of things they can’t do, but there are surely plenty of things we can’t do too.)
Processing an English sentence computationally is not at all the same thing as … whatever too-specific thing you are imagining it is; I can’t actually tell quite what that is.
The existence of paradoxes doesn’t prove that we are not computable. How could it possibly do that? Does the fact that I can write “God cannot consistently believe this statement” disprove the existence of God? (I guess it does disprove some awfully over-specific notions of God; e.g., if you say “God knows the truth or falsity of every statement”, that presupposes that every statement has a definite truth-value, which isn’t actually true. But what we’ve refuted there is something about sentences, not something about gods, right?)
In any case, your attempted paradox—“This true (in bivalent logic) statement cannot be processed by the human brain”—doesn’t even work. What I mean is that if I say it’s false but can be processed, there’s nothing paradoxical there at all.
I think what you wanted is something more like “This statement either is false or else cannot be processed computationally”. Then a naïve analysis looks at the two possible truth values, sees that you get a contradiction from “false”, and concludes that the statement is true and hence cannot be processed computationally. But you can equally write “Either this statement is false or Santa Claus exists” and “prove” that Santa Claus exists; this kind of naïve reasoning is no good. And I know of no reason to think that no computational process can recognize this. I think you are assuming that the only possible computational process consists of doing the sort of “assume the statement false, deduce that it’s true, deduce that it’s false, deduce that it’s true …” loop you describe, and therefore that anything more sophisticated has to be “uncomputable”; that’s just plain wrong. Processing something computationally does not mean blindly doing inferences without any sort of higher-level oversight.
In each case, what you appear to be doing is to pick a particular kind of computation that you can imagine being applied (execute the program! evaluate the function! follow first-order logical inferences!), seeing that in a particular case this will fail, and saying “therefore anything that can handle the situation is non-computational”. No! Therefore anything that can handle the situation isn’t doing the particular kind of computation you thought of, that’s all.

gjm 26 Jul 2022 9:59 UTC
16 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Can someone show the error in my reasoning here that seems to show something about the limits of AI?
I think you are equivocating between two senses of “computational”. One is something like “dealing with whatever text is in front of you by treating it as a computer program and executing it”. One is something like “acting according to some computer program”.
A human being reading your “program” isn’t doing the first of those. That isn’t what people do. We are not literal computers in the sense of being things that, when presented with code, just execute it.
But that doesn’t mean we are not computational. We might be executing a program that tells us (e.g.) to look out for “meta-ish” things and when we see them try looking one level up.
You might respond along the lines of ‘oh, no, that can’t be it, because the thing I wrote says that “it is not a meta-(meta-...) program”, etc.’ but I think that would be utterly confused: again, whether or not I “am” in some sense a computer program, what I do is not to blindly execute programs people put in front of me.
I don’t see any obstacle to having a literal computer program running on a literal computer with the same properties. In fact, if you have a literal computer program running on a literal computer you would have to go out of your way to make it try to execute every program it sees. (And I don’t think there’s any good reason to do that.)
Maybe this is what you call “meta-ignoring”. I confess that I don’t at all understand why you say that saying you “meta-ignore” a program is “not an argument”. Yes, the thing is in some sense a valid program that will get something trying to execute it into an infinite loop. So what?
I also don’t at all understand why you say that “you cannot process it meta-computationally, as it will get you into a meta-computational loop”. Just because that comment says “it is not a meta-program”? Maybe I don’t understand what you mean by “meta-computationally”—it seems like that is a term important to your argument which you have left entirely undefined. But if it means something like “an automated process executing a program but also observing and reasoning about the execution process”, then I think that means that said process has no reason at all to believe whatever is written in the comments of the program.
So. As a human reading your “program”, I do something akin to what you call “meta-ignoring” it. Nothing about what I do seems to me at all necessarily non-computational. If you specifically ask me to execute the program, I observe that it would put me in an infinite loop and respectfully decline. I don’t attempt to “execute” the comment; it’s just a comment, and comments in a program are often wrong or misleading, and this particular one reads as if it was written by someone who is confused about the nature of computation. I cannot imagine how anything here tells us anything about “the limits of AI”.

gjm 26 Jul 2022 2:20 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: A Bias Against Altruism
I agree that I was not responding to the main point you were making. I was responding to a peripheral issue that I think also matters. Sometimes when I do that I preface it with something like “Nitpick:” or “I know this is a side issue, but”; this time I didn’t; maybe I should have.
Why didn’t I respond to your main point? Well, honestly, largely because I’m not sure I understand it. When you talk about “weaponizing Good Guy (tm) badges” I get the impression that you expect your intended audience to recognize the exact phenomenon you have in mind, and to know exactly what the “(tm)” and the “badges” are sneering at; apparently I am not part of that intended audience, because I have to puzzle it out by hand.
I am fairly sure you mean something along these lines:
- we imagine that there is (or, that there is supposed to be) purely selfless altruism
- this somehow makes it possible for fakers to gain social status by looking as if they are being impressively selflessly-altruistic
- since social status is zero-sum, by doing that they are hurting everyone else, hence “weaponizing Good Guy (tm) badges” (the badges are worn, unironically, by the fakers, and it’s them that the “(tm)” and “badges” are sneering at)
- having seen this happen, people develop an allergy to things that look like “trying to look impressively selfishly-altruistic” and this is one cause of what OP is describing
The last bit certainly seems reasonable; my only objection is that it seems to be basically a restatement of what OP already said, namely that altruistic actions are treated as status-grabs and attacked as such, rather than an explanation.
The first bit puzzles me because it seems to blame the fakery on the “fiction of selfless altruism” and I don’t see how that’s supposed to work. If no one believed in “selfless altruism” then the things fakers would have to do would be a little different—they’d have to put more effort into looking extra-altruistic rather than into looking selfless—but if it’s meant to be obvious that fakery would be much more difficult or more costly in that scenario, I don’t see why.
(“Weaponizing” feels waaay overstated to me, too. Even when apparent altruism is pure fakery and aimed entirely at making the fake-altruist look good, I’m pretty sure it’s almost always for the sake of making them look better rather than of making others look worse, and I think it’s wrong to call something a weapon when its primary use is not harming others. If I earn money I am not “weaponizing cash” even though every penny I have effectively makes everyone else a tiny bit poorer. If I learn things that make me better at my job I am not “weaponizing knowledge” even though improving my own promotion prospects reduces others’ a bit. Even if instead of actually getting better at my job I just get better at flattering my managers, I think “weaponizing” is quite the wrong term. I have similar feelings about the “(tm)” and the “badges” and the “social lever”, though not so strongly. I guess I have a personal trigger that’s somewhat the inverse of yours: I don’t like it when it seems like most of the argument someone’s making is not actually being made but, so to speak, smuggled in in the connotations or presuppositions of their words, and I think this makes me more inclined to pick nits. That’s part of what is happening here.)

gjm 25 Jul 2022 14:54 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: A Bias Against Altruism
I’m surprised by the vehemence of your response; if something I wrote was particularly annoying to you, I’m sorry about that. I wasn’t trying to be annoying! (In particular, I wrote five paragraphs rather than just e.g. the first sentence) because I thought it would save both of us some back-and-forth about exactly what terms like “self-interest” mean.)
If I’m understanding right, you’re annoyed at least in part because you reckon I’m just saying the same thing you already said/implied and trying to make it look like a disagreement. I don’t think we’re just saying the same thing in different words (e.g., I think some altruism is “selfless” in a useful sense; I don’t think “shifting one’s sense of self” is how genuinely-other-regarding altruism generally comes about). Of course I could have misunderstood you, in which case again I’m sorry about that.
I wasn’t attempting to play any game.

gjm 25 Jul 2022 11:01 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Duncan_Sabien’s comment on: Double Crux
Interesting.
So if there’s a crux ¹⁄₃ of the time, and if my having a crux and your having a crux are independent (they surely aren’t, but it’s not obvious to me which way the correlation goes), we expect there to be cruxes on both sides about 10% of the time, which means it seems like it would be surprising if there were an available double-crux more than about 5% of the time. Does that seem plausible in view of CFAR experience?
Of course double-cruxing could be a valuable technique in many cases where there isn’t actually a double-crux to be found: it encourages both participants to understand the structure of their beliefs better, to go out of the way to look for things that might refute or weaken them, to pay attention to one another’s positions … What do you say to the idea that the real value in double-cruxing isn’t so much that sometimes you find double-cruxes, as that even when you don’t it usually helps you both understand the disagreement better and engage productively with one another?

gjm 24 Jul 2022 21:29 UTC
13 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: A Bias Against Altruism
I dispute that it’s “just a fact” that “everyone is only ever acting in self-interest”—unless the latter is defined so as to make that vacuously true, in which case it’s a fact but a boring one.
Some people, to some extent, genuinely do prefer other people to have better lives, sufficiently so to motivate them to do things that benefit those other people at cost to themselves.
In so acting, of course they are in some sense acting according to their own preferences: that’s just another way of saying that they are acting rather than someone else acting on them. But their preferences are, in these cases, about the welfare of others rather than their own, and to me it seems that if “self-interest” actually means anything at all then it should exclude that.
Am I using that term eccentrically? I don’t think so. For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary (which I cite not as an authority on how words must be used but as evidence of how they actually have been and are used) gives these definitions for “self-interest”: 1. Personal benefit, advantage, or profit. 2. Preoccupation with, or pursuit of, one’s own advantage or welfare, esp. to the exclusion of consideration for others; an instance or example of this. (It gives a third sense too, but it is marked as “obsolete” and is not relevant here.) If someone e.g. gives money to the Against Malaria Foundation that they could otherwise have used to buy books or save for their retirement, they are not pursuing personal benefit, advantage, or profit, and they are not being preoccupied with or pursuing their own advantage or welfare, especially not to the exclusion of consideration for others. So they are not, at least according to how the OED says the term “self-interest” is used, acting in self-interest.
Of course they might be making the donation only in order to boast about it, or something. But I claim not everyone who does such things does it with such purposes in view. And of course there may be selfish-geney explanations for why such altruism exists, where (1) genes that make such altruism happen more somehow end up getting more copies of themselves into existence or (2) that sort of altruism is an evolutionary misfire like masturbation or stuffing oneself with ice cream, an action that arises from evolutionarily-adaptive underlying drives but isn’t adaptive itself. None of that seems to me like it’s what “acting in self-interest” means, any more than a person is “acting so as to have more descendants” when they masturbate or “pursuing better health and nutrition” when they eat a pint of ice cream.

gjm 24 Jul 2022 21:17 UTC
5 points
3 ∶ 0
on: A Bias Against Altruism
There are incentives against saying you’re doing altruistic things, but I don’t see how that makes there be incentives against just doing them. So I don’t quite follow how the psycho-Kremlinology makes you “never, ever do anything out of altruism”. Can’t you just do altruistic things, if you find in yourself some wish to do so, and then not talk to other people about them?
(Perhaps you don’t find any such wish in yourself, except in so far as you would like to raise your status through visible altruism. I agree that it might be better if that worked more effectively than it does.)

gjm 24 Jul 2022 21:10 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Double Crux
This presentation of the technique does better than (my possibly bad recollection of) the last time I saw it explained in one important respect: acknowledging that in any given case there very well might not be a double-crux to find. I’d be happier if it were made more explicit that this is a thing that happens and that when it does it doesn’t mean “you need to double-crux harder”, it may simply be that the structure of your beliefs, or of the other person’s, or of both together, doesn’t enable your disagreement to be resolved or substantially clarified using this particular technique.
(if empirically it usually turns out in some class of circumstances that double-crux works, then I think this is a surprising and interesting finding, and any presentation of the technique should mention this and maybe offer explanations for why it might be. My guess is that (super-handwavily) say half the time a given top-level belief’s support is more “disjunctive” than “conjunctive”, so that no single one of the things that support it would definitely kill it if removed, and that typically if my support for belief X is more “conjunctive” then your support for belief not-X is likely to be more “disjunctive”. And you only get a double-crux when our beliefs both have “conjunctive” support (and when, furthermore, there are bits in the two supports that match in the right way).
Nitpicky remark: Of course in a rather degenerate sense any two people with a disagreement have a double-crux: if I think A and you think not-A, then A/not-A themselves are a double-crux: I would change my mind about A if I were shown to be wrong about A, and you would change your mind about not-A if you were shown to be wrong about not-A :-). Obviously making this observation is not going to do anything to help us resolve or clarify our disagreement. So I take it the aim is to find genuinely lower-level beliefs, in some sense, that have the double-crux relationship.
Further nitpicky-remark: even if someone’s belief that A is founded on hundreds of things B1, B2, … none of which is close to being cruxy, you can likely synthesize a crux by e.g. combining most of the Bs. This feels only slightly less cheaty than taking A itself and calling it a crux. Again, finding things of this sort probably isn’t going to help us resolve or clarify our disagreement. So I take it the aim is to find reasonably simple genuinely lower-level beliefs that have the double-crux relationship. And that’s what I would expect can often not be done, even in principle.
(I have a feeling I may have had a discussion like this with someone on LW before, but after a bit of searching I haven’t found it. If it turns out that I have and my comments above have already been refuted by someone else, my apologies for the waste of time :-).)

gjm 24 Jul 2022 11:28 UTC
13 points
9 ∶ 0
on: Curating “The Epistemic Sequences” (list v.0.1)
I like this, but would also like to register that I would be very interested to read more about your opinion that the how-to-behave bits of the Sequences are
at best “often wrong but sometimes motivationally helpful because of how they inspire people to think as individuals and try to help the world”, and at worst “inspiring of toxic relationships and civilizational disintegration.”

gjm 18 Jul 2022 21:36 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Don’t use ‘infohazard’ for collectively destructive info
To me “cognitohazard” seems like a good term for basilisks and their less exotic brethren—things that can somehow mess up your thinking when you hear them—but not for things more like spoilers. I’m not sure “infohazard” is great for that either but it seems less weird to me. (I don’t think I would ever refer to a spoiler as either an “infohazard” or a “cognitohazard”.)
Separately: Perhaps “infohazard” is, at present, unfixably ambiguous and we should use (say) “cognitohazard” for things that are individually harmful and “sociohazard” for things that are collectively harmful, and “infohazard” not at all.

gjm 18 Jul 2022 11:44 UTC
27 points
11 ∶ 0
on: How the ---- did Feynman Get Here !?
I think your view of what Feynman was like, and what he was good at, may be being distorted by the fact that books like “Surely you’re joking...” are written for a general audience and therefore inevitably focus on things other than the physics and mathematics.
A few more concrete remarks:
The “always consider concrete examples” technique seems to me very much the sort of thing that is valuable in doing physics (or mathematics) just as much as in engineering or business.
I bet most of Feynman’s time at the Manhattan project was spent doing physics (or in some cases engineering, or even something like programming—one of his contributions was getting the numerical calculations, done by a big team of people operating mechanical calculators, organized much more efficiently) but what you read about is the lockpicking because it’s (1) funnier, (2) easier for mere mortals to appreciate, and (3) not classified to hell and back.
When he was at Thinking Machines, sure, he bought pens, but he also came up with a novel physics-inspired way of thinking about the dataflow in the machines in terms of differential equations that led them to make some design changes that made them more effective.
I am not at all convinced that relative to other top theoretical physicists Feynman had a “dispreference for difficult mathematics”. He was good at difficult mathematics. Don’t be fooled by the folksy kinda-self-deprecating style of his writing.