gjm

Karma: 30,562

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 for several years. I live near Cambridge (UK) and work for Hewlett-Packard (who acquired the company that acquired what remained of the small company I used to work for, after they were acquired by someone else). 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 very 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 9 Mar 2009 1:27 UTC
20 points
in reply to: pwno’s comment on: The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist
I like the idea, except that to me it seems somehow dishonest: to wish for something is (inter alia) to state that one wants it to happen, which I assume was not true in this case. And I think reluctance to be dishonest even when no one else is going to be deceived is a valuable emotion, to counter self-deception.

This might just be rationalization (introspecting, it seems to me that I’d be reluctant to do as you did), but I don’t think so because similar introspection suggests that I’d be (e.g.) quite unafraid to learn that some group of religious people were praying for my death, unless there were some risk that they or their friends might try to bring it about by natural means.
What links here?
- gjm's comment on Rationality test: Vote for trump by pwno (23 Jun 2016 10:22 UTC; 4 points)

gjm 15 Mar 2009 13:36 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Marshall’s comment on: Closet survey #1
That doesn’t sound to me like an explanation. In fact, it’s not even clear that it’s saying anything. What do you mean? How does “a way of thinking” differ from whatever else “believing in God” might be?

gjm 15 Mar 2009 19:47 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Marshall’s comment on: Really Extreme Altruism
The questions (1) “Is the fact that someone does X evidence of mental problems?” and (2) “Is doing X a good thing or a bad thing, on balance?” are different. As I read it, this article is addressing #2 and not #1. (I see no reason to think that there couldn’t be rather a lot of things that ought to be done but that are psychologically near-impossible for most people with healthy minds.)

gjm 15 Mar 2009 20:39 UTC
0 points
in reply to: MBlume’s comment on: 3 Levels of Rationality Verification
Which Marshall is on record as not believing, so I guess he’s poking fun here.

gjm 16 Mar 2009 9:02 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Taboo “rationality,” please.
What a … convenient coincidence … that we live just past the transition where perfect rationality becomes the optimal strategy. Doesn’t it seem a little too convenient?

gjm 16 Mar 2009 22:56 UTC
8 points
on: Comments for “Rationality”

The only legitimate purpose of words having definitions in the first place is to let two people communicate—the purpose of attaching certain syllables to certain concepts is to help transport meanings from one mind to another.

Not quite, I think. I frequently use words in my own thinking, and have much reason to think I’m not alone in this, and if you really think that’s illegitimate then I’d be interested to know why. (I bet you don’t.) And it sure seems like I make use of the fact that (some) words have definitions when I do that.

gjm 17 Mar 2009 1:42 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Comments for “Rationality”
None of which makes it any less true that words-with-definitions are sometimes useful in private thought as well as in communication. For instance, technical terms in mathematics such as “transitive” or “uncountable” can be used robustly in lengthy chains of reasoning largely because they have precise definitions. The fact that when I use such a word (privately or publicly) I have plenty of mental machinery linked with it besides the bare definition doesn’t stop it being a definition. (Perhaps you’re using “define” in what seems to me to be an eccentric way, such that in fact essentially no words have actual definitions. Feel free, but I don’t find that helpful.)

gjm 17 Mar 2009 2:30 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Comments for “Rationality”
You seemed to be disagreeing with me, but declined to say just what your disagreement was. So I had to guess, and I tried to respond to the criticism I thought you were making. Now it appears that we are in agreement. Fair enough; what then was your point?

(My point, in case it wasn’t obvious, was that I think Eliezer erred when he wrote that the only legitimate use of definitions is to ease communication; I think they are sometimes helpful in private thought too.)

gjm 17 Mar 2009 10:20 UTC
2 points
in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Comments for “Rationality”
Yes, the rest of Eliezer’s point holds; that would be why I didn’t criticize the rest of Eliezer’s point.

Different people think in words to different extents. (And for some of what seems like thinking in words, perhaps the word-generation is more or less epiphenomenal—though I’d expect it always has some value, e.g. in helping the short-term memory along.) I find that I use words in the same sort of way as I use diagrams or mathematical symbols: as a way to avoid losing track of what I’m thinking, and to enable some degree of rigour when it’s needed.

Yes, there are situations when talking to yourself can usefully be considered “communication between two people”, but those aren’t the situations I had in mind.

gjm 17 Mar 2009 10:31 UTC
1 point
on: On Juvenile Fiction
(Guesswork based on feelings and handwaving; discount appropriately.) I am more worried by the unstated or mostly-unstated assumptions of children’s stories than I am by what they say clearly and explicitly. I have three reasons (or rationalizations) for this. (1) If something’s explicit, then it’s easier to talk about it, to say “this is probably wrong”, etc. (2) Fiction is usually more explicit about differences from the real world, presumably partly for reasons of parsimony, so readers are used to assuming background stuff as fact. (3) When something is stated explicitly, you are more likely to notice its odd features than if it’s just left fuzzily in the background.

gjm 17 Mar 2009 12:31 UTC
6 points
in reply to: MBlume’s comment on: On Juvenile Fiction
Consider, e.g., books in which magical things go on. Narnia or Harry Potter, say. I wouldn’t worry much about children becoming serious believers in magic as a result of reading such books, or actually expecting that if they crawl into a wardrobe they might find themselves in another world. On the other hand, in such stories it’s usually true on some level that Good Always Wins In The End, or that Love Conquers All (for some notion of “love”, usually not the same one as in escapist material for adults), and I think children are more likely to absorb that sort of idea uncritically.

gjm 17 Mar 2009 19:50 UTC
3 points
in reply to: rwallace’s comment on: On Juvenile Fiction
Could you be more specific about what particular feature you’re saying is the point of fiction?

gjm 18 Mar 2009 23:01 UTC
2 points
in reply to: kurige’s comment on: Never Leave Your Room
Hmm.

I found that with all of those I could make out at least some, and in some cases all, of the words in the sine-wave versions without the “priming” original recording. The very first example on that page was pretty much perfectly clear to me on the first listening; others were more work.

Then, for the ones where I hadn’t been able to make out all the words in the sine-wave version, I listened to the “primer” and tried again with the sine waves. In each case, I found that I could then recognize the words I’d found unclear before, but I wouldn’t say they were “clear as day” or anything like; more like “well, OK, I suppose it could be interpreted that way”.

The effect of priming, for me, therefore appears to be very small.

I tried the first pair on my wife, and her response appears to be the canonical one. Obviously I’m just strange. Anyone else have the same experience as me?

gjm 20 Mar 2009 19:59 UTC
1 point
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Rationalist Poetry Fans, Unite!
Giving weak arguments does not demonstrate that one is not arguing honestly and in good faith; only that one has cognitive limitations, or blind spots, or something of the sort. Which, alas, we all have here and there, and it’s hardly astonishing if a religious person has them in areas closely related to his religion.

(That might, for present purposes, be functionally equivalent to not arguing honestly and in good faith, and I share the suspicion that CSL wouldn’t be likely to be deconverted after an hour’s discussion. But it’s not the same thing, and in particular doesn’t have the same implications for the person’s character generally.)

gjm 22 Mar 2009 21:23 UTC
24 points
in reply to: steven0461’s comment on: Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts
Add me to the list of people who thought it was laugh-out-loud funny. I’m glad this sort of thing doesn’t make up a large fraction of LW articles but please, no, don’t delete it.

gjm 22 Mar 2009 22:40 UTC
11 points
on: Don’t Revere The Bearer Of Good Info
The article on theistic modal realism is ingenious. (One-sentence summary: God’s options when creating should be thought of as ensembles of worlds, and most likely he’d create every world that’s worth creating, so the mere fact that ours is far from optimal isn’t strong evidence that it didn’t arise by divine creation.)

I don’t find the TMR hypothesis terribly plausible in itself—my own intuitions about what a supremely good and powerful being would do don’t match Kraay’s—but of course a proponent of TMR could always just reject my intuitions as I’d reject theirs.

However, I think the TMR hypothesis should be strongly rejected on empirical grounds.
1. It is notable—and this is one element of a typical instance of the Argument From Evil—that our world appears to be governed by a bunch of very strict laws, which it obeys with great precision in ways that make substantial divine intervention almost impossible. It seems that there are many many many more possible worlds in which this property fails than in which it holds, simply because the more scope there is for intervention the more ways there are for things to happen. Therefore, unless the sort of lawlikeness we observe is so extraordinarily valuable that tiny changes in it make a world far less likely to be worth creating, we should expect that “most” worlds in the TMR ensemble would be much less lawlike than ours: e.g., we might expect prayers to be commonly answered in clearly detectable ways. So how come we’re in such an atypical world?
2. Generalizing: I think we should expect that for most measures of goodness X, worlds with higher values of X should be dramatically more numerous in the TMR ensemble unless increasing X reduces the number/measure of possible worlds much more drastically than for most other choices of X. (Because when you increase X, you get the chance to reduce Y or Z or … a bit. More choices.) Therefore, we should expect that for measures of goodness X where “better” doesn’t imply “much more constrained” most worlds (hence, in particular, ours, with high probability) should have values of X that are close to optimal, or at least far from marginally acceptable. This doesn’t seem to be true.
It seems to me that counter-arguments to these are likely to be basically the same as counter-arguments to the original argument from evil.

The other thing about TMR is that it undermines any version of theism that expects God to behave as if he cares about us. If TMR is right then, any time God has the option of doing something to make your life better, then he forks the universe vastly many ways and tries out every possible option (including lots of ways of doing nothing, and even ways of deliberately making things worse for you) apart from ones that make the whole universe not worth while. As mentioned above, it seems to me that this should make us expect that visible divine intervention should be pretty common, but in any case it’s not terribly inspiring. A bit like having a “friend” who, any time she interacts with you, rolls dice and chooses a random way of behaving subject only to the constraint that it doesn’t cause the extinction of all human life. Similarly, you’ve got no reason to trust any alleged divine revelation unless its wrongness would be so awful as to make the world not worth creating. (These arguments are again closely parallel to ones that come up with the ordinary argument from evil, in response to responses that basically take the form of radical skepticism.)

gjm 23 Mar 2009 8:25 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Liron’s comment on: Cached Selves
This perhaps offers a partial explanation of the “fundamental attribution error”.

gjm 25 Mar 2009 23:24 UTC
20 points
in reply to: Cyan’s comment on: Spock’s Dirty Little Secret
Strongly concur. I have the same reaction to pjeby’s blog. I don’t think it’s only because of the bold; it’s the writing style too, which consistently seems to me to be saying “I understand all this stuff, and you are stupid. So stupid I have to write in short sentences. And sentence fragments. Because otherwise … you won’t get it.” And I find it offputting. Very offputting.

Which is a pity, because …

… pjeby has some interesting things to say.

gjm 26 Mar 2009 9:48 UTC
1 point
in reply to: 0sn’s comment on: Never Leave Your Room
No, and I’ve never knowingly heard anything by Aphex Twin.

gjm 29 Mar 2009 17:59 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Rune’s comment on: When It’s Not Right to be Rational
Speaking of Scott Aaronson, his little fiction on more or less this topic is a delightful (and slightly disturbing) read.