Gram_Stone

Karma: 1,772

Gram_Stone 18 Mar 2015 6:39 UTC
35 points
on: Don’t Be Afraid of Asking Personally Important Questions of Less Wrong
I am really uncertain about writing this because it’s such a controversial topic in most places, but my mom recently took a turn for the worse and I had to decide whether or not I would sign a DNR. I was completely overwhelmed. I started implicitly distrusting the doctors, not considering just how low the probability of her survival was, and not thinking clearly about my mom’s preferences. She expressed a desire not to be resuscitated, and she had stage IV melanoma, and hepatic encephalopathy from her lifelong alcoholism and hepatitis B and C. She had wanted to die in a scenario just like this and there was nothing to be gained from prolonging her life. It wasn’t public, but it was a LessWrong user whom I reached out to who helped me make the right decision, and she could have suffered a lot more for no damned reason other than my stupid jury-rigged brain if it weren’t for that. I really wanted to point out that sometimes it’s not stuff like whether or not we should use nicotine when we study, or even which career we should choose; sometimes it’s really harrowing stuff that completely muddles our ability to think and that can turn out horribly for you and everyone else if you don’t just ask for help. And this is a great place to ask for help.

Gram_Stone 13 May 2015 14:40 UTC
31 points
on: Wild Moral Dilemmas
I had to decide whether I would send my sister to prison for a year or let her keep using IV drugs. I chose to send her to prison, but this was not the intuitive choice. I very much performed a utilitarian calculation. This leads me to remark on socioeconomic class: My station has certainly improved since childhood, but I would still say that I’m very much working class, and I dare say that the reliability of one’s moral and memetic heuristics and inputs are very dependent on class.

In my personal experience, though I take a risk in fully generalizing, the working class is permeated with toxic memes. The most common and general is probably anti-intellectualism, but there are other more specific ones that are better communicated in phrase: “It is better to be thrilled than it is to be safe”; “It is more important to conform to working-class social norms than to obey the law”; “Physical, verbal, and emotional abuse are tolerable so long as the abuser loves me”; “Physical exercise and healthy diet merely confer bonus points”; “Regrettable actions committed on emotional impulse are entirely excusable, even with this maxim in mind”; and perhaps most ironically, “One should follow one’s heart,” without the caveat that one should not follow it over the edge of a suspension bridge.

This is not to say that the other classes are entirely nontoxic, but I would say that they are less toxic. You can see in the other classes, being safety-conscious, physically exercising and eating healthy food, not tolerating abuse, and at the very least making the appearance of deliberation, are acts that actually confer social status. When I spend time around people in a higher socioeconomic class it seems that they on average have healthier thoughts than me, if we’re talking about gut reactions and intuitions, as we are, even if they have not deliberately sought out and acquired their memes. In one sense, we would expect them to seem healthier, and in another more objective sense, we would also expect them to seem healthier, because socioeconomic class, mental and physical health, and all of those other enumerable things correlate with one another; it is social and so it is a causal shooting gallery, but the correlation is there.

And likewise, LessWrong is skewed heavily towards white, male, very well-educated first-worlders. We might expect that an average LW user simply relying on the memes that they’ve acquired and not applying a moral calculus at all would not be a terribly worse alternative to applying the calculus, or perhaps an even better alternative, if they would apply the calculus selectively and in the pursuit of justification.

And so in my everyday life I find that I am surrounded by people with unhealthy memes and that I myself have some curled up in the various corners of my mind, and it is, more often than one might think, safer and very useful to consciously deliberate as opposed to following intuition. Virtue ethicists who consider virtuous danger, thrill-seeking, impulse and anti-intellectualism, do not live very long on average.

And furthermore, though I am technically twisting your words to my own end, I do not think that it is such a crazy hypothesis to say that higher classes lead more ‘morally inert’ lives, because many healthier memes allow you to ‘skip’ the moral dilemmas altogether; e.g. contraceptive use, abiding the law, taking care of your health, surrounding yourself with people who do all of these things and have all of these healthy memes, etc.

But of course, neither am I a human utility calculator.
What links here?
- Gram_Stone's comment on Monthly Bragging Thread July 2015 by elharo (9 Jul 2015 15:50 UTC; 6 points)

Gram_Stone 23 Aug 2016 19:15 UTC
24 points
on: Inefficient Games
It’s nice to see that someone else has thought about this.

It’s a popular rationalist pastime to try coming up with munchkin solutions to social dilemmas. A friend posed one such munchkin solution to me, and I thought he had an unrealistic idea of why regulations work, so I said to him:

Even though it’s what you really want, I don’t think the fact that you know everyone else will cooperate is the interesting thing per se about regulations, but that this is a consequence of the fact that you have decreased what was once the temptation payoff and thus constructed a different game. You have functionally reduced the expected payoff of the option “Don’t pay taxes,” by law. If you don’t pay taxes, then you get fined or jailed. Now all players are playing a game where the Nash equilibrium is also Pareto optimal: Pay taxes or be fined or jailed. Clearly, one should pay taxes.

Now, ironically, this is good news if we want to cause better outcomes with less or no coercion, because it suggests that it is not coercion in itself that does the good work, but the fact that we have changed the payoffs to construct a different game; we can interpret coercion as just one instantiation of the general process by which ‘inefficient games’ become ‘efficient games’. Coercion is perhaps a simple way to do the thing that all possible solutions to this problem seem to have in common, but there may be others that we can assume to syntactically change the payoffs in the way that coercion does, but which we may semantically interpret as something other than coercion.

A different time, a friend noticed that people building up trust seemed qualitatively similar to a Prisoner’s Dilemma but couldn’t see exactly how. I was like, “Have you heard of Stag Hunt? That’s the whole reason Rousseau came up with it!” PD is just one kind of coordination game.

More generally, isn’t it weird that the central objects of study in game theory, despite all of the formalization that has taken place since the beginning of the field, are remembered in the form of anecdotes?! You learn about the Stag Hunt and the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Chicken and all other sorts of game, but there doesn’t really seem to be any systematic notion of how different games are connected, or if any games are ‘closer’ to others in some sense (as our intuitions might suggest).

Meditations on Moloch was pretty but in the audience I coughed the words ‘mechanism design’. It just seems like pointing out the mainstream academic work makes you boring when you’re commenting on something poetic. You also might like Robinson and Goforth’s Topology of the 2x2 Games. The math isn’t that complex and it provides more insight than a barrage of anecdotes. Note that to my knowledge this is not taught in traditional game theory courses but probably should be one day. They refer to this general class of games as the ‘social dilemmas’, if I recall correctly.

Gram_Stone 28 Apr 2015 4:19 UTC
24 points
on: Learning Optimization
Some autodidacticism resources on LessWrong:
Very specifically, perhaps one of the most useful results in the psychology of learning and memory is the spacing effect, and by extension, spaced repetition. In that regard:
Now the part wherein I question your premise: a study of learning is certainly useful, but as so many are apt to mention, one can be an effective learner who is studying a sample that is largely noise, and in a contest, you might be defeated by a less effective learner who is studying a better sample. For the same meta-reason that you concluded that it’s useful to understand how to learn, it’s useful to have learning resources that are correct and efficiently presented, and moving one level up, how to find such learning resources in the first place when they have not yet been conveniently collected:
Going even further up, there are things that affect your actual progress, such as stress, sleep, diet, health both physical and psychological, and akrasia. Piotr Wozniak has written up a nice summary in that regard.

And lastly, there is the meta-trap itself, which you need only worry about if your interests lie outside the psychology of learning.

Gram_Stone 9 Apr 2015 19:39 UTC
23 points
in reply to: luminosity’s comment on: 16 types of useful predictions
My plan is to pick one of these and predict like hell, because sixteen possibilities makes this look more daunting than it is, and then I plan to move on to others or come up with my own when it’s semi-habitual. I did a sort of method of elimination to pick my initial habit-former. I’m not going to list my entire process, unless someone really wants me to, but I settled on #13 because:
1. I already do something similar to this. All I have to do is affix a Predict step to the beginning of my algorithm.
2. Successful and unsuccessful predictions are very clear cut, which is good for getting System 1′s attention and successfully forming the habit.
3. It has few, if any, trivial inconveniences.
4. It’s not associated with an activity that has an ugh field around it for me.
I haven’t been here long, but I feel like I’ve seen comments like this a lot, of the form, “This is all Well and Good, but how precisely do I really, actually implement this?” And sometimes that’s a valid point. Sometimes what looks like a suggestion is all noise and no signal (or all signal? Hell, I don’t know).

Other times someone is apt to say, “I predict that this post will not result in actual improvement of Problem X,” in Rationalspeak and all, and they are universally acclaimed. For you see, in this way, they and all of their followers are above the fray.

When the suggestions are good, I’ve always felt that it’s a bit inconsiderate to immediately ping the Burden of Thought back at someone who just wrote a blog post on a site as critical as LessWrong. I share things when my brain sputters out and can’t go any further on its own; it needs help from the tribe. Did you or the people who upvoted you think for five minutes by the clock about how you might form a predicting habit before outsourcing the question to Julia_Galef? It’s awfully easy to never form a predicting habit when the President of CFAR conveniently never gets back to you! You also could have #8-ed and predicted whether or not you would be able to come up with a way to build a predicting habit.

I sort of (read: completely) made an example out of you for community’s sake, so sorry if I was hurtful or otherwise. This is not all directed at you in particular; it was an opportunity to make an observation.

Gram_Stone 4 Feb 2015 23:59 UTC
19 points
on: Rationality Quotes Thread February 2015

Focus on what something does, rather than what it is.

-- Joshua Engel, Quora
What links here?
- Gram_Stone's comment on Bragging Thread February 2015 by Gunnar_Zarncke (8 Feb 2015 20:13 UTC; 4 points)

Gram_Stone 13 Nov 2016 20:30 UTC
18 points
on: Yudkowsky vs Trump: the nuclear showdown.
The foreign policy issue is coming up a lot. Apparently some people are arguing that Hillary may have been just as dangerous but for different reasons. I don’t think myself an expert, so I’m using the ‘look at what experts think’ heuristic, somewhat like Eliezer.

We all know about the open letter from Republican national security experts.

In a relatively highly upvoted comment, hg00 points out that Eliezer omitted a similar letter from 88 retired high-ranking military officers.

hg00 omits that Clinton received 95 endorsements from retired military leaders (later 110).

The Atlantic points out that Mitt Romney received 500 endorsements in 2012. So both lists of endorsements may be historically low.

An article in the Washington Post cites surveys conducted by the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project implying that most international relations experts (IR) positively regard Clinton’s ability to conduct international relations, and that expert opinions are considerably less polarized than public opinion on each candidate’s ability to conduct international relations:

This survey, the ninth in a series of snap polls conducted by the Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) Project, includes responses from 744 of the 4,078 IR scholars teaching and/or researching at colleges and universities throughout the United States.

[...]

Which candidate reflects the foreign policy views of IR scholars?

An overwhelming majority (82 percent) responded “Hillary Clinton” (see Figure 1, below). Just under 4 percent of the scholars surveyed said “Donald Trump,” while 14 percent chose to write in a third-party candidate, other national political figure, or some variation on “none of the above.”

We asked respondents to identify their own political leanings, and Figure 2 shows a similar preference order is apparent across the ideological spectrum. Clinton most closely reflects the foreign policy views of 90 and 84 percent of liberal and moderate respondents, respectively. Exactly half the conservative IR scholars in our poll prefer Clinton, while only 7 percent prefer Trump. Among no ideological subgroup does Trump come close to breaking out of third place.

[...]

IR scholars lean left, but this preference for Clinton over Trump likely reflects respondents’ expertise on foreign policy as much as their ideology. To illustrate this point, consider a recent Pew Research Center survey of the general public, which asks which candidate would do a better job on foreign policy. Among conservative members of the public, 54 percent prefer Trump to Clinton, but only 7 percent of conservative foreign policy experts prefer Trump. And while 23 percent of self-described moderate voters believe that Trump would be better on foreign policy, only 5 percent of moderate scholars agree.

[We] asked IR scholars how the election of Clinton or Trump would affect relations between the United States and its allies. Figure 3 shows that over 95 percent of scholars said Trump would have a negative effect on relations between the United States and NATO states, and 91 percent of scholars believe that the election of Donald Trump would cause NATO allies to doubt the U.S. commitment to the defense of Europe. By comparison, about 3 percent of scholars said Clinton would have a negative effect on relations between the United States and its NATO allies, and only 2 percent said her election would lead NATO allies to doubt the U.S. commitment.

[...]

Who will deal best with Russia?

On the campaign trail, Trump asked, “When you think about it, wouldn’t it be nice if we got along with Russia?” He has argued that the United States would be better off finding common ground with Russia and cooperating more effectively to defeat the Islamic State and negotiate a settlement in Ukraine.

IR scholars we surveyed are skeptical that Trump’s purported dealmaking skills would benefit the United States. Our respondents believe that any future deals between Russia and a Trump administration would be “less likely” to benefit the United States. Broadly speaking, scholars see the election of Hillary Clinton as a continuation of Obama’s foreign policy and thus expect “no effect” of a Clinton presidency (see Figure 4).

Willing to discuss this (maybe the surveys are less reliable than they appear?), but based on expert opinion, I believe that Clinton would have had better effects on our foreign policy. Given the outsized effects of the POTUS’s foreign policy positions, I perceive Trump’s election as an event with large negative expected value.

At the moment, I think EY could have looked into his objection a little more, and I also think it pans out in his favor anyway. For now at least.
What links here?
- Gram_Stone's comment on Yudkowsky vs Trump: the nuclear showdown. by MrMind (14 Nov 2016 17:23 UTC; 3 points)

Gram_Stone 18 Jun 2015 0:12 UTC
18 points
0
on: Autism, or early isolation?
ETA: I’ve updated my position since writing this comment and no longer endorse it; see this comment.

I agree with Lumifer and shminux’s comments. More generally, this does not seem like the sort of thing that you should be making conclusions about without taking a look at actual data when actual data is easily available. I recommend Neihart (1999). At best, the picture is a lot more nuanced than you’re making it out to be, and at worst, you’re regurgitating a cached thought: “Gifted children are poorly adjusted compared to their peers.” The closest thing to this in the literature is the correlation between highly creative adults and psychopathology, particularly mood disorders, psychosis, and suicidality; not more general giftedness and social competence. There isn’t enough evidence to conclude that this generalizes, in terms of populations, to highly intelligent individuals of all ages or to highly creative, or more generally, highly intelligent, children; or that this generalizes, in terms of individual characteristics, to social competence.

As for giftedness and measurements of psychological adjustment besides social competence, most studies have found little correlation between depression, anxiety, or suicidality and giftedness, and what correlation there is errs on the side of gifted children being better-adjusted than their average peers. Gifted children are also far less likely to engage in deviant behavior.

As for social competence, it’s diverse among gifted persons. We can’t conclude that either intelligence or personality factors are the primary causal factor in any purported correlation between the two and social competence. That is, your model is “Gifted children are highly intelligent. Gifted children are dissimilar from their peers because they are highly intelligent. Their peers ostracize them because they are dissimilar. Ostracized children engage in less social interaction. Gifted children have poor social skills because they have less experience with social interaction.” A similarly plausible model is: “Some gifted children feel dissimilar from their peers. Gifted children who feel dissimilar from their peers are less likely to interact with their peers. Gifted children who interact less have poor social skills.” And it can be both, and/or something else. There’s also some evidence that verbally precocious children are less socially competent, or at least perceive themselves so, than mathematically precocious children. Finally, a big confounder in this entire field of inquiry is the correlation between high socioeconomic class and giftedness; it’s hard to get a large control group that isn’t also more socioeconomically heterogeneous than the experimental group.

If we’re going to armchair psychologize, then I much prefer Paul Graham’s model. High-IQ societies suffer from the same deficiency as public schools and prisons: their selection criteria are neither the motives of their members nor individual characteristics highly correlated with particular motives, groups composed of individuals with diffuse motives are directionless, and directionless groups that are prevented from decomposing into smaller more purposeful groups degenerate into unadulterated status games.

This community has a tendency to speculate wildly, especially about psychology and sociology. This can be useful. Sometimes there’s no data to look at. But when there’s data to look at, you should look at it. Jonah, do you disagree that this article has unnecessarily low epistemic standards? Usually when this criticism is made, you point out that you are still explaining and not yet defending, but there are clear misunderstandings of psychopathology, as detailed below by Lumifer, and direct contradictions with empirical evidence, as I have detailed above, so I don’t see how that response would be applicable in this context.

Gram_Stone 4 May 2015 12:07 UTC
18 points
0
on: Is Scott Alexander bad at math?
I say everything I’m about to say as a person who is more certain than not that you have something valuable to contribute through this sequence, and who eagerly awaits more.

All of your posts in this sequence have purportedly been written to motivate your main thesis, but it’s not clear to me what that is. I think you should stop motivating and very clearly reveal your Big Secret. What can I do right now to improve my mathematical ability? That’s what I want to know.

Consider these points:
- Eliezer tried to explain his metaethics the first time and failed, but it was okay because he was able to write his epistemology sequence after that and clarify. His posts pretty much always motivate people to continue reading because they usually have such high insight density and people know that they do; but your posts in this sequence, as far as I can tell, have just been anecdotes, quotes, nonstandard definitions, references detailing your nonstandard definitions, and promises of elucidation in future posts, and in your case, there isn’t common knowledge of high insight density to make people trust you even when they don’t understand where you’re going. Your second post had less karma than your first post, and I predict that this post will have even less. I think that people are getting antsy. If no one understands your Big Secret and it turns out that all of this motivation really was necessary, then you can just do what Eliezer did and try again.
- It seems to me that you’re getting strawmanned a lot. I want to argue against those things but I don’t have a real man to point to, and if you wrote a clear thesis statement, then I would. Maybe someone would say that I’m defending a side rather than seeking the truth if I want to argue against another position when I have no clear position, but I think that amounts to claiming that your predicate’s extension is empty rather than that it’s vague. There are things that people have claimed about your posts that I can’t consider an accurate statement of your (vague) position no matter how charitable my interpretation. The most obvious is that you’re claiming that innate ability is irrelevant; you’ve explicitly claimed the opposite. Other possibilities in order of increasing plausibility include:
  - (Almost) anyone can be a famous mathematician.
  - (Almost) anyone can do mathematical research.
  - (Almost) anyone can be what an average person considers ‘good at math.’
  - Current mathematical pedagogy sucks.
You’ve explicitly stated the fourth item, and it’s the one I’m most sympathetic to, and it would be useful to me and many others if this were elucidated regardless of whether or not it means I can be a famous mathematician. If you’re claiming more than one of the above, then maybe you could just refine your points about that particular point into public form, and substantiate your more radical assertions afterwards. I really want to see what you have to say about pedagogical techniques more than anything else. I want to be better at math. I’m open to the possibility that I’m misinterpreting everyone’s attitudes about this and I’m the only one who wants to know what you have to say about that more than anything else.

I also think it’s weird that I see a lot of people throwing around ‘good at math’ and ‘bad at math’ as if those terms mean the same thing to everyone. Some people mean Calculus III, some people mean Fields Medal or thereabouts, and some people mean somewhere in between. Whether someone is good or bad will depend on what people mean. It also surprises me because that’s an amateur mistake here. It also doesn’t help when you quote modest mathematicians but describe people who are characterized as ‘bad at math’ in your anecdotes. It makes it too easy to assume that you’re claiming those people are secret Grothendiecks, and I don’t think you are. If you are, then I want to know.

Gram_Stone 19 Jan 2015 17:17 UTC
17 points
in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015
Julia Galef, President and Co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, has video blogged on this twice. The first was How to Raise a Rationalist Kid, and the second is Wisdom from Our Mother, which might be a bit more relevant to you because, in that video, her brother Jesse specifically discusses what his mother did in situations where he wasn’t enthusiastic about learning something. I should say that it has more to do with when your kids think that they’re bad at things than with when they reject something out of hand. To that I would say, and I think many others would say: Kids are smart and curious, rationalism makes sense, and if they don’t reject everything else kids have learned throughout history out of hand, then they probably won’t reject rationalism out of hand.

Gram_Stone 18 May 2015 21:46 UTC
16 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Open Thread, May 18 - May 24, 2015
As I often say, I haven’t been here long, but I notice a sort of political-esque conflict between empirical clusters of people that I privately refer to as the Nice People and the Forthright People. The Nice People think that being nice is pragmatic. The Forthright People think that too much niceness decreases the signal-to-noise ratio and also that there’s a slippery slope towards vacuous niceness that no longer serves its former pragmatic functions. A lot of it has to do with personality. Not everyone fits neatly, and there are Moderate People, but many fit pretty well.

I also notice policy preferences among these groups. The Nice don’t mind discussion of object-level things that people have been drawn towards as the result of purportedly rational thinking and deciding. The Forthright often prefer technical topics and more meta-level discussion of how to be rational, and many harken back to the Golden Age when LW was, as far as I can tell, basically a way to crowdsource hyperintelligent nerds (in the non-disparaging sense) to work past inadequate mainstream decision theories, and also to do cognitive-scientific philosophizing as opposed to the ceiling-gazing sort. The Nice think that new LW members should be welcomed with open arms and that this helps advance the Cause. The Forthright often profess that the Eternal September is long past and that new members that cannot tolerate their Forthrightness are only reducing the discussion quality further.

The current LW is a not-so-useful (certainly not useless, as far as I’m concerned) compromise between the two extremes. The Nice think that the Forthright are often rude and pedantic (often being from academia, as the Forthright are), and prefer not to post here. The Forthright think that the discussion quality has fallen too far, such that the content stream is too difficult to follow time-efficiently, and that to do so would have little value, and prefer not to post here.

I know that you specifically spoke out against subreddits, but I think subreddits would help. Last time I checked, the post was called Hold Off On Proposing Solutions, not Hold Off On Implementing Solutions Indefinitely. (Excuse my Forthrightness!) Tags are good for getting fed the right content, but subreddits encourage subcultures, and subcultures already exist on LW. If you posted in a more technical subreddit, you could expect more Forthright behavior, but also super-high discussion quality. Forthrightness really isn’t so bad in a semi-academic context; it’s the outside-LW norm. If you posted in a sub-reddit for object-level lifestyle stuff, or miscellaneous stuff, you could expect more Nice behavior; that’s also the outside-LW norm. This might actually be a case of LW collectively overestimating how atypical it is, which is, so ironically, very typical.

Gram_Stone 23 Feb 2017 15:02 UTC
15 points
on: Nearest unblocked strategy versus learning patches
Recently in the LW Facebook group, I shared a real-world example of an AI being patched and finding a nearby unblocked strategy several times. Maybe you can use it one day. This example is about Douglas Lenat’s Eurisko and the strategies it generated in a naval wargame. In this case, the ‘patch’ was a rules change. For some context, R7 is the name of one of Eurisko’s heuristics:

A second use of R7 in the naval design task, one which also inspired a rules change, was in regard to the fuel tenders for the fleet. The constraints specified a minimum fractional tonnage which had to be held back, away from battle, in ships serving as fuel tenders. R7 caused us to consider using warships for that purpose, and indeed that proved a useful decision: whenever some front-line ships were moderately (but not totally) damaged, they traded places with the tenders in the rear lines. This maneuver was explicitly permitted in the rules, but no one had ever employed it except in desperation near the end of a nearly-stalemated battle, when little besides tenders were left intact. Due to the unintuitive and undesirable power of this design, the tournament directors altered the rules so that in 1982 and succeeding years the act of ‘trading places’ is not so instantaneous. The rules modifications introduced more new synergies (loopholes) than they eliminated, and one of those involved having a ship which, when damaged, fired on (and sunk) itself so as not to reduce the overall fleet agility.

Gram_Stone 5 Sep 2016 22:59 UTC
15 points
on: Stupid Questions September 2016
Do you think it would be easier for you to untangle your earphones if the cord had a color gradient? Maybe something like the jack end is violet and the bud end is red, and it goes through the entire visible spectrum along the length of the cord. Could also be something like a grayscale gradient. I imagine it making it easier for me to simulate untangling strategies. Surprisingly there are basically no earphones that look like this even merely for aesthetic reasons.

Also, I’m already aware of ways to prevent tangling.

Gram_Stone 18 Jun 2015 21:41 UTC
15 points
on: Autism, or early isolation?
I’ve withdrawn my downvote and updated towards the hypothesis that the sort of gifted children to which you are referring tend to have lower social competence than their peers. I didn’t follow the link to Towers’s The Outsiders because it is not a social norm for readers to follow all of the links in the articles here, and I assumed (rightfully, I think) that you were quoting everything relevant to your article.

When Jonah is talking about giftedness, he is not talking about the usual measure of IQ >=130 (some studies use IQ >=125). He is talking about IQ >= 155, 1 in 10,000; or at least those are the studies that he’s implicitly citing. On this interpretation of Jonah’s claim, there is evidence.

You have to indicate this! I feel like this is going to bring up the explaining vs. defending distinction again, but that is a huge, easily mentionable difference! And instead of or in addition to quoting Towers’s essay, which looks like pure conjecture out of context, you could have cited some of those numbers from Terman or Hollingworth.

Dauber & Benbow (1990) has a good bibliography if you know where to look. Austin & Draper (1981) looks like it’s probably a good review of this kind of research, if a bit dated, but I can’t find a non-paywalled link. Each of the studies that I’ve seen seem to have weaknesses, but there are quite a few and it seems that their individual weaknesses are different.

Considering all of that, I would ask how relevant that research is to you or the community. In earlier articles you talked about being amazed by children with that 1 in 10,000 sort of ability, which makes me think that you aren’t in that sort of range, and the LW average is 138 last time I checked. If social competence is really relevant to you and your audience, then we should be looking at the research I linked before for explanations.

The review I linked in my other comment talks about educational fit as a much greater factor in adjustment problems than giftedness in and of itself, and you even personally experienced this:

When I was in elementary school, I would often fall short of answering all questions correctly on timed arithmetic tests. Multiple teachers told me that I needed to work on making fewer “careless mistakes.” I was puzzled by the situation – I certainly didn’t feel as though I was being careless. In hindsight, I see that my teachers were mostly misguided on this point. I imagine that their thinking was:

“He knows how to do the problems, but he still misses some. This is unusual: students who know how to do the problems usually don’t miss any. When there’s a task that I know how to do and don’t do it correctly, it’s usually because I’m being careless. So he’s probably being careless.”

If so, their error was in assuming that I was like them. I wasn’t missing questions that I knew how to do because I was being careless. I was missing the questions because my processing speed and short-term memory are unusually low relative to my other abilities. With twice as much time, I would have been able to get all of the problems correctly, but it wasn’t physically possible for me to do all of the problems correctly within the time limit based on what I knew at the time. (The situation may have been different if I had had exposure to mental math techniques, which can substitute for innate speed and accuracy.)

That in tandem with personality factors seems like an equally plausible explanation for many people.

Gram_Stone 3 Feb 2015 10:09 UTC
15 points
in reply to: Parmenides’s comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 2 - Feb 8, 2015
I think that your edit clarified things for me substantially. I read the entire article that you linked. I regret my earlier post for reasons that you will hopefully see.

I have a relevant anecdote about a simpler situation. I was with two friends. The One thought that it would be preferable for there to be less and/or simpler technology in the world, and the Other thought that the opposite was true. The One believed that technology causes people to live meaningless lives, and the Other conceded that he believed this to be true but also believed that technology has so many other benefits that this is acceptable. The One would always cite examples of how technology was used for entertainment, and the Other, examples of how technology was used for work. I stepped in and pointed out the patterns in their respective examples. I said that there were times when I had wasted time by using technology. I pointed out that if a person were like the One, and thus felt that they were leading a less meaningful life by the use of technology, then they should stop. It would be harmful were I to prescribe that a person like the One indiscriminately use technology. I then said that, through technology, I was able to meet people similar to me, people whom I would be far less likely to meet in physical life, and with whom I could hold conversations that I could not hold in physical life. In this way, my life had been made more meaningful by technology. And so it would be harmful for someone to prescribe that I indiscriminately do not use technology.

I learned three things from this event:

1) I should look for third alternatives.

I definitely did not consider this enough in my original response to you, and I apologize. Just like it is not a matter of less technology vs. more technology, it is not necessarily a matter of ‘Keep your old life,’ vs. ‘Start a new life.’ Honestly, your ‘vague tentative plans’ sound like potential third alternatives. I would say keep thinking about those, and also feel good for thinking of and about them. I’d love to hear about them, however vague and tentative. Vaniver touched on this. I would say that he found a third alternative in his own life. I’m bisexual; in physical life, I’m selective about whom I tell, and I don’t feel outraged that this is pragmatic or feel inauthentic for doing it. Others would feel like they were in a prison of their own making. I picked the best alternative that I could live with.

2) I should remember that humans are never ‘typical.’

There are people who feel like their skin is on wrong when they use technology that they consider undesirably advanced. I love technology. The One thought that people who used technology were suffering from a sense of meaninglessness, and they were simply unaware of this, or actively ignoring it. This was not true for me: Technology makes my life more meaningful. For either of us to act otherwise would be for us to act against our preferences. Likewise, it may have been more important for Shulem to act authentically than it was for him to keep his social relationships. Maryles had a sneaking suspicion that this is false. Yet, Shulem may really be more lonely and really not regret it.

3) I should remember that humans do things for more than just happiness.

People value other things besides happiness. The One saw that some people were happy playing mobile games all of the time, their reward centers firing away, but didn’t think that it was worth it because their happiness was meaningless. The One valued meaning more than entertainment, and perhaps even more than happiness in general. People forget this easily. I see this in the article when Maryles says:

Not that I have a right to tell people how to live their lives. I just wish that he would have made choices that would have kept his family intact, and given him a better more meaningful life. Shulem says that he has no regrets. And yet I wonder if he has had similar thoughts? So I am sad for Shulem who still seems to live a very lonely life. I am sad for his children who lost a father they once loved. And yet I am hopeful that those with similar leanings that read his book will realize that the kind of radical change Shulem Deen made- even as he felt it was the right one based on being true to oneself -may not be the best solution for individual happiness.

He wishes that Shulem had made decisions to give himself a more meaningful life. He wishes that Shulem had made decisions to give himself a happier life. He wishes that Shulem had made decisions to give himself a less lonely life. He thinks that, ultimately, Shulem has made decisions to give himself a more authentic life at the price of forgoing these other possibilities. About this, he may be right. Another possibility is that there was no more preferable alternative. Maryles suggests otherwise: He seems to think either that authenticity, meaning, community, and happiness are all the same; or that all are reducible to one; or that all necessarily follow from one. I cannot glean which he believes from context. It is entirely possible that Shulem feels that his life is less happy, less meaningful, more lonely, and more authentic, and that he prefers all and regrets none of this. On the other hand, you, it seems, would not prefer this and would regret this, because you are not typical, as said above. I keep the complexity of value in mind when evaluating potential third alternatives.

Lastly, because things are often about that which they explicitly are not, I feel obliged to touch on this:

I was sad not so much about his erroneous (in my view) conclusions about God and Judaism. Although I am in no way minimizing the importance of that—this post isn’t about that.

If this is true, then ‘The Lonely Man of No Faith’ is a bad title, in the sense that it isn’t representative of the article’s implication. (It does, however, make for excellent link bait.) No one is thinking, “Surely his lack of faith is merely a coincidence. There must be other reasons that this man is lonely.” Maryles has to say that the post is not about ‘that’ precisely because everyone has assumed that it’s about that.

The general implication is that the so-called truth-seekers are worse off even though the opposite should be true. On this, I will say that any time that I have seen someone become less satisfied with their life by reading about the sorts of things that are posted here, it’s because they have experienced a failure of imagination, or their new beliefs have not fully propagated. The failure modes that I’ve seen the most are:
- No absolute morality implies moral relativism or moral nihilism. (“Actions are not intrinsically good or bad, therefore, morality is open season or meaningless.”)
- Reductionism implies existential nihilism. (“Magical processes are really natural processes of such complexity that I mistook them for magical processes? I live for nothing!”)
- Determinism implies fatalism. (“Things can only go one way, therefore, I should not make decisions.”)
- Representing truth values with probabilities rather than with Boolean values implies epistemological nihilism. (“I can’t know things for sure, so I should stop trying to know things.”)
- The lack of sensation after death is equivalent to a sensation of darkness and silence of infinite duration). (“I know that you’re saying ‘no experience,’ but I feel like you’re saying ‘one of the worst experiences that I can possibly imagine.’”)
You’ve given no indication that you believe any of these things, but I had to address that because of the article’s implication, and you or others very well may believe these things, explicitly or implicitly, without indication. You identify as an open-minded person; you seem to take pride in it. As such, you may not really believe that there is no God; rather, you might believe that you ought to believe that there is no God, because perhaps that is what you believe open-minded people do, and you want to do what open-minded people do. (I had this very problem. Belief in belief goes both ways!) Saying that one atheist is less happy because he has been separated from his loved ones is very different from saying that atheists are universally dissatisfied because theism is essentially preferable. Though the author attempts to make that distinction, I think that he fails.

I’m also not saying that I deductively concluded that truth-seeking is preferable to ignorance. I inductively concluded it. Truth-seeking could have been horrible: It turns out it generally isn’t.

Gram_Stone 23 Jan 2015 15:55 UTC
15 points
on: Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015
Just thought of something. If you want to talk about variation and selection but you can’t say ‘evolution’ without someone flipping a table, then talk about animal husbandry instead.

EDIT: Heh, turns out Darwin actually did this.

Gram_Stone 8 Jan 2017 17:03 UTC
13 points
on: Rationality Considered Harmful (In Politics)

This post is already getting too long so I deleted the section on lessons to be learned, but if there is interest I’ll do a followup. Let me know what you think in the comments!

I at least would be interested in hearing anything else that you have to say about this topic. I’m not averse to private conversation on the matter either; most such conversations of mine are private.

Hypothesis: Fiction silently allows people to switch into truthseeking mode about politics.

A history student friend of mine was playing Fallout: New Vegas, and he wanted to talk to me about which ending he should choose for the game’s narrative. The conversation was mostly optimized for entertaining one another, but I found that this was a situation where I could slip in my real opinions on politics without getting wide-eyed stares! Like this one:

The question you have to ask yourself is “Do I value democracy because it is a good system, or do I value democracy per se?” A lot of people will admit that they value democracy per se. But that seems wrong to me. That means that if someone showed you a better system that you could verify was better, you would say “This is good governance, but the purpose of government is not good governance, the purpose of government is democracy.” (I do, however, understand democracy as a ‘current best bet’ or ‘local maximum’.)

I have in fact gotten wide-eyed stares for saying things like that, even granting the final pragmatic injunction on democracy as local maximum. I find that weird, because it seems like one of the first steps you would take towards thinking about politics clearly, not even as cognitive work but for the sake of avoiding cognitive anti-work, to not equivocate democracy with good governance. If you were further in the past and the fashionable political system were not democracy but monarchy, and you, like many others, consider democracy preferable to monarchy, then upon a future human revealing to you the notion of a modern democracy, you would find yourself saying, regrettably, “This is good governance, but the purpose of government is not good governance, the purpose of government is monarchy.”

But because we were arguing for fictional governments, I seemed to be sending an imperceptibly weak signal that I would defect in a real tossup between democracy and something else, and thus my conversation partner could entertain my opinion whilst looking through truthseeking goggles instead of political ones.

The student is one of two people with whom I’ve had this precise conversation, and I do mean in the particular sense of “Which Fallout ending do I pick?” I slipped this opinion into both, and both came back weeks later to tell me that they spent a lot of time thinking about that particular part of the conversation and that the opinion I shared seemed deep. If Eliezer’s hypothesis about the origin of feelings of deepness is true, then this is because they were actually truthseeking when they evaluated my opinion, and the opinion really got rid of a real cached thought: “Democracy is a priori unassailable.”

In the spirit of doing accidentally effective things deliberately, if you ever wanted to flip someone’s truthseeking switch, you might do it by placing the debate within the context of a fictional universe.

Gram_Stone 12 Jun 2016 22:22 UTC
13 points
on: Revitalizing Less Wrong seems like a lost purpose, but here are some other ideas
Well, this is discouraging to someone who had the opposite reaction to ingres’ recent survey analysis. I heard, “Try to solve the object-level problem and create content that meets the desiderata that are implicit in the survey results.”

I was going to start writing about feelings-as-information theory; Kaj Sotala introduced moods as information in Avoid misinterpreting your emotions, lukeprog mentions it briefly in When Intuitions Are Useful (which Wei Dai thought might be relevant to metaphilosophy), and gwern mentions related work on processing fluency here. There are simple but interesting twists on classic, already-simple heuristics and biases experiments that everyone here’s familiar with, debiasing implications, stuff about aesthetics, stuff on how we switch between Type 1 and Type 2 processing, which is relevant to the stuff lukeprog was getting into with Project guide: How IQ predicts metacognition and philosophical success, and what Kaj Sotala was getting into with his summaries of Stanovich’s What Intelligence Tests Miss.

I was just about to write another post about how thinking of too many alternative outcomes to historical events can actually make hindsight bias worse, with explanations of the experimental evidence, like my most recent post. I don’t know how to do more for the audience than do things like warn them about how debiasing hindsight can backfire.

And there’s other stuff I could think to write about after all of that.

There are quite a number of people coordinating to fulfill the goal of revitalizing LW, and I wonder if something like this couldn’t have waited. I mean, everyone just told everyone exactly what everyone’s doing wrong.

Gram_Stone 5 Apr 2017 11:40 UTC
12 points
on: Brief update on the consequences of my “Two arguments for not thinking about ethics” (2014) article
Thank you for following up after all this time. Longitudinal studies seem important.

Gram_Stone 14 Sep 2016 16:12 UTC
12 points
on: Learning and Internalizing the Lessons from the Sequences
Eliezer has recommended that one read them twice. I found this helpful.