Gram_Stone

Karma: 1,768

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.

Look for Lone Correct Contrarians

Gram_Stone13 Mar 2016 16:11 UTC

33 points

27 comments4 min readLW link

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)

Yudkowsky’s ‘Four Layers of Intellectual Conversation’

Gram_Stone8 Jan 2017 21:47 UTC

29 points

3 comments1 min readLW link

(rationalconspiracy.com)

Tonic Judo

Gram_Stone2 Apr 2016 21:19 UTC

29 points

17 comments4 min readLW link

Planning the Enemy’s Retreat

Gram_Stone11 Jan 2017 5:44 UTC

28 points

12 comments4 min readLW link

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.

Common Misconceptions about Dual Process Theories of Human Reasoning

Gram_Stone19 Mar 2016 21:50 UTC

23 points

16 comments3 min readLW link

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.

On Making Things

Gram_Stone5 Mar 2016 3:26 UTC

22 points

13 comments6 min readLW link

The Rubber Hand Illusion and Preaching to the Unconverted

Gram_Stone29 Dec 2014 12:56 UTC

21 points

38 comments3 min readLW link

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 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 18 Jun 2015 0:12 UTC
17 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 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.

[Link] Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom Speak About AI Risk at UN International Security Event

Gram_Stone13 Oct 2015 23:25 UTC

16 points

10 comments1 min readLW link

Fake Amnesia

Gram_Stone3 Apr 2016 21:23 UTC

16 points

18 comments2 min readLW link

Gram_Stone 18 May 2015 21:46 UTC
16 points
in reply to: shminux’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.