Idan Arye

Karma: 210

Idan Arye 27 Oct 2021 20:39 UTC
52 points
on: Self-Integrity and the Drowning Child
I think the key to the drowning child parable is the ability of others to judge you. I can’t judge you for not donating a huge portion of your income to charity, because then you’ll bring up the fact that I don’t donate a huge portion of my own income to charity. Sure, there are people who do donate that much, but they are few enough that it is still socially safe to not donate. But I can judge you for not saving the child, because you can’t challenge me for not saving them—I was not there. This means that not saving the child poses a risk to your social status, which can greatly tilt the utility balance in favor of saving them.

Idan Arye 10 Mar 2021 16:43 UTC
16 points
on: Defending the non-central fallacy
Most^[1] logical fallacies are obvious when arranged in their pattern, but when you encounter them in the wild they are usually transformed by rhetorics to mask that pattern. The “lack of rhetorical skills”, then, may not be bad argumentation by itself—but it does help exposing it. If a pickpocket is caught in the act, it won’t help them to claim that they were only caught because they were not dexterous enough and it’s unfair to put someone in jail for a lack of skill. The fact remains that they tried to steal, and it would still be a crime if they were proficient enough to succeed. Similarly, just because one’s rhetorical skills are not good enough to mask a bad argument does not make it a good argument.

A more important implication of my take on the nature of logical fallacies is that it is not enough to show that an argument fits the fallacy’s pattern—the important part of countering it is showing how, when rearranged in that pattern, the argument loses its power to convince. If it still makes sense even in that form.

Note that in all of Scott’s examples, he never just said “X is a noncentral member of Y” and left it at that. He always said “we usually hate Y because most of its members share the trait Z, but X is not Z and only happens to be in Y because of some other trait W, which we don’t have such strong feeling about”.

So, if we take your first example (the one about eating meat) and fully rearrange it by the noncentral fallacy not only with X and Y but also with Z and W, the counter-argument would look something like that:

It’s true that animal farming (X) is technically cruelty (Y), but the central members of cruelty are things like torture and child abuse. What these things have in common is that they hurt humans (Z), and this is the reason why we should frown upon cruelty. Animal farming does not share that trait. Animal farming is only included in the cruelty category because it involves involuntary suffering (W) - a trait that we don’t really care about.

Does this breakdown make the original argument lose its punch? Not really. Certainly not as much as breaking down the “MLK was a criminal” argument to the noncentral fallacy pattern makes that argument lose its punch. Here, at most, the breakdown exposes the underlying reasoning, and shifts the discussion from “whether or not meat is technically a cruelty” to “to what extent do animals deserve to be protected from involuntary suffering”.

Which is a good thing. I believe the goal noticing logical fallacies is not to directly disprove claims, but to strip them from the rhetorical dressing and expose the actual argument underneath. That underlying argument can be bad, or it can be good—but it needs to be exposed before it can be properly discussed.
1. ↩︎
  I say “most”, but the only exception I can think of is the proving too much fallacy. And even then—that’s only because there is no common template like other fallacies have. But that doesn’t mean that arguments that inhibit that fallacy cannot be transformed to expose it—in this case, to normalize the fallacy one has to reshape it to a form where the claim, instead of being a critical part of its logic, is just a placeholder that can contain anything and still make the same amount of sense.
  
  So, there is still an normal form involved. But instead of a normal form for the fallacy, the proving too much fallacy is about finding the normal form of the specific argument you are trying to expose the fallacy in, and showing how that form can be used for proving too much. I guess this makes the proving too much fallacy a meta-fallacy?

Idan Arye 16 Jul 2021 22:51 UTC
15 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: “If and Only If” Should Be Spelled “Ifeff”
I’d argue that people who are not familiar with “iff” are usually unfamiliar with its full version “if and only if” as well and, unaware of the need for such distinction, tend to treat regular “if” as bidirectional. These two mistakes will cancel each other out and they won’t miss said something key.

Idan Arye 20 Feb 2021 12:26 UTC
12 points
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: Oliver Sipple
Is pulling the lever after the trolley had passed still a murder?

Idan Arye 21 Oct 2020 11:51 UTC
10 points
on: Raised in Technophilia
My father used to say that if the present system had been in place a hundred years ago, automobiles would have been outlawed to protect the saddle industry.
Maybe not outright outlawed, but automobiles were used to be regulated to the point of uselessness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws

Idan Arye 19 Aug 2021 15:25 UTC
7 points
on: When Programmers Don’t Understand Code, Don’t Blame The User
I think this lesson extends behind the scope of programming, even behind the more general scope of technology. We should not be too humble before complicated, hard-to-understand things. We should not be too quick to assume the fault is in our inability to comprehend them. We should always consider the possibility that it’s their fault being needlessly complicated, or even just plain nonsense.
I’ve seen some essays (often in the area of philosophy and/or religion) that—I believe—try to take advantage of that utility. They support their argument with cryptic, cumbersome and confusing reasoning that seem to me like an attempt to force their would be challengers to give up on the discourse for failing to understand it. Their supporters, of course, can remain—they are not trying to disprove the argument, so they don’t really need to understand it.
To fight this mentality, we need to give more credit to ourselves. Is the person making the argument smarter than us? Maybe. Does their intelligence exceed our own so much that they can create coherent arguments we cannot understand no matter how hard we try? Very unlikely. Maybe not outright impossible, but the probability is low enough that we should insist on the argument being flawed even when they try to convince us we simply fail to understand it.

Idan Arye 14 Mar 2021 18:58 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Ericf’s comment on: Strong Evidence is Common
Isn’t that the information density for sentences? With all the conjunctions, and with the limitness of the number of different words that can appear in different places of the sentence, it’s not that surprising we only get 1.1 bits per letter. But names should be more information dense—maybe not the full 4.7 (because some names just don’t make sense) but at least 2 bits per letter, maybe even 3?
I don’t know where to find (or how to handle) a big list of full names, so I’m settling for the (probably partial) lists of first names from https://www.galbithink.org/names/us200.htm (picked because the plaintext format is easy to process). I wrote a small script: https://gist.github.com/idanarye/fb75e5f813ddbff7d664204607c20321
When I run it on the list of female names from the 1990s I get this:
$ ./names_entropy.py https://www.galbithink.org/names/s1990f.txt
Entropy per letter: 1.299113499617074
Any of the 5 rarest name are 1:7676.4534883720935
Bits for rarest name: 12.906224226276189
Rarest name needs to be 10 letters long
Rarest names are between 4 and 7 letters long
#1 Most frequent name is Christin, which is 8 letters long
Christin is worth 5.118397576228959 bits
Christin would needs to be 4 letters long
#2 Most frequent name is Mary, which is 4 letters long
Mary is worth 5.380839995073667 bits
Mary would needs to be 5 letters long
#3 Most frequent name is Ashley, which is 6 letters long
Ashley is worth 5.420441711983749 bits
Ashley would needs to be 5 letters long
#4 Most frequent name is Jesse, which is 5 letters long
Jesse is worth 5.4899422055346445 bits
Jesse would needs to be 5 letters long
#5 Most frequent name is Alice, which is 5 letters long
Alice is worth 5.590706018293878 bits
Alice would needs to be 5 letters long
And when I run it on the list of male names from the 1990s I get this:
$ ./names_entropy.py https://www.galbithink.org/names/s1990m.txt
Entropy per letter: 1.3429318549784128
Any of the 11 rarest name are 1:14261.4
Bits for rarest name: 13.799827993443198
Rarest name needs to be 11 letters long
Rarest names are between 4 and 8 letters long
#1 Most frequent name is John, which is 4 letters long
John is worth 5.004526222833823 bits
John would needs to be 4 letters long
#2 Most frequent name is Michael, which is 7 letters long
Michael is worth 5.1584658860672485 bits
Michael would needs to be 4 letters long
#3 Most frequent name is Joseph, which is 6 letters long
Joseph is worth 5.4305677416620135 bits
Joseph would needs to be 5 letters long
#4 Most frequent name is Christop, which is 8 letters long
Christop is worth 5.549228103371756 bits
Christop would needs to be 5 letters long
#5 Most frequent name is Matthew, which is 7 letters long
Matthew is worth 5.563161441124633 bits
Matthew would needs to be 5 letters long
So the information density is about 1.3 bits per letter. Higher than 1.1, but not nearly as high as I expected. But—the rarest names in these list are about 1:14k—not 1:1m like OP’s estimation. Then again—I’m only looking at given names—surnames tend to be more diverse. But that would also give them higher entropy, so instead of to figure out how to scale everything let’s just go with the given names, which I have numbers for (for simplicity, assume these lists I found are complete)
So—the rare names are about half as long as the number of letters required to represent them. The frequent names are anywhere between the number of letters required to represent them and twice that amount. I guess that is to be expected—names are not optimized to be an ideal representation, after all. But my point is that the amount of evidence needed here is not orders of magnitude bigger than the amount of information you gain from hearing the name.
Actually, due to what entropy is supposed to represent, on average the amount of information needed is exactly the amount of information contained in the name.

Idan Arye 14 Mar 2021 12:49 UTC
7 points
on: Strong Evidence is Common
The prior odds that someone’s name is “Mark Xu” are generously 1:1,000,000. Posterior odds of 20:1 implies that the odds ratio of me saying “Mark Xu” is 20,000,000:1, or roughly 24 bits of evidence. That’s a lot of evidence.
There are 26 letters in the English alphabet. Even if, for simplicity, our encoding ignores word boundaries and message ending, that’s ${log}_{2} 26 \approx 4.7$ bits per letter so hearing you say “Mark Xu” is 28.2 bits of evidence total—more than the 24 bits required.
Of course—my encoding is flawed. An optimal encoding should assign “Mark Xu” with less bits than, say, “Rqex Gh”—even though they both have the same amount of letters. And “Maria Rodriguez” should be assigned an even shorter message even though it has more than twice the letters of “Mark Xu”.
Measuring the amount of information given in messages is not as easy to do on actual real life cases as it is in theory...

Idan Arye 16 Oct 2020 13:05 UTC
7 points
in reply to: yogev hendel’s comment on: Feeling Moral
Say we have a treatment of curing hiccups. Or some other inconvenience. Maybe even all medical inconveniences. We have done all the research and experiments and concluded that the treatment is perfectly safe—except there is no such thing as “certainty” in Bayesianism so we must still allocate a tiny probability to the event our treatment may kill a patient—say, a one in a googol chance. The expected utility of the treatment will now have a $\frac{- ω}{10^{100}}$ component in it, which far outweighs any positive utility gained from the treatment, which only cures inconveniences, a mere real number that cannot be overcome the negative $ω$ no matter how small the probability of that $ω$ is nor how much you multiply the positive utility of curing the inconveniences.

Idan Arye 23 Aug 2021 13:14 UTC
6 points
on: A Philosopher Walks Into A Coffee Shop
Rene Descartes goes up to the counter. “I’ll have a scone,” he says. “Would you like juice with that?” asks the barista. “I think not,” says Descartes, and he ceases to exist.
I can’t believe you missed an opportunity to do an “I drink, therefore I am” joke...

Idan Arye 20 Feb 2021 21:53 UTC
6 points
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: Oliver Sipple
Manslaughter? Probably not—you did not contribute to that person’s death. You are, however, guilty of:
1. Desecration of the corpse.
2. Obstructing the work of the sanitation workers (it’s too late for paramedics) that can’t remove the body from the road because of the endless stream of cars running over it.
3. You probably didn’t count 100k vehicles running over that body. A bystander who stayed there for a couple of days could have, but since you are one of the drivers you probably only witness a few cars running over that person—so as far as you know there is a slim chance they are still alive.
I may be taking the allegory too far here, but I feel these offenses can map quite well. Starting from the last—being able to know that all the damage is done. In Sipple’s case, this is history so it’s easy to know that all the damage was already done. He can’t be outed again. His family will not be harassed again by their community, and will not estrange him again. His life will not be ruined again, and he will not die again.
Up next—interfering with the efforts to make things better. Does this really happen here? I don’t think so. On the contrary—talking about this, establishing that this is wrong, can help prevent this from happening to other people. And it’s better to talk about cases from the past, where all the damage is already done, than about current cases that still have damage potential.
This leaves us with the final issue—respecting the dead. Which is probably the main issue, so I could have just skipped the other two points, but I took the trouble of writing them so I might as well impose on you the trouble of reading them. Are we really disrespecting Oliver Sipple by talking about him?
Sipple did not want to be outed because he did not want his family to know and he did not want his employer to know. They all know, but even after they were originally told about this, Sipple probably did want want them to be constantly reminded and harassed about this. But… are discussions about this bringing reporters to his surviving family members? I doubt it. This issue is no longer about his sexual orientation, it’s about the journalism ethics now, and there is no point in interviewing his parents and asking them what they think about their son being gay.
Given all that—I don’t think talking about this case should be considered as a violation of Sipple’s wish to not be outed.

Idan Arye 5 Dec 2020 16:21 UTC
6 points
on: Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets—Part 5
Are potential HPMOR spoilers acceptable in the comments here? I’m not really sure—the default is to assume they aren’t, but the fanfic itself contains some, so to be sure I’ll hide it just in case:
Can Harry really discuss the idea of destroying the world so casually? Shouldn’t his unbreakable oath compel him to avoid anything that can contribute to it, and abandon the idea of building the hospital without permit as soon as Moody jokes (is that the correct term when talking about Moody?) about it causing the end of the world?

Idan Arye 1 Dec 2020 21:13 UTC
6 points
on: Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets—Part 3
I’m a bit surprised the twins had the patience and concentration to sit with Luna and help her go over the map over and over.

Idan Arye 2 Nov 2020 0:10 UTC
6 points
on: What is the right phrase for “theoretical evidence”?
These are not evidence at all! They are the opposite of evidence. Evidence are something from the territory that you use to update your map—what you are describing goes the opposite direction—it comes from the map to say something specific about the territory.
“Using the map to say something about the territory” sounds like “predictions”, but in this case it does not seem like you intend to update your beliefs based on whether or not the predictions come true—in fact, you specify that the empirical evidence is already going against these predictions, and you seem perfectly content with that.
So… maybe you could call it “application”? Since you are applying your knowledge?
Or, since they explicitly go against the empirical evidence, how about we just call it “stubbornness”?

Idan Arye 28 Dec 2020 14:50 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Measure’s comment on: Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets—Part 11
Even if you could tell—Voldemort was Obliviated while knocked out and then transfigured before having the chance to wake up, so there never was an opportunity to verify that the Obliviation worked.

Idan Arye 10 Dec 2020 16:25 UTC
5 points
in reply to: mingyuan’s comment on: Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets—Part 6
I don’t think so—the Vow is not an electric collar that shocks Harry every time he tries to destroy the world. This would invite ways to try and outsmart the Vow. Remember—the allegory here is to AI alignment. The Vow is not just giving Harry deterrents—it modifies his internal reasoning and values so that he would avoid world destruction.

Idan Arye 6 Dec 2020 1:55 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Measure’s comment on: Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets—Part 5
By the way, I wouldn’t be surprised if “the end of the world” is Moody’s stock response to “what’s the worst that could happen?” in any context.
(this is no longer spoiler so we no longer need to hide it)
I’m not sure about that. That could be Harry’s stock response—“there was always a slight probability for the end of the world and this suggestion will not completely eliminate that probability”. But Moody’s? I would expect him to quickly make a list of all the things that could go wrong for each suggested course of action.

Idan Arye 9 Mar 2022 18:22 UTC
4 points
on: Being Moral is an end goal.
Doesn’t society already consider it immoral to go to crowded places untested when you suspect you have COVID? This is not just about a specific detail of this specific story—one important feature is morality is preventing humans from convincing themselves that the thing they want to do is the utilitarian choice. We decided that going untested is immoral precisely because people like Alice who avoid testing themselves for such reasons.
Instead of morality, I think what Alice seeks here is deniability. If Alice does not take the test, she can convince herself (and possibly others?) that the probability of her sore throat indicating COVID is as low as she wants. No one else can really tell how bad it was—certainly not days later, when the thing is discovered—she may even claim that she felt nothing unusual. She is still immoral, but she can at least convince herself that she has done nothing wrong.

Idan Arye 11 Oct 2021 9:30 UTC
4 points
on: A Modern Myth
If Heracles was staring at Hermes’ back, shouldn’t he have noticed the Eagle eating his liver?

Idan Arye 16 Oct 2020 13:27 UTC
4 points
on: Feeling Moral
“Lives saved don’t diminish in marginal utility”, as you have said, but maybe hiccups do? A single person in a group of 10 hiccuppers is not as unfortunate as a lone hiccupper standing with 9 other people who don’t have hiccups. So even if the total negative utility of 10 hiccuppers is worse than that of one hiccupper, it’s not 10 times worse.
Since the utility function doesn’t have to be linear function in the number of hiccuppers (it only has to be monotonic) there is no reason why it can’t be bounded, forever lower (in absolute value) than the value of a single human life.