James_Bach

Karma: 122

James_Bach 21 Jan 2008 3:52 UTC
−6 points
on: Allais Malaise
“If the largest utility you care about is the utility of feeling good about your decision, then any decision that feels good is the right one.”

I don’t think so, Eliezer. Perhaps you’ve misunderstood the argument. It isn’t necessarily “any decision that feels good”, it’s any decision that gets the decider what the decider wants. I was trying to raise a question about your assumptions about what matters. Sometimes, the way you write, it seems you may not be aware that your particular model of what should matter to people isn’t shared by everyone.

I agree that if you think you are playing a particular game, and you want to win that game, there may be very specific things you need to do to win. Where I’m trying to draw your attention is to the fact that human activity encompasses a great number of different games, simultaneously. A rejection of the game you want to play is not the same thing as saying “anything goes.” If you are talking about chess, and someone says “Hey, I play checkers” the proper response is not “Oh, well then it doesn’t matter what move you make. You can make any move.”

It wouldn’t take very much adjustment of your rhetoric to avoid wantonly trampling on the flowerbeds of alternative utility systems. You can be incisive without being mean-spirited.

James_Bach 20 Jan 2008 6:33 UTC
−7 points
on: Zut Allais!
Far more important than rationality is the story of who we are and what we believe. I think that may be the best rational explanation for your insistence on trying to convince people that rationality is a good thing. It’s your story and it obviously means a lot to you.

There is no special rational basis for claiming that when lives are at stake, it’s especially important to be rational, because the value we place on lives is beyond rational control or assessment. But there may be any number of non-rational reasons to be rational… or appear rational, anyway.

Rationality is a game. It’s a game I, personally, like to play. Irrationality is how humans actually live and experience the world, most of the time.

James_Bach 15 Jan 2008 7:41 UTC
1 point
on: Trust in Math
For me, the purpose of doubt is to motivate inquiry. When any particular doubt no longer serves inquiry, I retire it.

If the purpose of doubt were to eliminate doubt, it would be far more efficient simply never to doubt.

Therefore, I doubt your philosophy of doubt. Let the inquiry continue.

James_Bach 12 Jan 2008 6:56 UTC
2 points
on: Expecting Beauty
When you wrote “But neither does it seem like the same shade of uncertainty” I suppose you mean that it doesn’t seem that way, to you. Nor does it to me. But before, as a thinking person, I suggest that the difference is meaningful, I need a context or a reason. You haven’t provided one, and that’s why your argument has the flavor of religion, to my palette.

I’d love to see your answer to the actual skeptical argument, rather than the straw man you offer, here. Here you are doing the equivalent of announcing “I’m thinking of a number!..… 5!...… I’m right again! My quest for order is rewarded!”

If you use mathematics to find order in the messy world, and you succeed, does that amount to a proof that the order you found is the actual order? Kepler would have argued yes! So would have Newton. Both were wrong. We know they were wrong. Wrong but their ideas are enduringly useful, as far as we know… so far… The skeptical position is not one of denying the value of ideas, but rather that of continuing the inquiry.

When my inquiry ceases, my beliefs become hardened premises that define my world and prevents me from benefiting from ideas of people with different premises. That’s fine in a simple world. A gamer’s world. I’ve become convinced that there is no simple world, except in our fantasies. Overcoming bias is about finding our center in a messy world. It’s about overcoming fantasy.

James_Bach 10 Jan 2008 23:53 UTC
7 points
on: Beautiful Math
I love math. It’s the only reason I sometimes wish I’d stayed in school. When I get rich, I want to hire a mathematician to live in my basement and tutor me. I bet they can be had for cheap.

Pure math is potentially a perfect idea. Applied math; not so much. When you see that line of 2′s, how do you know it continues forever? You don’t. You’re making an induction; a beautiful guess. It’s only because you peeked at the real answer—an answer you yourself created—that you can confidently say that you “predicted” the sequence with your method.

I’m much more interested in sequences produced in a simple deterministic way that are extremely difficult to crack. The move from “it makes no sense” to “it’s obvious” is a critical dynamic in human thought. I’d like to see you write about that.

As Polya would say, solving these problems is a heuristic process. The reason you think you find order when you dig down far enough is that you systematically ignore any situation where you don’t find order. Your categories have order built into them. You are drawn to order. There are probably a host of biases influencing that: availability, ontology, instrumentalism, and hindsight among them.

There’s lots of order to be found. There is also infinite amounts of disorder, unprovable order, and alternate plausible order. Occam’s razor helps sort it out—that’s also a heuristic.

James_Bach 9 Jan 2008 7:49 UTC
12 points
on: Infinite Certainty
Thanks, Eliezer. Helpful post.

I have personally witnessed a room of people nod their heads in agreement with a definition of a particular term in software testing. Then when we discussed examples of that term in action, we discovered that many of us having agreed with the words in the definition, had a very different interpretation of those words. To my great discouragement, I learned that agreeing on a sign is not the same as agreeing on the interpretant or the object. (sign, object, and interpretant are the three parts of Peirce’s semiotic triangle)

In the case of 2+2=4, I think I know what that means, but when Euclid, Euler, or Laplace thought of 2+2=4, were they thinking the same thing I am? Maybe they were, but I’m not confident of that. And when someday a artificial intelligence ponders 2+2=4, will it be thinking what I’m thinking?

I feel 100% positive that 2+2=4 is true, and 100% positive that I don’t entirely know what I mean by “2+2=4”. I am also not entirely sure what other people mean by it. Maybe they mean “any two objects, combined with two objects, always results in four objects”, which is obviously not true.

In thinking about certainty, it helps me to consider the history of the number zero. That something so obvious could be unknown (or unrecognized as important) for so long is sobering. The Greeks would also have sworn that the square root of negative one has no meaning and certainly no use in mathematics. 100% certain! The Pythagoreans would have sworn it just before stoning you to death for math heresy.

James_Bach 8 Jan 2008 5:08 UTC
6 points
on: Absolute Authority
I wonder what your life must be like. The way you write, it sounds as if you spend a lot of your time trying to convince crazy people (by which I mean most of humanity, of course) to be less crazy and more rational, like us. Why not just ignore them?

Then I looked at your Wikipedia entry and noticed how young you are. Ah! When I was your age, I was also trying to convert everybody. My endless arguments about software development methods, circa 1994, are still in Google’s Usenet archive. So, who am I to talk?

(Note: Mostly I write comments that complain about something you say, but please understand that there’s a selection bias here. Even though I often find myself thinking “What an interesting way to think about that. Great idea, Eliezer!” I would rather write comments that have some kind of content, and those tend to be the critical ones.)

James_Bach 7 Jan 2008 8:31 UTC
−12 points
on: The Fallacy of Gray
It sounds like you are trying to rescue induction from Hume’s argument that it has no basis in logic. “The future will be like the past because in the past the future was like the past” is a circular argument. He was the first to really make that point. Immanuel Kant spent years spinning elaborate philosophy to try to defeat that argument. Immanuel Kant, like lots of people, had a deep need for universal closure.

An easier way to go is to overcome your need for universal closure.

Induction is not logically justified, but you can make a different argument. You could point out that creatures who ignore the apparent patterns in nature tend to die pretty quick. Induction is a behavior that seems to help us stay alive. That’s pretty good. That’s why people can’t just wave their hands and claim reality is whatever anyone believes—if they do that, they will discover that acting on that belief won’t necessarily, say, win them the New York lottery.

My concern with your argument is, again, structural. You are talking about “gray”, and then you link that to probability. Wait a minute, that oversimplifies the metaphor. You present the idea of gray as a one-dimensional quantity, similar to probability. But when people invoke “gray” in rhetoric they are simply trying to say that there are potentially many ways to see something, many ways to understand and analyze it. It’s not a one-dimensional gray, it’s a many dimensional gray. You can’t reduce that to probability, in any actionable way, without specifying your model.

Here’s the tactic I use when I’m trying to stand up for a distinction that I want other people to accept (notice that I don’t need to invoke “reality” when I say that, since only theories of reality are available to me). I ask them to specify in what way the issue is gray. Let’s distinguish between “my spider senses are telling me to be cautious” and “I can think of five specific factors that must be included in a competent analysis. Here they are...”

In other words, don’t deny the gray, explore it.

A second tactic I use is to talk about the practical implications of acting-as-if a fact is certain: “I know that nothing can be known for sure, but if we can agree, for the moment, that X, Y, and Z are ‘true’ then look what we can do… Doesn’t that seem nice?”

I think you can get what you want without ridiculing people who don’t share your precise worldview, if that sort of thing matters to you.

James_Bach 6 Jan 2008 4:10 UTC
14 points
on: But There’s Still A Chance, Right?
I don’t understand why you invoke probability theory in a situation where it has no rhetorical value. Your conversation was a rhetorical situation, not a math problem, so you have to evaluate it and calibrate your speech acts accordingly—or else you get nowhere, which is exactly what happened.

Your argument to your friend was exactly like someone justifying something about their own religion by citing their bible. It works great for people in your own community who already accept your premises. To anyone outside your community, you might as well be singing a tuneless hymn.

Besides that, the refuge available to anyone even within your community is to challenge the way that you have modeled the probability problem. If we change the model, the probabilities are dramatically changed. This is the lesson we get from Lord Kelvin’s miscalculation of the age of the Sun, for instance. Arnold Sommerfeld once remarked that the hydrogen atom appeared to be more complex than a grand piano. In a way it is, but not so much once quantum mechanics was better understood. The story of the Periodic Table of Elements is also a story of trying different models.

Mathematics is powerful and pure. Your only little problem is demonstrating—in terms your audience will value—that your mathematics actually represents the part of the world you claim it represents. That’s why you can’t impose closure on everyone else using a rational argument; and why you may need a few other rhetorical tools.

Your confidence in your arguments seems to come from a coherence theory of truth: when facts align in beautiful and consistent ways, that coherence creates a powerful incentive to accept the whole pattern. Annoyingly, there turn out to be many ways to find or create coherence by blurring a detail here, or making an assumption there, or disqualifying evidence. For instance, you consistently disqualify evidence from spiritual intuition, don’t you? Me, too. How can we be sure we should be doing that?

Why not learn to live with that? Why not give up the quest for universal closure, and settle for local closure? That’s Pyrhhonian skepticism.

James_Bach 4 Jan 2008 8:12 UTC
1 point
on: Rational vs. Scientific Ev-Psych
I think the advocates of Naturalistic Inquiry (see Lincoln and Guba) would say that you aren’t talking about all of science, but of just the “positivistic paradigm” of science, whereas there is another paradigm called “naturalistic” or “constructivist” that does science differently.

I don’t buy the whole Naturalistic program, but they raise some useful points. One of them is that the experiments you suggest require you to impose upon the object of your study an ontology along with the value system associated with it. When studying complex and ill-defined systems, such as psychological or social systems, this may suppress or disrupt the very phenomena that matter, and we never the wiser.

A naturalistic approach to science may tactically employ the kind of experiments you suggest, but proceeds with a great deal of caution about potential variables and hypotheses. “Hunter” and “gatherer” are socially overloaded terms with many implications and connections to other aspects of human life. It may be a big spaghetti mess to disentangle the issues. Inquiry proceeds in an exploratory fashion to tease out potential factors.

On other hand, it may not be a big mess! But the naturalistic bias is toward assuming complexity and subtlety and looking closely at the role of a priori assumptions in the choices of words, variables, and instrumentation that may lead to false results. It’s sort of post-modernism applied to scientific method.

Again, I’m not a partisan of Naturalistic Inquiry. I just find it intriguing, and I have an allergic reaction to oversimplification (having been fooled so often by my own simplifications).

James_Bach 3 Jan 2008 21:29 UTC
10 points
on: Stop Voting For Nincompoops
Forget voting. Here’s how to make a big difference in society: at least once a month, do something amazingly kind for a perfect stranger. My preference is leaving $100 tips for waitresses or hotel maids, because I’m basically lazy.

Also, raise your kids with kindness.

Practice showing courage in challenging situations.

Don’t instigate a lawsuit unless it’s reaaaaaally important.

What’s great about America is not democracy, but the sense we have that we can travel almost anywhere here and other people will smile with us, do business with us, and not hate us. There are still many places and people within America for which and whom this is not true (or not true enough). But let’s keep working toward that idea with our daily actions. No amount of voting will solve that problem.

James_Bach 3 Jan 2008 3:10 UTC
−3 points
on: Stop Voting For Nincompoops
Since I don’t accept being part of a majority that dominates a minority, I only consent to vote in a situation where my vote is for the minority, and therefore cannot possibly influence the outcome. This is mathematically identical to staying home, except staying home is more pleasant. So, I’d rather stay home.

For those who believe in majority rule, I still don’t understand why you vote, since your vote cannot make any difference. There is no such thing as a deciding vote in a large election, since the error present in the system even for a fair election itself far exceeds one vote.

It only makes sense to advocate voting if you believe you can control a lot of other peoples’ votes. Then you can actually make a difference. Since the Diebold voting machines are hackable, and recounts are a sham, and the central tabulating software is easily manipulated by whomever happens to be running it, I see no rational basis for the assumption that the behavior of any voter or group of voters actually controls the outcome of any important election.

James_Bach 30 Dec 2007 2:58 UTC
0 points
on: Cultish Countercultishness
You’re such a lion against religion, I admire that. So, I’m surprised you would say that living with doubt is not a virtue. You know about incommensurability right? You know about perspectivism? There is no “view from nowhere” that can make perfect objectivity possible.

Therefore: doubt. To live with doubt makes room for learning. Lose doubt and you also lose inquiry. Some doubts are annihilated by inquiry, but as Richard Feynman said, “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”. He said we need a well developed theory of ignorance to protect the future from our misconceptions of the present.

Doubt is difficult to live with. I’d love to say with certainty that Christianity is false. I’m constrained to saying that I have no better reason to accept Christianity than to accept the Spaghetti monster theory. The guy who came up with the Spaghetti monster did so as a parody—but maybe the Monster Himself placed the ideas in his head to spread the good word of Spaghetti.

Bayesian rationality doesn’t solve doubt, because nothing tells you how to identify the system and its factors that must be modeled. So, you’re still stuck with having to define your premises, and doubt comes in with the premises.

Doubt is like an anti-oxidant that protects against cultishness. Of course, a cult can use fake doubt to throw people off its scent.

James_Bach 28 Dec 2007 7:01 UTC
9 points
on: Lonely Dissent
Eliezer, never mind black, the true iconoclasts don’t go to school. I quit in 10th grade and became an emancipated minor. In the three years prior, I refused to do homework, citing the 13th Amendment. My motivation echoes yours: I could not abide fakers, and public school abounds with them. Fake lessons. Fake arguments. Fake sentiments. Public school is a thinly disguised day care center.

Fortunately, education is not the same as schooling, and there are plenty of ways to become better educated in private life. Then I discovered as an adult that being unconventionally educated could be a competitive advantage.

James_Bach 26 Dec 2007 8:25 UTC
2 points
on: Asch’s Conformity Experiment
I don’t see this exercise as being so much about rationality as it is about our relationship with dissonance. People in my community (context-driven software testers) are expected to treat confusion or controversy as itself evidence of a potentially serious problem. For the responsible tester, such evidence must be investigated and probably raised as an issue to the client.

In short, in the situation given in the exercise, I would not answer the question, but rather raise some questions.

I drive telephone surveyors nuts in this way. They just don’t know what to do with a guy who answers “no opinion” or “I don’t know” or “can’t answer” to every single question in their poorly worded and context-non-specific questionnaires.

James_Bach 23 Dec 2007 5:15 UTC
4 points
on: Effortless Technique
Thank you for this post. I’m in the process of writing about my system of self-education, which has two interesting elements I haven’t heard anywhere else: A) it requires no self-discipline whatsoever, B) it is centered on the feelings of learning, rather than artifacts and techniques of learning (those latter two things are interesting, but they orbit the first).

One of the things I try to explain is how to embrace certain mental behaviors that seem bad, such as procrastination. I procrastinate extensively. I am procrastinating right now (I’m “supposed to be” writing a chapter on the history of buccaneering and how that relates to intellectual buccaneering).

Procrastination helps me learn with less effort. It’s too long to explain fully here, but one way I use it is called “springboard procrastination” which is the phenomenon of trying to work on one thing, and feeling your mind aggressively push you into another thing. I once thought that was a shameful thing, to let my mind push against my will, but I eventually discovered that by rolling with that impulse, I could get lots of things done. I read more, I write more, I exercise, I am quite productive while avoiding the work I’m “supposed to do”.

I also use a technique I call “procrastinate and push” which means I keep coming back and knocking on the door of my mind, trying to work on the problem of the day, and when my mind tells me to go play a video game instead, I just do that. But I come back a little later, and a little later. I go through these cycles without any sort of bad feeling (unlike when I was younger and disgusted with my inability to bring my mind to heel). Eventually, usually shortly before a deadline, my mind relents. Often progress is very rapid after that.

These experiences have caused me to explore lots of way in which I can make good progress without the feeling of making an effort. One of my mentors in this, Jerry Weinberg, recently wrote a book about a relaxed way of writing called the Fieldstone Approach, which he first put into words while coaching me on this stuff.

Anyone interested in reviewing my book prior to its publication should contact me directly. I will soon need a few bright people to critique it.

James_Bach 18 Dec 2007 8:57 UTC
21 points
on: Guardians of Ayn Rand
Great essay!

But, how can a set of ideas be a closed system? It’s ridiculous. If someone were to tell me that Objectivism is closed, I would say, Ha! I just reopened it. Ha! Try and stop me from calling myself an Objectivist if I feel like it! Oh, they can trademark it, I supposed, but if they do, I could rename my system as Reasonablism and explain it as an improved form of what-Ayn-Rand-was-talking-about.

A community of people can close itself off, but ideas are helpless to resist whatever buccaneering minds may prey upon them. This harkens to Buckminster Fuller’s cry that “true wealth only increases”, because true wealth is knowledge and knowledge is infinitely replicable and shareable.

James_Bach 15 Dec 2007 23:17 UTC
5 points
on: Guardians of the Truth
When you speak of “guardians of truth” I hear “guardians of social order.” I don’t think the Inquisition thought of truth in epistemic terms, the way we do. They thought of “truth” as the order of the world that was under constant assault by dark forces.

Truth guardianship in science might be understood as defending Kuhnian “normal science” from assault by people outside of the dominant paradigm; or perhaps the process of indoctrinating new scientists in the accepted norms of that paradigm.

James_Bach 14 Dec 2007 6:01 UTC
3 points
on: Argument Screens Off Authority
You said: “So it seems there’s an asymmetry between argument and authority. If we know authority we are still interested in hearing the arguments; but if we know the arguments fully, we have very little left to learn from authority.”

I like your conclusion, but I can’t find anything in your argument to support it! By rearranging some words in your text I could construct an equally plausible (to a hypothetical neutral observer) argument that authority screens off evidence. You seem to believe that evidence screens off authority simply because you think evidence is what makes authority believe something. But isn’t that assuming the very thing you want to demonstrate?

Your scenarios in the first paragraphs are neither arguments nor demonstrations. They are statements of what you believe. Fair enough. But then I was expecting that you’d provide some reason for me to reject the hypothesis—a hypothesis that carried a lot of weight during the era of Scholasticism—that there is no such thing as evidence without authority (in other words, it is authority that consecrates evidence as evidence).

I used to wonder how anyone could take the obviously wrong physics of Aristotle seriously, until I learned enough about history that it dawned on me that for the Scholastic thinkers of the middle ages, how physics really worked was far less important than maintaining social order. If maintaining social order is the problem that trumps all others in your life and in your society, then evidence must necessarily carry little weight compared to authority. You will give up a lot of science, of course, but you will give it up gladly.

Obviously, we aren’t in that situation. But I worry when I see, for instance, rational arguments for the existence of God that assume the very thing they purport to prove. And your argument (hopefully I’ve misunderstood it) seems a lot like those.

James_Bach 25 Nov 2007 18:48 UTC
3 points
on: Lost Purposes
As a high school dropout and aspiring philosopher of self-education, I salute you.

My son is homeschooled, and the homeschooling consists of… nothing. He studies spontaneously to solve problems that are authentic to him, just as I do. Mostly these involve video games and online fantasy role-playing games. It’s like A.S. Neill’s Summerhill school except he’s all alone. There are disadvantages to this sort of education, but inauthenticity is not among them.

I am writing a book along these lines. It’s about how we can creates ourselves as individual thinkers. It’s called How I Learn Stuff: Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar (old draft is temporarily online at http://www.satisfice.com/hils.pdf. The book itself should be finished in a few months).