JenniferRM

Karma: 7,973

JenniferRM 13 May 2008 17:21 UTC
16 points
on: The Failures of Eld Science
I recently decided to try reading this blog to see what the fuss was and this leapt out at me:

“At that time, there were no Conspiracies, no secret truths; as soon as Eld scientists solved a major problem, they published the solution to the world and each other. Truly scary and confusing open problems would have been in extremely rare supply, and used up the moment they were solved.”

It occurs to me that Mr Yudkowsky is proposing that having science (or scientific fields) incorporate something like a “hidden secret” of the sort mystery religions use would actually be beneficial for science or the world. It’s not the first time I’ve heard the idea connected to him.

Also, I’ve heard interpretations of Noam Chomsky’s early publishing tactics in linguistics described in roughly this way (not publishing enough to replicate his work, letting special people in on the secret who then publish papers based on it, immunizing his theories from disconfirming argument by explaining that critical papers aren’t criticizing the full true theory (the one he was working on but hadn’t yet published to people not specially selected and sworn to secrecy)). I’m not sure if this is is true or not. It’s academic gossip mostly.

But it might explain why linguistics is in such a “pre science” state even now, with many competing paradigms co-existing in the community so that linguists spend much time re-arguing fundamentals and relatively less solving puzzles about language. At the same time, Chomsky’s citation tree is breathtakingly large. Tenuous conclusion on the mystery cult tactic from this example: good for Chomsksy, bad for linguistics?

Other than modeling experiments, it’s hard to even test the theory because the object of study would be scientific communities and it would be difficult and (ahem!) ethically dubious to experiment on them… but the thought is worrisome when bearing in mind that the payoffs of the dynamic are (on first glance) structured like an N-person prisoner’s dilemma with no obvious regulatory agent.

If this is a failure mode of scientific disciplines, it would tend to occur where someone unilaterally broke with the cultural norms of academic science.

EDIT in 2023: To augment the link, with a residual broken one, and a better link to a hopefully more stable archive that helps maintain the reliable infrastructure that supports Bacon’s Project.

JenniferRM 9 Mar 2009 4:44 UTC
5 points
on: The ethic of hand-washing and community epistemic practice
Two points...

POINT ONE: The cholera example is even more fascinating when you drill down. The bacteria involved is “Vibrio cholerae”.

http://www.textbookofbacteriology.net/cholera.html

It seems to actually have numerically common non-pathogenic forms and the ones with enterotoxin genes appear to have received them from bacteria targeting viruses. If I understand correctly, the toxin genes are integrated (but dormant) within bacterial genomes and infection by bacteriophage CTX triggers their expression.

http://www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/genomes/madanm/articles/cholera.htm

POINT TWO: It is probably worth keeping in mind the fundamental attribution error.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/4545312

This point is mostly in response to the focus here on habits and norms. Not to say that someone couldn’t work on those productively, but I suspect environmental effects like “mere proximity” have a lot more influence than would be assumed without consciously factoring it in, even over people in this community. The cholera example comes bundled with the same “context focused” message: the authors cited in the OP mostly focusing not on hand washing but on the design of water purification infrastructure.

I can’t imagine that this crowd is unaware of this sort of thing, but I’m not aware of a better example of the “location location location” message this Google’s results from studying their internal betting markets.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/flow-of-information-at-googleplex.html

For myself, I tend to assume that if changes to my habits are to have any significant influence on me, many of them must be focused around shaping and choosing environments that support the kinds of thinking and living that I want to do. I’m still working on this process for myself and have few unambiguously positive results to report and the negative results are too embarrassing to list and would take a lot of text to describe any in useful detail :-P

For lack of such text I’ll recommend “Lady of Mazes” for it’s exploration of themes around technology, “spacial nearness”, social networks, medium-message distinctions, choice architecture, suggestions systems, personal character, political awareness, value-technology interactions, and having a life that is felt to be meaningful. This book is less accessible than “Accelerando” but, for me, it has had much more staying power.

http://www.amazon.com/Lady-Mazes-Karl-Schroeder/dp/0765312190

http://www.amazon.com/Accelerando-Singularity-Charles-Stross/dp/0441012841

JenniferRM 7 Nov 2009 5:32 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Hamster in Tutu Shuts Down Large Hadron Collider
One thing you could do is make a probability estimate now and see how well calibrated you are :-)

http://predictionbook.com/predictions/663

JenniferRM 1 Feb 2010 0:16 UTC
18 points
in reply to: Breakfast’s comment on: Deontology for Consequentialists
There is a “magical causal connection” between one’s individual actions and the actions of the rest of the world.

Other people will observe you acting and make reasonable inferences on the basis of their observation. Depending on your scientific leanings, it’s plausible to suppose that these inferences have been so necessary to human survival that we may have evolutionary optimizations that make moral reasoning more effective than general reasoning.

For example, if they see you “get away with” an act they will infer that if they repeat your action the will also avoid reprisal (especially if you and they are in similar social reference classes). If they see you act proudly and in the open they will infer that you’ve already done the relevant social calculations to determine that no one will object and apply sanctions. If they see you defend the act with words, they will assume that they can cite you as an authority and you’ll support them in a factional debate in order not to look like a hypocrite… and so on ad nauseum.

There are various reasons people might deny that they function as role models in society. Perhaps they are hermits? Or perhaps they are not paying attention to how social processes actually happen? Or it may also be the case that they are momentarily confabulating excuses because they’ve been caught with blood on their hands?

Not that I’m a big deontologist, but I think deontologists say things that are interesting, worthwhile, and seem unlikely to be noticed from other theoretical perspectives. Several apologists for deontology who I’ve known from a distance (mostly in speech and debate contexts) were super big brains.

Their pitch, to get people into the relevant deliberative framework, frequently involved an epistemic argument at the beginning. Basically they pointed out that it was silly to make moral judgments with instantaneous behavioral consequences based on things you can’t see or measure or know in the present. There is more to it than that (like there are nice ways to update and calculate deontic moral theories based on morality estimates, subsequent acts, and independent “retrospective moral feelings” about how the things turned out) but we’re just in the comment section, and I’d rather not have my fourth post in this community spend a lot of time articulating the upsides a moral theory that I don’t “fully endorse” :-)

JenniferRM 1 Feb 2010 10:00 UTC
14 points
in reply to: Breakfast’s comment on: Deontology for Consequentialists
Err… I suspect our priors on this subject are very different.

From my perspective you seem to be quibbling over an unintended technical meaning of the word “everyone” while not tracking consequences clearly. I don’t understand how you think littering is coherent example of how people’s actions do not affect the rest of the world via social signaling. In my mind, littering is the third most common example of a “signal crime” after window breaking and graffiti.

The only way your comments are intelligible to me is that you are enmeshed in a social context where people regularly free ride on community goods or even outright ruin them… and they may even be proud to do so as a sign of their “rationality”?!? These circumstances might provide background evidence that supports what you seem to be saying—hence the inference.

If my inference about your circumstances is correct, you might try to influence your RL community, as an experiment, and if that fails an alternative would be to leave and find a better one. However, if you are in such a context, and no one around you is particularly influenced by your opinions or actions, and you can’t get out of the context, then I agree that your small contribution to the ruin of the community may be negligible (because the people near to you are already ruining the broader community, so their “background noise” would wash out your potentially positive signal). In that case, rule breaking and crime may be the only survival tactic available to you, and you have my sympathy.

In contrast, when I picture littering, I imagine someone in a relatively pristine place who throws the first piece of garbage. Then they are scolded by someone nearby for harming the community in a way that will have negative long term consequences. If the litterbug walks away without picking up their own litter, the scolder takes it upon themselves to pick up the litter and dispose of it properly on behalf of the neighborhood.

In this scenario, the cost of littering is born, personally and directly, by the scolder who picks up the garbage, who should follow this up by telling other people about it, badmouthing the person who littered and claiming credit for scolding and cleaning up after them. This would broadcast and maintain positive norms within the community.

I prefer using norms in part because the major alternatives I’m aware of are either (1) letting the world to “fall to shit” or else (2) fixing problems using government solutions. If positive social customs can do the job instead, that’s a total win to me :-)

JenniferRM 3 Feb 2010 1:44 UTC
18 points
in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: Deontology for Consequentialists
Do you think it is likely that the emotional core of your claim was captured by the statement that “everything I’m reading here seems to closely resemble something that I had to grow out of… making it really hard for me to take it seriously”?

And then assuming this question finds some measure of ground.… how likely do you think it is that you would grow in a rewarding way by applying “your emotional reprogramming techniques” to this emotional reaction to an entry-level exposition on deontological modes of reasoning so that you could consider the positive and negative applications in a more dispassionate manner?

I haven’t read into your writings super extensively, but from what I read you have quite a lot of practice doing something like “soul dowsing” to find emotional reactions. Then you trace them back to especially vivid “formative memories” which can then then be rationally reprocessed using other techniques—the general goal being to allow clearer thinking about retrospectively critical experiences in a more careful manner and in light of subsequent life experiences. (I’m sure there’s a huge amount more, but this is my gloss that’s relevant to your post.)

I’ve never taken your specific suggestions along these lines into practice (for various reasons having mostly to do with opportunity costs) but the potential long term upside seem high and your post just seemed like a gorgeous opportunity to explore some of the longer term consequences of your suggested practices.

JenniferRM 4 Feb 2010 21:15 UTC
9 points
in reply to: JamesAndrix’s comment on: A Much Better Life?
I think most people agree about the importance of “the substrate universe” whether that universe is this one, or actually higher than our own. But suppose the we argued against a more compelling reconstruction of the proposal by modifying the experience machine in various ways? The original post did the opposite of course—removing the off button in a gratuitous way that highlights the loss (rather than extension) of autonomy. Maybe if we repair the experience box too much it stops functioning as the same puzzle, but I don’t see how an obviously broken box is that helpful an intuition pump.

For example, rather than just giving me plain old physics inside the machine, the Matrix experience of those who knew they were in the matrix seemed nice: astonishing physical grace, the ability to fly and walk on walls, and access to tools and environments of one’s choosing. Then you could graft on the good parts from Diaspora so going into the box automatically comes with effective immortality, faster subjective thinking processes, real time access to all the digitally accessible data of human civilization, and the ability to examine and cautiously optimize the algorithms of one’s own mind using an “exoself” to adjust your “endoself” (so that you could, for example, edit addictions out of your psychological makeup except when you wanted to go on a “psychosis vacation”).

And I’d also want to have a say in how human civilization progressed. If there were environmental/astronomical catastrophes I’d want to make sure they were either prevented or at least that people’s simulators were safely evacuated. If we could build the kinds of simulators I’m talking about then people in simulators could probably build and teleoperate all kinds of neat machinery for emergencies, repair of the experience machines, space exploration, and so on.

Another argument against experience machines is sometimes that they wouldn’t be as “challenging” as the real world because you’d be in a “merely man made” world… but the proper response is simply to augment the machine so that it offers more challenges and more meaningful challenges than mere reality—for example, the environments you could call up to give you arbitrary levels of challenge might be calibrated to be “slightly beyond your abilities about 50% of the time but always educational and fun”.

Spending time in one of these improved experience machines would be way better than, say, spending the equivalent time in college, because mere college graduates would pale in comparison to people who’d spent the same four years gaining subjective centuries of hands on experience dealing with issues whose “challenge modes” were vastly more complex puzzles than most of the learning opportunities on our boring planet. Even for equivalent subjective time, I think the experience machines would be better, because they’d be calibrated precisely to the person with no worries about educational economies of scale… instead of lectures, conversations… instead of case studies, simulations… and so on.

The only intelligible arguments against the original “straw man” experience machine (though perhaps there are others I’m not clever enough to notice) that remain compelling to me after repairing the design of the machine, are focused on social relationships.

First, one of the greatest challenges in the human environment is other humans. If you’re setting up an experience machine scenario with a sliding scale of challenge, where to you get the characters from? Do you just “fabricate” the facade of a someone who presents a particular kind of coordination challenge due to their difficult personal quirks? If you’re going to simulate conflict, do you just “fabricate” enemies? And hurt them? Where do all these people come from and what is the moral significance of their existence? Not being distressed by this is probably a character defect, but the alternative seems to involve inevitable distress.

And then on the other side of the coin, there are many people who I love as friends or family, even though they are not physically gorgeous, fully self actualized, passionately moral, polymath “greek gods”. Which is probably a lucky thing, because neither am I :-P

But if they refused to enter repaired experience machines (networked, of course, so we could hang out anytime we wanted) the only way I could interact with them would be through an avatar in the substrate world where they were plodding along without the same growth opportunities. Would I eventually see them as grossly incapacitated caricatures of what humans are truly capable of? How much distress would that cause? Or suppose they opted in and then got vastly more out of their experience machine than I got out of mine? Would I feel inferior? Would I need to be protected from the awareness of my inferiority for my own good? Would they feel sorry for me? Would they need to be protected from my disappointing-ness? Would we all just drift apart, putting “facade interfaces” between each other, so everyone’s understanding of other people drifted farther and farther out of calibration—me appearing better than actual to them and them worse than actual to me?

And then if something in the external universe supporting our experience machines posed a real challenge that involves actual choices we’re back to the political challenges around coordinating with other people where the stakes are authentic and substantial. We’d probably debate from inside the experience boxes about what the world manipulation machines should do, and the arguments would inevitably carry some measure of distress for any “losing factions”.

It is precisely the existence of morally significant “non-me entities” that creates challenges that I don’t see how to avoid under any variety of experience machine. It’s not that I particularly care whether my desk is real or not—its that I care that my family is real.

Given the state of human technology, one could argue that human civilization (especially in the developed world, and hopefully for everyone within a few decades) is already in something reasonably close to an optimal experience machine. We have video games. We have reasonable material comfort. We have raw NASA data online. We can cross our fingers and somewhat reasonably imagine technology improving medical care to cure death and stupidity… But the thing we may never have a solution to is the existence of people we care about, who are not exactly as they would be if their primary concern was our own happiness, while recognizing we are constrained in similar ways, especially when we care about multiple people who want different things for us.

Perhaps this is where we cue Sartre’s version of a “three body problem”?

Unless… what if much of the challenges in politics and social interactions happen because people in general are so defective? If my blindnesses and failures compound against those of others, it sounds like a recipe for unhappiness to me. But if experience machines could really help us to become more the kind of people we wanted to be, perhaps other people would be less hellish after we got the hang of self improvement?

JenniferRM 5 Feb 2010 9:51 UTC
9 points
in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: Deontology for Consequentialists
Thanks for the response.

That was way more than I was hoping to get back and went in really interesting directions—the corrections about the way the “reprocessing” works and the limits of reprocessing was helpful. The detail about the way vivid memories can no longer be accessed through the same “index” and become more like stories was totally unexpected and fascinating.

Also, that was very impressive in terms of just… raw emotional openness, I guess. I don’t know about other readers, but it stirred up my emotions just reading about your issues as you worked through them. I have a hard time imagining the courage it would take for me to make similar emotional disclosures in a place like this if they were my own. I’m a little frightened by how much trust you gave me I think? But I’m very grateful too.

(And yes, “soul dousing” is a term I made up for the post for the sake of trying to summarize things I’ve read by you in the past in my own words to see if I was hearing what you were trying to say.)

JenniferRM 6 Feb 2010 2:26 UTC
19 points
on: Debate tools: an experience report
Comment in a nutshell: “Practice with very simple tools optimized for swift use in a culture that values logic and evidence are likely to be better than specialized tools with hard coded abstractions.”

There’s a specialized form of note taking called “flowing” within the policy/CEDA/NDT debate community. Here is a wikipedia article on the subject if anyone wants to hunt in the concept space for keywords and links and such :-)

In this speech community (especially at the higher levels) people tend to speak very swiftly because there is a background theory that “dropping arguments is conceding arguments” which creates an incentive to make many parallel arguments with the same conclusion that reach towards different sets of evidence. It is possible to win simply by making many adequate arguments that your opponent is incapable of handling with enough speed or concision.

(It can be dangerous to spin out many arguments without paying attention to how they interact, because sometimes a response will be something like “I concede argument 2 and 5 which constitute a turn on the general position that works like X. Arguments 1, 3, and 4 were about A, B, and C which are all less important than this, so I win the position.”)

In terms of basic mechanics, the note taking process that I learned used strikingly simple tools: a four color pen, a legal pad, and (if you were going to prep for standard positions or responses by taking re-usable notes on what you would say) cover up tape. The process involved taking notes in a very narrow up-down column (about the width of cover up tape) so that iterated response and counter response could move horizontally across the page in rows. Time through each speech flows down on a given page, speech to speech flows horizontally. Arrows sometimes connect points if you underestimate the space requirements for a “clean flow” to help show how the rows are supposed to line up.

An eight minute speech would be flowed on several different pages, usually called “positions”. As a matter of helping the judge flow the round (so they can take clean notes on your arguments and will notice when you win) it was wise to start a speech by announcing how many new positions would be introduced and/or the order in which existing positions would be addressed. Then everyone shuffles papers for the first few seconds of the speech. For a debate round on cryonics there might be a positions (each with a separate piece of paper) for “personal friendships and relationships”, “health-dollar utility”, “dehumanization critique”, and so on.

Sometimes a column on a page would be a simple list of numbered points, but sometimes an argument would actually have an implicit tree structure, with mulitple points having sub points of their own. Comparing columns, then, its best to imagine one serialized tree next aligned with another. Structured argument was much more common in the early speeches of a round when significant preparation was possible and evidence was being read whose implications would be argued later on. Also, each piece of paper functioned sort of like its own “major tree branch” for the entire round (if you’re trying to map the physical objects to an abstract data structure) and it was rare for cross applications of logic to jump from one page to another, but more common within a page.

The actual note taking would be full of your own jottings for arguments, like I used to use a capital T with a circle around it for “turn” which meant that the argument related to the “sign” (positive or negative) of the general position. An extended example might help...

Imagine that one side argues that the spread of some public perception would have a terrible consequence; then the other side might concede at the consequence level but proceed to argue that the perception already exists in the status quo and is growing and would actually go down on the basis of a proposed course of action… that would be a turn. In notes I might have one side flowed as “2. Perc {right arrow} H” (the 2nd argument was that perception is causally connected to harm) and then the response would be recorded just to the right with something like “T: Perc {up arrow}ing SQ” (perception is increasing in the status quo and somehow the proposed policy would decrease it, changing the sign of the broader argument).

Another important thing for the actual debate was that people would read sourced evidence into the round (at very high speed) so aside from the gist of the content, the author and year of publication could be very helpful because you might be familiar with them and have a retraction (or rebuttal by another author) written two years later in your own debate files. Even if you have no response you can go to the library with the citation and prep for the next time you see that evidence in a round… or you could use it yourself to argue the other side if it’s just a great position :-)

One issue is that note taking systems like this work much better when the speakers are trying to be logically intelligible and expect you to flow them. The speakers can “signpost” as they raise a point by saying things like ”...and my fourth argument here is that X” and then it can be responded with “their fourth argument about X is spurious because of Z”. The numbers in the speech and in the notes help everyone retain the same alignment.

Sometimes I would debate using flowing skills in competitive contexts that were focused on rhetoric rather than reason (less signposting, less note-taking by the judge, speaker points awarded for wardrobe, little tolerance for meta-arguments about debate theory to enforce compliance with social norms, etc) and the note taking system generally still worked.

If the audience has a phobic reaction to stuttered logic and reason you can get hurt relying on the cultural forms of policy debate (in policy debate, T-shirts could reverse-signal to some judges that you relied on “pure logic”), but in the absence of phobias, “flow skills” still appeared to be relatively valuable because they helped you address people’s points directly (which audiences usually like) and notice when they tried a logical shenanigan (which academic audiences enjoy seeing called out and given a latin name).

It’s been many years since I judged or coached, and even more since I debated myself. My understanding is that in modern times people frequently bring laptops into rounds and flow using spreadsheets. Evidence is stored on hard drives instead of lugging around 100 pounds of paper in a filing system. It sounds altogether more civilized in that respect—and learning to use the hotkeys for high speed note taking in spreadsheets is probably a skill that would help for years after in contexts like finance and consulting :-)

In any case, these sorts of experiences have adjusted my priors on the subject of rationality prostheses to favor of practice and skill with generic tools (paper and pen, or spreadsheets) as opposed to highly specialized software with a bunch of YAGNI features.

If any readers are in college (or better yet choosing a college), I would recommend googling around to see if you can find an associated intercollegiate policy debate team. Sometimes they are called CEDA (Cross Examination Debate Association) and sometimes NDT (National Debate Tournament) although the formerly distinct communities had already pretty well merged 10 years ago when I was debating. It can cost 20 to 60 hours a week, but I know of no other “game” with as wonderful a mix of adrenaline, logic, and language. In retrospect, I think that policy debating was more educational than many of my actual classes :-)
What links here?
- JenniferRM's comment on Bloggingheads: Robert Wright and Eliezer Yudkowsky by Liron (10 Sep 2010 1:46 UTC; 6 points)

JenniferRM 7 Feb 2010 6:43 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: Debate tools: an experience report
When I was composing the response I was a bit worried that I was using too much jargon. If someone has access and time to experience policy debate I’d highly recommend it, but I’m not sure how much value can be transmitted via mere text (even if it was a book’s worth of text—and books have been written on the theory and practices behind competitive policy debate).

If there are any questions about something that didn’t make sense, I’d be happy to try to answer them :-)

Honestly, there are some seriously negative elements to policy debate that go with the positive. If I understand correctly, REM’s song “Its the end of the world as we know it” was inspired by visiting a debate tournament and seeing high level debaters trying to flow each other out of rounds with “techno strategic language” that was basically unintelligible to normal people.

Rounds would be decided on “existential risk” level policy impacts but no one was doing anything about it really… they’d just win or lose a debate round and move on to the next one. I once judged a round where the decision came down to whether the affirmative policy would increase or decrease the likelihood of human detection and extermination by extra-solar civilizations stealth-bombing our sun with large masses moving at relativistic velocities in order to make sure humans weren’t competing with them for stars 50k years from now...

I think a lot of smart people get involved with policy debate and end with a very cynical view of “competitive” communication.

REM:

Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself churn. Locking in, uniforming, book burning, blood letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate. Light a candle, light a votive. Step down, step down. Watch your heel crush, crushed, uh-oh, this means no fear cavalier. Renegade steer clear! A tournament, tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline.

JenniferRM 9 Feb 2010 6:08 UTC
7 points
in reply to: MBlume’s comment on: A survey of anti-cryonics writing
Pretty much agree.

The only thing that gives much comfort is that was written in 1991 so there’s theoretically enough time for some of the obstructionist cohort to have retired or run out of steam on the subject. Perhaps the upside of a pessimistic view on scientific progress could be kicking in by now?

I tried to verify the actual current state of the Society for Cryobiology’s bylaws to see if they even contain the provisions banning cryonicists or their research any longer. With 20 years for them to have realized that such censorship is at the very least in poor taste, maybe things have settled down? When I tried looking for an online version of the document with the it didn’t appear to be something they have on display.

Does anyone else have stronger google-fu than I? It would be neat to track down the document so we could see for ourselves :-)

JenniferRM 9 Feb 2010 21:42 UTC
11 points
on: Shut Up and Divide?
Personally, I think the correct thing to do is to recognize that a simple abstraction like “number of people involved” isn’t the only thing that is relevant to deciding whether a course of action is appropriate.

Note that the behavior consequences of “shut up and multiply” and “shut up and divide” are largely the same in this particular case… both argue that one should ignore Amanda’s situation because she’s only one person and based on raw numbers she (as well as you, and I, and pretty much every individual person on the planet) don’t really matter relative to the rest of the world in aggregate.

The big behavioral consequence of the two paths (multiplication versus division) seems to be the distinction between taking one’s personal selfishness (say, the objective fact that you’d cry more if a fingernail were ripped off than if you heard of the death of 1000 strangers on the far side of the planet) to mean that you really would or should choose to preserve your fingernail over the people, if the choice was somehow actually presented to you in reality. That is, the theories have different consequences only in one’s behavioral orientation towards “the big picture”.

If this distinction is the case, then maybe it makes more sense to limit yourself to thinking about the right thing to do for big picture questions? (Note that if you were going to truly apply a the division principle across all human circumstances this would apply to yourself just as much as Amanda… and I’m not sure if you’re also advocating self-disregard or not.)

In the meantime, I personally think that it is important to pay attention to more than the number of people involved. In my case, I pay a lot of attention to my “responsibility” in terms of my actual literal ability to respond. This causes me to focus on my degree of knowledge and proximity to other people (or groups of people) when I try to decide if I can effectively improve a situation.

Assuming basically competent adults are involved, other adults can probably take care of themselves better than other people can take care of them, and if their self-help abilities are limited they may still think of attempts to help more as “meddling interference”. The utility of assistance will thus be reduced by the transaction costs imposed by attempts to coordinate with the person or people being helped. If they’re hostile and resistive to help, it may tragically be a case where leaving them to their own unfortunate circumstances is the best way to achieve good in the world. If they’re falsely signaling greater need than they actually experience, that’s also something I don’t want to support.

In the meantime, if you’ve developed a good set of cooperative understandings with other people it can make more sense for you to continue to cooperate with those people even in the presence of more needy third parties, just because you don’t know much about them and don’t have cooperation protocols worked out.

When I saw komponisto’s initial post about Amanda Knox I did stop and think about it for a while. My first impression based on 10 minutes of reading was that a miscarriage of justice was probably happening based on prosecutorial and investigative confirmation biases compounded by subsequent public commitment and unwillingness to lose political credibility. I estimated something like a 20% chance that she’d committed the crime (though obviously she was formally “guilty” because notionally legitimate legal forms had been followed to apply a legal status of “guilty” to Amanda).

The reason I worried about it in the first place was possibility that I’d someday be trapped in a foreign country, not having committed a crime, but subject to a crazy and xenophobic justice system, and I would be relying on moral compatriots to intervene on my behalf. The thing that prevented me from either posting my estimates in that thread or becoming politically involved in Amanda’s actual case was the recognition that there were other people already in a better position to do the right thing than myself.

JenniferRM 9 Feb 2010 22:13 UTC
8 points
in reply to: komponisto’s comment on: Shut Up and Divide?
To a large degree, public commitment is involvement.

My fair share, as an American, to a hypothetical “free Amanda Knox if independent investigation determines she should actually be freed” fund would be less than a penny. Between my stopping to consider it earlier and posting about it here I’ve already done more than that. The transaction costs here are so large that the right thing is probably for something like one in a thousand people to randomly be assigned to even worry if they should care, and if they do donate a few bucks to the cause.

Also, I was mostly a lurker at that time, and assuming I started posting (as I have recently) I didn’t want such a controversial and specific issue to determine my initial trajectory here.

I consider Wei Dai’s meta-meta-ethical considerations to be much more relevant to an actual concrete project that I care about much more: building mutual cooperation protocols with this community, starting with abstract principles and methods for deriving them, and working through to implications, and eventually (hopefully) reaching actions in the world that benefit me, the rest of the community here, and the broader world that I assume most of us care about.

JenniferRM 10 Feb 2010 6:20 UTC
14 points
in reply to: Kevin’s comment on: Shut Up and Divide?
“Craigslist users matter. 100 million lives could be saved by a billion dollars. That’s ONE banner ad on CL for five years—for charity. Craig’ll do it if we ask for it. We just need to ask.”

194 characters.

Hotlink the word ask to a page with a larger pitch that’s one more click away from the place they need to type. The $20k per person thing goes in the larger pitch.

I think the people doing it would have to actually be regular CL people. Maybe see about checking first with CL forums in big metro areas… make a meetup out of it maybe? I don’t personally think its money “out of nothing” though. Even if people don’t feel the “epistemic pain” I suspect ads do impose a dust speck style cost on their viewers.

JenniferRM 10 Feb 2010 20:43 UTC
0 points
in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: Shut Up and Divide?
I agree. I’m not even sure if there are hard-to-explain methods for that price.

If you were really going to do it you’d want to figure out a lot more about the details (like where to direct the money to maximize the goodness of the outcome in a way that was intelligible to people, and whether ads of the sort proposed could really generate the predicted amount).

But the numbers you ended up with could be plugged into the text without changing the emotional impact. The pitch is aimed at people’s sense of “making a difference” and “belonging to a community” and “being heard” and so on, not at their excitement for dollar-efficient charity. The stated problem was the difficulty of pressing the right buttons in a compact and readable way that would (hopefully) get viral traction.

The numbers just have to be enough to feel like they matter for the text to be sufficient. The emotional impact of “Half a million...” versus “100 million” is probably not large, even if the real world impact is 200 times less. This is (if I understand correctly) the whole point of the “shut up and multiply” slogan in this community—recognition of our lack of cognitive sensitivity to numerical differences.

But that is part of what I meant about the fact that its really not money “out of nothing”. Watching a single ad costs you something. Equally, a trillion ad impressions is a lot of cost to impose on people’s minds. At some point, the damage to CL and the world might really be worse than the number of lives saved.

It’s not clear to me that the relative impacts could even be worked out in advance… if ads were put up according to the whims of the passionate few, the money ended up in dumb places, there was a backlash and CL’s functioning as an institution people can trust was damaged, and the world economy had X amount of value destroyed thereby, then the whole thing might be a net negative. The damage to CL’s reputation with people who didn’t understand why the ads had suddenly appeared might have to be monitored in real time rather than predicted in advance.

But assuming there was an honestly great thing to be gained that was really blocked by nothing more than a bit of text… well… there was some text to work as the first draft :-)

JenniferRM 18 Feb 2010 18:42 UTC
0 points
in reply to: BenAlbahari’s comment on: You’re Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof
Thanks, Michael and Ben, for pulling those details out!

I read, learned, and then joined the Thorium Energy Alliance FB group that was mentioned but not yet linked so I could help with the viral promotion.

JenniferRM 20 Feb 2010 8:33 UTC
6 points
in reply to: RobinZ’s comment on: Things You Can’t Countersignal
Seriously?

JenniferRM 22 Feb 2010 5:30 UTC
1 point
on: Akrasia Tactics Review
See many other comments about the goodness of Leechblock and the idea of “reading holes” that are deeper than they look I looked into the three tools listed for crippling one’s internet. I found that page addict appears to be unreliable and ended up not installing it.

Freedom is for Macs and therefore not usable by me.

I skimmed through many Leechblock reviews checking to see if a competitor was ever mentioned that might be better. I saw no mention of competition but there were a lot of rave reviews and few complaints so I’m installing and testing it.

No input to integrate back into the OP here, but I write up this comment in case others wanted to piggyback on my due diligence :-)

JenniferRM 12 Mar 2010 1:32 UTC
7 points
in reply to: JustinShovelain’s comment on: Individual vs. Group Epistemic Rationality
Having read this paper in the past I’d encourage people to look into it.

It offers the case of stomach ulcer etiology. A study many decades ago came to the conclusion that bacteria were not the cause of ulcers (the study was reasonably thorough, it just missed some details) and that lead no one to do research in the area because the payoff of confirming a theory that was very likely to be right was so low.

This affected many many people. Ulcers caused by H. Pylori can generally be treated simply with antibiotics and some pepto for the symptoms, but for lack of this treatment many people suffered chronic ulcers for decades.

After the example, the paper develops a model for both the speed of scientific progress and the likelihood of a community settling on a wrong conclusion based on the social graph of the researchers. It shows that communities where everyone knows of everyone else’s research results converge more swiftly but are more likely to make group errors. By contrast, sparsely connected communities converge more slowly but are less likely to make substantive errors.

Part of the trick here (not really highlighted in the paper) is the way that hearing everyone’s latest results is selfishly beneficial for researchers who are rewarded for personally answering “the biggest open question in their field” whereas people whose position in a social graph of knowledge workers is more marginal are likely to be working on questions where the social utility relative to personal career utility is more pro-social than is usual.

Most marginal researchers will gain no significant benefits, of course, because they’ll simply confirm the answers that central researchers were already assuming based on a single study they heard about once. Romantically considered, these people are sort of the unsung heroes of science… the patent clerks who didn’t come up with a theory of relativity even if they were looking in plausible places. But the big surprises and big career boosts are likely to come from these sorts of researchers, not from the mainstream. Very dramatic :-)

Note, however, that this is not necessarily a reason to pat yourself on the back for being scientifically isolated. The total utility (social + personal) of marginal work may still be substantially lower than mainstream pursuit of the “lowest hanging open question based on all known evidence”.

I think the real social coordination question is more about trying to calculate the value of information for various possible experiments and then socially optimize this by having people work on the biggest question for which they are more suited than any other available researcher. Right now I think science tends to have boom and bust cycles where many research teams all jump on the biggest lowest hanging open question and the first to publish ends up in Science or Nature and the slower teams end up publishing in lesser journals (and in some sense their work may be considered retrospectively wasteful). We can hope that this flurry of research reached the right answer, because the researchers in the field are likely to consider further replication work to be a waste of their grant dollars.

JenniferRM 12 Mar 2010 3:03 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Clippy’s comment on: Open Thread: March 2010
Questions:
1. Would you be open to help working through the problem?
2. Do you have an estimate for the value of information in answering the new questions you face?
3. Given that your previously assumed “life purpose” is in a state of some confusion, what are your thoughts about abstract issues that apply to “life purposes in general”? For example, if there are several equally plausible theories of “correct paper clipping” that you might choose between, would you consider temporarily or permanently weighing one or the other of them more based on negotiating with outside parties who prefer one theory to another based on their own values?