“The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses”
-- Francis Bacon
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5741-the-root-of-all-superstition-is-that-men-observe-when
johnlawrenceaspden
Karma: 1,694
A Medical Mystery: Thyroid Hormones, Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia
The audience here is mainly Americans so you might want to add an explicit sarcasm tag.
I mentioned it only because it seems to have been a unique triumph for Less Wrong. I’d read about the case, and thought nothing of it particularly. And then people here started saying “Look at it from a probabilistic point of view”, and so I did, and after a few hours head-scratching and diagram-drawing I realized that it was almost certainly a miscarriage.
I mentioned this to a few people I know, and they reacted pretty well as you’d expect to a middle-aged man suddenly getting a bee in his bonnet about a high-profile sex murder case involving pretty girls.
When she was eventually acquitted, various people said “How did you do that?”. And the mathematically minded types were quite impressed with the answer, while the muggles think I’ve got some sort of incomprehensible maths-witchcraft thing that I can do to find out the truth.
Which is exactly the sort of thing you might want to sell, if you can find a way to teach it.
Thank you Luke for this beautifully written post.
A while ago I saw a kindly waitress give my friend’s two year old daughter a small cookie in a restaurant. Various emotions flickered across her tiny face, and then she made a decision, accompanied by a small smile.
She broke the cookie into three pieces and gave them to her brothers. Completely unprompted.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I asked my friend, who is a lecturer in experimental psychology, whether altruism was normal amongst very young siblings.
He looked a bit smug and said “Well we put a lot of reinforcement into that.”
I hadn’t really thought about what that meant until now. Your clear writing has made it obvious.
As a result of your post, I think I’m going to try deliberately modifying some of my own behaviours this way, and maybe try the techniques on some friends. (The first time, by the way, that I’ve changed my behaviour as a result of reading less wrong, rather than just treating it as philosophical crack.)
For friends it seems that sincere praise / avoiding criticism would be good, but what would you recommend as rewards to self? I’m pretty sure that nicotine and pizza slices would work for me, but I’m also sure that those aren’t things I want to do more of.
I live in Cambridge in England. It’s a small town which until recently was dominated by its famous university. Everyone here is very clever (the local bar staff are usually writing up PhDs, the local juvenile delinquents are the sons and daughters of academics). And it’s lovely.
Every time I go somewhere else I’m just bewildered by how stupid people are. And I really hate it. Whenever I leave Cambridge for more than a couple of days I pine for it and long for proper conversations where people can think straight.
It’s probably true that if I went and lived somewhere else, then qualifications that are commonplaces here would grant me some sort of raised status for free, and I can believe that might lead to a long-term increase in happiness. But there’s no way I’d ever be able to do it. Within a week of arriving here I knew I’d probably never leave.
When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it. This is knowledge.
Confucius, Analects
Don’t worry, Eliezer, there’s almost certainly a configuration of particles where something that remembers being you also remembers surviving the singularity. And in that universe your heroic attempts were very likely a principal reason why the catastrophe didn’t happen. All that’s left is arguing about the relative measure.
Even if things don’t work that way, and there really is a single timeline for some incomprehensible reason, you had a proper pop, and you and MIRI have done some fascinating bits of maths, and produced some really inspired philosophical essays, and through them attracted a large number of followers, many of whom have done excellent stuff.
I’ve enjoyed everything you’ve ever written, and I’ve really missed your voice over the last few years.
It’s not your fault that the universe set you an insurmountable challenge, or that you’re surrounded by the sorts of people who are clever enough to build a God and stupid enough to do it in spite of fairly clear warnings.
Honestly, even if you were in some sort of Groundhog Day setup, what on earth were you supposed to do? The ancients tell us that it takes many thousands of years just to seduce Andie MacDowell, and that doesn’t even look hard.
I argued publicly with my German teacher about the derivation of ‘case’ in class. At the beginning of the next lesson, she started with an admission that she’d been wrong and I’d been right. In conceding to a twelve year old on her home ground in front of a class of other children that her job was to control, she taught me an awesome lesson about honesty and humility. I held her in huge respect after that and was her ally ever after. Thank you Ms Eyre.
The Proof of Doom
A data point: My father bought me a beautiful and very conservative black suit for my Grandfather’s funeral around 1994 when I was still a student. I liked it very much and wore it a lot.
The other day, looking for something to wear to a wedding, I dug it out and tried it on. It makes me look like a character from an 80′s rock video, or possibly an episode of “Miami Vice”, and I wouldn’t be seen dead in it.
From which I conclude not only that there is fashion even in the most sober of men’s clothing, but that I am aware of it in some way.
Both these conclusions surprised me.
I did judo as a child. At first it was because my parents thought I’d develop physical self-confidence that way. It worked (and judo’s something I’d recommend to any boy), but it doesn’t take much training before you can win fights against most people. After that you stay interested because you want to beat other people at judo, just like any other sport.
So you might sell your rationality dojos as being about winning arguments, but pretty soon I imagine that the practitioners might get more interested in being right.
Most people will get very competitive the minute they’ve got something they can measure. Is there any form of transport which isn’t raced? And most non-competitive people will get very competitive the moment they’re in a fight they can win.
Suddenly I’m imagining a room where the sensei is describing the Amanda Knox case, and the students are asking him questions and debating with each other, and after all the talking is done, people place and take bets on the result at various odds, and then the sensei reveals the actual answer and the correct reasoning. And ranking points are transferred accordingly, and there is a ladder on the wall where names are listed in order with the scores.
I already reckon I could seriously enjoy such a game. Who wants to play?
Why not do something like the Clay Prize for Mathematics? Offer gargantuan sums for progress on particular subproblems like corrigibility, or inner alignment, or coming up with new reasons why it’s even harder than it already looks, or new frameworks for attacking the problem.
Let MIRI be the judge, and make it so that even the most trivial progress gets a fat cheque. (A few thousand for pointing out typos in MIRI papers seems fair)
It should be obviously easy money even to clever undergraduate compscis.
That should inspire vast numbers of people to do the research instead of their day jobs, which would obviously be great news.
That will likely lead to companies banning their staff from thinking about the problem, which is the best possible publicity. Nothing gets one of us thinking like being told to not think about something.
It might even produce some progress (even better!!).
But what it will likely really do is convince everyone that alignment is the same sort of problem as P=NP, or the Riemann Hypothesis.
Not lying. Saying a thing in such a way that it’s impossible to tell whether he believes it or not, and doing that explicitly.
Seems a very honest thing to do to me, if you have a thing you want to say, but do not want people to know whether you believe it or not. As to the why of that, I have no idea. But I do not feel deceived.
Experimental Fat Loss
I totally get where you’re coming from, and if I thought the chance of doom was 1% I’d say “full speed ahead!”
As it is, at fifty-three years old, I’m one of the corpses I’m prepared to throw on the pile to stop AI.
The “bribe” I require is several OOMs more money invested into radical life extension research
Hell yes. That’s been needed rather urgently for a while now.
This sounds a bit like a university.
The Thyroid Madness : Core Argument, Evidence, Probabilities and Predictions
It is not obvious at all that ‘AI aligned with its human creators’ is actually better than Clippy.
It’s pretty obvious to me, but then I am a human being. I would like to live in the sort of world that human beings would like to live in.
When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny’d myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear’d or seem’d to me some difference, etc.
I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag’d in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos’d my opinions procur’d them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail’d with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.
Benjamin Franklin