Nebu

Karma: 693

Nebu 9 Mar 2009 16:26 UTC
38 points
on: Simultaneously Right and Wrong

In order to handicap, subjects must have an inaccurate assessment of their own abilities. Otherwise, there’s no self-esteem to protect. If I believe my IQ is 80, and I get 80 on an IQ test, I have no incentive to make excuses to myself, or to try to explain away the results. The only time I would want to explain away the results as based on some external factor was if I’d been going around thinking my real IQ was 100.

I used to be pretty good at this videogame called Dance Dance Revolution (or DDR for short). I’ve won several province-level tournaments (both in my own province and in neighboring tournaments), did official internet rankings and ranked 10th place in North America, and 95th world wide.

People would often ask to play a match against me, and I’d always accept (figuring it was the “polite” thing to do), though I had mixed feelings about it. I very quickly realized it was a losing proposition for me: If I won, nobody noticed or remarked upon it (because I was known to be the “best” in my area), but I figured if I ever lost, people would make a big deal about it.

I often self-handicapped myself. I claimed that this was to make the match more interesting (and I often won despite self-handicap), but sometimes I wondered if perhaps I was also preparing excuses for myself so that if I ever did lose, I could blame the handicaps (and probably do so accurately, since I truly believe I could have beaten them in a “fair” match).

I had the fortune of traveling to Japan and a DDR player named Aaron who had ranked top 3 worldwide. He agreed to play a match with me, and I won the match, but it was very obvious to both of us that I had only won because of a glitch in the machine (basically, the game had unexpected froze and locked up, something I had never seen before, but when the game unfroze, I had been lucky and anticipated this before Aaron had).

So after the match, I turned to him, pulled out my digital camera and jokingly said “I can’t believe I actually beat you. I gotta get a picture of this.” But he had a rather serious look on his face and said something like “No, no pictures.” I was a bit surprised, but I put away my camera. We didn’t talk about it, but I suspected that I understood how he felt. I often felt like my reputation as the best DDR player in my province was constantly under attack. I figured he felt the same way, except world-wide, instead of provincially.

Nebu 9 Mar 2009 16:36 UTC
26 points
0
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist

the source of the fear can’t be entirely evolutionary—I could be not the least bit afraid of the dark in normal life but become very afraid when in a supposedly haunted area.

The human brain has evolved several mechanisms that are useful for detecting other agents, but which sometimes produce false-positives. For example, we have some sort of hardware specifically dedicated to recognizing faces (presumably detect the pattern of two eyes, a nose and a mouth). There exist people who have damage to their brain such that they seem mentally perfectly normal, except that they have trouble detecting people in photographs, for example.

When this hardware produces a false positive, then at some (subconcious?) level, you are detecting that there is someone here. But when you use your conscious mind to scan your environment, you don’t see anyone. This is what causes unease, and the feeling of “hauntedness”.

I believe there’s also a part of the brain which has evolved to detect agency (perhaps to help with dealing with “Theory of Mind” and emulating other people’s minds for social purposes?) and “false positives” in detecting agency may be one explanation of religion.

Nebu 9 Mar 2009 17:17 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Information cascades
I think the explanation for this on LessWrong is the same as the explanation on Reddit (which, from what I understand, served as the code base for LW).

People don’t have unlimited time, and they are willing to spend time on LW reading good posts, but unwilling to waste time reading bad posts. Thus many people will somehow filter lower posts (I do so by simply sorting the posts from highest rated to lowest rated, and read until I run out of time or get bored).

If many people do this, then posts which are “generally agreed as good” will then to shoot up as everyone votes them up. Posts which are bad will generally drop down to the filter point (usually around 0), and then stay there rather than go further below.

If everyone voted on every post, you would expected bad posts to continue dropping down, and a post which was “generally agreed as bad” would have just as large a magnitude as posts which are “generally agreed as good”, except in the negative direction.

But we don’t see posts with a score of −23. They seem to either be neutral, or good. So my theory that people filter to only see (and thus only vote on) neutral or better article seems to be able to predict what actually happens with the scores.

Nebu 9 Mar 2009 17:48 UTC
5 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Does blind review slow down science?

Reviewers are likely to have a hard time shooting down the work of anyone they know personally, and in specialized sciences, the probability that a paper was written by a friend or former colleague of the reviewer is high enough to be a problem.

On the other hand, people have different, and often recognizable writing styles. If you’re in a specialized science with a small enough circle, then you may be able to recognize a paper written by your friend (or your foe!) even though it was anonymized.

Or maybe you may even know that your friend (or foe?) is working on a paper on a specific topic just from reading their blog/Facebook/Twitter/etc.

Nebu 9 Mar 2009 18:04 UTC
15 points
on: Unteachable Excellence
When I combine the following ideas:

Just anyone can do it, so it must not be important.

You will, at best, learn a few useful tricks that a lot of other people can learn as well, and that won’t put you anywhere near the delicious high status of the superstar.

(If someone actually does come up with a new teachable supertrick, so that civilization itself is about to take another lurching step forward, then you should expect to have a lot of fellow superstars by the time you’re done learning!)

I realize that there are “supertricks”; and as Eliezer noted, there’s a lot of fellow superstars all around us using these supertricks all the time.

These tricks include things like “written language”, “using tools”, “cooking food”, etc. People who don’t use these supertrick probably see the people who do as superstars (at least relative to them).

We all know and use these supertricks, so we don’t see each other as being superstars, and we don’t see these tricks as being supertricks.

If you define excellence as being unusually good at something—rare by definition—then, supertricks are inherently unteachable. If they were teachable, everyone woudl learn it, and the related skills would no longer be rare, and thus no longer be “excellent” under this definition.

Under this definition, supertricks are only super because they are unteachable.

Nebu 10 Mar 2009 18:55 UTC
7 points
on: You May Already Be A Sinner
Interestingly enough (to me, at least), I would live a life of sin, and yet one-box. Now I’m trying to come up with justifications for this gut reaction.

The best I can come up with so far is that I can see God having a “causal” relationship towards me. That is, I am exactly what I am because God made me that way. The Alien, however, isn’t causal, merely observational. It didn’t cause me to choose whether to one-box or two-box, it simply observes me and determines which I would do.

The reason I would sin is because it seems like the way the hypothetical situation is set up, we’re assuming predestination, which seems to make me really not worry to hard about putting effort towards anything. If I was supposed to “fight” predestination, then things will turn out so that I do fight predestination. But until that happens, why not simply take the path of least resistance (especially since in a predestined universe, you cannot offer up any resistance at all) and enjoy whatever pleasures you wish? Language is failing me here, because I’m speaking as if I can actually make decisions or control my actions, but obviously I can’t.

Also, it might be important to clarify that I would choose “sin” only in this hypothetical world where I somehow know with certainty that the universe was predestined. In reality, I’d be unsure about whether or not the universe was predestined, and thus wouldn’t automatically choose “sin”.

Contrast this with the Newcomb problem, where there is a possibility that I have “free will” or some sort of control over my actions. In this scenario, I want to be the type of agent whom the alien will reward, and I know the alien rewards one boxers, and so I choose to be a one boxer.

I can sense all sort of inconsistencies in my reasoning, and I can sense ways of making these inconsistencies more salient E.g. the alien is able to predict whether I will one-box or two-box before human life has evolved, and thus plants the two boxes somewhere on Earth during the dinosaur age in a location it knows no one will discover except for me (or perhaps plants it on Neptune, but sets up some chain of events so that the boxes will arrive to me by the time I’m in my mid-20s). Since the alien infallibly knew whether I would one-box or two-box, can I really in any sense say that my universe is not predestined?

Clearly there is confusion in my mind that I have to meditate upon and clear up.

Nebu 12 Mar 2009 14:52 UTC
52 points
on: Raising the Sanity Waterline
I already mentioned this as a comment to another post, but it’s worth repeating here: The human brain has evolved some “dedicated hardware” for accelerating certain tasks.

I already mentioned in that other post that one such hardware was for recognizing faces, and that false-positives generated by this hardware caused us have a feeling of hauntedness and ghosts (because the brain receives a subconscious signal indicating the presence of a face, but consciously looking around we see no one around).

Another such hardware (which I only briefly alluded to in the other post) was “agency detection”. I.e. trying to figure out whether a certain event occurred “naturally”, or because another agent (a friend, a foe, or a neutral?) caused it to happen. False positives from this hardware would cause us to “detect agency” where none was, and if the event seems something way out of the capacity for a human to control, and since humans seem to be the most powerful “natural” beings in the universe, the agent in question must be something supernatural, like God.

I don’t have all the details worked out, but it seems plausible that agency-detection could have been naturally selected for, perhaps to be able to integrate better into a society, and to help with knowing when it is appropriate to cooperate and when it is appropriate to defect. It’s a useful skill to be able to differentiate between “something good happened to me, because this person wanted something good to happen to me and made it happen. They cooperated (successfully). I should become their friend.” versus “something good happened to me, despite this person wanting something bad to happen to me, but it backfired on them. They defected (unsuccessfully). I should be wary of them.”

From there, bring in Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawkideas about tag-along selection, and it seems like religion really may be a tag-along evolutionary attribute.

Anyway, I used to be scared of ghosts and the dark and stuff like that, but once I found out about the face-recognition hardware and its false positives (and other hardware, such as sound-location) this fear has almost completely disappeared almost instantaneously.

I was already atheist or agnostic (depending on what definitions you assign to those words) when I found out about the hardware false-positives, so I can’t say for sure whether had I been religious, this would have converted me.

But if it worked at making me stop “believing”[1] in ghosts, then perhaps it could work at making people stop beliving in God as well.

1: Here I am using the term “believe” in the sense of Yvain’s post on haunted rationalists. Like everyone else, I would assert that ghosts didn’t really exist, and would be willing to make a wager that they didn’t exist. And yet, like everyone else, I was still scared of them.

Nebu 12 Mar 2009 15:31 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Daniel_Burfoot’s comment on: Raising the Sanity Waterline

Second, evidence shows that religious people are happier. Now, this happiness research is of course murky, and we should hesitate to make any grand conclusions on the basis of it. But if it is true, it is deeply problematic for the kind of rationality you are advocating. If rationalists should “just win”, and we equate winning with happiness, and the faithful are happier than atheists, then we should all stop reading this blog and start going to church on Sundays.

I think Eliezer Yudkowsky already addressed this point several times on “that other site” (Overcoming Bias). Basically “happiness” is a nice-sounding one word summary of “what people want”, but it’s inaccurate.

Look at the examples of the wish-granting genie/AI. If you wish for “happiness”, it’ll turn you into a pile of orgasmium, basically grey-matter which just experiences infinite pleasure constantly. You’ve got happiness, but it seems like it’s not what most people actually want.

Nebu 12 Mar 2009 15:35 UTC
3 points
in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: The Wrath of Kahneman

Should not that money go to the State?

Why should the money automatically go to the state?

It should probably not go to the claimant because this would encourage spurious lawsuits for the sole purpose of trying to gather lots of money. Assuming a non-corrupt government, it should go to the state (or other level of government) so that it could benefit everybody, e.g. via tax breaks, or more investment in science, medicine, education, etc.

In practice governments are corrupt, so the answer is a bit more complicated. If the money does go to the government, how do we make sure the government isn’t tempted to cause the punishment to become unfairly severe in order to gather more income?

Nebu 13 Mar 2009 17:07 UTC
12 points
on: So you say you’re an altruist...
So I imagined myself at this person’s speech, and found it fairly predictable for the most part. When he said he wanted to ask a few questions before the speech, I knew that the questions would actually be “part of” the speech, and I felt I should put the effort to try to answer them honestly (at least internally, if I were too embarrassed to admit the true answers publicly), as he probably chose the questions to trigger some insight later on.

When he asks if I was 50% confident I would kill myself to save 10, I was pretty torn, and I suspect I would not have resolved the question (and thus not raised my hand) by the time he moved on to the next question.

When he asks if I’m 95% confident I would kill myself to save 10, this was a much easier question. I know I’m not 95% confident and thus did not even consider raising my hand.

When he asks if I would spend 20 years in jail to save 10, my first gut instinct was to raise my hand, and I think I would have raised my hand. But, with my hand still in the air, I think I would immediately start regretting it, as I know that I, personally, am terrible at intuiting time duration, and started to wonder “how long is 20 years, really? That’s practically my whole life so far… am I really willing to give up almost as much time as all the time I’ve ever experienced so far?”

“Too late”, I imagined thinking to myself, “he’s moved on to the next question.” Would I live in eternal poverty to save 10? This again was an easy answer: definitely not. If 20 years was uncomfortably long, there’s no way I’d live 60-80, or longer (if I sign up for cryonics?) without being able to afford videogames, internet access, etc.

And I’d at first be surprised by the number of hands that went up, but then I’d figure this is typical of neurotypicals (I’m on the autistic spectrum), who don’t say what they mean, and don’t even realize they don’t mean what they are saying.

Then, as soon as the speaker said

In both situations if the people die, you will be rich; if they live, you will be poor, and it is within your power to decide which it is to be. In either situation if you decide that they should die in order that you can be rich, you have put your happiness, or not actually even that, you have put material riches for yourself above 10 people’s lives.

I successfully predicted that this speech would be about donating money to the poor.

So to answer the implied question:

I’d be really interested to hear what the Less Wrong community thinks of this.

I can tell you that my thoughts really didn’t have much to do with poverty, morality, charities or Africa, but a lot more to do with people (in general, not just neurotypicals) not actually thinking about nor realizing what it is that they are saying. As an Autist, I “knew” on some level that NTs weren’t doing this intentionally, but this speech actually really hit me hard with the idea that they really weren’t doing it intentionally.

This really reminds me of Eliezer’s Cached Thought concept.

the next time you hear someone unhesitatingly repeating a meme you think is silly or false, you’ll think, “Cached thoughts.” My belief is now there in your mind, waiting to complete the pattern. But is it true? Don’t let your mind complete the pattern! Think!

Nebu 13 Mar 2009 17:13 UTC
5 points
on: Reality vs Virtual Reality

The “reality” of the game, while being superficially similar to the reality of the player, must at the same time be much simpler. Hence three-dimensional humans play in the two-dimensional world.

I disagree with this “axiom”. Most VR games that exist today simulate or model a 3D environment. It’s only the “rendering” that eventually becomes 2D because most of us have 2D monitors. But the model itself is in 3D, and as our display technology improves, we may eventually render to 3D, without needing to change anything about our model.

1) The game protagonists would resemble the players. Yet, the need for simplification would require them to be three-dimensional.

And so I suspect that creatures in a 4D world playing VR games would have their games model a 4D world, but perhaps would only render to 3D (because that’s what their “flat” screens are capable of displaying). If our universe were merely a simulated model in their game, we would expect our universe to be 4D.

Nebu 13 Mar 2009 18:01 UTC
1 point
in reply to: cleonid’s comment on: Reality vs Virtual Reality
See games such as Homeworld or Sins of the Solar Empire. These take place in 3D environments (outer space) with no “hard walls”: rather than explicitly forbidding you from leaving the “game zone”, there simply is no point to. There’s so much empty space between galaxies that you would never be able to fly from one galaxy to another before getting terribly bored with the game. So players are strongly motivated to stay within the star systems where the real action is.

Also, in the same way you can construct a finite but boundary-less 2D universe for your game (e.g. a universe on the surface of a sphere, or a universe on the surface of a torus), you can also construct a finite but boundary-less 3D universe for your game.

Nebu 16 Mar 2009 17:07 UTC
17 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Epistemic Viciousness
Maybe instead of a fight, form it as a riddle:

The master gives an argument for creationism. The “homework” is for the student to understand why this argument is invalid.

Every now and then, just to mix things up, the master would give an argument for a statement which actually turns out to be true, to make sure that the student is actually searching for truth, and not just arbitrary counter-arguments to whatever it is the master said.

Nebu 16 Mar 2009 17:31 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Emile’s comment on: 3 Levels of Rationality Verification
Voted up if only because this reads like a description for the first reality TV show I would actually want to watch.

Nebu 16 Mar 2009 18:17 UTC
9 points
on: Soulless morality

Someone says you should send all your money to Africa, because this will result in more human lives.

To which I would respond “Okay, but is that necessarily a good thing?”

Here you are, spending a part of your precious life reading Less Wrong. If you spend 10% of your life on the Web, you are saying that that activity is worth at least 1/10th of a life, and that lives with no access to the Web are worth less than lives with access. If you value rationality, then lives lived rationally are more valuable than lives lived irrationally. If you think something has a value, you have to give it the same value in every equation. Not doing so is immoral. You can’t use different value scales for everyday and moral reasoning.

I think many of the reasons I disagree with your post as a whole have kernels in this paragraph.

If I spend 10% of my life on the web, it doesn’t necessarily mean I value going on the web at least by 1/10th of my life. I think the truth is closer to “10% of my time awake, I was bored and happened to have a computer with internet access nearby”. If you offered someone the deal “we will extend your life by 10%, but you may never access the web again”… well, I wouldn’t accept the deal, but I’m sure there exists people who would; people who have spent 10% of their lives on the web.

And just because I spend 10% of my time on the web doesn’t mean I value lives that go on the web more than lives which don’t. This argument is as much of a non-sequitur as saying “People who spend 10% of the their time masturbating value lives involving masturbation more than lives that don’t”.

And I can easily give lives different values, while remaining self consistent and rational. Perhaps I’m selfish and I value my life more than any one else’s lives. If the king had gave me the choice of either I die, or one other person dies, then I’d choose for the other person to die. If it was me against two other people, I’d probably still choose myself, though I’d feel guiltier about it. When it becomes ten is when I really start to hesitate, and when it becomes a million, I guess I really have to give up and allow myself to die.

Unless, of course, the world is already suffering through an overpopulation crisis, in which case by allowing those million to die, I could claim to be acting in the greater good of the world.

Nebu 16 Mar 2009 18:32 UTC
27 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Closet survey #1
I personally know one girl whom, when she was 8, actively went into sex chat rooms and flirted with older men (anywhere from 16 to 40). I don’t think she actually had physical sexual experiences with anyone, though.

I personally know two girls who have had sexual intercourse with adults, one when she was aged 5, the other 8. It was rape in the sense that they were explicitly nonconsentual (they explicitly said didn’t want to do it), but it didn’t traumatized them. One theory might be that “doing stuff you don’t want to do, but adults tell you to do, so you do them anyway” is pretty common at that age (e.g. being forced to clean your room).

I suspect the sex act itself isn’t “pleasurable” for them, but having “sexual relationships” with adults may be pleasurable (since the first-mentioned 8 year old sought it out). It may be seen by many of them as a neutral act (like the 5 and second-mentioned 8 year old) and a form of curious exploration.

This is assuming, for lack of a better term, “gentle loving pedophilia”. The way pedophilia is often portrayed by mainstream media is violent rape, with screaming, kicking and blood. While I don’t personally know of any girl who actually experienced “violent rape pedophilia”, I think it’s safe to assume that they don’t find this pleasurable at all.

Nebu 16 Mar 2009 18:37 UTC
14 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Closet survey #1
I can’t find the article now, but an evolutionary-psychology noticed that the “cooties” concept seems to exist across all cultures (though obviously not always given the name “cooties”), and furthermore noticed that children often don’t consider their siblings to have cooties. I.e. boys will feel that most girls have cooties, but not their sisters.

The psychologist offered this as an explanation: We evolved to find the people we grow up with to be not sexually attractive. This is a mechanism to avoid incest (which can result in genetic problems). However, if you live in a society, you don’t want to find people who grow up with you, but who do not share genes with you, to be sexually unattractive (or else you might find no one within your whole society attractive), and thus this “cooties” sensation was placed by evolution so that we can avoid people of the opposite sex during this critical period so that later on, as adults, we may be sexually attracted to them.

Nebu 16 Mar 2009 19:12 UTC
11 points
in reply to: Sebastian_Hagen’s comment on: Closet survey #1

I don’t know how many people here would agree with the following, but my position on it is extreme relative to the mainstream, so I think it deserves a mention:

As a matter of individual rights as well as for a well working society, all information should be absolutely free; there should be no laws on the collection, distribution or use of information.

Normally, when people say they believe “all information should be free”, I suspect they don’t really mean this, but since you claim your position is very “extreme”, perhaps you really do mean it?

I think information, such as what is the PIN to my bank account, or the password to my LessWrong.com account, should not be freely accessible.

Information privacy is massively overrated; the right to remember, use and distribute valuable information available to a specific entity should always override the right of other entites not to be embarassed or disadvantaged by these acts.

You don’t believe there is value in anonymity? E.g. being able to criticize an oppressive government, without fear of retribution from said government?

Nebu 16 Mar 2009 19:14 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Closet survey #1
In this particular post, I’m upvoting all the comments which make me think. So if I agree with someone’s post, but it’s pretty much a cached-thought for me, I won’t bother upvoting it. And if I strongly disagree with someone, but they’ve forced me to think about why I disagree with them, I upvote it.

(This isn’t the metric I normally use for deciding when to upvote in other LW posts.)

Nebu 16 Mar 2009 19:21 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Annoyance’s comment on: Closet survey #1
Depending on your definition of “justified” and “justifiable”, you may run into the problem that eventually your beliefs depend on other believes that depend on other beliefs, and so on until you reach an axiom. And this axiom may be “unjustifiable” or “unjustified”, but you “need” to believe it in order to have any beliefs at all.

One such axiom may be that your brain is “sane”, in the sense that when it tries to use logic to reason about something, you can trust the conclusion. For example, let’s say your thoughts are “All A are B. C is an A. Therefore C is a B.” Can you trust the conclusion that C is a B? Well, maybe you might revisit your thoughts, starting from the first statement “All A are B”. But wait, was that really the first statement? Here you’re relying on your memory, that you can correctly remember what you were thinking about just 2 seconds ago. Is that belief justified? How could you know?