I’ve found that theft, when it comes to worldbuilding, is cheaper and more effective than making things up wholesale. Or at least less prone to producing apostrophe stew.
Nornagest
Howdy. I’ve been reading this blog for several months, but I’m hoping that having an identity on this site will provide incentives to internalize its logic; I’ve found in the past that it’s easy for knowledge to fly away when you don’t have a short-term stake in understanding it. Of course, that introduces its own potential for bias, but you’ve got to start somewhere.
Demographically, I’m a software engineer in my mid-to-late twenties living in the SF Bay Area. I spent some time studying classical AI while I was working on my undergraduate degree, but I’ve recently developed an interest in nonclassical methods; I also have interests in game theory, economics, and game design. I’m additionally a fairly serious martial artist, which informs many aspects of my thinking.
I have a fairly strong aversion to calling myself an “-ist” of any kind, but I can label myself a reductive materialist without cringing.
My name’s Brian. I’m posting under a handle because I expect more people I’d encounter here to have associations attached to the handle than to my actual name.
I’ve met a few people on TVTropes who claim to be playing a villain role or something roughly cognate to one in real life, without having any particular higher-level reason for doing so in mind; the infamous Troper Tales pages are a particularly fruitful source of examples, although it’s likely that a lot of the more extreme ones come out of attempts at trolling.
Even if we discount active attempts at deception, that site selects for people who spend a lot of time thinking about character types, and additionally has the right demographics for many of them to put an excessively high priority on looking cool; it’s wise to take this sort of character identification with several grains of salt. As best I can tell the motivations involved aren’t usually all that villainous relative to most external observers, but it’s self-image that’s at issue here.
I think it might be productive to taboo “intelligence” here. It’s pretty clear that any reasonably large organization has more raw computational power at its disposal than any individual—but you need to make some nontrivial assumptions to say that organizations are better on average at allocating that power, or at making and acting on predictions.
There are any number of organization-specific failures of rationality—groupthink, the Peter Principle, etc. It’s not immediately clear to me under what circumstances these would outweigh the corresponding benefits for the classes of problem that are being discussed, although I suspect organizations would still outperform individuals most of the time (with some substantial caveats).
It’s not entirely clear, but I get the impression that the OP is mainly concerned with how efficiently organizational effort satisfies our long-term preferences. If I’m right, then specifying the goal precisely would amount to solving the “meaning of right” problem, which is probably why the post seems a little muddled.
As to organizational vs. individual rationality, I broadly AWYC—but with the caveats that the optimal organizational design is not identical for all problems, and that I don’t have anything approaching a proof.
Lottery tickets exploit a completely different failure of rationality, that being our difficulties with small probabilities and big numbers, and our problems dealing with scale more generally. (ETA: The fantasies commonly cited in the context of lotteries’ “true value” are a symptom of this failure.) It’s not hard to come up with a game-theoretic agent that maximizes its payoffs against that kind of math. Second-guessing other agents’ models is considerably harder.
I haven’t given much thought to this particular problem for a while, but my impression is that Newcomb exposes an exploit in simpler decision theories that’s related to that kind of recursive modeling: naively, if you trust Omega’s judgment of your psychology, you pick the one-box option, and if you don’t, you pick up both boxes. Omega’s track record gives us an excellent reason to trust its judgment from a probabilistic perspective, but it’s trickier to come up with an algorithm that stabilizes on that solution without immediately trying to outdo itself.
Interesting question.
I’ve forgotten which page convinced me to start reading this site in earnest. It might have been “Generalization from Fictional Evidence”, which is excellent, but that served a rather specific purpose for me and I’m not sure it’d do the same for others.
Looking over some of the sequences now, I think “Positive Bias: Look Into The Dark” might have the right balance of accessible and mind-blowing to hook a layman of no more than average mathematical sophistication. The 2-4-6 task is one of the more elegant ways of demonstrating both bias and possible countermeasures that I’ve encountered here.
Insurance is as far as I can tell a hedge with particularly high overhead, but it is a hedge. You’re paying to reduce your exposure to unwanted risk—a move that as you correctly deduce averages out to putting less money in your pocket, but which can nonetheless be quite rational when you take into account the Gambler’s Ruin and similar effects.
There’s also the psychological effects of risk to consider, as well as the diminishing-returns effect that TobyBartels mentioned.
Banality’s a recurring Vonnegut theme. Reading that exchange, I got the impression that he’s using the science-destroys-wonder meme as a way of expressing it, just like manipulating human history in order to deliver a minor spaceship part or tagging the firebombing of Dresden with “so it goes”. We shouldn’t read too much into the fact that the characters aren’t resentful of it; Vonnegut’s characters never are.
I’m not sure we have enough evidence to say that Vonnegut thought we should be resentful towards science for spoiling the beauty and terror of the unknown, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t regard that kind of spoiler—or indifference to it—as a positive thing. And that seems to me like it maps pretty well to “the dull catalogue of common things”.
I’m not entirely sure how belief in belief fits in here. The dragon’s unlucky host doesn’t merely believe in belief: as you go out of your way to point out, he has excellent evidence of the creature’s existence and can make predictions based on it. His fatal error is of a different category: rather than adopting a belief for signaling reasons and constructing a model which excuses him from providing empirical evidence for it, he’s constructed a working empirical model and failed to note some of its likely consequences.
An imperfect model of an empirical reality can show fatal gaps when applied to the real world. But that’s not the error of a tithing churchgoer whose concern for his immortal soul disappears in the face of a tempting Tag Heuer watch; it’s the error of a novice pilot who fails to pull out of a tailspin, or of a novice chemist who mistakenly attempts to douse a sodium fire with a water-based foam. A level-one error, in other words, whereas belief in belief would be level zero or off the scale entirely.
Yeah, that clarifies some things. Reading over the OP, I note with some embarrassment that you never used the phrase “belief in belief” in the body text—but I also note that Mass_Driver didn’t, either.
“Understanding Your Understanding” does a pretty good job of illustrating the levels of belief, but now I’m starting to think that it might be a good idea to look at the same scale from the perspective of expected error types, not just the warning signs the article already includes.
Hmm. If you visualize meaning as a mapping between representation space and some subset of expectation space, “this English sentence has six words” forms a tight little loop disconnected from the rest of the universe. That seems to me like as good an indication as any that the statement has no useful consequences.
The distinction between “meaningless” and “trivial” seems pretty semantic to me.
Given your definitions, that makes sense. One of the points I was trying to make, though, is that “meaningless” is one of those words with several related but slightly different interpretations, and that a lot of the trouble in this thread seems to have come from conflicts between those interpretations. In particular, a lot of the people here seem to be using it to mean “lacks evidential value” without making a distinction between the cases you do.
As to which definition to use: I’d say it depends on what we’re looking at. If we’re trying to figure out the internal properties of the logical system we’re working with, it’s quite important to make a distinction between cata!trivial and cata!meaningless statements; the latter give us information about the system that the former don’t. If we’re looking at the external consequences of the system, though, the two seem pretty much equivalent to me—in both cases we can’t productively take truth or falsity into account..
Beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you.
(Developed in the context of biblical interpretation, of course. But despite my nontheism, I’ve found the principle behind it to be widely applicable.)
What story was that?
In any case, that’s rather remarkably bizarre. I’m trying to think of a real-life condition for which it’d work as an allegory, and coming up with absolutely nothing—at least without involving some of the more extreme forms of genital mutilation, and I doubt Card’s trying to defend those.
I suppose that makes a twisted kind of sense. I’d been exposed to the idea before (though I wouldn’t have called it pervasive in the cultural milieu I grew up in), but didn’t make the connection—possibly because Card’s setup doesn’t seem to work if sex/loss of virginity is ordinarily painful or unpleasant.
It’s odd to write an allegory which implicitly rejects the real-life idea it’s supposed to point to (ETA: as opposed to tactfully ignoring it). I suppose Card might be trying to write for an audience that he assumes to have already rejected it, but now I feel like I’m making too many speculative leaps to be confident of my predictions.
With this in mind, I suppose the difficult part would be correctly identifying the range you’re climbing.
IAWTC in principle, but have noticed in practice that similarly formed questions almost always segue into an appeal to popularity or an appeal to uncertainty. Since dealing with these arguments is time-consuming and frustrating (they’re clearly fallacious, but that’s not obvious to most audiences), it usually works better to reject the premises at step one.
Same goes for most trolleylike problems posed in casual debate.
So you’re essentially using politeness signals as a way of dodging fundamental attribution error. This seems to be a pretty useful guideline for situations in which conspicuous politeness-signaling could be expected to be productive: more intimacy means better motivational models and thus less expectation of politeness, while more stressful situations or greater cultural or situational distance between actors means their model of you is on average less reliable and increases politeness’s relative importance. I can’t think of any situations offhand where these predictions would fail.
It ignores the status and situational formality dimensions, though. I’ve had friends working in retail tell me that they feel awkward when a customer thanks them for an ordinary transaction, which probably comes out of a violation of status expectations—of course, I thank clerks anyway.
I wrote this about a month ago for a game I help run. It is not specifically a rationalist story, but its moral is about as rationalist as it gets. Hopefully it’ll stay reasonably accessible out of context.
The Fable of the Two Swords
Long ago, a band of the People grazed their herds on cursed and blighted land. With each season the plains withered, the blades of grass growing thin and crumpled like parchment cast into flames; and the band’s cattle ate the grass, and starved, and bore no calves. At last the elders of the band called together its greatest hunters and sent forth them in all directions, each seeking new lands as yet unfounded.
The youngest among them was Sarai, and she rode to the east, taking with her the herdswoman Tamar, her friend since childhood; and her sword and her bow; and two good horses. They crossed many miles of wasted land, and many more of good land grazed by other bands with whom they were at peace. They rode beside pillars of stone, and over cracked expanses of unsown earth, and through copses of green trees. Yet for many days they found nothing.
A score of nights and a night they traveled, and at last they came to the fires of another band of the People. As they broke bread with the newcomers, Sarai asked its Wayfinder if there was land to be settled: a question already growing weary to the travelers, for they had asked the same of the last band and the one before. The old man shook his quilled and silvered braids, a gesture well-worn to Sarai; yet the guise of sorrow and fear came over his face as he said:
“Not far to the east there is a low place in the plains, girdled round with hills and dotted with mounds of hollow earth. And from ridge to ridge there are no campfires of the People, and neither are the stars obscured by the smoke of burning dung; yet do not rejoice, little sisters, for it is a cursed place.
“A tribe of demons dwells in the hollow mounds, children of the world’s end of which our parents all have told, and they are without thought or mercy. Fire smolders in their hair and the manes of their horses; and hard and bony are their fanged faces; and fiery lashes they snap as they come ravening. Their chief carries a sword no man could wield, blazing with flames, and none dare stand against him.
“Ride no further, little ones. Even as close as we camp now, we are in danger; we dare not stray any closer, lest they rob us of our cattle and our children. So I have declared, for the safety of my band, and so do the elders agree.”
Sarai fell silent at this, and thanked the Wayfinder for his counsel, and chose a place near the fire to sleep. Yet she remained awake, and as the moon rose she crept to the edges of the camp to gather her thoughts.
There, as she gazed into the tall grass beyond, she for a moment glimpsed a face like a horse’s skull, limned in ruddy flame. Startled, she cried out, and a sentry hurried at her cry. But the specter was gone in the space of a breath, and when the man arrived nothing remained but bent grass and the smell of smoke.
She could not sleep for her fears, tossing and turning throughout the night. Yet the next morning, as the band gathered for the morning meal, she stood by the fire, and drew her sword, and spoke:
“Look at my sword.
“You do not see a warrior’s birthright, nor a blacksmith’s pride, nor a chieftain’s comfort. You see an edge, a tool made only for cutting. I could perhaps use a longer sword, or a thicker, or a finer, but it makes no difference; whatever the blade, I must think only of cutting my enemy, or I will surely die at her hands.
“Wield your mind as you would a sword. Do not think of fears or hopes, of what has been or what may be; think only of cutting to the heart of what lies before you.
“Come with me to the east, and we will drive out these demons. Any man or woman of you who stands with me stands to gain an honored place in my Thousand Cranes Band, and the first choice of spoils in the hunts to come.”
The Wayfinder turned away, making a sign against evil as he did so, and most of the band turned with him. But a scarce handful of hunters, the young or the foolish or the quick-thinking, raised their weapons and met Sarai’s gaze.
And when the sun set, the small band rode for the hollow mounds.
They did not have far to ride. Soon they crested the first of the hills of which the Wayfinder had spoken; and soon after they were among the hollow mounds, buzzing in the twilight with web-winged insects. The band slowed there, and closed tightly about each other, and the demons at once were upon them.
The spirits were as the Wayfinder had said. Their horses were black and gaunt, and their tattered manes flickered with fire. Their faces were the skulls of cattle, and horses, and buffalo, and fire glittered in their long, loose hair. They were robed in black, and raised lashes of fire as they closed with a shrill, warbling cry.
Their leader was more terrible still: tall as a horseman’s spear, swathed in darkness, his head was the pale skull of a crocodile. Flames blazed from his sword, long and heavy as a barge’s oar, as he held it aloft and howled.
Sarai’s band trembled, teetering for a moment on the verge of flight. Yet Sarai steeled herself and urged her horse forward, charging headlong at the fanged monstrosity.
Flames snapped at her from the demons’ lashes, but she was not daunted. Soon she had broken through the ring of evil spirits; and soon after she had met their chief, who raised his flaming sword like a lance to meet her.
Steel clashed, scattering motes of fire. Sarai’s coat charred, and her horse spooked and reared; yet she held firm, bringing her blade back to meet the cumbersome arc of the demon’s sword a second and a third time.
On the fourth, the demon blade shattered.
The demon recoiled. Dropping the broken hilt, he drew a long dagger; but Sarai pressed her attack, striking two blows for each of the spirit’s. At once the dagger spun to the ground with the demon’s fingers, and Sarai drove the point of her sword with all her strength through the bony mask and into the eye beyond.
For a mask it was, shaped to accommodate the human face beneath and trailing strips of thin-beaten copper, which glinted in the flames of the pitch-coated blade. The man’s height was true, yet his limbs were twisted and overgrown, and his baleful robe was but tattered cloth. And the sound he made as he died was not a demon’s ululation but a man’s mortal scream.
The false demons broke then, dropping their trickster’s masks and charlatan’s chains as they fled. And in the shadow of the hollow mounds the new hunters of Thousand Cranes Band slept for the first time; and that night each man and woman of them resolved forever to reason as with a blade.