pdf23ds

Karma: 762

pdf23ds 28 Nov 2006 0:55 UTC
1 point
on: ...What’s a bias, again?
“it seems damn hard to very precisely define exactly what”

Robin, I don’t see why a definition offered in terms of the origin of a phenomenon (“the shape of our mental machinery”) should be any less a definition (or any less precise) than one that directly describes the characteristics of the phenomenon. Why isn’t the former sufficient?

pdf23ds 28 Nov 2006 2:18 UTC
5 points
on: The Martial Art of Rationality
Steve, you’re probably right, but I doubt that’s really a big obstacle. Rationality has plenty of uses, and if anyone wants to teach it for money, they shouldn’t have problems finding ways to promote it, in the long run. Besides, if people want to learn karate to beat people up, why don’t dojos advertise based on that?

But I think that the analogy to martial arts is ill-advised for other reasons. Martial arts is a mostly anachronistic practice when evaluated against its original purpose. If you’re really serious about self-defense nowadays, you get weapons. (Weapons have always been an advantage, but it’s only been for a few hundred years now that they’ve become such a decisive advantage.)

Where are the tools for giving us a rational advantage? Sure, we have plenty of them for bringing knowledge to us quickly. The internet has been pretty successful at that. But what about other prostheses that specifically target our rational acuity?

pdf23ds 2 Dec 2006 0:05 UTC
1 point
on: The Proper Use of Humility
“Most abstract beliefs most people have make pretty much no difference to their actions.”

I’m pretty sure I understand well enough what you’re trying to say. But this statement is literally false, since abstract beliefs include many general knowledge claims. If I were informed that my car had just been run into in the parking lot, that would certainly influence my actions.

Perhaps you mean to restrict “beliefs” to “moral beliefs”? Or maybe you mean “abstract” as in “related to one’s daily life only tenuously, if at all”?

pdf23ds 10 Dec 2006 23:33 UTC
3 points
on: The Modesty Argument
I don’t see how there’s a problem with saying that the Modesty Principle is only ever a good one to follow when conversing with someone you believe to be more or equally rational as yourself. I guess the extreme case to illustrate this would be applying the principle to a conversation with a chatbot.

pdf23ds 22 Jan 2007 21:00 UTC
4 points
on: Outside the Laboratory
“And there goes Walter Mitty and Calvin, then. If it is justifiable to enjoy art or sport, why is it not justifiable to enjoy gambling for its own sake?”

You don’t have to believe (at any level) that there’s a higher chance of you winning than there actually is to enjoy gambling. You just have to consider that the “thrill” payoff inherent in the uncertainty itself is high enough to justify the money that will be statistically spent. I think exactly the same argument could be made about sport.

pdf23ds 22 Jan 2007 21:05 UTC
2 points
on: Outside the Laboratory
OT: Eliezer, what do you think about null hypotheses? E.g. what’s the correct null hypothesis regarding the probability distribution of the size of (cubic) boxes produced by the box factory, where a flat distribution over the length would produce a polynomial distribution over surface area and volume, for instance?

pdf23ds 4 Mar 2007 4:58 UTC
16 points
on: Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
TGGP, I think we have to define “deserve” relative to social consensus—a person deserves something if we aren’t outraged when they get it for one reason or another. (Most people define this based on the consensus of a subset of society—people who share certain values, for instance.) Differences in the concept of “deserve” are one of the fundamental differences (if not the primary difference) between conservatism and liberalism.

pdf23ds 28 Mar 2007 18:06 UTC
16 points
on: Tsuyoku vs. the Egalitarian Instinct
Hmm. I’ve never had this problem. On the other hand, I have had the problem of my sense of self-worth being based in being naturally talented at things, and so when I don’t pick up some new pursuit easily, I tend to get discouraged. Thus, I’m bad at math and don’t read enough science papers. It’s a hard cost/benefit analysis to choose whether to improve your skill at something you’re naturally talented at (and already better than most people at), or some other equally valued skill that you’re not very talented at (and well below average in skill). And the pressure of competition, and the psychological problems caused by perfectionism, have to be dealt with.

pdf23ds 28 Mar 2007 21:37 UTC
0 points
on: Tsuyoku vs. the Egalitarian Instinct
Hal, I wasn’t under the impression that tsuyoku naritai was about the pursuit of happiness or satisfaction. On the contrary, it seems to involve some self-abnegation, in that you’re sacrificing contentment for accomplishment, trading in mediocrity at the cost of self-criticism. I think this is more about honor and perfectionism than happiness. Both of the former seem to be less fashionable nowadays, but that doesn’t mean some people can’t put them before happiness.

pdf23ds 29 Mar 2007 1:21 UTC
1 point
on: Tsuyoku vs. the Egalitarian Instinct
Richard, interesting question. I’m not sure it’s possible to make that choice, though. Can someone with a strong perfectionist element to their personality be happy unless they get over the perfectionism? Perfectionism involves constant self-criticism and assessment, and thus might be incompatible with happiness in the long term. So in order to choose happiness over perfectionism, they’d have to change their personality substantially. That may not be possible, or effective. Then again, mind-altering agents might help you. OCD medication might be an example of this.

As for me, I don’t really have any higher criteria on which to judge between the two options. I don’t have any reason to prefer one over the other. Very driven people might not be generally happy, but they do have a certain sense of pride and accomplishment that some might call happiness, and which isn’t shared in that form by other people. It’s similar to parents of children—they rate their lives as much less happy over the course of their children’s lives, but they express more satisfaction and meaning with their life. I can’t really judge between the conditions, though I have to say that people often choose child rearing explicitly because of the meaning and accomplishment they think it will bring.

pdf23ds 6 Apr 2007 21:09 UTC
0 points
on: Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People
“Nonetheless, it would not be correct for Archimedes to conclude that Bell’s theorem is therefore false.”

I think this is a terrible hypothetical to use to illuminate your point, since most of Archimedes’ decision would be based on how much evidence is proper to give to the source of information he gets the theorem from. I would say that, for any historically plausible mechanism, he’d certainly be correct in rejecting it.

pdf23ds 7 Apr 2007 2:08 UTC
0 points
on: Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People
The probability that an arbitrary person has string in their pockets (given that they’re wearing pockets at the time) is knowable, and given no other information we could say that it’s X%. The proper attitude towards the claim “Rooney has string in his pockets” is that it has about an X% chance of being true. (Unless we get other evidence to the contrary—and the fact that someone made the claim might be evidence here.)

Say X is 3%. Then I should say that Rooney very likely has no string in his pockets. Say X were 50%. Then I should say that there’s an even chance Rooney has string in his pockets. In neither case am I withholding judgment. Given what you’ve said, Rooney, I think you might say that the latter would be withholding judgment? Or would you say that neither assertion is justified, and in that case, what does it mean to withhold judgment?

I think there’s a post somewhere last year where Eliezer went over these points.

pdf23ds 15 Apr 2007 15:18 UTC
13 points
on: Your Rationality is My Business
Kevembuangga,

If you take a Bayesian view of the scientific process as opposed to a Popperian one, then theories are never disproved either, just shown to be very unlikely.

But though science can never prove anything conclusively, it doesn’t follow that science is not a pursuit of truth. There are no processes that produce certain truths. The ones that claim to are mainly fundamentalist religions. But something doesn’t have to be certain to be a truth, if you’re a Bayesian, and not a fundamentalist.

pdf23ds 15 Apr 2007 17:15 UTC
4 points
on: Your Rationality is My Business
I suppose, to put it more clearly, one would say that truth does actually exist, but is only approximated with increasing degrees of accuracy by science. The output of science might not be truth, but it’s the closest approximation anyone could ever have to truth.

pdf23ds 7 Aug 2007 14:03 UTC
0 points
on: The Proper Use of Doubt
Eliezer, I still don’t think the definition of doubt you posit in your comment accounts well for its usage in your post. There are a number of topics that I have only cursory knowledge on, and positions on ideas in those topics that I judge as having only a limited probability of truth. Most of these topics are on the periphery of my awareness most of the time, and only have a very limited usefulness to me, and are not very interesting. While I could easily investigate these matters in more depth and come to a more well-considered position on many ideas, I have no motivation to. So do I have doubts about these? According to your definition, yes, but that doesn’t quite work. If the topics were to become important to me for some reason (whether because they were necessary to solve some problem I were working on or just because I became interested in them) then I would have doubts, and I would fill out my knowledge to get rid of them.

Maybe all your definition needs is a proviso that the utility of the increased certainty about a topic (which would be determined by the goal system of the intelligence, and might be technically arational) must outweigh the cost of the line of inquiry suggested by the doubt. More precisely, that the utility of resolving the doubt be higher than the utility of saving resources for other pursuits.

pdf23ds 7 Aug 2007 16:57 UTC
0 points
on: The Proper Use of Doubt
Conchis, the path of investigation would have a high probability of changing your current estimate up or down (by the same weighted amount), so your current estimate can still be your best guess as an ideal Bayesian while still making the investigation likely to change it to be more accurate.

pdf23ds 8 Aug 2007 17:56 UTC
0 points
on: The Proper Use of Doubt
Conchis, I didn’t get the impression that a doubt more often downgrades than it upgrades, since you can just as easily doubt a low estimation as a high one, and since you can express any probability of X greater than .5 as one of ~X under .5. Someone can just as easily doubt their atheism as they can their theism.

But the doubts could be asymmetrical. What about a path of investigation (POI) that had a 10% chance of increasing you estimation by .3 and a 90% chance of lowering it by .03? (Those numbers might not actually be balanced, but I think you get the idea.)

pdf23ds 13 Aug 2007 1:25 UTC
1 point
on: I Defy the Data!
Stuart, the doctor’s latter two statements are interesting, but it would seem his first statement is false. He does need to come up with a fresh theory.

pdf23ds 16 Aug 2007 18:44 UTC
0 points
on: One Argument Against An Army
What can we actually observe? Relevant to what you describe, we can observe two things:

Also, we can observe (I read about a study that showed this) that people who intentionally seek out arguments that oppose their position tend to strengthen their belief in their position relative to people who only read friendly arguments. I forget exactly where I read this, unfortunately.

pdf23ds 16 Aug 2007 19:23 UTC
0 points
on: One Argument Against An Army
Carl, you might confuse people by addressing me by my real name when I’m not using it.

Unfortunately, my recollection of that study is weak. To the best of my memory, though, it was only a survey of people’s blog/news reading habits combined with a test of dogmatism, not one where they actually instructed people in different groups to read more of fewer opposing arguments. I forget what the terms for these types of studies are.