PhilGoetz
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Yep, nice list. One I didn’t see: Defining a word in a way that is less useful (that conveys less information) and rejecting a definition that is more useful (that conveys more information). Always choose the definition that conveys more information; eliminate words that convey zero information. It’s common for people to define words that convey zero information. But if everything has the Buddha nature, nothing empirical can be said about what it means and it conveys no information.
Along similar lines, always define words so that no other word conveys too much mutual information about them. For instance, many people have argued with me that I should use the word “totalitarian” to mean “the fascist nations of the 20th century”. Well, we already have a word for that, which is “fascist”, so to define “totalitarian” as a synonym makes it a useless word.
The word “fascist” raises the question of when to use extensional vs. intensional definitions. It’s conventionally defined extensionally, to mean the Axis powers in World War 2. This is not a useful definition, as we already have a label for that. Worse, people define it extensionally but pretend they’ve defined it intensionally. They call people today “fascist”, conveying connotations in a way that can’t be easily disputed, because there is no intensional definition to evaluate the claim.
Sometimes you want to switch back and forth between extensional and intensional definitions. In art history, we have a term for each period or “movement”, like “neo-classical” and “Romantic”. The exemplars of the category are defined both intensionally and extensionally, as those artworks having certain properties and produced in certain geographic locations during a certain time period. It is appropriate to use the intensional definition alone if describing a contemporary work of art (you can call it “Romantic” if it looks Romantic), but inappropriate to use examples that fit the intension but not the extension as exemplars, or to deduce things about the category from them. This keeps the categories stable.
A little ways back I talked about defining the phrase “Buddha nature”. Phrases also have definitions—words are not atoms of meaning. Analyzing a phrase as if our theories of grammar worked, ignoring knowledge about idioms, is an error rationalists sometimes commit.
Pretending words don’t have connotations is another error rationalists commit regularly—often in sneaky ways, deliberately using the connotations, while pretending they’re being objective. Marxist literary criticism, for instance, loads a lot into the word “bourgeois”.
Another category missing here is gostoks and doshes. This is when a word’s connotations and tribal affiliation-signalling displace its semantic content entirely, and no one notices it has no meaning. Extremely common in Marxism and in “theory”; “capitalism” and “bourgeois” being the most-common examples. “Bourgeoisie” originally meant people like Rockefeller and the Borges, but as soon as artists began using the word, they used it to mean “people who don’t like my scribbles,” and now it has no meaning at all, but demonic connotations. “Capitalism” has no meaning that can single out post-feudal societies in the way Marxists pretend it does; any definition of it that I’ve seen includes things that Marxists don’t want it to, like the Soviet Union, absolute monarchies, or even hunter-gatherer tribes. It should be called simply “free markets”, which is what they really object to and much more accurate at identifying the economic systems that they oppose, but they don’t want to admit that the essence of their ideology is opposition to freedom.
Avoid words with connotations that you haven’t justified. Don’t say “cheap” if you mean “inexpensive” or “shoddy”. Especially avoid words which have a synonym with the opposite connotation: “frugal” and “miserly”. Be aware of your etymological payloads: “awesome” and “awful” (full of awe), “incredible” (not credible), “wonderful” (thought-provoking).
Another category is when 2 subcultures have different sets of definitions for the same words, and don’t realize it. For instance, in the humanities, “rational” literally means ratio-based reasoning, which rejects the use of real numbers, continuous equations, empirical measurements, or continuous changes over time. This is the basis of the Romantic/Modernist hatred of “science” (by which they mean Aristotelian rationality), and of many post-modern arguments that rationality doesn’t work. Many people in the humanities are genuinely unaware that science is different than it was 2400 years ago, and most were 100% ignorant of science until perhaps the mid-20th century. A “classical education” excludes all empiricism.
Another problem is meaning drift. When you use writings from different centuries, you need to be aware of how the meanings of words and phrases have changed over time. For instance, the official academic line nowadays is that alchemy and astrology are legitimate sciences; this is justified in part by using the word “science” as if it meant the same as the Latin “scientia”.
A problem in translation is decollapsing definitions. Medieval Latin conflated some important concepts because their neo-Platonist metaphysics said that all good things sort of went together. So for instance they had a single word, “pulchrum”, which meant “beautiful”, “sexy”, “appropriate to its purpose”, “good”, and “noble”. Translators will translate that into English based on the context, but that’s not conveying the original mindset. This comes up most frequently when ancient writers made puns, like Plato’s puns in the Crito, or “Jesus’” (Greek) puns in the opening chapters of John, which are destroyed in translation, leaving the reader with a false impression of the speaker’s intent.
I disagree that saying “X is Y by definition” Is usually wrong, but I should probably leave my comment on that post instead of here.
[moved to top level of replies]
But you’re arguing against Eliezer, as “God” and “miracle” were (and still are) commonly-used words, and so Eliezer is saying those are good, short words for them.
Great post! There is also the non-discrete aspect of compression: information loss. English has, according to some dictionaries, over a million words. It’s unlikely we store most of our information in English. Probably there is some sort of dimension reduction, like PCA. There is in any case probably lossy compression. This means people with different histories will use different frequency tables for their compression, and will throw out different information when encoding a verbal statement. I think you would almost certainly find that if you measure word use frequency for different people, then cluster the word use distributions, some clusters would correspond to ideologies. The interesting question is which comes first, the ideology, or the word usage frequency (caused by different life experiences).
I don’t think that what you need has any bearing on what reality has actually given you. Nor can we talk about different decision theories here—as long as we are talking about maximizing expected utility, we have our decision theory; that is enough specification to answer the Newcomb one-shot question. We can only arrive at a different outcome by stating the problem differently, or by sneaking in different metaphysics, or by just doing bad logic (in this case, usually allowing contradictory beliefs about free will in different parts of the analysis.)
Your comment implies you’re talking about policy, which must be modelled as an iterated game. I don’t deny that one-boxing is good in the iterated game.
My concern in this post is that there’s been a lack of distinction in the community between “one-boxing is the best policy” and “one-boxing is the best decision at one point in time in a decision-theoretic analysis, which assumes complete freedom of choice at that moment.” This lack of distinction has led many people into wishful or magical rather than rational thinking.
I can believe that it would make sense to commit ahead of time to one-box at such an event. Doing so would affect your behavior in a way that the predictor might pick up on.
Hmm. Thinking about this convinces me that there’s a big problem here in how we talk about the problem, because if we allow people who already knew about Newcomb’s Problem to play, there are really 4 possible actions, not 2:
intended to one-box, one-boxed
intended to one-box, two-boxed
intended to two-box, one-boxed
intended to two-box, two-boxed
I don’t know if the usual statement of Newcomb’s problem specifies whether the subjects learns the rules of the game before or after the predictor makes a prediction. It seems to me that’s a critical factor. If the subject is told the rules of the game before the predictor observes the subject and makes a prediction, then we’re just saying Omega is a very good lie detector, and the problem is not even about decision theory, but about psychology: Do you have a good enough poker face to lie to Omega? If not, pre-commit to one-box.
We shouldn’t ask, “Should you two-box?“, but, “Should you two-box now, given how you would have acted earlier?” The various probabilities in the present depend on what you thought in the past. Under the proposition that Omega is perfect at predicting, the person inclined to 2-box should still 2-box, ’coz that $1M probably ain’t there.
So Newcomb’s problem isn’t a paradox. If we’re talking just about the final decision, the one made by a subject after Omega’s prediction, then the subject should probably two-box (as argued in the post). If we’re talking about two decisions, one before and one after the box-opening, then all we’re asking is whether you can convince Omega that you’re going to one-box if you aren’t. Then it would not be terribly hard to say that a predictor might be so good (say, an Amazing Kreskin-level cold-reader of humans, or that you are an AI) that your only hope is to precommit to one-box.
This was argued against in the Sequences and in general, doesn’t seem to be a strong argument. It seems perfectly compatible to believe your actions follow deterministically and still talk about decision theory—all the functional decision theory stuff is assuming a deterministic decision process, I think.
It is compatible to believe your actions follow deterministically and still talk about decision theory. It is not compatible to believe your actions follow deterministically, and still talk about decision theory from a first-person point of view, as if you could by force of will violate your programming.
To ask what choice a deterministic entity should make presupposes both that it does, and does not, have choice. Presupposing a contradiction means STOP, your reasoning has crashed and you can prove any conclusion if you continue.
I think that first you should elaborate on what you mean by “the goals of humanity”. Do you mean majority opinion? In that case, one goal of humanity is to have a single world religious State, although there is disagreement on what that religion should be. Other goals of humanity include eliminating homosexuality and enforcing traditional patriarchal family structures.
Okay, I admit it—what I really think is that “goals of humanity” is a nonsensical phrase, especially when spoken by an American academic. It would be a little better to talk about values instead of goals, but not much better. The phrase still implies the unspoken belief that everyone would think like the person who speaks it, if only they were smarter.
The part of physics that implies someone cannot scan your brain and simulate inputs so as to perfectly predict your actions is quantum mechanics. But I don’t think invoking it is the best response to your question. Though it does make me wonder how Eliezer reconciles his thoughts on one-boxing with his many-worlds interpretation of QM. Doesn’t many-worlds imply that every game with Omega creates worlds in which Omega is wrong?
If they can perfectly predict your actions, then you have no choice, so talking about which choice to make is meaningless. If you believe you should one-box based if Omega can perfectly predict your actions, but two-box otherwise, then you are better off trying to two-box: In that case, you’ve already agreed that you should two=box if Omega can’t perfectly predict your actions. If Omega can, you won’t be able to two-box unless Omega already predicted that you would, so it won’t hurt to try to 2-box.
Sorry. I’ve been reading English literary journals and lit theory books for the past year, and the default assumption is always that the reader is a Marxist.
The rationalist virtue of empiricism...
I’m not disagreeing with any of the content above, but a note about terminology--
LessWrong keeps using the word “rationalism” to mean something like “reason” or possibly even “scientific methodology”. In philosophy, however, “rationalism” is not allied to “empiricism”, but diametrically opposed to it. What we call science was a gradual development, over a few centuries, of methodologies that harnessed the powers both of rationalism and empiricism, which had previously been thought to be incompatible.
But if you talk to a modernist or post-modernist today, when they use the term “rational”, they mean old-school Greek, Platonic-Aristotelian rationalism. They, like us, think so much in this old Greek way that they may use the term “reason” when they mean “Aristotelian logic”. All post-modernism is based on the assumption that scientific methodology is essentially the combination of Platonic essences, Aristotelian physics, and Aristotelian logic, which is rationalism. They are completely ignorant of what science is and how it works. But this is partly our fault, because they hear us talking about science and using the term “rationality” as if science were rationalism!
(Inb4 somebody says Plato was a rationalist and Aristotle was an empiricist: Really, really not. Aristotle couldn’t measure things, and very likely couldn’t do arithmetic. In any case the most important Aristotelian writings to post-modernists are the Physics, which aren’t empirical in the slightest. No time to go into it here, though.)
I was unfairly inserting in the parentheses my own presumption about why Christians saw the world as having been created perfect. The passage I was talking about from Aquinas did not talk about perfection of the environment.
I’d like to see what Aquinas did say. Have you got a citation? I’m pretty sure that the notion that the world was created imperfect has never been tolerated by the Catholic Church. Asserting that creation was imperfect might even be condemned as Manicheeism. Opinions vary on what happened after the Fall, but I find it unlikely that Aquinas could have said God’s original creation was imperfect. (If he did, he was probably copying Aristotle, and making some fine definitional distinction not explained here, to avoid heresy.)
Yep, the argument to justify the imperfection of children, and thus the necessity of growth, is based on Aristotle’s notion of perfect and imperfect actualities. Aquinas wrote:
Everything is perfect inasmuch as it is in actuality; imperfect, inasmuch as it is in potentiality, with privation of actuality. … It is impossible therefore for any effect that is brought into being by action to be of a nobler actuality than is the actuality of the agent. It is possible though for the actuality of the effect to be less perfect than the actuality of the acting cause, inasmuch as action may be weakened on the part of the object to which it is terminated, or upon which it is spent.
The reason God created humans so that they have to grow from imperfect childhood (lacking the maturity of a complete human) towards a perfect adult state, rather than being adult, is thus so that they may learn virtue, which is the process of striving for perfection. (The environment does not need to learn virtue; therefore it was created perfect.)
I don’t know whether humans would have born offspring that were babies if not for the Fall, nor why animals bear babies, if not for the sake of their spiritual growth.
I didn’t mean to retract this, but to delete it and move the comment down below.
Historically, Christians objected strongly to fossil evidence that some species had gone extinct. They said God would not have created species and then let them go extinct.
Perfection is a crucial part of Christian ontology. God’s creation was perfect. That means, in the Christian way of thinking, it is unchanging. Read Christian descriptions of God (who is perfect), and “unchanging” is always one of the adjectives. “Unchanging” is a necessary attribute of perfection in Christian theology, and God’s creation is necessarily perfect. The environment, therefore, was designed and created not to ever change.
One could argue that individuals are thus imperfect because they are born young and then mature. I’ve never heard a counter-argument against this accusation, though I suspect they exist in the wreckage of medieval theology.
The kid says that school is competitive, and that’s bad—why can’t they all agree to work less hard (presumably so they can have more time to play video games)? “Getting students to accept the reality that they might just not go to the best schools is good, I guess. But unless it also comes with the rallying call of engaging in a full-on socialist revolution, it doesn’t really deal with the whole issue.”
This kid is the straw man conservatives present of socialism—the idea that the purpose of labor unions and socialism isn’t to have a decent wage, but to not have to work hard.
There is a competition crisis, though. The problem is partly the idea that getting into an elite school is a measure of your intelligence—it isn’t; they’re explicit that that isn’t the sole basis of admission, nor do they even have any measure of intelligence other than standardized test scores, so why not use the standardize test scores?
But it’s also the allocation of social attention. Each field of study is too large now relative to the number of practitioners. Merit doesn’t work anymore. There is no such thing as reputation anymore, except within a small circle of colleagues. Nobody trusts grades or recommendations. The problem isn’t competition, but that we have no functioning reputation system anymore.
What conservatives and environmentalists agree on
I don’t see how this follows. Evolutionary psychology provides some explanations for our intuitions and instincts that the majority of humans share but that doesn’t really say anything about morality as Is Cannot Imply Ought.
Start by saying “rationality” means satisficing your goals and values. The issue is what values you have. You certainly have selfish values. A human also has values that lead to optimizing group survival. Behavior oriented primarily towards those goals is called altruistic.
The model of rationality presented on LessWrong usually treats goals and values that are of negative utility to the agent as biases or errors rather than as goals evolved to benefit the group or the genes. That leads to a view of rationality as strictly optimizing selfish goals.
As to old Utilitarianism 1.0, where somebody just declares by fiat that we are all interested in the greatest good for the greatest number of people—that isn’t on the table anymore. People don’t do that. Anyone who brings that up is the one asserting an “ought” with no justification. There is no need to talk about “oughts” yet.
This sounds great! There is no FAQ on the linked-to website, though. Is Arbital open-source? What are the key licensing terms? How’s it implemented? How does voting work?
If we’re all supposed to use the same website, there are advantages to that, but I would be less excited about that.
Also, the home page links to https://arbital.com/explore/math, but that page is blank. Er… https://arbital.com/explore/ai_alignment is also blank for me. Perhaps Arbital doesn’t work for Chrome on Windows 7 without flash installed.
I just now read that one post. It isn’t clear how you think it’s relevant. I’m guessing you think that it implies that positing free will is invalid.
You don’t have to believe in free will to incorporate it into a model of how humans act. We’re all nominalists here; we don’t believe that the concepts in our theories actually exist somewhere in Form-space.
When someone asks the question, “Should you one-box?“, they’re using a model which uses the concept of free will. You can’t object to that by saying “You don’t really have free will.” You can object that it is the wrong model to use for this problem, but then you have to spell out why, and what model you want to use instead, and what question you actually want to ask, since it can’t be that one.
People in the LW community don’t usually do that. I see sloppy statements claiming that humans “should” one-box, based on a presumption that they have no free will. That’s making a claim within a paradigm while rejecting the paradigm. It makes no sense.
Consider what Eliezer says about coin flips:
The mind projection fallacy is treating the word “probability” not in a nominalist way, but in a philosophical realist way, as if they were things existing in the world. Probabilities are subjective. You don’t project them onto the external world. That doesn’t make “coin.probability == 0.5″ a “false” statement. It correctly specifies the distribution of possibilities given the information available within the mind making the probability assessment. I think that is what Eliezer is trying to say there.
“Free will” is a useful theoretical construct in a similar way. It may not be a thing in the world, but it is a model for talking about how we make decisions. We can only model our own brains; you can’t fully simulate your own brain within your own brain; you can’t demand that we use the territory as our map.