Scott Alexander

Karma: 42,073

Scott Alexander 28 Feb 2009 16:09 UTC
12 points
on: The Most Important Thing You Learned
The most important thing I learned from Overcoming Bias was to stop viewing the human mind as a blank slate, ideally a blank slate, an approximation to a blank slate, or anything with properties even slightly resembling blankness or slateness. The rest is just commentary—admittedly very, very good commentary.

The posts I associate with this are everything on evolutionary psychology such as Godshatter (second most important thing I learned: study evolutionary psychology!), the free will series, the “ghost in the machine” and “ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness” series, and the Mind Projection Fallacy.

Scott Alexander 28 Feb 2009 16:24 UTC
6 points
on: Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features
Reddit’s up-arrow/down-arrow system with the selected arrow highlighted is much more intuitive and easier to see at a glance than a “vote up” and “vote down” with the selected link in bold. It also makes sense to have the point count next to the vote buttons. I spent my first few seconds on this site wondering why there was only a “vote down” button before I realized the minus sign next to the point count had nothing to do with voting.

I agree with the people saying show the number of comments on the front page.

Scott Alexander 28 Feb 2009 20:57 UTC
3 points
on: The Most Frequently Useful Thing
How to take Joy In The Merely Real.

Scott Alexander 28 Feb 2009 21:25 UTC
53 points
on: Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story
Since it would be impossible to disentangle and explain all the different factors, and all the studies say people are terrible at determining what events influence them anyway, I’ll just tell the event in my transition to rationalism that makes for the best story:

When I was around five, my kindergarten teacher decided to initiate my friends and I into the Great Miracle Of Life by bringing an incubator full of chicken eggs into the classroom. I watched them hatch, loved the little chicks, and (after some time and other events including a bad experience at a meat-filled Asian restaurant) decided to become a vegetarian and eat neither meat nor eggs.

When I was about eleven, I got quite into politics, and like most people in my area ended up as a typical liberal. And so I was of course pro-choice: why should we respect the rights of fetuses when they’re just a collection of cells and not even really alive?

It took me a while to realize that I was simultaneously refusing to eat eggs because potential-chickens were valuable living beings who deserved respect, and condoning abortion because potential-humans weren’t.

If I’d been a little older and a little cleverer, I’d have made up some typical political excuse why it was really about freedom or human rights or society or something (or else just learned the difference between fertilized and unfertilized eggs!)

But I was young and innocent enough to take a moment to think “Maybe my brain is just telling me what it thinks I want to hear in each situation, instead of really thinking things through. I should find a way to stop that.”

Scott Alexander 28 Feb 2009 21:32 UTC
4 points
in reply to: steven0461’s comment on: Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features
Also, the longer I stare at it, the more trouble I have remembering that the map is not the territory.

Seriously, it’s a really clever image. Kudos to whoever thought it up.

Scott Alexander 4 Mar 2009 11:45 UTC
13 points
on: That You’d Tell All Your Friends
I am likely to buy the book for my friends in any case, but I did just think of something that would give me an extra incentive. I want my friends to understand consequentialism/utility.

Most people I know are very stuck in “morality means not doing anything bad” mode. Not only would they not push the fat person off the bridge in the trolley problem, but many (perhaps most) wouldn’t so much as push the lever to switch tracks. A lot of them think the whole question is some sort of reductio ad absurdum of consequentialist philosophy (“you’re a consequentialist? I thought that was discredited when people showed that philosophy could be used to justify murdering someone in that trolley problem”). I’ve had no success arguing against these people, and one of the things that impressed me most the first time I read Overcoming Bias was that it was a community of people who used consequentialist arguments without fumbling for excuses, who thought Torture Vs. Dust Specks was a real problem instead of just “It would be wrong to inflict either of those options on people, so it’s not a moral issue” (which is what my old philosophy professor said when I mentioned it to her).

I don’t think Overcoming Bias ever officially argued for consequentialism, but a book aimed at the general public might have to. Eliezer is one of the most persuasive writers I’ve ever read, and if I thought his book could convince my friends to think consequentially I would be recommending it even more than I would otherwise.

Scott Alexander 4 Mar 2009 16:34 UTC
8 points
in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: The Costs of Rationality
Tim, that’s an excellent argument for why rationality isn’t always the winning strategy in real life. People have been saying this sort of thing all week, but it was your “most humans lie so poorly” comment that really made it click for me, especially in the context of evolutionary psychology.

I’d really like to hear one of the “rationalists should always win” people address this objection.

Scott Alexander 4 Mar 2009 23:01 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Johnicholas’s comment on: The Costs of Rationality
Thanks, John.

As you say, defining rationality as winning and then saying rationalists always win is a tautology. But aside from your two definitions, there’s a third definition: the common definition of rationality as basing decisions on evidence, Bayes, and logic. So as I see it, supporters of “rationalists always win” need to do one of the following:
1. Show that the winning definition is the same as the Bayes/logic/evidence definition. Tim’s counterexample of the religious believer who’s a poor liar makes me doubt this is possible.
2. Stop using “rationality” to refer to things like the Twelve Virtues and Bayesian techniques, since these virtues and techniques sometimes lose and are therefore not always rational.
3. Abandon “rationalists always win” in favor of Robin’s “rationalists always seek the truth”. I think that definition is sufficient to demonstrate that a rationalist should one-box on Newcombe’s problem anyway. After all, if it’s true that one boxing is the better result, a seeker of truth should realize that and decide to one-box.

Scott Alexander 5 Mar 2009 12:17 UTC
18 points
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: No, Really, I’ve Deceived Myself
The best justification I’ve heard for believing simple hypotheses is an argument from probability.

Consider some event caused by a certain block. We know the block’s color must be either red, yellow, blue, or green; its shape must be either square, round, or triangular; its material must be either wood or metal.

We come up with two theories about the event. Both theories explain the event adequately:

The event was caused by the block being made of wood. The event was caused by the block being blue, and triangular, and and made of metal. Before the event happens, there are twenty four different possibile configurations of the block. “Made of wood” is true of twelve configurations, “blue, triangular, and made of metal” is true of one configuration.

After the event, we dismiss all configurations except these thirteen under which we believe the event was possible. We assume all of these thirteen are equally likely. Therefore, there’s a ¹²⁄₁₃ chance that the block is made of wood and a ¹⁄₁₃ chance the block is blue, triangular, and made of metal.

Therefore, Theory 1 is twelve times more likely than Theory 2.

The same principle is at work any time you have a simple theory competing with a more complex theory. Because the complicated theory has more preconditions that have to be just right, it has a lower prior probability relative to the simple theory, and since the occurence of the event adjusts the probabilities of both theories equally, it has a lower posterior probability.

I know I read this explanation first on a discussion of Kolmogorov complexity on someone’s rationality blog, but I can’t remember who’s or what the link was. If I stole your explanation, please step up and take credit.

Scott Alexander 5 Mar 2009 18:17 UTC
35 points
0
on: No, Really, I’ve Deceived Myself
When I first read “Belief in Belief”, I liked it, and agreed with it, but I thought it was describing a curiousity; an exotic specimen of irrationality for us to oooh and aaah over. I mentally applied it to Unitarians and Reform Jews and that was about it.

I’ve since started wondering more and more if it actually describes a majority of religious people. I don’t know if this is how Eliezer intended it, but it was two things that really convinced me:

The first reason was behavior. Most theists I know occasionally deviate from their religious principles; not egregiously, but they’re far from perfect. But when I imagine a world that would make me believe religion with certainty—a world where angels routinely descend to people’s bedsides to carry their souls to Heaven, or where Satan allows National Geographic into Hell to film a documentary—I find it hard to imagine people sleeping in on Sundays. Not even the most hardened criminal will steal when the policeman’s right in front of him and the punishment is infinite.

The second was a webcomic: http://www.heavingdeadcats.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/file1126-2.jpg It wasn’t so much that theists wouldn’t drink the poison as that they’d be surprised, even offended at being asked. It would seem like a cheap trick. Whereas (for example) I would be happy to prove my “faith” in science by ingesting poison after I’d taken an antidote proven to work in clinical trials.

I see two ways this issue is directly important to rationalists:
1. Is this solely a religious phenomenon, or are our own beliefs vulnerable to this kind of self-deception?
2. What kind of tests can we create to determine whether a belief is sincerely held?

Scott Alexander 5 Mar 2009 18:21 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: No, Really, I’ve Deceived Myself
Doesn’t she receive a benefit by not having to live a lie her whole life? I’ve read deconversion stories, and they almost always include a point where someone has lost faith but tries to stay in their religious communities and go through the motions. Most of them end up miserable (granted that there is a 100% selection bias because these are deconversion stories)

Scott Alexander 6 Mar 2009 9:52 UTC
13 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: No, Really, I’ve Deceived Myself
The intention was to provide a clarifying example of an existential statement that should be non-controversial (“There exist some people who are uncomfortable living a lie”), not to assert probabilistic evidence for a universal statement (“Everyone I have read about is uncomfortable living a lie, therefore this is true of all humans”). I noted the selection bias only to clarify that I am not making the stronger universal statement, but it doesn’t interfere with the existential statement.

Scott Alexander 6 Mar 2009 12:21 UTC
7 points
on: Is it rational to take psilocybin?
Some of the commenters on this thread seem to be viewing the change caused by psilocylbin as foreign or hostile in some way. Maybe I’m approaching it from a different perspective. My emotional tendencies fluctuate from hour to hour, day to day, and month to month. Just eating a good meal brings me from grouchy and irritable, to happy and creative. I don’t feel like my identity is lost during any of these transformations.

Going from sad to happy doesn’t change my utility function/preference ordering, my beliefs about the world, or my level of rationality. It just makes me able to enjoy all these things more fully. So if I were assured that the psilocybin would just change my happiness set point it would seem like a pretty good deal.

Applying the wirehead argument here seems a case of lost purposes. The problem with wireheading isn’t that you’re happier than you “should” be, it’s that you’ve lost the chance to get all of those things in your utility function that aren’t just happiness, because you’re too busy blissing out. I see no reason to believe the psilocybin takers are at even the slightest risk of that.

A question to anyone who wouldn’t take the psilocybin: if you had depression, would you take Prozac (assume for this hypothetical that Prozac is proven to work)? Do you think the answer to this question should always be the same as the psilocybin question?

Scott Alexander 6 Mar 2009 23:45 UTC
2 points
in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features
I am definitely no better than Anna at ignoring gold stars. I think the situation might be improved if the “top contributors” box wasn’t there on the right margin looking temptingly like a scoreboard.

Scott Alexander 7 Mar 2009 22:30 UTC
4 points
on: Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features
I am having some trouble posting an article.

I first tried posting it to Drafts For Yvain to see what it would look like, and it showed up with karma 1 on the main site (but I could only see it when logged in). Although it looked good, I didn’t see any obvious way to change it from draft to official post.

So I deleted the draft, went back to the editor, and posted the article to Less Wrong. But it redirected me to a version of the article with [deleted] next to the title, and it doesn’t show up on the main site.

Also, I saved my draft, but don’t see any way to load the saved file. There’s nothing in the tab that says “saved” on the right of the top menu.
What links here?
- Douglas_Knight's comment on Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features by Eliezer Yudkowsky (25 Jul 2009 9:14 UTC; 3 points)

Scott Alexander 7 Mar 2009 22:56 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features
I’ve since posted the article, but I’d still like an explanation of drafts and saving.

Scott Alexander 8 Mar 2009 1:10 UTC
18 points
in reply to: GuySrinivasan’s comment on: Simultaneously Right and Wrong
I agree with your first paragraph, but I don’t quite understand your second.

In particular, I don’t understand what you mean by there being no need to say he “believes”. If upon being asked he would assert that his IQ is 100, and he wouldn’t be consciously aware of lying, isn’t that enough to say he believes his IQ is 100 on at least one level?

(also, when I say I agree with your first paragraph, I do so on the assumption that we mean the same thing by status. In particular, I would describe the “status” in this case as closer to “self-esteem” than “real position in a social hierarchy”. Are most Less Wrong readers already aware of the theory that self-esteem is the way the calculation of status feels from the inside, or is that worth another post?)
What links here?
- How some algorithms feel from inside by cousin_it (17 May 2011 11:26 UTC; 48 points)

Scott Alexander 8 Mar 2009 1:28 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Simultaneously Right and Wrong
Thank you. Since I learned practically everything I know about rationality either from you or from books you recommended, I’m very happy to earn your approval...but also a little amused, since I consciously tried to copy your writing style as much as I could without actually inserting litanies.
What links here?
- LessWrong anti-kibitzer (hides comment authors and vote counts) by Marcello (9 Mar 2009 19:18 UTC; 66 points)

Scott Alexander 8 Mar 2009 1:53 UTC
8 points
in reply to: infotropism’s comment on: Simultaneously Right and Wrong
The relationship discussed in the literature mostly involves them as two competing explanations for underachievement. Learned helplessness is about internalizing the conception of yourself as worthless; self-handicapping is about trying as hard as you can to avoid viewing yourself as worthless. The studies I could find in ten minutes on Google Scholar mostly suggested a current consensus that run-of-the-mill underachievers are sometimes self-handicappers but not learned-helplessness victims—but ten minutes does not a literature review make.

Oh, and thank you for linking to that Wikipedia article. The sentence about how “people performed mental tasks in the presence of distracting noise...if the person could use a switch to turn off the noise, his performance improved, even though he rarely bothered to turn off the noise. Simply being aware of this option was enough to substantially counteract its distracting effect” is really, really interesting.

Scott Alexander 8 Mar 2009 11:10 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Cameron_Taylor’s comment on: Simultaneously Right and Wrong
You’re right. Edited to Jim’s version, although it sounds kind of convoluted. I’m going to keep an eye out for how real statisticians describe this.