I’m Shai Horowitz. I’m currently a duel physics and mathematics major at Rutgers university. I first learned of the concept of “Bayesian” or “rationality” through HPMOR and from there i took it upon myself to read the Overcoming Bias post which has been an extremely long endeavor of which I have almost but not yet accomplished. Through conversation with others in my dorm at Rutgers I have realized simply how much this learning has done to my thought process and it allowed me to hone in on my own thoughts that i could see were still biased and go about fixing them. Through this same reasoning it became apparent to me that it would be largely beneficial to become an active part in the lesswrong community to sharpen my own skills as a rationalist while helping others along the way. I embrace rationality for the very specific reason that I wish to be a Physicists and realize that in trying to do so i could (as Eliezer puts hit) “shoot off my own foot” while doing things that conventional science allows. In the process of learning this I did stall out for months at a time and even became depressed for a while as I was stabbing my weakest points with the metaphorical knife. I do look back at laugh at the fact now that a college student was making incredibly bad decisions to get over the pain of fully embracing the second law of thermodynamics and its implications, which to me seems to be a sign of my progress moving forward. I don’t think that i will soon have to face a fact as daunting as that one and with the knowledge that I know how to accept even that law I will now be able to accept any truths much more easily. That being said even though hard science is my primary purpose for learning rationality I am a bit of a self proclaimed polymath and have spent recent times learning more of psychology and cognition then simply the cognitive bias’s i need to be self weary of. I just finished the book “Influence: Science and Practice” which I’ve heard Eliezer mention multiple times and very recently as in this week my interest have turned into pushing standard ethical theories to there limits as to truly understand how to make the world a better place and to unravel the black box that is itself the word “better”. I conclude with I would love to talk with anyone experienced or new to rationality about pretty much any topic and would very much like if someone would message me. furthermore if anyone reading this goes to Rutgers university or is around the area, a meet up over coffee or something similar would make my day.
shaih
My thoughts on its implications are along the lines of even if cryogenics works or the human race finds some other way of indefinitely increasing the length of the human life span, the second law of thermodynamics would eventually force this prolonged life to be unsustainable. That combined with the adjusting of my probability estimates of an afterlife made me have to face the unthinkable fact that there will be a day in which i cease to exist regardless of what i do and i am helpless to stop it. while i was getting over the shock of this i would have sleepless night which turned into days that i was to tired to be coherent which turned into missing classes which turned into missed grades. In summation I allowed a truth which would not come to pass for an unthinkable amount of time to change how i acted in the present in a way in which it did not warrant (being depressed or happy or any action now would not change that future).
From lessons I learned in HPMOR before making an important decision ask yourself “What do you think you know, and why do you think you know it?” I have found that this not only shows you what knowledge you have is sound enough to make decisions on but shows which pieces of knowledge you’re emotionally attached to and would therefore lead to a biased conclusion.
i’m going to reply to the quote as if it means “Truth doesn’t have a moral valence” and rebuttal that truth should be held more sacred then morals rather then simply outside of it. For example if there are two cases and case 1 leads to a morally “better” (in quotes because the word better is really a black box) outcome then case 2 but case 1 leads to hiding the truth (including hiding from it yourself) then I would have to think very specifically about it. In short I abide by the rule “That which can be destroyed by the Truth should be” but am weary that this breaks down practically in many situations. So when presented with a scenario where i would be tempted to break this principle for the “greater good” or the “morally better case” I would think long and hard about whether it is a rationalization or that i did not expend the mental effort to come up with a better third alternative.
I think what Creutzer is trying to mean is in ordinary discourse meaning everyday problems in which you are not always able to give the thought time it deserves, when you don’t even have 5 minutes by the clock hand to think about the problem rationally, it is better to rely on the heuristic assume people are smart and some unknown context is causing problems then to rely on the heuristic people who make mistakes are dumb. this said heuristics are only good most of the time and may lead you to errors such as
It’s epistemically incorrect to adopt a belief “for the purpose of action”
in this case it is still technically an error but you are merely attempting to be “less wrong” about a case where you don’t have time to be correct then assuming the heuristic until you encounter contrary evidence (or you have the time to think of better answers) follows closely the point of this website
It seems that the prisoner’s dilemma mentioned here differs from the typical (from at least my perspective) prisoner’s dilemma in the sense that rewards for both defecting are equal to instead of greater then the rewards for the one that cooperates in the defect/cooperate case. This leads to the outcome of whenever one person (p1) is known to defect (p2) no longer stands a chance to gain anything. Unless this game is repeated in which case punishments make sense (p2) has no game theory incentive to pick one case over the other outside of made deals such as the ultimatum. The difference between the two would only be the money (p1) walks away with. So instead of a prisoner’s dilemma it turns into (p2) having the two moves cooperate (p1) gets money defect (p1) gets no money from here it would seem that even though (p1) did something that was to (p2)’s disadvantage, (p2) gains nothing from causing (p1) the harm of defecting and it seems to me that a moral argument could easily be made that states (p2) must cooperate. This doesn’t work for the traditional prisoner’s dilemma because once (p1) defects (p2) stands more to gain from defecting then cooperating.
This being said, one should not hesitate to downvote a short message if it does not add at all to the discussion, simply to keep the flow of useful comments without superfluous interruption that would hamper what could otherwise be a constructive argument.
No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.
Karl Popper
The first thing that came to mind is it would only be possible to do this for the original post because it would be nearly impossible to be able to calculate how many of the readers read each comment. Further if it was implemented it would have to be able to count one reader per username, or more specifically one reader per person that can vote. that way if lets say i were to read an article but come back multiple times to read different comments it would not skew the ratio.
As a side note to this we could also implement a ratio per username that would show (post read)/(post voted on) so we would be able to see which users participate in voting at all. This however is nowhere near as useful to those who post as the original ratio and could have many possible downsides that i’m not going to take the time to think about because it will probably not be considered, but it is a fun idea.
I do not believe it would be a good way to practice because even with actors acting the way they are supposed (consistent body language and facial expressions) lets say conservatively 90% of the time, you are left with 10% wrong data. This 10% wouldn’t be that bad except for the fact that it is actors trying to act correctly (meaning you would interpret what it looks like for a fabricated emotion to be a real emotion). This could be detrimental to many uses of being able to read body language such as telling when other people are lying.
My preferred method has been to watch court cases on YouTube where it has come out afterword whether the person was guilty or innocent. I watch these videos before i know what the truth is make a prediction and then read what the truth is. In this way I am able to get situations where the person is feeling real emotions and is likely to hide what there feeling with fake emotions.
After practicing like this for about a week i found that i could more easily discern whether people were telling the truth or lying, and it was easier to see what emotions they truly felt.
This may not extremely applicable to the real world because emotions felt in court rooms are particularly intense but i found that it allows me to get my mind to the point of being used to looking for emotion which has helped in the real world.
I should also note that i have read many books from Paul Ekman and have used some of his training programs.
If it is important to you how to learn to read faces I largely recommend SETT and METT where if its simply a curiosity you’re unwilling to spend much money on i recommend checking out “emotions revealed” in your local library
I was not hear for the roko post and i only have a general idea of what its about, that being said i experienced a bout of depression when applying rationality to the second law of thermodynamics.
Two things helped me, 1 i realized that while dealing with a future that is either very unlikely or inconceivably far away it is hard to properly diminish the emotional impact by what is rationally required. knowing that the emotions felt completely out way what is cause for them, you can hopefully realize that acting in the present towards those beliefs is irrational and ignoring those beliefs would actually help you be more rational. Also realize that giving weight to an improbable future more then it deserves is in its self irrational. With this i realized that by trying to be rational i was being irrational and found that it was easier to resolve this paradox then simply getting over the emotional weight it took to think about the future rationally to begin with.
2 I meditated on the following quote
People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
-Gendlin nothing has changed after you read a post on this website besides what is in your brain. Becoming more rational should never make you lose, after all Rationality is Systematized Winning so instead if you find that a belief you have is making you lose it is clearly a irrational one or is being thought of in a irrational way.
Hope this helps
The majority of scientific discoveries (I’m tempted to say all but I’m 90% certain that there exist at least one counter example) have very good consequences as well as bad. I think the good and bad actually usually go hand in hand.
To make the obvious example nuclear research lead to both the creation of nuclear weapons but also the creation of nuclear energy.
At what point could you label research into any scientific field as having to many negative consequences to pursue?
My knowledge of statistics at the time was very much lacking (that being said i still only have about a semesters worth of stat) so I was not able to do any type of statistical analysis that would be rigorous in any way. I did however keep track of my predictions and was around 60% on the first day (slightly better then guessing probably caused by reading books i mentioned) to around 80% about a week later of practicing every day. I no longer have the exact data though only approximate percentages of how i did.
I remember also that it was difficult tracking down the cases in which truth was known and this was very time consuming, this is the predominant reason that i only practiced like this for a week.
I do not ask it because I wanted to stop the discussion by asking a hard question. I ask it because I aspire to do research into physics and will someday need an answer to it. As such I have been very curious about different arguments to this question. By no means did I mean by asking this question that there are things that should not be research simply how to go about finding them?
Hello and welcome to lesswrong, your goal to understanding time as the 4th dimension stuck out to me in that it reminded me of a post that i found beautiful and insightful while contemplating the same thing. timeless physics has a certain beauty to it that resonates to me much better then 4th dimensional time and sounds like something you would appreciate.
I’m reading through all of the sequences (slowly, it takes a while to truly understand and I started in 2012) and by coincidence I happen to be at the beginning of metaethics currently. Until I finish I won’t argue any further on this subject due to being confused. Thanks for help
I think a main reason why I try to correct friends thought patterns is practice. With friends I get a certain amount of wiggle room, if I accidentally say something that insults them, or turns them off of rationality, or would cause a form a social friction, they would be inclined to tell me before it got between us. I can learn what I did wrong and don’t have to keep bothering the same friend to the point of it actually hampering our friendship.
Lessons learned from this can be used to correct someones thought patterns when it is much more imperative for you to do so as in cases where
your ability to accomplish your goals directly depends on their rationality.
and allows you to teach these people whom having social conflict would be very difficult since they are typically people you have to cooperate with a lot.
You have a very good point and have shown me something that I knew better and will have to keep an eye on closer for now on.
That being said Beauty is not enough to be accepted into any realm of science but thinking about beautiful concepts such as timeless physics could increase the probability of thinking up an original testable theory that is true.
In particular I’m thinking how the notion of absolute time slowed down the discovery of relativity while if someone were to contemplate the beautiful notion of relative time, relativity could have been found much faster.
I am new to less wrong and am coincidentally a student at rvcc. i unfortunetly have class until 3:15 but will stop by for the end of the meetup