Daniel,
Eliezer has been addressing his definition of intelligence recently. See, for instance, here. You should be able to see how it relates to animal intelligence.
Swimmy
Karma: 958
I was raised in a religious household and took it very seriously. At the same time, I always enjoyed skepticism and debunking, because I was always entertained by such things. But when it came to philosophy I was completely full of it. I got away with it by living in an area where I only encountered other Christians, not many atheists. When I did actually encounter some atheists, I would do some hand-waving about how there was something Deep and Intellectual about Christian apologetics that they were missing.
I dated someone who was extremely, well, hippie. Completely non-judgemental about even the most absurd hypotheses. I really hated that kind of attitude—where was her intellectual curiosity? So I got more into specific skeptic arguments. I fell in love with James Randi and watched almost every video of him that existed on Youtube at the time. But I waited to apply any of the lessons to the Big Question. Christianity was a huge part of my life; my entire family is still very seriously Christian, and a huge chunk of my social network used to be.
I started reading Overcoming Bias because, hey, Mason econ student, why wouldn’t I read another great blog? There are several lessons on that site that I still summon all the time in arguments, but it took some internal realization to understand what applied where.
First, if I hadn’t been trained in orthodox statistics—if I didn’t know specifically what methods science used—I never would have gotten many of the arguments. I would have been happy to get this training much earlier in life. That’s a basis by which “science can’t know anything” arguments immediately fall apart.
From there, these are the posts that most helped me and why.
First, being raised in a presuppositionalist church, I had to be convinced that it really did come down to evidence and not assumptions. For this, “How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3” was a good starting point, and it even helped me address some false claims in Austrian Economics. “Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable” also helped, but it took a while for me to get to the point that I was willing to look at this argument head-on with the idea that I should consider it with my best judgement rather than dismiss it as missing-the-point.
To get there, I needed the point made in “The Bottom Line”: it is illegitimate in epistemology to start from the bottom line. That is rationalization, which can take more than one form. I thought back to my education in geology, where I was presented with indisputable evidence that the earth was several billion years old. Back when I was taking that class, I researched creationist arguments on the internet and found that all of them had been soundly refuted. But instead of immediately questioning my religion, I put all of that away in a box, to be dealt with later. When I brought some of it up to my mom, she said, “Tim, you’re creative enough to come up with some kind of explanation that can fit.” I accepted this back then: indeed I was, though I never seriously tried. But to even have such a thought is to outright admit that you’re wrong beforehand, that the only way to reconcile your opposing beliefs is to come up with a fancy lie.
Then I was more receptive to “Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable.” Eliezer presents the best defense against presuppositionalism I’ve ever seen: presuppositionalism is to be found nowhere in the Bible. It is evidentialist through and through. Miracles are presented as evidence of God, are cited constantly throughout as proof of the One True God above all the others. Paul’s entire defense against the Roman government in Acts is simply, “The claims I’m making about miracles are true and here are the witnesses.”
So I decided I finally had to see if I could reconcile the fact of the discovery of natural sciences with the Bible. I never found Intelligent Design convincing, quite frankly because I had begun to respect the biologists who dismissed it more than the religious leaders who touted it. But of course as I researched it individually anyway, well. I needed a better theory of evidence, which I got from “A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation” and “The Conservation of Expected Evidence.” Bayes + my traditional probability training started working their way into my mind, so I could evaluate different evidential claims much better than before.
Also important was “Occam’s Razor.” I had never seen a technical definition of Occam’s Razor provided, and I was suddenly floored by the outright wrongness of arguments like, “God is the simplest explanation for the universe.”
There’s more to the story than that. After all, changes like this never have one true cause. I began to see the disconnect between my thoughts about morality (“I have to admit that homosexuality is wrong”) and my feelings about it (“But I can’t feel like my gay friends are really bad people”). I started getting kind of disgusted by the sheer number of bad Christian arguments parroted about like it was nothing. The entire time I was studying economics, which I put a lot of stock in, and theories about interest rates being evil, the necessity of Christian governance, and so on, all started to look less and less like God’s wisdom and more like the same old ignorance that every society has.
It was this feeling of disgust that forced me to finally admit I didn’t consider myself a “Christian” anymore, and the arguments I had gathered in my mind in the mean time that led me to fill the gap with “atheist.”
This is all relatively recent, so it is in much better detail than the other influences. Surely there must have been something in my brain that led me to be able to reject Creationism long before I ever considered myself a “rationalist.”
I vote for “Conservation of Expected Evidence.” The essential answer to supposed evidence from irrationalists.
Second place, either “Occam’s Razor” or “Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable” for the understandable explanation of technical definitions of Occam’s Razor.
The general idea of science as Bayesianism. It would be a great resource for the irrational and scientists alike.
I started reading OB because I liked Robin Hanson as an economist. I continued reading because I liked Yudkowsky as a writer. I agree I’m still part of an unrepresentative sample (people who are willing to read and consider Yudkowsky’s long ramblings), but not everyone found the site because of an interest in rationality per se.
Unfortunately, anyone taking a college course probably would be interested in rationality qua rationality. But the lessons are still valuable for those poor souls who, like I once was, are still religious despite it. The same for those who are religious fence-sitters.
I left a comment about it here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2/tell_your_rationalist_origin_story/45#comments
Long story short, OB helped a lot.
Almost every possible non-absurd claim is also false. I think this is Occam’s Razor, not the absurdity heuristic, in effect and working great.
I say don’t bother with Santa, unless you really think the shattered emotional engagement is necessary for some reason. Instead, come up with a technique similar to the one used in My Favorite Liar. Although much less complicated, of course.
So, applying to some popular claim, say the resurrection of Jesus. The argument is that, instead of concluding, “It’s highly unlikely that Jesus resurrected; his disciples were either mistaken, lying, or hallucinating; let’s talk about the things we can test instead,” attempts to assess the probability of surviving crucifixion according to available evidence are superior?
I agree on some level, but many “ignore” decisions are based on perfectly defensible Bayesian priors. Not ones that apply 0% probability to events, but I believe I could successfully argue that each of the 4 above explanations for the resurrection are ALL more likely than supernatural resurrection itself. And because of my knowledge of cognitive bias, I think I could well argue that the dismissive claims are more likely than surviving crucifixion as well.
Am I missing the point?
Edit: Actually, I think I see the error I made already. Explaining “hallucinating, mistaken, or lying” in terms of cognitive bias is much, much better than any of those explanations on their own.
“The Road To Wisdom” should immediately go on this site’s About page.
Secret Identities vs. Groupthink
On the contrary. If you even have a particularly unique way to read about rationality, that’s useful information.
I was going for a bit of this post’s point in my post. I actually can think of a good example in economics that I’ve applied specific principles from OB to argue against, but I’m wary about setting off people’s political minds, so I prefer not to bring it up.
Awful Austrians
Yeah, that works better.
I agree that Hayek doesn’t fall into the same methodological trap. Which is why hardcore Mises/Rothbard Austrians spend a little time eschewing his work on knowledge. (See especially the last handful of quotes.)
Caplan indeed has quite a back-and-forth with Hülsman and Block. Especially of note for those on this site will be this paper (pdf) advocating a Bayesian interpretation of probability, something Austrians resist vehemently.
To be fair to the Austrians, mainstream economists aren’t always keen on it either. Caplan recounted a story to us in class: Robin Hanson apparently submitted a paper to a journal about beliefs. The editor responded that using probabilities to represent people’s beliefs was “crude charlatanism.”
It may be unfair to lump the specific fallacy presented above as the essence of Austrian economics, or as something its true believers follow. But there undoubtedly is a strain of dedicated Mises/Rothbard followers who insist on it, and these are the Austrians I’m criticizing. I’ll refer to this link again. Many major Austrians are ready to pounce all over Hayek at a moment’s notice.
P.S. Hey, gonna go ahead and guess you’re the same Peter Twieg from my class. This is Tim McGowan.
I only meant to use presuppositionalism as a starting point, to compare to another epistemology as bad as a theism. As according to the standard hangups one gets after leaving a religion, I have a whole lot more to say about presuppositionalism, let me tell you.
I’m not looking for Popperian falsifiability. I’m looking for Bayesian inferential updating. If the argument is that no evidence of any form could ever change the Austrian’s probability estimate of a certain theory, I charge the Austrian is either being overconfident or violating the conservation of expected evidence.
Even extremely messy evidence can still be evidence. In economics, messy evidence that is messy in a stable way can be very good evidence. For instance, Mises explains that we can never find examples of irrationality, because preferences can never be frozen in time. So the preference reversal involved in the Allais Paradox is perfectly rational. But even if it’s a rational preference change, those constant changes are stable over time. If you ask a person which gambles they prefer a second time, they’ll give the same answers, and so on. By saying “it’s not a controlled experiment so it doesn’t count,” the Austrian misses out on a key insight about how people can be milked. The Austrian tells us that this person wants to be milked!
Ryan Law brought up videogames. This past console generation offers a good example. The Playstation 2 was weaker, graphically, than the Gamecube and the Xbox. (It cost more than the former and less than the latter.) Moreover, it was plagued with hardware problems—after a couple years of use, a huge majority of first-generation PS2 owners reported numerous Disc Read Errors; their PS2s simply stopped reading games. Sony went as far as to remodel the console entirely, on top of settling a major class action lawsuit (in which they ceded no admission of hardware failure).
However, it wildly outsold the Gamecube and Xbox. It was, in a big way, the lowest common denominator. It could play old Playstation games, so users had a built-in library. They could even use their old controllers—a popular, if standard, design based on the Super Nintendo controller. The Gamecube tried a more innovative layout, with a large “home” button and surrounding buttons designed to accomodate thumb-sliding. The Xbox’s original controller was considered too big for most users. As for format, the Gamecube used minidiscs. They did not have as much capacity as DVDs, but they loaded much faster. The Xbox used DVDs and a hard drive (which made it the choice console for game pirating). The PS2 played CDs, DVDs, acted as a DVD player right out of the box, and came out before the other systems.
So the PS2 was a very conservative console. It did a lot of comfortable things, and even though Nintendo and Microsoft’s systems were unquestionably more powerful, there’s no doubt the PS2 “won”: it attracted the most software, as the lowest common denominator would be expected to do. Meanwhile, developers who spent their time on the other consoles enjoyed huge game sales from their smaller user bases: Itagaki and Tecmo on the Xbox, Nintendo (of course) on the Gamecube, etc.