Tesseract

Karma: 1,029

Tesseract Jan 2, 2011, 10:46 PM
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in reply to: endoself’s comment on: Article: The Decline Effect and the Scientific Method
Damnation, didn’t check thoroughly. Will delete.

Tesseract Jan 2, 2011, 8:03 PM
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in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: Choose To Be Happy

Our emotions are not synonymous with our values, nor directly derived from them. If they were, we would all be rational, all the time!

You have misunderstood my entire point. I know that emotions don’t naturally reflect values. The argument was over whether achieving your values requires you to change your emotions to reflect them, or if you can be equally motivated by values alone.

From the original post:

...you are horrified by the huge amounts of suffering. You have shut up and calculated, and the calculation output that you should feel 3^^^3 times as bad as over a stubbed toe. And a stubbed toe can be pretty bad.

In other words, you have decided that your emotions need to be realigned to reflect (what your value system says about) the state of the world. DanArmak argued that this is false. I argued that it is generally true.

Tesseract Jan 2, 2011, 6:10 PM
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in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: Choose To Be Happy
I’m going to stop going point-for-point on this, and this will probably be my final post on the matter. But the gist of my argument is this:

You say that it’s reasonable to “look away”, to consciously try to disconnect your emotions from reality. This is essentially sacrificing emotional epistemic rationality for emotional instrumental rationality. In that sense, I consider it theoretically reasonable: epistemic rationality is ultimately only a sub-goal of instrumental rationality.

But unless you’re a perfect rationalist, it is extremely dangerous to have a policy of favoring instrumental rationality over epistemic rationality. It’s virtually impossible to lie to yourself in a way that is not contagious. Unless you have complete information about the universe and total knowledge of how to apply it, you can never be sure that the lie you told to cover up one unfortunate truth won’t catch you somewhere else—and when it’s a lie you’ve told yourself, a false thing you’ve willed yourself into believing, you can’t even keep the truth at the back of your mind to make sure you maintain correspondence with reality.

Yours is the logic of conversion, the argument that says you should abandon truth for religion if it seems likely to make you happier. Maybe this is the case—but only if you can be sure that reality will never come back and bite you in the ass. Because once you’ve given up that instinct for truth, you can’t get it back. A lie you tell to yourself is self-reinforcing and can’t be isolated. Most likely you will never be able to dig it out.

If you were perfect, you could entirely disjoin the emotional state you wished to feel from the emotional valuation you wished to decide with—making one conscious and keeping the other deep inside your head. But you’re not perfect, you’re human—and humans can’t do that. One who tries to do so will find that their real, underlying, motivating emotions change to match the ones they consciously desire to feel—and in doing so alter their actions.

So your choice is this: either change your emotions to match reality, with all the suffering that entails; or ignore reality for the sake of your emotions, and sacrifice your moral code in doing so.

Sacrificing epistemology is not something you can do once you’ve awakened as a rationalist.

Tesseract Jan 2, 2011, 3:41 AM
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in reply to: Psychohistorian’s comment on: Choose To Be Happy
See note on ambiguity at the end of my second post.

Also, one ambiguity that may be creating misunderstanding on both our parts: Ideally, no one should be generally unhappy, no matter what state the world is in. What they should be is unhappy about things, so that they can work harder to solve them—and they should be unhappy about things in proportion to how bad they are.

Tesseract Jan 2, 2011, 3:32 AM
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in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: Choose To Be Happy
See, I feel the same way about your post as you do about my reply. I think that you’re getting at something, but you’ve significantly overstated your argument—to the point that someone following its recommendations would be less effective.

(There’s something bizarrely wrong with the autoformatting which I can’t reproduce and can’t fix -- 1, 2, and 3 all address part 1, 4 is 2, and so on.)
1. a. (“perhaps they definitely cannot affect it”) This is true if you can do literally nothing about it, but the number of things on which you can have literally no effect are far outweighed by the number of things that holding this attitude will cause you to give up on. Do you think that you can have literally no effect on prison torture? That you could do nothing which would affect it, in any way? Try harder, Luke. Even death itself is not something you can give up feeling bad about—nor was it a few centuries ago, because the societal effects of people trying to stop feeling bad about it then are damaging efforts to stop it now.
2. b. (“perhaps they have consciously decided not to try to solve it, and invest their effort elsewhere”) This, I think, significantly understates the effect someone can have without investing much effort. What if you just told your friends, and told them to tell their friends? Maybe one of the friends-of-friends would be struck by the cause, and decide that their effort would be best spent there. Probably this won’t happen, but it certainly won’t happen if you decide just to stop thinking about it because it’s not happy-making to think about.
3. c. (“This suffering is needless”) This suffering is clearly not needless if it produces actions which can help resolve the problem.
4. Life ain’t easy. I don’t see how trying to look away helps.
5. I (falsifiably) expect that not feeling bad about problems has a much stronger influence.
6. It’s true that we keep acting in the absence of immediate strong emotion, but do you really believe that we’d act just as strongly to resolve a problem whether we still felt strongly about it or not?
7. True. But the post doesn’t argue for this, only for eliminating negative motivation.
I agree with you that sadness is intrinsically bad, and that constantly being sad is counterproductive. I disagree with you on the merits of negative motivation—that is, I think that feeling sad about something causes you to work harder than not feeling sad about it—and on the number of things that it’s rational to “look away” from.

Also, one ambiguity that may be creating misunderstanding on both our parts: Ideally, no one should be generally unhappy, no matter what state the world is in. What they should be is unhappy about things, so that they can work harder to solve them—and they should be unhappy about things in proportion to how bad they are. I think the post would be better if this distinction were clearly made.

Edit: And given that distinction, it is bad to ruminate on the existence of suffering/death/etc., if it’s not motivating you to combat suffering/death/etc. So I agree with that part of the post.
What links here?
- Formatting issues by Tesseract (Jan 2, 2011, 4:01 AM; 2 points)

Tesseract Jan 2, 2011, 2:14 AM
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in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Choose To Be Happy
I think the comic is better matched by The Scourge of Perverse-Mindedness.

Tesseract Jan 2, 2011, 1:59 AM
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on: Choose To Be Happy
This post’s basic claims:
1. If you ‘should’ feel bad about bad things (e.g. suffering), you ‘should’ feel bad about them in proportion to their magnitude.
2. Doing 1 is not a good idea, because a. it’s intrinsically bad to feel bad, and b. feeling bad does not help you to fight bad things.
3. Therefore you should try not to feel bad about bad things, only to alleviate them.
All of which boils down to the proposition “It is instrumentally irrational to feel bad about bad things.”

The problem is that 2.b. is blatantly false. Human beings are not capable of completely disconnecting action from emotion. Certainly, if you feel bad enough then due to the way the human brain works it’s possible that you will (instrumentally irrationally) lapse into depression, and therefore do less to achieve your goals than if you never felt bad at all. And there are obviously cases in which what you feel emotionally can be overridden by calculation (e.g. trolley problem for many utilitarians). But given that no one performs explicit calculations to determine even most of their actions in more than a few small parts of their life, emotions determine most of our decisions. Do you really believe that someone who felt happy despite knowing about the state of suffering in the world would be more strongly motivated to reduce suffering than someone who felt a great sadness and a burning desire to stop it every time they thought about it? Do you think being happily mortal is the best emotional state for someone crusading to stop death?

If your actual goal is to end suffering—if your moral system dictates, as most of ours do, that reducing suffering is currently by far the best thing you could do, and you actually want, unlike most of us, to follow your morals to their conclusions—then you will do your absolute best to make your emotions about suffering dwarf all other emotions, because that is what will make you spend a life reducing suffering, and not any amount of abstract calculation.

On the other hand, if your real goal is to be as happy as you can, this post is great advice. But so is wireheading.

Tesseract Dec 31, 2010, 9:17 AM
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in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Some rationality tweets
I agree with you. My dispute is that ‘pithy’ means not ‘short’ but ‘concisely meaningful.’ If a line is short but confusing, it’s not pithy.

Tesseract Dec 31, 2010, 3:00 AM
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on: Some rationality tweets
There’s a certain style distinct to many didactic quotes: they express claims in a wise-sounding but opaque way, so that they automatically appear deep without requiring the reader to actually think about them. This can cloak empty language and doubtful claims in a veneer of impressiveness—not to mention being uncommunicative if the ideas really are good.

It looks to me like these match that style. The ideas here could be both true and interesting, but making them into aphorisms (to fit Twitter) removes the explanation and examples that would convince me they’re true and interesting. As it is, they sound meaningless to me—the medium totally obscures the message.

I’d be interested in a post exploring some of these ideas, but tweets seem to me to be a format utterly unsuited to the topic.

[Also, I really think that this should not be on the front page. If even commenters have to puzzle over many of these, it’s not a good choice for the general audience.]

Tesseract Dec 29, 2010, 10:59 AM
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in reply to: MBlume’s comment on: Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story
Not to dispute your main point here (that emotionally-protected false beliefs discourage contact with reality), but do you really think that many religious practices were developed consciously and explicitly for the purpose of preventing contact with outside ideas? It seems to me that something like kosher law was more likely the combination of traditional practice and the desire to forge a sense of social identity than a structure explicitly designed to stop interactions. Group differences hinder interaction between groups, but that doesn’t mean that the purpose of group differences is to do so.

I don’t disagree with you on the point that religion often explicitly discourages contact with nonbelievers, either, but that seems to me to be more easily explained by honest belief than Dark Side practices. If you believe something is true (and important to know the truth of) but that someone can be easily persuaded otherwise by sophistic arguments, then it’s reasonable to try to prevent them from hearing them. If someone believes in global warming but doesn’t have a firm grasp on the science, then you shouldn’t let them wander into a skeptics’ convention if you value valid beliefs.

Tesseract Dec 28, 2010, 11:54 PM
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in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: Dark Arts 101: Using presuppositions
“Human” is a word with many meanings, interpretations, and implications, not all of which are satisfied by the condition of possessing human DNA. “Person” is likewise disputable.

And I hate to sound like a style guide, but the phrase “everyone will agree that [x]” is false almost without exception and should probably be avoided.

Tesseract Dec 22, 2010, 7:19 AM
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on: The 9 Circles of Scientific Hell
Ironic punishment is seriously underrated.

Tesseract Dec 20, 2010, 10:28 PM
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in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics
Okay, now I can see the application of this argument. You can think of the punishment as a tax, the cost of which gets tacked on to the price of the good so that the seller ultimately gets the same amount of benefit whether they sell it at X price with no punishment or at X+Y price with punishment. (As I understand it, something much like this trade-off happens in drug trafficking.) But when there’s no punishment and you’re just unable to sell?

Tesseract Dec 20, 2010, 7:00 PM
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in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics
...So if you’re not allowed to sell your trumpet, you’ve been revealed as valuing your trumpet more?

Tesseract Dec 20, 2010, 6:27 PM
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in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics
Hmm. That makes more sense in that it allows the relationship to be precisely calculated, but that doesn’t seem to me to be the argument he actually makes. It’s strongly implied throughout (especially in the passage about the two sons) that the ‘value’ here is one being assigned by an independent observer, not by either the king or the prisoner—namely society.

Also, I don’t think it makes sense to say that you can be forced to value anything. The prisoner would trade more life for pleasure if he could, therefore he values pleasure more highly than the current ‘exchange rate’. He isn’t allowed to make the trade, but that doesn’t mean his values have been changed. (For an analogy, imagine that you want to sell your trumpet for $100 at the local pawn shop, but the pawn shop is currently closed. Does this mean that you value your trumpet at more than $100 until the pawn shop opens again?)

Tesseract Dec 20, 2010, 7:12 AM
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on: The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics
Though I initially really liked the resolution to the second story, thinking about it further has made me realize that it’s incoherent.

The cambist’s answer in the second tale appears to be that life is valued by society’s willingness to allow each one to trade life for pleasure, and that because the king is given a greater degree of freedom to trade, it follows that society values his life-time less. (Though even in this view I can’t see how one would actually come up with a numerical result.) One flaw in this argument is that society holds freedom as having a value independent from life or pleasure. Another shows up if you imagine the counterfactual case of the king being a health freak: if he used his freedom to eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, while the prisoners only got dry bread, he would likely live longer than them—but the way the cambist defines it, that wouldn’t change the respective value of their days of life. Nailing the coffin is the fact that only a prisoner would make such a trade.

I think the question as asked is insolvable, because it doesn’t specify perspective. If you asked the king how many days of a prisoner’s life he’d trade for one of his own, and a prisoner how many days of his life he’d trade for one of the king’s, you’d get different answers, and they’d both be correct; the utility functions simply differ.

Great story, though.

[As a side note, I wonder if there are some characteristics common to arguments that are wrong but in which it’s difficult to locate the wrongness. Even though I know that the answer the cambist gave is wrong, and I can provide a counterexample that proves it, I still don’t know exactly where it’s wrong.]

Tesseract Dec 20, 2010, 4:55 AM
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on: Why did the internet stop working just now?
Given the error messages, I’d guess that concentrated snark brought the servers down.

Tesseract Dec 13, 2010, 8:39 AM
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in reply to: MichaelGR’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: December 2010
A concurring opinion:

All men can make mistakes; but, once mistaken, a man is no longer stupid or accursed who, having fallen on ill, tries to cure that ill, not taking a fine undeviating stand. It is obstinacy that convicts of folly.

Sophocles, Antigone

Tesseract Dec 11, 2010, 5:03 AM
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in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: How To Lose 100 Karma In 6 Hours—What Just Happened
Though reading this comment and others like it have managed to convince not to seek out the deleted post, I can’t help but think that they would be aided by a reminder of what it means to be Schmuck Bait.

Tesseract Dec 10, 2010, 11:34 AM
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in reply to: Pfft’s comment on: Unpacking the Concept of “Blackmail”
That makes sense from a reciprocal altruism perspective. If someone can benefit you at no cost to themself, and doesn’t, that probably indicates a lack of intent to cooperate under all circumstances. The natural response is hostility.