Am I the only one who noticed that the bucket lost a pebble during the argument? Poor sheep...
tlhonmey
Indeed… So does this count as weak evidence that our brains are built to outmaneuver other thinking creatures rather than purely random environmental phenomena?
I ran across a work of fiction that proposed an interesting hypothesis as to why we have some of this programming:
If you’re a primitive tribesman, and something wipes out half your kin in a single incident, that’s probably not something you can pick up your spear and hope to fight with any effectiveness. But if it gets just one or two, that might be something you can take on and win. And so as numbers grow larger we tend to grow numb to it and prefer avoidance over confrontation as a survival strategy.
In the “Star Trek: Judgement Rites” game there’s a spot where Spock gives ridiculously precise odds, and Kirk comments that they seem “better than usual.” Spock then clarifies that he has begun factoring Kirk’s history of prevailing when the odds are against him into the calculations.
And do keep in mind that the audience doesn’t necessarily see all the times that low-odds plans don’t work out.
The market cares for individuals about as much as evolution does.
Yes. Bezos can bid more for the meal than the hungry drifter. Why is that the case? It’s because Bezos is instrumental to offering a useful service to literally billions of people and the drifter… isn’t.
It seems cruel. It is cruel. But it’s a cruel world we live in. It is perfectly possible for preventing Bezos from being mildly “hangry” at an inopportune time to alleviate more suffering worldwide than preventing one shiftless vagrant from starving to death.
And that’s not intuitively obvious because your social instincts are programmed for a world where you know everyone in your entire community personally and can see exactly what they’re contributing with your own eyes.
Set the situation in a small tribe where you’re choosing between feeding the shaman who knows where the watering holes are and what food is safe to eat and is obviously critical to the survival of everyone, or feeding the aged cripple who can barely walk unassisted and your social instincts will likely choose correctly. You’ll still be sad, but finite resources often means hard choices.
We use markets to decide things like this because they’re the most efficient way we know of to deal with the scope of the calculation being far too big for our puny brains to handle all at once. But that cuts us off from always being able to understand the why of the calculation result. And so when the market hands down a result that is painful to look at we reflexively want to call it a “market failure” and “correct” it.
But there are consequences for doing that. The fact that the immediate consequences of the market’s choice are obvious and the long-term consequences of overriding that choice are invisible (except with great effort) doesn’t mean that there are no costs. There is no free lunch. Every choice must be paid for. While you might sometimes “beat the market” and spot the more-optimal solution just the sheer difference in data-crunching capability means that, most of the time, you’re going to be wrong. Even if the consequences don’t hit for years. Even if you’ve stopped paying attention by the time the piper comes around to collect his due.
At the end of the day what keeps the system running is that 98% of us are decent people who care about others, even strangers. Jeff Bezos certainly could outbid the starving vagrant. But, unless this were the last meal in the world, would he? Likely not.
And if he did I expect he could be easily persuaded to purchase a more normal meal for the fellow—it’s a trivial cost to him and most normal people would get a good feeling from doing it.
And even if he didn’t, in a full economy that high bid lowers the cost of another meal and encourages an increase in meal production, so that 2% of selfish people are still at least pulling their own weight.
It’s not that a market always makes things perfect for everyone. It’s that, in the long run, it screws up less often that the other systems we currently know of.
The poisons are variations on digestive enzymes, only turned up to 11 potency-wise. Lots of enzyme producing organs have bladders to store their output until needed, so that likely would have copy-pasted in at the same time, and there are several species of reptiles which are venomous, but don’t have fangs. There seems to be a progression of teeth near the venom entry point becoming longer and grooved, eventually culminating in fangs.
Digestion first, then pre-digestive saliva (your saliva has digestive enzymes too for that matter) then more potent saliva, then teeth to stuff it into the prey more effectively once it was strong enough to help with incapacitation and not just chewing, then more specialized saliva, then more specialized teeth. Pretty easy to see how it would have developed a piece at a time.
Another potential reason for the disparity in social reaction to overconfidence vs underconfidence may be that, for primitive people, overconfidence would likely get one killed immediately when taking on too large a challenge while underconfidence would merely result in being hungry but usually living to find another opportunity later.
In the modern world very few of our challenges are of a nature where failure results in immediate death, but our brains are still wired as though we’re debating the wisdom of leaping onto a mammoth’s back. Being pack animals we are naturally inclined to curb the exuberance of others to avoid incurring fatality rates that would jeopardize the survival of the tribe, but most of us have a mis-calibrated scale due to never having had to take on significant, life-or-death decisions.
There are quite a few ways it can go wrong other than just central planning. Ultimately most of them come back to some special interest group attempting to forcibly subvert the economy to favor their own preferences.
High extraction ratios aren’t inherently problematic economically speaking since it’s not like the extracted resources simply vanish, and market forces tend to bring the extraction ratio down over time until it reaches the lowest level anyone’s willing to do the job for. But, high extraction ratios do make a tempting target for non-economic actions designed to preserve the lucrative ratio against the actions of the market.
A lot of the things that ancient cultures attributed to God are this kind of thinking.
If you see a dead pig on the side of the road with no signs of violence, stay the heck away from it. You don’t have to know which specific disease it died of, or even what a disease is. People have just noticed that anyone who goes near such a thing tends to die horribly later and maybe takes half the tribe with them. The precise intermediate steps are largely irrelevant, just the statistical correlation.
There are two failure modes to watch out for.
The first is when people start worshiping their own ignorance and refuse to update the rules as their understanding of the underlying principles improves.
The second is when people recognize that the idea of “God” as an old man with a long beard who lives in the clouds is patently ridiculous and assume therefore that all of the principles and rules intended to “stay his wrath” may be ignored with utter impunity.
To the first type I generally point out that whatever creator they believe exists gave us our intelligence as well, and refusing to use that gift to the utmost would be an insult.
To the second I like to suggest that, since “Thor” is imaginary, maybe they should go stand in an open field and wave a metal stick around during the next thunderstorm… A “primitive” understanding of something is not the same as being stupid, and a few thousand years of experience that says, “If you do X, bad things happen,” should not be ignored lightly.
The hard part is that it’s one of those mental skills that can’t really be taught. You can tell people about it, but they have to learn it for themselves. Because, even once you know about it intellectually, what it “feels” like when your brain is deliberately not thinking about something is almost certainly a subjective experience that will be different for everyone.
So, like Zen, you’d have to work out a large set of training scenarios that put a person in a situation where it’ll happen and then draw their attention to it, and plan on having to run most people through quite a few of them before they grok.
One thing I see is that people take the fact that some pieces of their religion are of a nature that can be neither proven nor disproven and assume that that absolves them from having to justify any of it.
Believing in a supernatural master of our universe isn’t any more unreasonable than believing we live in a simulation instead of the top-level reality. Neither supposition can be definitively shown to be true or false without access to an outside view of the universe itself. That’s not something we’re likely to accomplish any time soon.
But does that automatically translate into your particular religion correctly ascertaining the will of any such master so strongly that you don’t need to justify it somehow?
Insofar as some of the ancient religions were based on a search for the truth they can make reasonable starting points. But many people take that ancient finger pointing toward the truth and instead of looking toward the shining city in the distance, shouldering their packs, and setting off to continue the journey, they sit down and suck on what’s really just a road sign and tell themselves they’re “glorying in its Majesty”...
Why? If the answer is “no” then applying a proper punishment causes the nebulous whatsit in charge of the person’s free will to change their future behaviour.
If the answer is “yes” then applying a proper punishment adjusts the programming of their brain in a way that will change their future behaviour.
The only way a “yes” makes it harder to justify punishing someone is if you overexpand a lack of “free will” to imply “incapable of learning”.
If you interpret it strictly, an answer of “yes” puts you in the space of “I used to beat my wife, but I have stopped.” An answer of “no” puts you in the ambiguous space of “Either I used to beat her, and I still do, or I never have and therefore can’t have stopped.”
The question is which of those two possibilities people will assume. Which will depend on the context and what they already think of both you and the person asking.
I’m afraid I haven’t collected a definite list. I just notice when it pops up in the wide variety of materials I tend to read. For example, traffic studies showing better flow rates and safety when drivers are allowed more individual discretion. You’ll probably also find some stuff in Austrian economics with regard to how more freedom of choice allows for better optimization by making fuller use of the processing capability of each individual. And there have been a few references to it in business management studies about why micromanaging your employees almost invariably leads to worse productivity.
“Network Effects” is probably a good keyword if you want to go looking for such examples specifically. It seems to be a common phrase.
Reminds me of one of the early AI research projects using some variety of optimization algorithm to try to “learn” the ability to solve a wide variety of problems in a single program. Genetic algorithm I think, random mutation and cross-pollination of the programs between the best performers, that kind of thing.
After a while, they noticed that one of the lines that had developed, while not the best at any of the test problems, was second-best at all of them.
Yet when they tried to make it the base of all their next generation… it didn’t work...
Cue a massive analysis effort to rip it apart at the machine-code level and figure out what the heck was going on. Eventually they found that it had stumbled upon a security flaw in their running environment and learned to steal answers from the other programs running on the system.
Evolution doesn’t care if it’s cheating, only if it works.
Sure. Your cells have two methods for copying DNA. One of them is fast and highly accurate. The other is quite slow and makes mistakes several times more often.
The chemical structure of the accurate method is basically an order of magnitude more complex than the inaccurate one. It seems likely that the inaccurate method is the remnant of some previous stage of development.
The inaccurate method has stuck around because the error checking on the accurate method also causes the process to stall if it hits a damaged segment. At which point the strand being copied gets kicked over to the older machinery.
The new method, being significantly more complex, is dependent for assembly on significantly more complicated structures than the old method, structures which could not have been created without the old method or something like it. Figuring out exactly how far down the stack of turtles goes is tricky though since all the evidence has long-since decayed. Maybe as we get better at decoding DNA we’ll find leftover scraps of some of them lurking in the seemingly-unused sections of various genomes.
An interesting choice since horses are one of the few other animals on the planet that sweat and, therefore, are one of the hardest to run down.
Interestingly, the ability to sweat also coincides with the ability to run oneself to death. Other creatures use panting as their primary cooling mechanism, and, as a result, when they become too warm, they cease to be able to take in sufficient oxygen to maintain their exertion and have to stop. Non-sweaters will drop from exhaustion, but it’s rarely fatal.
Horses use their extreme running ability to get away from predators. Humans use it to be predators. When we finally teamed up we became nearly unstoppable. :D
So I grew up around Jesuits and, while I obviously can’t speak for all of them, I’d say that they probably qualify as proto-rationalists, if not rationalists. To the point where a large portion of other Christian sects denounce them as atheists because they refuse to wallow in mysticism like everyone else.
A core principle of the Jesuit philosophy is that God gave us our intellect specifically so that we could come to better understand him. You won’t find them trying to quibble about “micro” vs “macro” evolution or any of the other silliness that other groups use as a membership badge and try to talk in circles around. They do still believe that there is a super-natural world beyond our ability to directly observe, but everything about this world must be logically consistent and any apparent inconsistency is a flaw in your own understanding, not a flaw in the world or a “divine mystery”.
They are trained to draw a hard line between what they believe and what they know, and to treat any perceived inconsistency between the two as a reason to probe deeper until it makes sense. And any fellow Christian who gives the appearance of engaging in “belief in belief”? They’ll tear him a new one just as fast as Yudkowsky would, if not faster. They have his lack of tolerance for it, coupled with encyclopedic knowledge not only of the Bible’s contents, but also generally of practically every work by every significant Christian and major pagan philosopher before or since.
I suppose a good way to explain the fundamental difference is that where most Christian sects believe that certain things are true because they are in the Bible, the Jesuits would say that the stories in the Bible were selected because they teach a fundamental truth or two. Were it not for the weight of Catholic tradition, I strongly suspect many Jesuits would be in favor of continuing to add to the anthology that is the Bible as we develop better stories for teaching the desired lessons. Or, at least, developing an updated one that would make sense to a modern reader without having to spend decades studying all the cultural context necessary to understand what’s going on. I first heard the observation that “The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally Christian story and worldview, just dressed up in different mythology” from a Jesuit for example.
Definitely interesting people and nearly always worth developing a relationship with when you can. And while they’ll try to convert you, they’ll do it by presenting logical arguments, not by shouting and hitting you with a large book. They’ll take what they consider to be the core lessons and principles of Christianity and recompute how to explain them couched in your own world view. And if you end up agreeing on everything but the mythology? Well that’s good enough.
Just to point it out, even the term “denialist” was designed to be a loaded word that biases everyone who hears it against the position. Which doesn’t make them any more or less likely to be correct, but it does let you know that the whole debate has gone political and scoring points against the opposing side has become more important than finding the truth.
Which doesn’t actually add any evidence to either side being correct, because the universe doesn’t really care about what we think, but it does tell you to watch out, because the mainstream voices have already picked which side they want to be correct and are ruthlessly filtering the “evidence” to eliminate all dissent. Perhaps the dissenters really don’t have a point, but if they did they’d be shouted down long before they could make it.
Reminds me of a family dinner where the topic of the credit union my grandparents had started came up.
According to my grandmother, the state auditor was a horribly sexist fellow. He came and audited their books every single month, telling everyone who would listen that it was because he “didn’t think a woman could be a successful credit union manager.”
This, of course, got my new-agey aunts and cousins all up-in-arms about how horrible it was that that kind of sexism was allowed back in the 60s and 70s. They really wanted to make sure everyone knew they didn’t approve, so the conversation dragged on and on...
And about the time everyone was all thoroughly riled up and angry from the stories of the mean, vindictive things this auditor had done because the credit union was run by a woman my grandfather decided to get in on the ruckus and told his story about the auditor...
Seems like the very first time the auditor had come through, the auditor spent several hours going over the books and couldn’t make it all balance correctly. He was all-fired sure this brand new credit union was up to something shady. Finally, my grandfather (who was the credit union accountant) leaned over his shoulder and pointed out the rookie math mistake the auditor had been making… repeatedly… until an hour past closing time and “could we please go home now?”
The auditor was horribly embarrassed, and stormed out in a huff. And then proceeded to come back every single month for over twenty years trying to catch them in a mistake somewhere.
I don’t know if my cousins learned anything from that story. My grandfather’s a quiet fellow. They might not even have heard his side of it. But I sure did. See, in the 60s and 70s, the auditor coming out and saying, “I’m harassing you because you humiliated me and I want revenge” would have been totally unacceptable and likely would have gotten him dismissed. But saying it was because he didn’t trust a female manager? That was a lie, but it was a socially acceptable reason for doing what he wanted to do for personal reasons anyway.
Makes me wonder just how much historic racism and sexism was simply people looking for a socially acceptable excuse to be jerks. And since I don’t think people’s overall level of desire to be spiteful has changed much, I wonder what the excuses are today now that the “traditional” ones are no longer acceptable.