Vladimir_M

Karma: 13,907

Vladimir_M 16 Apr 2011 1:50 UTC
169 points
on: Offense versus harm minimization
Yvain:

The offender, for eir part, should stop offending as soon as ey realizes that the amount of pain eir actions cause is greater than the amount of annoyance it would take to avoid the offending action, even if ey can’t understand why it would cause any pain at all.

In a world where people make decisions according to this principle, one has the incentive to self-modify into a utility monster who feels enormous suffering at any actions of other people one dislikes for whatever reason. And indeed, we can see this happening to some extent: when people take unreasonable offense and create drama to gain concessions, their feelings are usually quite sincere.

You say, “pretending to be offended for personal gain is… less common in reality than it is in people’s imaginations.” That is indeed true, but only because people have the ability to whip themselves into a very sincere feeling of offense given the incentive to do so. Although sincere, these feelings will usually subside if they realize that nothing’s to be gained.
What links here?

Vladimir_M 14 Mar 2012 4:03 UTC
130 points
0
on: Schelling fences on slippery slopes

There are also a host of other well-respected exceptions to free speech, like shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.

I wonder how many people would use this example nowadays if they knew that it comes from a WW1-era U.S. Supreme Court opinion upholding a ten year prison sentence for sedition against an anti-war activist—whose crime was to distribute pamphlets arguing that military conscription is unconstitutional under the 13th Amendment, which prohibits “involuntary servitude.”

(By the way, speaking of slippery slopes, the following year the same court upheld another ten year conviction for a speech whose content was carefully crafted to remain within the bounds of the sedition laws, but which was still judged to be illegal on the grounds of intent and indirect implication.)

Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields

Vladimir_M15 Feb 2011 9:17 UTC

101 points

276 comments9 min readLW link

Vladimir_M 20 Apr 2011 19:06 UTC
92 points
on: Official Less Wrong Redesign: Call for Suggestions
One thing I’d really like to see: make the total number of upvotes and downvotes visible separately instead of just the difference. That way controversial posts and comments will stand apart from uninteresting ones.

Vladimir_M 16 Apr 2011 20:52 UTC
75 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Offense versus harm minimization

If X doesn’t offend you, why would self-modify to make X offend you to stop people from doing X, since X doesn’t offend you?

It’s a Schellingian idea: in conflict situations, it is often a rational strategy to pre-commit to act irrationally (i.e. without regards to cost and benefit) unless the opponent yields. The idea in this case is that I’ll self-modify to care about X far more than I initially do, and thus pre-commit to lash out if anyone does it.

If we have a dispute and I credibly signal that I’m going to flip out and create drama out of all proportion to the issue at stake, you’re faced with a choice between conceding to my demands or getting into an unpleasant situation that will cost more than the matter of dispute is worth. I’m sure you can think of many examples where people successfully get the upper hand in disputes using this strategy. The only way to disincentivize such behavior is to pre-commit credibly to be defiant in face of threats of drama. In contrast, if you act like a (naive) utilitarian, you are exceptionally vulnerable to this strategy, since I don’t even need drama to get what I want, if I can self-modify to care tremendously about every single thing I want. (Which I won’t do if I’m a good naive utilitarian myself, but the whole point is that it’s not a stable strategy.)

Now, the key point is that such behavior is usually not consciously manipulative and calculated. On the contrary—someone flipping out and creating drama for a seemingly trivial reason is likely to be under God-honest severe distress, feeling genuine pain of offense and injustice. This is a common pattern in human social behavior: humans are extremely good at detecting faked emotions and conscious manipulation, and as a result, we have evolved so that our brains lash out with honest strong emotion that is nevertheless directed by some module that performs game-theoretic assessment of the situation. This of course prompts strategic responses from others, leading to a strategic arms race without end.

The further crucial point is that these game-theoretic calculators in our brains are usually smart enough to assess whether the flipping out strategy is likely to be successful, given what might be expected in response. Basically, it is a part of the human brain that responds to rational incentives even though it’s not under the control of the conscious mind. With this in mind, you can resolve the seeming contradiction between the sincerity of the pain of offense and the fact that it responds to rational incentives.

All this is somewhat complicated when we consider issues of group conflict rather than individual conflict, but the same basic principles apply.
What links here?
- Said Achmiz's comment on On insecurity as a friend by Kaj_Sotala (10 Oct 2018 8:41 UTC; 12 points)
- Kaj_Sotala's comment on On insecurity as a friend by Kaj_Sotala (10 Oct 2018 12:46 UTC; 4 points)

Vladimir_M 15 Mar 2012 1:09 UTC
71 points
on: Schelling fences on slippery slopes
Thinking about this article a bit more, you’re missing a very important point. Namely, a “Schelling fence” is often of supreme importance even when there aren’t multiple interest groups involved. (Nor even time- or value-inconsistent versions of the same party.)

This is because in most cases of conflict, pre-commitments are difficult to communicate. If you’re maintaining some line of defence against an opponent and you’re credibly pre-committed to defend even if the cost of defence is higher than the value of the prize fought over, you’re safe against a rational opponent who perceives this pre-commitment correctly. However, if you have no such pre-commitment, the opponent has the incentive to mount an overwhelming attack even if the cost of the attack is higher than the prize—since in that case you’ll find it rational to retreat and avoid fighting.

The trouble is, communicating pre-commitment credibly is difficult, since it’s always in your interest to assert pre-commitment to defend as credibly as possible, but secretly plan to withdraw if your bluff gets called. So this is where the Schelling points come into play: a conspicuous Schelling point helps create a meeting of minds about pre-commitments between the conflicting parties. Your commitment to defend at that line is credible because by failing to defend it, you lose not only that particular prize, but also everything up to the next strong Schelling point, which may even be nonexistent. (And is certainly harder to use effectively once you have a reputation as a pushover who gives up on valuable Schelling points.)

So, in case of Holocaust denial laws, there might be rational reason to oppose them even if a single Holocaust denier didn’t exist. The principle that the government can’t legislate official truth is a very clear Schelling point. The same principle modified by an exemption for those cases where the truth is evident and its denial offensive, much less so. Who gets to decide what’s evident and what’s offensive anyway? So once you’ve conceded that the government can prohibit you to say that that the Holocaust didn’t happen, or that 2+2=5, there isn’t any clear Schelling point where you’d draw the line and pre-commit to fight the prohibition.

Or is there? Currently, in the Western world outside the U.S., there are several fairly strong Schelling points based on a general perception about a few extremely low-status kinds of people—basically, speech restrictions are considered OK if and only if they specifically target these sorts of people. In most places, these groups include neo-Nazis (and right-wing extremists in general) and certain kinds of sexual deviants, and Holocaust denial prohibition is considered OK because it specifically targets the former. However, there is definitely an ongoing slippery-slope effect here—in many countries, the class of speech restrictions that is vaguely associated with the “right-wing extremist” exception is increasingly used to enforce ideological conformity on a number of issues where dissent from the respectable opinion should not merit that title by any reasonable definition. (And where, arguably, honest pursuit of truth will lead one to disagree with the respectable opinion.)

Vladimir_M 9 Feb 2011 21:18 UTC
65 points
in reply to: Blueberry’s comment on: Procedural Knowledge Gaps
Even with an ordinary thermostat, cranking it up can be effective in some realistic situations. If some corners of the house take longer to heat up than the location of the thermostat, they’ll reach the desired temperature faster if you let the thermostat itself and the rest of the house get a few degrees warmer first. Or to put it differently, scoffing at people who crank up the thermostat is justified only under the assumption that it measures the temperature of the whole house accurately, which is a pretty shaky assumption when you think about it.

As the moral of the story, even when your physics is guaranteed to be more accurate than folk physics, that’s still not a reason to scoff at the conclusions of folk physics. The latter, bad as it is, has after all evolved for robust grappling with real-world problems, whereas any scientific model’s connection with reality is delicately brittle.

That’s an important lesson, generalizable to much more than just physics.
What links here?
- Vladimir_M's comment on Folk theories can be useful even when they’re entirely wrong by taw (23 Mar 2011 16:28 UTC; 4 points)

Vladimir_M 14 Mar 2012 4:20 UTC
63 points
in reply to: Vladimir_M’s comment on: Schelling fences on slippery slopes
As an interesting side note, the grimly ironic pinnacle of these American WW1-era sedition laws was the ten-year sentence (another one!) against a certain Robert Goldstein for defying the censorship of his film about the American Revolution. The film was deemed to be seditious on the theory that it incited hostility towards Britain, a war ally.

Vladimir_M 5 Nov 2011 21:42 UTC
55 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics

Generally I think avoiding mindkillers is a good thing for the community in my mind, and the comment section of this discussion is better than I expected, so perhaps the comment is coming of harsher than intended.

I think your comment was quite appropriate. Even under the best imaginable scenario, these articles and their follow-up discussions will suffer from at least two problems.

First, there is the conspicuous omission of any references to the PUA elephant in the room. The body of insight developed by this particular sort of people, whatever its faults, is of supreme practical importance for anyone who wants to formulate practical advice in this area. Without referencing it explicitly, one can either ignore it altogether and thus inevitably talk nonsense, or pretend to speak based solely on official academic literature, which is disingenuous and unfair in its failure to attribute credit (and also misleading for those who would like to pursue their own research in the matter). It’s as if someone wanted to talk about electronics but insisted that the only legitimate references should be from pure academic quantum theory, and the nuts-and-bolts work of tech entrepreneurs and industry engineers is forbidden and unmentionable.

Second, really good practical advice in this area simply cannot be inoffensive. To take a clear and obvious example, one absolutely essential sort of knowledge is what kinds of people are likely to lead to various sorts of trouble if you entangle yourself with them. In principle, this is an exercise in assigning conditional probabilities that should be greatly attractive to the LW folks fond of Bayesianism. Yet since in our culture the discussion (let alone practical use) of certain kinds of conditional probabilities about people is considered immoral, discussing these things while remaining within the contemporary inoffensive bounds is as if one wanted to discuss sexual techniques while respecting the prudery norms of 17th century puritanism. (Also, on a more mundane level, LW is still far from the standards of rationality that would make people who recognize themselves in some of these conditional probabilities refrain from destroying the discourse by crying offense, and various others not to try boosting their staus by joining them in solidarity, or even complaining preemptively on their behalf.) There are of course many other important aspects of the topic where one faces similar problems.

On the whole, the article is based on the premise that an accurate and no-nonsense analysis of the topic will result in something that sounds not just inoffensive, but actually strongly in line with various fashionable and high-status norms and ideals of the broader society. This premise however is flawed, and those who believe that this has in fact been accomplished should apply the powerful debiasing heuristic that says that when a seemingly rational discussion of some deeply problematic and controversial topic sounds pleasant and reassuring, there’s probably something fishy going on. There is simply no way to approach this topic without ending up with something that’s either offensive to the mainstream sensibilities and apt to upset certain sorts of people, or disingenuous and inaccurate to a significant degree.

Vladimir_M 15 Aug 2010 18:58 UTC
55 points
on: Existential Risk and Public Relations
I am a relative newbie commenter here, and my interest in this site has so far been limited to using it as a fun forum where it’s possible to discuss all kinds of sundry topics with exceptionally smart people. However, I have read a large part of the background sequences, and I’m familiar with the main issues of concern here, so even though it might sound impertinent coming from someone without any status in this community, I can’t resist commenting on this article.

To put it bluntly, I think the main point of the article is, if anything, an understatement. Let me speak from personal experience. From the perspective of this community, I am a sort of person who should be exceptionally easy to get interested and won over to its cause, considering both my intellectual background and my extreme openness to contrarian viewpoints and skepticism towards the official academic respectability as a criteron of truth and intellectual soundness. Yet, to be honest, even though I find a lot of the writing and discussion here extremely interesting, and the writings of Yudkowsky (in addition to others such as Bostrom, Hanson, etc.) have convinced me that technology-related existential risks should be taken much more seriously than they presently are, I still keep encountering things in this community that set off various red flags, which are undoubtedly taken by many people as a sign of weirdness and crackpottery, and thus alienate huge numbers of potential quality audience.

Probably the worst such example I’ve seen was the recent disturbance in which Roko was subjected to abuse that made him leave. When I read the subsequent discussions, it surprised me that virtually nobody here appears to be aware what an extreme PR disaster it was. Honestly, for someone unfamiliar with this website who has read about that episode, it would be irrational not to conclude that there’s some loony cult thing going on here, unless he’s also presented with enormous amounts of evidence to the contrary in the form of a selection of the best stuff that this site has to offer. After these events, I myself wondered whether I want to be associated with an outlet where such things happen, even just as an occasional commenter. (And not to even mention that Roko’s departure is an enormous PR loss in its own right, in that he was one of the few people here who know how to write in a way that’s interesting and appealing to people who aren’t hard-core insiders.)

Even besides this major PR fail, I see many statements and arguments here that may be true, or at least not outright unreasonable, but should definitely be worded more cautiously and diplomatically if they’re given openly for the whole world to see. I’m not going to get into details of concrete examples—in particular, I do not concur unconditionally with any of the specific complaints from the above article—but I really can’t help but conclude that lots of people here, including some of the most prominent individuals, seem oblivious as to how broader audiences, even all kinds of very smart, knowledgeable, and open-minded people, will perceive what they write and say. If you want to have a closed inner circle where specific background knowledge and attitudes can be presumed, that’s fine—but if you set up a large website attracting lots of visitors and participants to propagate your ideas, you have to follow sound PR principles, or otherwise its effect may well end up being counter-productive.
What links here?
- multifoliaterose's comment on “Target audience” size for the Less Wrong sequences by Louie (20 Nov 2010 17:06 UTC; 4 points)

Vladimir_M 27 Apr 2011 1:03 UTC
54 points
on: Consequentialism FAQ
OK, I’ve read the whole FAQ. Clearly, a really detailed critique would have to be given at similar length. Therefore, here is just a sketch of the problems I see with your exposition.

For start, you use several invalid examples, or at least controversial examples that you incorrectly present as clear-cut. For example, the phlogiston theory was nothing like the silly strawman you present. It was a falsifiable scientific theory that was abandoned because it was eventually falsified (when it was discovered that burning stuff adds mass due to oxidation, rather than losing mass due to escaped phlogiston). It was certainly a reductionist theory—it attempted to reduce fire (which itself has different manifestations) and the human and animal metabolism to the same underlying physical process. (Google “Becher-Stahl theory”.) Or, at another place, you present the issue of “opposing condoms” as a clear-cut case of “a horrendous decision” from a consequentialist perspective—although in reality the question is far less clear.

Otherwise, up to Section 4, your argumentation is passable. But then it goes completely off the rails. I’ll list just a few main issues:
- In the discussion of the trolley problem, you present a miserable caricature of the “don’t push” arguments. The real reason why pushing the fat main is problematic requires delving into a broader game-theoretic analysis that establishes the Schelling points that hold in interactions between people, including those gravest ones that define unprovoked deadly assault. The reason why any sort of organized society is possible is that you can trust that other people will always respect these Schelling points without regards to any cost-benefit calculations, except perhaps when the alternative to violating them is by orders of magnitude more awful than in the trolley examples. (I have compressed an essay’s worth of arguments into a few sentences, but I hope the main point is clear.)
- In Section 5, you don’t even mention the key problem of how utilities are supposed to be compared and aggregated interpersonally. If you cannot address this issue convincingly, the whole edifice crumbles.
- In Section 6, at first it seems like you get the important point that even if we agree on some aggregate welfare maximization, we have no hope of getting any practical guidelines for action beyond quasi-deontologist heuristics. But they you boldly declare that “we do have procedures in place for breaking the heuristic when we need to.” No, we don’t. You may think we have them, but what we actually have are either somewhat more finely tuned heuristics that aren’t captured by simple first-order formulations (which is good), or rationalizations and other nonsensical arguments couched in terms of a plausible-sounding consequentialist analysis (which is often a recipe for disaster). The law of unintended consequences often bites even in seemingly clear-cut “what could possibly go wrong?” situations.
- Along similar lines, you note that in any conflict all parties are quick to point out that their natural rights are at stake. Well, guess what. If they just have smart enough advocates, they can also all come up with different consequentialist analyses whose implications favor their interests. Different ways of interpersonal utility comparison are often themselves enough to tilt the scales as you like. Further, these analyses will all by necessity be based on spherical-cow models of the real world, which you can usually engineer to get pretty much any implication you like.
- Section 7 is rather incoherent. You jump from one case study to another arguing that even when it seems like consequentialism might imply something revolting, that’s not really so. Well, if you’re ready to bite awful consequentialist bullets like Robin Hanson does, then be explicit about it. Otherwise, clarify where exactly you draw the lines.
- Since we’re already at biting bullets, your FAQ fails to address another crucial issue: it is normal for humans to value the welfare of some people more than others. You clearly value your own welfare and the welfare of your family and friends more than strangers (and even for strangers there are normally multiple circles of diminishing caring). How to reconcile this with global maximization of aggregate utility? Or do you bite the bullet that it’s immoral to care about one’s own family and friends more than strangers?
- Question 7.6 is the only one where you give even a passing nod to game-theoretical issues. Considering their fundamental importance in the human social order and all human interactions, and their complex and often counter-intuitive nature, this fact by itself means that most of your discussion is likely to be remote from reality. This is another aspect of the law of unintended consequences that you nonchalantly ignore.
- Finally, your idea that it is possible to employ economists and statisticians and get accurate and objective consequentialist analysis to guide public policy is altogether utopian. If such things were possible, economic central planning would be a path to prosperity, not the disaster that it is. (That particular consequentialist folly was finally abandoned in the mainstream after it had produced utter disaster in a sizable part of the world, but many currently fashionable ideas about “scientific” management of government and society suffer from similar delusions.)
What links here?
- Morendil's comment on Consequentialism FAQ by Scott Alexander (27 Apr 2011 12:06 UTC; 3 points)
- [deleted]'s comment on Rationality Quotes January 2013 by katydee (19 Jan 2013 16:11 UTC; 1 point)

Vladimir_M 11 May 2012 7:30 UTC
53 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: RationalWiki’s take on LW

Describing it as a “heavily ideological website” when it’s nothing of the sort is not how I would steel-man your argument, and may not serve your advocacy of said argument optimally.

I’m surprised that you perceive this characterization as controversial and unfair. From what I’ve seen, RW articles engage in scathing rhetoric of ideological warfare constantly and unabashedly, and their ideological perspective is, as far as I can tell, remarkably uniform and consistent.

The only way one could object to my characterization is if one agrees with the ideological positions of RW to such degree that one sees them as objectively correct, i.e. a matter of mere common sense and rational thinking, so that characterizing them as “ideological” would by itself be a dishonest rhetorical ploy. Now, I can accept this argument when it comes to the RW articles that sneer at, say, various physics crackpots (although even there, one wonders why the authors find it a worthwhile use of their time). However, I don’t see how one could extend it to topics that are inherently heavily ideological and where we have nothing like the solid epistemological base that exists in hard sciences, like for example economics, history, politics, etc. Yet, from what I’ve seen, RW articles on such topics sneer and jeer with the same strength of conviction.

What are the best example articles of what you’re talking about, and what’s wrong with their positions? (If possible, pick something bronze or better… )

To avoid any possibility of cherry-picking, I’ll take the links on top of the main page of RW. The first one is RW’s article about itself, so I hope I can be pardoned if I skip that one. The next one is an article about “pseudoscience.” So what does RW tell us about pseudoscience?

What it tells us is, basically, that “science” should be understood as the bureaucratic system implemented by the contemporary academia, and “pseudoscience” as any effort at finding truth that doesn’t have the official imprimatur of this system. For an especially blatant example of this, consider their bizarre claim that peer review is somehow an essential part of science—whereas in reality, as anyone with even a cursory familiarity with the history of science knows, peer review is a bureaucratic innovation that has been widely imposed only in the decades since WW2, and science had functioned perfectly well for centuries before that. Also, the writers seem to be badly confused about the difference between peer review and the truly important fundamental issue of replication. (By the way, one wonders what cognitive dissonance might be induced if they were aware that Homeopathy is a bona fide peer-reviewed journal!)

Note how the article doesn’t even conceive of the possibility that pseudoscience might in fact be practiced by some branches of the official high-status academia, with peer review and all the other bureaucratic frills in place. Its authors clearly wouldn’t be able to discuss meaningfully the question of how one could try to evaluate the reliability of the academic output in different areas and determine what sorts of pseudoscience might be thriving under prestigious academic titles and affiliations. On the contrary, all their examples are from low-status folkish superstitions and distant history. (Also, tellingly, the closest thing to a mainstream academic work that is included as an example of “pseudoscience” is The Bell Curve—a book which was co-authored by a Harvard professor, but whose conclusions are ideologically unpalatable for the sort of people who write on RW.)

This is by no means the worst example—for that, we’d need to look at articles about topics that have more direct political implications. But I think it does illustrate my points pretty well.

And by the way, what are “the intellectual institutions whose output inspires the RW writers”? I can tell you if they in fact inspired me, for example.

I think this should be clear from the above. What I have in mind is the mainstream academia and, in case of more immediate political topics, the left-centrist perspective of the mainstream media. (For the latter, a good litmus test is if you can imagine a given position being argued by a New York Times op-ed columnist.)

Vladimir_M 10 May 2012 15:11 UTC
52 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: RationalWiki’s take on LW
Pretty much any RW article I’ve ever seen takes the premise that the position of the mainstream academia—and, in case of more explicitly politicized topics, the left-center of the respectable public opinion—is correct, and any serious contrarian position can be held only by comically nutty crackpots or sinisterly malevolent extremists. Now, this isn’t always a bad heuristic: it produces more or less correct conclusions on topics where the aforementioned institutions are usually reliable, such as, say, physics. But on any topic where they are significantly biased, RW ends up as a passionate defender of all their biases and falsities. And from what I’ve seen, the RW writers typically make no serious effort to study such topics dispassionately, but instead jump at the first opportunity to engage in ideological warfare, typically via ignorant sneering and mocking.

As an example, you can take pretty much any topic that’s matter of significant ideological controversy—economics, history, human differences, political theory, let alone everyday politics. Out of several dozen RW articles I’ve read, I don’t think I’ve seen a single one that looks like a fair attempt to make sense of the topic at hand.

Of course, you may believe that the intellectual institutions whose output inspires the RW writers are in fact reliably correct about everything. But even then, it would be clear that the latter are mostly just parroting the former without much real understanding and motivated mainly by the thrill of ideological warfare.

Vladimir_M 20 Apr 2011 1:16 UTC
51 points
on: Genes are overrated
I am only an amateur in all the relevant areas of expertise, but I have invested quite a bit of effort trying to make sense of these controversies. I have to say that your post is very confused, and you seem to lack familiarity with many important facts that would have to be considered before pronouncing such a sweeping judgment.

The lack of obvious correlations between genes and phenotypes implies only that the phenotypes in question are not determined by the genotype in a simple way. If they are determined by complex interactions between genes, then straightforward association studies won’t detect this connection. To make an imperfect but relevant analogy, if you took the machine code of various computer programs and did a statistical association study between these codes and the resulting behavior of the computer, while being ignorant of the way the instructions are actually decoded and executed—as we are still largely ignorant of the relevant biochemistry, which is also far more complicated—you could easily end up with no observable correlations.

Similarly, if some trait can be influenced by environmental factors strongly and rapidly, it is still a total fallacy to conclude that it is therefore determined purely by environmental factors. To take a trivial example, nobody disputes that hair color is highly heritable, but the development of cheap and convenient hair dyes has changed the average hair colors in the population dramatically. The behavior of computer programs is highly dependent on what you give them as input, but it doesn’t mean that the program code is irrelevant.

As for heritability studies, you are certainly right that there is a lot of shoddy work, and by necessity they make a whole lot of wildly simplifying assumptions. If there existed only a handful of such studies, one would be well advised not to take them very seriously. However, the amount of data that has been gathered in recent decades is just too overwhelming to dismiss, especially taking into account that often there have been considerable ideological incentives to support the opposite conclusions.

On the whole, you are making a wholly unsubstantiated sweeping conclusion.

Vladimir_M 16 Apr 2011 2:26 UTC
51 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Offense versus harm minimization

The salmon example is a really clever way of separating some of the issues.

I think the salmon example is seriously misleading, and in a way that shows a very common pattern of fallacies in consequentialist reasoning. It presents a thought experiment that is contrived to be free of any game-theoretic concerns, and then this example is used as a rhetorical sleight of hand by positing a superficial analogy with a real-life example, in which the game-theoretic concerns are of supreme importance.

Subsequently, these concerns are dismissed with another misleading observation, namely that people rarely fake offense. Well, yes, but the whole point is that people’s sincerely felt emotions are very much directed by their brains’ game-theoretic assessment of the situation, which may well indicate that a seemingly irrational extreme emotional response is in fact quite rational given the circumstances. Those who ignore this point should read up on their Schelling.

Vladimir_M 1 Nov 2011 2:22 UTC
49 points
on: Great Explanations
I see that the physics list consists of math-free pop-science books. I don’t see how these can possibly count as “great explanations,” since it’s impossible to gain any real understanding of physics from such materials.

For example, a good explanation of relativity would first present the concepts of Minkowski spacetime and proper time, and then show how all those “relativistic effects” follow from these reasonably simple concepts. (This as opposed to a bad explanation of the traditional sort that confuses the reader with various “effects” and “paradoxes.”) Then it would explain how a curved metric with a Minkowski signature can make the geodesic lines look like the free fall curves of Newtonian gravity, thus providing an intuitive grasp of the whole “gravity is geometry” business. Beyond that, you just have to get into the hairy tensor stuff, and even this minimum requires a solid knowledge of algebra, analytic geometry, and basic calculus. Anything less than that is just rambling that may have a lot of entertainment and signaling value, but won’t move you one millimeter closer to any real insight.
What links here?

Vladimir_M 5 Aug 2012 8:15 UTC
47 points
0
on: What are the optimal biases to overcome?
Basically, the problem is that K&T-style insights about cognitive biases—and, by extension, the whole OB/LW folklore that has arisen around them—are useless for pretty much any question of practical importance. This is true both with regards to personal success and accomplishment (a.k.a. “instrumental rationality”) and pure intellectual curiosity (a.k.a. “epistemic rationality”).

From the point of view of a human being, the really important questions are worlds apart from anything touched by these neat academic categorizations of biases. Whom should I trust? What rules are safe to break? What rules am I in fact expected to break? When do social institutions work as advertised, and when is there in fact conniving and off-the-record tacit understanding that I’m unaware of? What do other people really think about me? For pretty much anything that really matters, the important biases are those that you have about questions of this sort—and knowing about the artificial lab scenarios where anchoring, conjunction fallacies, etc. are observable won’t give you any advantage there.

Note that this applies to your biases about abstract intellectual topics just as much as to your practical life. Whatever you know about any such topic, you know largely ad verecundiam from the intellectual authorities you trust, so that chances are you have inherited their biases wholesale. (An exception here is material that stands purely on rigorous internal logical evidence, like mathematical proofs, but there isn’t much you can do with that beyond pure math.) And to answer the question of what biases might be distorting the output of the official intellectual authorities in the system you live under, you need to ask hard questions about human nature and behavior akin to the above listed ones, and accurately detect biases far more complex and difficult than anything within the reach of the simplistic behavioral economics.

Of course, the problem you ultimately run into is that such analysis, if done consistently and accurately, will produce results that clash with the social norms you live under. Which leads to the observation that some well-calibrated instinctive bias towards conformity is usually good for you.

Vladimir_M 9 Dec 2011 4:17 UTC
47 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Value evolution
Well, where should I start? A few examples:
- The Roman Empire reached its maximum extent under Trajan circa 100AD. (And even that was a fairly small increase relative to a century earlier under Augustus.) Signs of crisis started appearing only towards the end of the 2nd century, and Christianity started being officially tolerated only in the early 4th century. How these centuries of non-expansion before Christianity entered the political stage can be reconciled with the theory from the article is beyond me.
- There is clear evidence that the fall of the Roman empire occasioned a huge fall in living standards throughout the former Empire, including its provinces that it supposedly only pillaged and exploited. (See The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins for a good recent overview.)
- Ascribing the decline in masculinity to some mysterious “reprogramming” that is narrated in passive voice strikes as me as bizarrely incoherent.
- Large cities are not a modern invention. In the largest cities of the ancient world, enormous numbers of men (certainly on the order of hundreds of thousands) lived packed together much more tightly than in modern cities. How did the states ruling these cities handle that situation, if the mysterious “reprogramming” occurred only in the last few centuries?
- In the antebellum U.S., the South was not fighting to implement federal tariffs, but opposing them bitterly.
- Cotton picking wasn’t widely automated until the mid-20th century. How long slavery would have remained profitable without abolition is a difficult question, but in 1861, “mechanical reapers.. mak[ing] slavery uneconomical” were still firmly in the realm of science fiction.
- If the reason for the lack of interest in slaves in the North was their short growing season, then the ongoing industrialization should have changed that. Factories can utilize labor profitably 365 days a year. So clearly other factors were more important.

Vladimir_M 4 Jun 2010 19:34 UTC
47 points
on: Virtue Ethics for Consequentialists
Will_Newsome:

Consequentialists, deontologists, and virtue ethicists don’t really disagree on any major points in day to day life, just in crazy situations like trolley problems.

More precisely, they do disagree about the same practically relevant ethical questions that provoke controversy among common folks too, especially the politically and ideologically charged ones—but their positions are only loosely correlated with their ethical theories, and instead stem from the same gut feelings and signaling games as everybody else’s. This seems to me like a pretty damning fact about the way this whole area of intellectual work is conducted in practice.
What links here?
- [deleted]'s comment on Rationality Quotes January 2013 by katydee (19 Jan 2013 21:24 UTC; 0 points)

Vladimir_M 14 Mar 2012 4:47 UTC
46 points
0
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Schelling fences on slippery slopes
My country?! I’m not American. I haven’t even been to the U.S. in several years.

(That said, you’re Australian, right? I’ve definitely seen stuff written on LW that is technically illegal in Victoria—google for “serious contempt for, or revulsion or severe ridicule,” with the quotes.)

The fire analogy must be understood in the context of the legal test of “clear and present danger” that the court was upholding. The theory is that just as the shouting “fire” in a theater creates a clear and present danger of a stampede in which people get hurt, so does the anti-war agitation create a clear and present danger of subverting the war effort, in this case by inciting resistance to conscription.

Of course, you may reply that this “clear and present danger” stuff can be stretched this way without limit, but that is the point. (By the way, in U.S. jurisprudence, this standard has in the meantime been superseded by a much clearer one of imminent lawless action, which, whatever its overall merits and faults, has shown in practice to provide for a very strong Schelling point.)

Vladimir_M

Some Heuris­tics for Eval­u­at­ing the Sound­ness of the Aca­demic Main­stream in Un­fa­mil­iar Fields

Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields