You know, sometimes I think Daria’s attitude is much healthier than Ferris’s.
Z._M._Davis
Eliezer: “As far as I know, [Rand] wasn’t particularly good at math.”
A relevant passage from Barbara Branden’s biography of Rand:
“The subject [Rand] most enjoyed during her high school years, the one subject of which she never tired, was mathematics. ‘My mathematics teacher was delighted with me. When I graduated, he said, “It will be a crime if you don’t go into mathematics.” I said only, “That’s not enough of a career.” I felt that it was too abstract, it had nothing to do with real life. I loved it, but I didn’t intend to be an engineer or to go into any applied profession, and to study mathematics as such seemed too ivory tower, too purposeless—and I would say so today.’ Mathematics, she thought, was a method. Like logic, it was an invaluable tool, but it was a means to an end, not an end in itself. She wanted an activity that, while drawing on her theoretical capacity, would unite theory and its practical application. That desire was an essential element in the continuing appeal that fiction held for her: fiction made possible the integration of wide abstract principles and their direct expression in and application to man’s life.” (Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand, page 35 of my edition)
- “What kind of cognitive algorithm, as felt from the inside, would generate the observed debate about ‘free will’?”
I would say: people have mechanisms for causally modeling the outside world, and for choosing a course of action based on its imagined consequences, but we don’t have a mechanism for causally modeling the mechanism within us that makes the choice, so it seems as if our own choices aren’t subject to causality (and are thus “freely willed”).
However, this is likely to be wrong or incomplete, firstly because it is merely a rephrasing of what I understand to be the standard philosophical answer, and secondly because I’m not sure that I feel done.
- 2 Mar 2015 4:30 UTC; 0 points) 's comment on Dissolving the Question by (
“Requiring someone to laugh in order to prove their non-cultishness [...] doesn’t quite work.”
But if they don’t laugh, and it’s not sufficiently obvious that the joke is too obvious, doesn’t the lack of laughter serve as (rather weak) Bayesian evidence of cultishness?
Which suggests—
Q: How many Overcoming Bias readers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: None; the RAND experiment showed that lightbulbs are worthless.
Q: How many Overcoming Bias readers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Just one, but first they have to calculate (P(change|light)P(light))/((P(change|light)P(light) + P(change|no-light)*P(no-light)).
“How many Overcoming Bias readers does it take to change a lightbulb?” “I think four. What do you think?” “Um, I was going to say ‘One,’ and then the punchl—” “Okay, then 2.5?”
If you don’t find the above funny, consider raising P(we’re-a-cult).
- 23 Jul 2019 7:21 UTC; 43 points) 's comment on Appeal to Consequence, Value Tensions, And Robust Organizations by (
- 19 Apr 2023 18:54 UTC; 10 points) 's comment on Moderation notes re: recent Said/Duncan threads by (
Psy and John, I think the idea is this: if you want to buy a hundred shares of OB at ten dollars each, because you think it’s going to go way up, you have to buy them from someone else who’s willing to sell at that price. But clearly that person does not likewise think that the price of OB is going to go way up, because if she did, why would she sell it to you now, at the current price? So in an efficient market, situations where everyone agrees on the future movement of prices simply don’t occur. If everyone thought the price of OB was going to go to thirty dollars a share, then said shares would already be trading at thirty (modulo expectations about interest rates, inflation, &c.).
Mtraven: “I truly have trouble understanding why people here think death is so terrible [...] [S]ince we are all hard-core materialists here, let me remind you that the flow of time is an illusion, spacetime is eternal [...]”
I actually think this one goes the other way. You choose to live right now, rather than killing yourself. Why not consistently affirm that choice across your entire stretch of spacetime?
“[W]hat makes you so damn important that you need to live forever?”
Important to whom?
Vladimir: “These are easy.” Ben: “None of them are tough to explain. Some Vlad’s nailed [...]” Elliot: “Humans [...] prepared for the hunt by looking at their cave paintings of animals they would soon kill [...]” Elliot again: “hunting music [...] How’s that?”
In case anyone was wondering where evolutionary psychology gets its bad reputation for being a bunch of “just-so” stories, see above.
To be clear, I’m not saying that there aren’t any adaptive explanations for aesthetic appreciation of music, rainbows, &c. Rather, it’s that we’re unlikely to uncover the true explanations in the process of speculating on a blog comment thread. To do this properly, and therefore actually have half a chance of getting the right answer, you’d want to be deeply familiar with the literature on human evolution and modern-day hunter-gatherers. You’d want to review or conduct cross-cultural studies. You’d want to devise some extremely clever experiments to run in the psychology lab, &c.
By all means, generate hypotheses! Guess!--but know when you’re just guessing.
Eliezer: “[E]very time I can recall hearing someone say ‘I want to know what it’s like to be the opposite sex’, the speaker has been male. I don’t know if that’s a genuine gender difference in wishes [...]”
sighs There’s a name for it.
Eliezer: “Strong enough to disrupt personal identity, if taken in one shot?”
Is it cheating if you deliberately define your personal identity such that the answer is No?
Frelkins: “I mean, if anyone wants to check it out, just try Second Life.”
Not exactly what we’re looking for, unfortunately …
Frelkins: “[T]hey flunk the shoe chatter and reveal themselves quickly.”
Surely you’re not literally claiming that there are no women who aren’t good at shoe chatter. Maybe in Second Life there are enough men using female avatars such that P(male-in-RL | female-avatar-bad-at-shoe-chatter) really is greater than P(female-in-RL | female-avatar-bad-at-shoe-chatter). But I should hope that being a woman or man is not conflated with behaving in gender-typical ways, for to do so is to deliberately ignore the nontrivial amount of variation in actually existing women and men.
Frelkins, in the other thread, you said you were saddened by Tino Sehgal’s Edge answer about the end of masculinity as we know it, and you asked, “Why do even men hate men nowadays?” Well, please take my word for it that Sahgal and friends don’t literally hate men. Rather, we just find it kind of obnoxious that far too often, being male is systematically conflated with talking about porn or football or whatever it is that “guys’ guys” talk about (I wouldn’t know—or I wish that I didn’t). I hope I am not misunderstood—of course there is nothing wrong with being typically feminine or masculine. It’s just that there should be other options.
adept42: “Therefore, since we can only observe gendered behaviors through social interaction the presumption should be each behavior has a social origin; biology carries the burden of proof to prove otherwise on a case-by-case basis.”
I really don’t think that follows. These empirical questions aren’t like a court trial, where “nature” is the prosecution and “nurture” is innocent until proven guilty (cf. Eliezer’s “The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality”). Rather, for each question, we must search for evidence and seek out the most accurate belief possible, being prepared to update as new evidence comes in. Sometimes this is very painful, when there’s something you desperately want to be true, and you’re afraid of the evidence. But we must be brave together, else we be utterly deceived. And what would we do then?
I’m sure you’ve already heard this, but have you tried reading relevant papers rather than random websites?
Personally, I’m kind of giving up on “discipline” as such, in favor of looking for things worth doing and then doing them because they are worth doing. Why torture myself trying to regulate and control every minute, when that doesn’t even work? Of course every minute is precious, but just because I’m not following a schedule doesn’t mean nothing valuable is getting done. Whatever happened to the power of play? The first virtue is curiosity, isn’t it?
Results are mixed so far, but with a certain history, even “mixed” counts as a win.
Eliezer, I have to second Hopefully, Recovering, et al.: good points (as almost always), but the Science versus Bayescraft rhetoric is a disaster. Lone autodidacts railing against the failings of Mainstream Science are almost always crackpots—that you’re probably right, doesn’t mean you can expect people to ignore that likelihood ratio when deciding whether or not to pay attention to you. “Meaning does not excuse impact!”
Concerning the qualitative vs. quantitative Bayescraft issue: taking qualitative lessons like Conservation of Expected Evidence from probability theory is clearly fruitful, but I wonder if we shouldn’t be a little worried about Solmonoff induction. Take the example of Maxwell’s equations being a simpler computer program than anger. Even though we have reason to suppose that it’s possible in principle to make a computer program simulating anger-in-general—anger runs on brains; brains run on physics; physics is computable (isn’t it?)--I don’t wonder if it shouldn’t make us a bit nervous that we really have no idea how to even begin writing such a program (modulo that “No One Knows What Science,” &c.). The obvious response would be to say that all we need is “just” a computer program that duplicates whatever angry human brains do, but I don’t think that counts as a solution if we don’t know exactly how to reduce anger-in-general to math. A convincing knockdown of dualism doesn’t make the Hard Problem any less confusing.
Maybe all this is properly answered by repeating that the math is out there, whether or not we actually know how to do the calculation. After all, given that there is a program for anger, it would obviously be longer than the one for electromagnetism. Still, I worry about putting too much trust in a formalism that is not just computationally intractible, but that we don’t really know how to use, for if anyone really knew in concrete detail how to reduce thought to computation in any but the most trivial of cases, she’d essentially have solved the AGI problem, right?
Or take Pascal’s Mugging. If I recall correctly from the discussion at the February meetup, the current best solution to the problem is that given a universe big enough to contain 3^^^^3 minds, the prior probability of any one causal node exerting so much influence is low enough to overcome the vast disutility of the mugger’s threat. Eliezer noted that that this would imply that you’re not allowed to believe the mugger even if she takes you out of the Matrix and shows you the hardware. This seems much like ruling out the mugger’s claim a priori—which I guess is the result we “want,” but it seems far too convenient.
Of course, it is possible that I simply don’t know enough math to see that everything I just said is actually nonsense. Sorry for the long comment.
Say our prior odds for the LHC being a destroyer of worlds are a billion to one against. Then this hypothesis is at negative ninety decibels. Conditioned on the hypothesis being true, the probability of observing failure is near unity, because in the modal worlds where the world really is destroyed, we don’t get to make an observation—or we won’t get to remember it very long. Say that conditioned on the hypothesis being false, the probability of observing failure is one-fifth—this is very delicate equipment, yes? So each observation of failure gives us 10log(1/0.2), or about seven decibels of evidence for the hypothesis. We need ninety decibels of evidence to bring us to even odds; ninety divided by seven is about 12.86. So under these assumptions it takes thirteen failures before we believe that the LHC is a planet-killer.
- “My thesis is that non-reductionism is a confusion; and once you realize that an idea is a confusion, it becomes a tad difficult to envision what the universe would look like if the confusion were true.”
I still seem to be able to envision what things would look like if a form of Cartesian dualism were true. Our ordinary laws of physics would govern all matter except one or more places deep in the brain, where the laws of physics would be violated where the soul is “pulling the strings” of the body, as it were. These deviations from physics would not happen unlawfully, but rather would be governed by special, complicated laws of psychology, rather than physics. In principle, this should be testable.
Unlawfulness and nonreductionism are distinct concepts; I can see how the former is incoherent, but the latter still seems logically possible, if false.
“But of course I made a very deliberate decision not to speak of “h-right”. That sounds like there is a general license to be human.”
Okay, this is a good point, and a good post.
I still think, however, you’re left with the empirical question of how strongly psychological unity applies to moral dynamics: to what extent (if any) different people are just different optimization processes with nothing to argue about.
- “What about Vulcans? They have no emotions at all.”
Trekkie nitpick: Vulcans do have emotions; they just repress them.
I don’t think I see how moral-philosophy fiction is problematic at all. When you have a beautiful moral sentiment that you need to offer to the world, of course you bind it up in a glorious work of high art, and let the work stand as your offering. That makes sense. When you have some info you want to share with the world about some dull ordinary thing that actually exists, that’s when you write a journal article. When you’ve got something to protect, something you need to say, some set of notions that you really are entitled to, then you write a novel.
Just as it is dishonest to fail to be objective in matters of fact, so it is dishonest to feign objectivity where there simply is no fact. Why pretend to make arguments when what you really want to write is a hymn?
I take it the name is a coincidence.
nazgulnarsil: “What is bad about this scenario? the genie himself [sic] said it will only be a few decades before women and men can be reunited if they choose. what’s a few decades?”
That’s the most horrifying part of all, though—they won’t so choose! By the time the women and men reïnvent enough technology to build interplanetary spacecraft, they’ll be so happy that they won’t want to get back together again. It’s tempting to think that the humans can just choose to be unhappy until they build the requisite technology for reünification—but you probably can’t sulk for twenty years straight, even if you want to, even if everything you currently care about depends on it. We might wish that some of our values are so deeply held that no circumstances could possibly make us change them, but in the face of an environment superinelligently optimized to change our values, it probably just isn’t so. The space of possible environments is so large compared to the narrow set of outcomes that we would genuinely call a win that even the people on the freak planets (see de Blanc’s comment above) will probably be made happy in some way that their preSingularity selves would find horrifying. Scary, scary, scary. I’m donating twenty dollars to SIAI right now.
- 23 Jul 2019 7:21 UTC; 43 points) 's comment on Appeal to Consequence, Value Tensions, And Robust Organizations by (
“I wish I knew whether the unimpressed commenters got what Shane Legg did, just from hearing about Special Relativity; or if they still haven’t gotten it yet from reading my brief summary of Barbour.”
Hard to say. I don’t really see the difference between “time is ‘just’ a coördinate in 3+1-dimensional spacetime” and “time really doesn’t exist.” Even if we can get rid of the t in our equations (because we never personally observe a t out there in the world, but infer it from our memories and clocks and such), something still has to account for our memories, and clocks, and the apparent changes in what we perceive: for things to be otherwise would be a violation of Egan’s Law. I don’t see why it matters whether we call this whatever-it-is “causal relations within configuration space” or whether we give it its own coördinate and call it time.
Eliezer wrote (to Angel):”If you can point out an exact specific moment where you were offended, we may be able to cross the gap and see this thing that is in your brain and not in ours. If you only tell us that you were offended, we can only guess.” And: “Still if you have specific suggestions for ‘things that male writers on rationality inadvertently do that turn off female readers’, or even just ‘Here’s the exact sentence where I stopped reading’, then I am, according to my own goals, interested.”
I think I may be able to offer some potentially valuable insight here about the psychology of people who are shocked and horrified by talk of psychological sex differences, seeing as that I’m one of them. (Yes, beliefs that “can be destroyed by the truth should be,” but that doesn’t mean you have to love the world exactly the way it is right now.) For example, statements like this bother me:
“Among the controversial ideas I would propose, is that until men start thinking of themselves as men they will tend to regard women as defective humans.”
Look, I get the point that sex differences exist, and that one mustn’t regard others as defective versions of oneself—but, as you note in passing, “[w]hether or not [a psychological difference] is due to sex is ultimately irrelevant[.]” So one mustn’t dismiss those who are skeptical or offended by the notion of sex differences as being simply blind, either. The fact is that there are a nontrivial number of people who are really, genuinely fed up with their gender role, or gender roles in general, without actually being transsexual. They don’t want their sex to be a deep part of their self-identity, and I would vehemently contend that this is a valid preference. So talk of What Men Are Like and What Women Are Like sounds really obnoxious to these people: the first thought that comes to mind when they hear of some stereotype about their sex is: “But I’m not like that!”—usually followed by: “Therefore it can’t be true.” Bad epistemology, I know, but remember that no one is born Bayesian, and right now I’m just explaining the facts of the matter about what it feels like to be one of these people.
And so when these people read poorly-written stories in the mainstream media about deep, innate, immutable sex differences, it clashes with their internal experience, and a lot of them end up rejecting biologically-informed approaches to psychology altogether. Which is foolish, of course, but you can at least see why it happens.
We hear a lot about how men are after beautiful women, and women are after high-status men. And yes, this does seem to be a very common pattern. I’m a twenty-year-old heterosexual male; when people say that men are after sex, it’s not as if I have no idea what they’re talking about. I get it; believe me I get it. And yet—even so, I find this idea of romance as a resources-for-sex transaction unspeakably ugly. I conceive of romance as a relationship of mutual love and respect between unique individuals. There are those who say I can’t really believe that, that I am only signaling—but the meme has to resonate with something within some people, or we’d never have heard of it in the first place.
By all means, lay out the facts of the matter: tell people what they are qua real-brain-in-a-real-universe. But please, please, Eliezer, and especially as a transhumanist, remember your post “Hypocrisy or Akrasia?” and stay far, far away from rhetoric that can be read to suggest that you know better than people what their substrate-independent-self-identity should be. Tell me that I’m male, and that that has nontrivial psychological consequences, but don’t tell me I should think of myself as a man. It’s a subtle distinction, I know, and maybe I need better words to express it, but it’s terribly important. “The utility function is not up for grabs.”
Given that we’re heading towards morality and the Singularity, I imagine this is here as a dependency for a future post arguing that there is a more-or-less objective notion of morality/humaneness/Friendliness for humans. However, even though all humans are virtually alike compared to the vastness of possible mind design space, there is still, from a human perspective, an enormous amount of variation amongst people. The things that everyone has in common are ipso facto irrelevant: it would border on contradiction to tell a human that her moral stance is wrong because it is contrary to human nature, for if it really were, a human couldn’t hold it.
Something to address in a future post, perhaps.
ShardPhoenix: “the basis of human morality is (presumably) so much more complicated than the “prime numbers = good” presented here that the analogy is a bit strained”
I actually didn’t notice that the Pebblesorters like primes until I read this comment. Somehow I feel as if this supports Eliezer’s point in some way which I can’t notice on my own either.