Perhaps I am just contrarian in nature, but I took issue with several parts of her reasoning.
“What you’re saying is tantamount to saying that you want to fuck me. So why shouldn’t I react with revulsion precisely as though you’d said the latter?”
The real question is why should she react with revulsion if he said he wanted to fuck her? The revulsion is a response to the tone of the message, not to the implications one can draw from it. After all, she can conclude with >75% certainty that any male wants to fuck her. Why doesn’t she show revulsion simply upon discovering that someone is male? Or even upon finding out that the world population is larger than previously thought, because that implies that there are more men who want to fuck her? Clearly she is smart enough to have resolved this paradox on her own, and posing it to him in this situation is simply being verbally aggressive.
“For my face is merely a reflection of my intellect. I can no more leave fingernails unchewed when I contemplate the nature of rationality than grin convincingly when miserable.”
She seems to be claiming that her confrontational behavior and unsocial values are inseparable from rationality. Perhaps this is only so clearly false to me because I frequent lesswrong.
“If it was electromagnetism, then even the slightest instability would cause the middle sections to fly out and plummet to the ground… By the end of class, it wasn’t only sapphire donut-holes that had broken loose in my mind and fallen into a new equilibrium. I never was bat-mitzvahed.”
This seems to show an incredible lack of creativity (or dare I say it, intelligence), that she would be unable to come up with a plausible way in which an engineer (never mind a supernatural deity) could fix a piece of rock to appear to be floating in the hole in a secure way. It’s also incredible that she would not catch onto the whole paradox of omnipotence long before this, a paradox with a lot more substance.
“he eventual outcome would most likely be a compromise, dependent, for instance, on whether the computations needed to conceal one’s rationality are inherently harder than those needed to detect such concealment.”
Whoah, whoah, since when did cheating and catching it become a race of computation? Maybe an arms race of finding and concealing evidence, but when does computational complexity enter the picture? Second of all, the whole section about the Darwinian arms race makes the (extremely common) mistake of conflating evolutionary “goals” and individual desires. There is a difference between an action being evolutionarily advantageous, and an individual wanting to do it. Never mind the whole confusion about the nature of an individual human’s goals (see http://lesswrong.com/lw/6ha/the_blueminimizing_robot/).
One side point is that the way she presents it (“Emotions are the mechanisms by which reason, when it pays to do so, cripples itself”) is essentially presenting the situation as Newcomb’s Paradox, and claiming that emotions are the solution, since her idea of “rationality” can’t solve it on its own.
“By contrast, Type-1 thinking is concerned with the truth about which beliefs are most advantageous to hold.”
But wait… the example given is not about which beliefs are most advantageous to hold… it’s about which beliefs it’s most advantageous to act like you hold. In fact, if you examine all of the further Type-X levels, you realize that they all collapse down to the same level. Suppose there is a button in front of you that you can press (or not press). How could it be beneficial to believe that you should push the button, but not beneficial to push the button? Barring of course, supercomputer Omegas which can read your mind. You’re not a computer. You can’t get a core dump of your mind which will show a clearly structured hierarchy of thoughts. There’s no distinction to the outside world between your different levels of recursive thoughts.
I suppose this bothered me a lot more before I realized this was a piece of fiction and that the writer was a paranoid schizophrenic (the former applying to most else of what I am saying).
“Ah, yet is not dancing merely a vertical expression of a horizontal desire?”
No, certainly not merely. Too bad Elliot lacked the opportunity (and probably the quickness of tongue) to respond.
“But perplexities abound: can I reason that the number of humans who will live after me is probably not much greater than the number who have lived before, and that therefore, taking population growth into account, humanity faces imminent extinction?...”
Because I am overly negative in this post, I thought I’d point out the above section, which I found especially interesting.
But the whole “Flowers for Algernon” ending seemed a bit extreme...and out of place.
I’ve promised to shut up in the comments to the other post, but since that story’s been brought up here, too …
The real question is why should she react with revulsion if he said he wanted to fuck her? The revulsion is a response to the tone of the message, not to the implications one can draw from it.
Is it, though? Is there any possible tone that would make it acceptable?
After all, she can conclude with >75% certainty that any male wants to fuck her. Why doesn’t she show revulsion simply upon discovering that someone is male? Or even upon finding out that the world population is larger than previously thought, because that implies that there are more men who want to fuck her?
So the message is redundant. Therefore, the appropriate way to express it is to say nothing at all. Anything else, regardless of its tone, forces her to pay needless attention to an obvious fact and is therefore an aggression. Especially if the speaker is not so attractive that considering potential partners of his attractiveness level is actually worth her time. Especially if he’s not just insufficiently attractive, but net repulsive, i.e., she’d rather not have sex ever again than have it with him. Of course, a nerdier and less sporty male classmate would be even more repulsive.
Clearly she is smart enough to have resolved this paradox on her own, and posing it to him in this situation is simply being verbally aggressive.
Or a way to test him, and he obviously failed.
No, certainly not merely.
I wonder what counts as not merely.
But the whole “Flowers for Algernon” ending seemed a bit extreme...and out of place.
I didn’t even realize it was supposed to be a horror story. She basically did what should have been expected from biology: she chose a high-quality mate who can afford to profess irrational nonsense on the handicap principle, and will most likely breed with him and be happy. It’s only sad to those who would like her to be prevented from doing what she wants, for whatever selfish reasons.
she can conclude with >75% certainty that any male wants to fuck her.
… she can? Really? That seems pretty damn high for something as variable as taste in partners.
EDIT: wait, that’s a reference to how many guys on a university campus will accept offers of one night stands, right? It’s still too high, or too general.
It’s also irrelevant to the point I was making. You can point to different studies giving different percentages, but however you slice it a significant portion of the men she interacts with would have sex with her if she offered. So maybe 75% is only true for a certain demographic, but replace it with 10% for another demographic and it doesn’t make a difference.
I am not an island. There are a few good ways to set up a life of bounded bias or a rational decision about whether or not to engage in bias. I am a social creature and as such am acutely aware that most of my decisions are made as a mix of peer pressure, groupthink, discussions with friends, unconscious reasoning and whatever media I may have managed to digest in the past few hours. I have several friends, one of whom is a dedicated rationalist but a genuinely kind person, his name is Steve I have given him these instructions..::please give me unsolicited advice and interrupt me if you see me doing something stupid or immoral but only if you think I could emotionally cope with the reasons why my action was immoral:: I have another friend he’s something of a spiritualist and currently some form of wiccan something or other. His name is Dave, also a kind person and he has explicit instructions. ::Please give me unsolicited advice and help me out if I seem to be unhappy Give me the course of action you think would make me happiest so long as it doesn’t conflict with what Steve has told me to do. When I have to get a good think on about something I call steve and dave separately, then call them both together, and compare the three suggestions. What is interesting is I have done this often enough that I can often predict what each will say in a sort of mental role taking that is much easier if you imagine it not being you that has such thoughts. As such I have achieved some bounded bias, that is I am biogted enough to not be a social pariah in America (one must be somewhat prejudiced against someone to survive socially even if its only prejudiced against bigots and republicans) But rational enough not to fall for gambler’s fallacies and at least bright enough to nod along when a modus ponens is explained to me using small words for the fourteenth time.
Its not perfect, but its mine, Most people outsource their morality anyway., from what would jesus do, to local faith leaders to calling their parents for advice. I’m just a little more structured and deliberate. Through this system I can have someone have an unbiased view and speak to someone with a biased view and make a decision as to which is a better view to have without having to unsee everything. Yes I realize steve won’t be perfectly unbiased every time or perfectly rational or make the right choices but then again, neither would I and there’s nothing special about me making my mistakes.
Yes I realize steve won’t be perfectly unbiased every time or perfectly rational or make the right choices but then again, neither would I and there’s nothing special about me making my mistakes.
A good principal in general. If more people realized this, the world would be a better place, I should think.
Hmm, I wonder if there’s some snappy Wise Saying -esque way of formulating this
Paul Graham argues that a nerd is anyone not primarily focused on popularity, and that nerds lose the competitive and zero-sum game of popularity to those who aren’t distracted by things like studying. After nerds enter the real world, however, they can form their own special-interest communities and often do very well.
Regarding Aaronson’s piece, ditziness as signaling makes sense. However, the protagonist failed to see other options: she could have “won” by making the first moves to date an attractive but passive/malleable and socially clueless boy. She could have really “won” by stringing along several passive/malleable/clueless boys. Instead, she sold her soul to stay with the next random guy who asked her out after her “realization”, because being alone was more painful. She didn’t realize that her understanding of evolutionary theory and rationality failed to make up for her lack of domain knowledge about dating/relationships.
I suspect the vast majority of Overcoming Bias readers could not achieve the “happiness of stupidity” if they tried. That way is closed to you. You can never achieve that degree of ignorance, you cannot forget what you know, you cannot unsee what you see.
The happiness of stupidity is closed to you. You will never have it short of actual brain damage, and maybe not even then. You should wonder, I think, whether the happiness of stupidity is optimal—if it is the most happiness that a human can aspire to—but it matters not. That way is closed to you, if it was ever open.
All that is left to you now, is to aspire to such happiness as a rationalist can achieve.
So, to be clear, you don’t think that such neurohacking as presented in the story is possible?
That said, I think you’ve found a pretty convincing argument that we shouldn’t accept the tradeoff, even if it’s available. That is one scary piece of writing.
PS: See also Scott Aaronson’s classic On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality.
Perhaps I am just contrarian in nature, but I took issue with several parts of her reasoning.
The real question is why should she react with revulsion if he said he wanted to fuck her? The revulsion is a response to the tone of the message, not to the implications one can draw from it. After all, she can conclude with >75% certainty that any male wants to fuck her. Why doesn’t she show revulsion simply upon discovering that someone is male? Or even upon finding out that the world population is larger than previously thought, because that implies that there are more men who want to fuck her? Clearly she is smart enough to have resolved this paradox on her own, and posing it to him in this situation is simply being verbally aggressive.
She seems to be claiming that her confrontational behavior and unsocial values are inseparable from rationality. Perhaps this is only so clearly false to me because I frequent lesswrong.
This seems to show an incredible lack of creativity (or dare I say it, intelligence), that she would be unable to come up with a plausible way in which an engineer (never mind a supernatural deity) could fix a piece of rock to appear to be floating in the hole in a secure way. It’s also incredible that she would not catch onto the whole paradox of omnipotence long before this, a paradox with a lot more substance.
“he eventual outcome would most likely be a compromise, dependent, for instance, on whether the computations needed to conceal one’s rationality are inherently harder than those needed to detect such concealment.”
Whoah, whoah, since when did cheating and catching it become a race of computation? Maybe an arms race of finding and concealing evidence, but when does computational complexity enter the picture? Second of all, the whole section about the Darwinian arms race makes the (extremely common) mistake of conflating evolutionary “goals” and individual desires. There is a difference between an action being evolutionarily advantageous, and an individual wanting to do it. Never mind the whole confusion about the nature of an individual human’s goals (see http://lesswrong.com/lw/6ha/the_blueminimizing_robot/).
One side point is that the way she presents it (“Emotions are the mechanisms by which reason, when it pays to do so, cripples itself”) is essentially presenting the situation as Newcomb’s Paradox, and claiming that emotions are the solution, since her idea of “rationality” can’t solve it on its own.
But wait… the example given is not about which beliefs are most advantageous to hold… it’s about which beliefs it’s most advantageous to act like you hold. In fact, if you examine all of the further Type-X levels, you realize that they all collapse down to the same level. Suppose there is a button in front of you that you can press (or not press). How could it be beneficial to believe that you should push the button, but not beneficial to push the button? Barring of course, supercomputer Omegas which can read your mind. You’re not a computer. You can’t get a core dump of your mind which will show a clearly structured hierarchy of thoughts. There’s no distinction to the outside world between your different levels of recursive thoughts.
I suppose this bothered me a lot more before I realized this was a piece of fiction and that the writer was a paranoid schizophrenic (the former applying to most else of what I am saying).
No, certainly not merely. Too bad Elliot lacked the opportunity (and probably the quickness of tongue) to respond.
Because I am overly negative in this post, I thought I’d point out the above section, which I found especially interesting.
But the whole “Flowers for Algernon” ending seemed a bit extreme...and out of place.
I’ve promised to shut up in the comments to the other post, but since that story’s been brought up here, too …
Is it, though? Is there any possible tone that would make it acceptable?
So the message is redundant. Therefore, the appropriate way to express it is to say nothing at all. Anything else, regardless of its tone, forces her to pay needless attention to an obvious fact and is therefore an aggression. Especially if the speaker is not so attractive that considering potential partners of his attractiveness level is actually worth her time. Especially if he’s not just insufficiently attractive, but net repulsive, i.e., she’d rather not have sex ever again than have it with him. Of course, a nerdier and less sporty male classmate would be even more repulsive.
Or a way to test him, and he obviously failed.
I wonder what counts as not merely.
I didn’t even realize it was supposed to be a horror story. She basically did what should have been expected from biology: she chose a high-quality mate who can afford to profess irrational nonsense on the handicap principle, and will most likely breed with him and be happy. It’s only sad to those who would like her to be prevented from doing what she wants, for whatever selfish reasons.
… she can? Really? That seems pretty damn high for something as variable as taste in partners.
EDIT: wait, that’s a reference to how many guys on a university campus will accept offers of one night stands, right? It’s still too high, or too general.
It’s also irrelevant to the point I was making. You can point to different studies giving different percentages, but however you slice it a significant portion of the men she interacts with would have sex with her if she offered. So maybe 75% is only true for a certain demographic, but replace it with 10% for another demographic and it doesn’t make a difference.
Oh, it certainly doesn’t affect your point. I agree with your point completely. I was just nitpicking the numbers.
It does affect your point.
I am not an island. There are a few good ways to set up a life of bounded bias or a rational decision about whether or not to engage in bias. I am a social creature and as such am acutely aware that most of my decisions are made as a mix of peer pressure, groupthink, discussions with friends, unconscious reasoning and whatever media I may have managed to digest in the past few hours. I have several friends, one of whom is a dedicated rationalist but a genuinely kind person, his name is Steve I have given him these instructions..::please give me unsolicited advice and interrupt me if you see me doing something stupid or immoral but only if you think I could emotionally cope with the reasons why my action was immoral:: I have another friend he’s something of a spiritualist and currently some form of wiccan something or other. His name is Dave, also a kind person and he has explicit instructions. ::Please give me unsolicited advice and help me out if I seem to be unhappy Give me the course of action you think would make me happiest so long as it doesn’t conflict with what Steve has told me to do. When I have to get a good think on about something I call steve and dave separately, then call them both together, and compare the three suggestions. What is interesting is I have done this often enough that I can often predict what each will say in a sort of mental role taking that is much easier if you imagine it not being you that has such thoughts. As such I have achieved some bounded bias, that is I am biogted enough to not be a social pariah in America (one must be somewhat prejudiced against someone to survive socially even if its only prejudiced against bigots and republicans) But rational enough not to fall for gambler’s fallacies and at least bright enough to nod along when a modus ponens is explained to me using small words for the fourteenth time. Its not perfect, but its mine, Most people outsource their morality anyway., from what would jesus do, to local faith leaders to calling their parents for advice. I’m just a little more structured and deliberate. Through this system I can have someone have an unbiased view and speak to someone with a biased view and make a decision as to which is a better view to have without having to unsee everything. Yes I realize steve won’t be perfectly unbiased every time or perfectly rational or make the right choices but then again, neither would I and there’s nothing special about me making my mistakes.
A good principal in general. If more people realized this, the world would be a better place, I should think.
Hmm, I wonder if there’s some snappy Wise Saying -esque way of formulating this
“I know I can never be perfect, but that’s certainly not going to stop me from trying.” --Sean Coincon
:D
Relevant: Paul Graham, Why Nerds are Unpopular
Paul Graham argues that a nerd is anyone not primarily focused on popularity, and that nerds lose the competitive and zero-sum game of popularity to those who aren’t distracted by things like studying. After nerds enter the real world, however, they can form their own special-interest communities and often do very well.
Regarding Aaronson’s piece, ditziness as signaling makes sense. However, the protagonist failed to see other options: she could have “won” by making the first moves to date an attractive but passive/malleable and socially clueless boy. She could have really “won” by stringing along several passive/malleable/clueless boys. Instead, she sold her soul to stay with the next random guy who asked her out after her “realization”, because being alone was more painful. She didn’t realize that her understanding of evolutionary theory and rationality failed to make up for her lack of domain knowledge about dating/relationships.
Assuming one of those could even begin to compete with a jock, which I greatly doubt.
That could work if she gets them to support her while she cheats on them with Elliot and he’s her children’s biological father, yeah.
This post and the linked story scared the heck out of me. Thanks for the thought-provoking material.
So, to be clear, you don’t think that such neurohacking as presented in the story is possible?
That said, I think you’ve found a pretty convincing argument that we shouldn’t accept the tradeoff, even if it’s available. That is one scary piece of writing.