Eventually, the good guys capture an evil alien ship, and go exploring inside it. The captain of the good guys finds the alien bridge, and on the bridge is a lever. “Ah,” says the captain, “this must be the lever that makes the ship dematerialize!” So he pries up the control lever and carries it back to his ship, after which his ship can also dematerialize.
Beautiful Probability:
It seems to me that the toolboxers are looking at the sequence of cubes {1, 8, 27, 64, 125, …} and pointing to the first differences {7, 19, 37, 61, …} and saying “Look, life isn’t always so neat—you’ve got to adapt to circumstances.” And the Bayesians are pointing to the third differences, the underlying stable level {6, 6, 6, 6, 6, …}. And the critics are saying, “What the heck are you talking about? It’s 7, 19, 37 not 6, 6, 6. You are oversimplifying this messy problem; you are too attached to simplicity.”
It’s not necessarily simple on a surface level. You have to dive deeper than that to find stability.
On the one hand, as a good person who cares about the feelings of others, you don’t want to call them out, make them feel stupid, and embarrass them. On the other hand… what if it’s in the name of intellectual progress?
Intellectual progress seems like it is more than enough to justify it. Under a veil of ignorance, I’d really, really prefer it.
And yet that doesn’t seem to do the trick. I at least still feel awkward using examples from real life in writing and cringe a little when I see others do so.
I think the example with the detached lever is Yudkowsky being overconfident. Come on, it is an alien technology, way beyond our technical capabilities. Why should we assume that the mechanism responsible for dematerializing the ship is not in the lever? Just because the humans would not do it that way? Maybe the alien ships are built in a way that makes them easy to configure on purpose. That would be actually the smart way to do this.
Somewhere, in a tribe that has seen automobile for the first time, a local shaman is probably composing an essay on a Detached CD Player Fallacy.
Using examples of people being stupid
I’ve noticed that a lot of cool concepts stem from examples of people being stupid. For example, I recently re-read Detached Lever Fallacy and Beautiful Probability.
Detached Lever Fallacy:
Beautiful Probability:
On the one hand, as a good person who cares about the feelings of others, you don’t want to call them out, make them feel stupid, and embarrass them. On the other hand… what if it’s in the name of intellectual progress?
Intellectual progress seems like it is more than enough to justify it. Under a veil of ignorance, I’d really, really prefer it.
And yet that doesn’t seem to do the trick. I at least still feel awkward using examples from real life in writing and cringe a little when I see others do so.
I think the example with the detached lever is Yudkowsky being overconfident. Come on, it is an alien technology, way beyond our technical capabilities. Why should we assume that the mechanism responsible for dematerializing the ship is not in the lever? Just because the humans would not do it that way? Maybe the alien ships are built in a way that makes them easy to configure on purpose. That would be actually the smart way to do this.
Somewhere, in a tribe that has seen automobile for the first time, a local shaman is probably composing an essay on a Detached CD Player Fallacy.
(just kidding)