I’m Robby Oliphant. I started a few months ago reading HP:MoR, which led me to the Sequences, which led me here about two weeks ago. So far I have read comments and discussions solely as a spectator. But finally, after developing my understanding and beginning on the path set forth by the sequences, I remain silent no more.
I am fresh out of high school, excited about life and plan to become a teacher, eventually. My short-term plans involve going out and doing missionary work for my church for the next two years. When I came head on against the problem of being a rationalist and a missionary for a theology, I took a step back and had a crisis of belief, not the first time, but this time I followed the prescribed method and came to a modified conclusion, though I still find it rational and advantageous to serve my 2 year mission.
I find some of this difficult, some of this intuitive and some of this neither difficult or intuitive, which is extremely frustrating, how something can appears simple but defy my efforts to intuitively work it. I will continue to work at it because rationality seems to be praiseworthy and useful. I hope to find the best evidence about theology here. I don’t mean evidence for or against, just the evidence about the subject.
Hahaha! I find it heartening that that is your response to me wanting to be a teacher. I am quite aware that the system is broken. My personal way of explaining it: The school system works for what it was made to work for; avoiding responsibility for a failed product.
The parents are not responsible; the school taught their kids.
The students are not socially responsible; everything was compulsory, they had no choice to make.
Teachers are not to blame; they teach what they are told to teach and have the autonomy of a pre-AI computer intelligence.
The administrators are not to blame; They are not the students’ parents or teachers.
The faceless, nameless committees that set the curriculum are not responsible, they formed then separated after setting forth the unavoidably terrible standards for all students of an arbitrary age everywhere.
So the product fails but everyone did they’re best. No nails stick out, no one gets hammered.
I have high dreams of being the educator that takes down public education. If a teacher comes up with a new way of teaching or an important thing to teach, he can go to class the next day and test it. I have a hope of professional teachers; either trusted with the autonomy of being professionals, or actual professionals in their subject, teaching only those that want to learn.
Also the literature on Mormons fromDesrtopa, Ford and Nisan I am thankful for. I enjoyed the Mormonism organizational post because I have also noticed how well the church runs. It is one reason I stay a Latter-Day Saint in this time of Atheism mainstreaming. The church is winning, it is well organized, service and family-oriented, and supports me as I study rationality and education. I can give examples, but I will leave my deeper insights for my future posts; I feel I am well introduced for now.
I’d like to know how they [=consequentialist deists stuck in religions with financial obligations] justify tithing so much of their income to an ineffective charity.
That seems rather unlikely, inasmuch as the first English translation was in 1896 - by which point Smith had preached, died, the Mormons evacuated to Utah, begun proselytizing overseas and baptism of the dead, set up a successful state, disavowed polygamy, etc.
There’s also the fact that it wasn’t even written until after Joseph Smith had died, translation not even being an issue. (In point of fact, Nietzsche was born the same year that Joseph Smith died.)
Nonetheless! I am convinced a time traveler gave Joseph Smith the book.
I don’t think you’ll find much discussion of theology here, since in these parts religion is generally treated as an open and shut case. The archives of Luke Muelhauser’s blog, Common Sense Atheism, are probably a much more abundant resource for rational analysis of theology; it documents his (fairly extensive) research into theological matters stemming from his own crisis of faith, starting before he became an atheist.
Obviously, the name of the site is rather a giveaway as to the ultimate conclusion that he drew (I would have named it differently in his place,) and the foregone conclusion might be a bit mindkilling, but I think the contents will probably be a fair approximation of the position of most of the community here on religious theological matters, made more explicit than they generally are on Less Wrong.
I took a step back and had a crisis of belief, not the first time, but this time I followed the prescribed method and came to a modified conclusion, though I still find it rational and advantageous to serve my 2 year mission.
I would love to hear more details, both about the process and about the conclusion, if you are brave/foolish enough to share.
I appreciate your altruistic spirit and your goal of gathering objective evidence regarding your religion. I’m glad to see you beginning on the path of improving your rationality! If you haven’t encountered the term “effective altruist” yet or have not yet investigated the effective altruist organizations, I very much encourage you to investigate them! As a fellow altruistic rationalist, I can say that they’ve been inspiring to me and hope they’re inspiring to you as well.
I feel it necessary to inform you of something important yet unfortunate about your goal of becoming a teacher. I’m not happy to have to tell you this, but I am quite glad that somebody told you about it at the beginning of your adulthood:
If you wish to investigate alternatives to becoming a standard school teacher, I would highly recommend considering becoming involved with effective altruists. An organization like THINK or 80,000 hours may be very helpful to you in determining what sorts of effective and altruistic things you might do with your skills. THINK does training for effective altruists and helps them figure out what to do with themselves. 80,000 hours helps people figure out how to make the most altruistic contribution with careers they already have.
For information regarding religion, I recommend the blog of a former Christian (Luke Muehlhauser) as an addition to your reading list. That is here: Common Sense Atheism. I recommend this in particular because he completed the process you’ve started—the process of reviewing Christian beliefs—so Luke’s writing may be able to save you significant time and provide you with information you may not encounter in other sources. Also, due to the fact that he began as a Christian, I’m guessing that his reasoning was not unnecessarily harsh toward Christian ideas like they might have been otherwise. The sampling of his blog that I’ve read is of good quality. He’s a rationalist, so that might be part of why.
The school system is broken in a serious way. The problem is with the fundamental system, so it’s not something teachers can compensate for.
See also Lockhart’s Lament (PDF link) . That said, in my own case, competent teachers (such as Lockhart appears to be) did indeed make a difference. Though my IQ is much closer to the population than the IQ of an average LWer’s, so maybe my anecdotal evidence does not apply (not that it ever does, what with being anecdotal and all).
I have, in fact, read the Speech before, quite some time ago. My point is that outstanding teachers can make a big positive difference in the students’ lives (at least, that was the case for me), largely by deliberately avoiding some or all of the anti-patterns that Gatto lists in his Speech. We were also taught the basics of critical thinking in an English class (of all places), though this could’ve been a fluke (or, once again, a teacher’s personal initiative).
I should also point out that these anti-patterns are not ubiquitous. I was lucky enough to attend a school in another country for a few of my teenage years (a long, long time ago). During a typical week, we’d learn how to solve equations in Math class, apply these skills to exercises in Statistics, stage an experiment and record the results in Physics, then program in the statistics formulae and run them on our experimental results in Informatics (a.k.a. Computer Science). Ideas tend to make more sense when connections between them are revealed.
I haven’t seen anything like this in US-ian education, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some school somewhere in the US is employing such an approach.
Edited to add:
Failing to teach reasoning skills in school is a crime against humanity.
I share your frustration, but there’s no need to overdramatize.
I should also point out that, while Gatto makes some good points, his overall thesis is hopelessly lost in all the hyperbole, melodrama, and outright conspiracy theorizing. He does his own ideas a disservice by presenting them the way he does. For example, I highly doubt that mental illnesses, television broadcasts, and restaurants would all magically disappear (as Gatto claims on pg. 8) if only we could teach our children some critical thinking skills.
Check out Ed DeBono’s CORT thinking system. His research (I haven’t thoroughly reviewed it, just reciting from memory) shows that by increasing people’s lateral thinking / creativity, it decreases things like their suicide rate. If you have been taught to see more options, you’re less likely to choose to behave desperately and destructively. If you’re able to reason things out, you’re less likely to feel stuck and need help. If you’re able to analyze, you’re less likely to believe something batty. Would mental illness completely disappear? I don’t think so. Sometimes conditions are mostly due to genes or health issues. But there are connections, definitely, between one’s ability to think and one’s sanity.
If you don’t agree with this, then do you also criticize Eliezer’s method of raising the sanity waterline by encouraging people to refine their rationality?
Connection between education and indulging in passive entertainment
As for television, I think he’s got a point. When I was 17, I realized that I was spending most of my free time watching someone else’s life. I wasn’t spending my time making my own life. If the school system makes you dependent like he says (and I believe it does) then you’ll be a heck of a lot less likely to take initiative and do something. If your self-confidence depends on other expert’s approval, it becomes hard to take a risk and go do your own project. If your creativity and analytical abilities are reduced, so too will be your ability to imagine projects for yourself to do and guide yourself while doing them. If your love for learning and working is destroyed, why would you want to do self-directed projects in the first place? And if you aren’t doing your own projects your own way, that sucks a lot of the life and pleasure out of them. Fortunately, for me, a significant amount of my creativity, analytical abilities, and a significant amount of my passion for learning and working survived school. That gave me the perspective I needed to make the choice between living an idle life of passive entertainment, and making my own life. Making my own life is more engaging than passive entertainment because it’s tailored to my interests exactly, more fulfilling than accomplishing nothing could ever be, more exciting than fantasy can be because it is real, and more beneficial and rewarding in both emotional and practical ways than entertainment can be due to the fact that learning and working opens up new social and career opportunities.
If the choice you are making is between “watch TV” and “not watch TV” you’re probably going to watch it.
But if you have a busy mind full of ideas and thoughts and passions, that’s not the choice you’re perceiving. You’ve got the choice between “watch character’s lives” and “make my own life awesome and watch that”. If you felt strongly that you could make your own life awesome, is there anything that could convince you to watch TV instead?
Gatto doesn’t do a good job of giving you perspective so you can understand his point of view here. He didn’t explain how incredible it can feel to have a mind that is on, how engaging it can be to learn something you’re interested in, how satisfying it is to do your own d project your own d way and see it actually work! He doesn’t do a good job of helping you imagine how much more motivation you would experience if your creativity and analytical abilities were jacked up way beyond what they are. If your life was packed full of thoughts and ideas and self-confidence, could you spend half your free time in front of a show? If you had the kind of motivation it causes to feel like you’re in the process of building an amazing life, would you be able to still your mind and focus on sitcoms?
I wouldn’t. I can’t. It is as if I am possessed by this supernova sized drive to DO THINGS.
Restaurants and education
I honestly don’t know anything about whether these are connected. My best guess is that Gatto loves to cook, but had found not being taught how to cook to be a rather large obstacle in the way of enjoying it.
I mostly agree with the things you say, but these are not the things that Gatto says. Your position is a great deal milder than his.
In a single sentence, he claims that if only we could set up our schools the way he wants them to be set up, then social services would utterly disappear, the number of “psychic invalids” would drop to zero, “commercial entertainment of all sorts” would “vanish”, and restaurants would be “drastically down-sized”.
This is going beyound hyperbole; this borders on drastic ignorance.
For example, not all mental illnesses are caused by a lack of gumption. Many, such as clinical depression and schizophrenia, are genetic in nature, and will strike their victims regardless of how awesomely rational they are. Others, such as PTSD, are caused by psychological trauma and would fell even the mighty Gatto, should he be unfortunate enough to experience it.
While it’s true that most of the “commercial entertainment of all sorts” is junk, some of it is art; we know this because a lot of it has survived since ancient times, despite the proclamations of people who thought just like Gatto (only referring to oil paintings, phonograph records, and plain old-fashioned writing instead of electronic media). As an English teacher, it seems like Gatto should know this.
And what’s his beef with restaurants, anyway ? That’s just… weird.
If you had the kind of motivation it causes to feel like you’re in the process of building an amazing life, would you be able to still your mind and focus on sitcoms?
Do you feel the same way about fiction books, out of curiosity ?
If you don’t agree with this, then do you also criticize Eliezer’s method of raising the sanity waterline by encouraging people to refine their rationality?
If Eliezer claimed that raising the sanity waterline is the one magic bullet that would usher us into a new Golden Age, as we reclaim the faded glory of our ancestors, then yes, I would disagree with him too. But, AFAIK, he doesn’t claim this—unlike Gatto.
For example, not all mental illnesses are caused by a lack of gumption. Many, such as clinical depression and schizophrenia, are genetic in nature, and will strike their victims regardless of how awesomely rational they are.
I’m afraid this account has swung to the opposite extreme—to the extent that it is quite possibly further from the truth and more misleading than Gatto’s obvious hyperbole.
Schizophrenia is one of the most genetically determined of the well known mental health problems but even it is heavily dependent on life experiences. In particular, long term exposure to stressful environments or social adversity dramatically increases the risk that someone at risk for developing the condition will in fact do so.
As for clinical depression, the implication that due to being ‘genetic in nature’ means that the environment in which an individual spends decades of growth and development in is somehow not important is utterly absurd. Genetics is again relevant in determining how vulnerable the individual is but the social environment is again critical for determining whether problems will arise.
That’s a good point, I did not mean to imply that these mental illnesses are completely unaffected by environmental factors. In addition, in case of some illnesses such as depression, there are in fact many different causes that can lead to similar symptoms, so the true picture is a lot more complex (and is still not entirely well understood).
However, this is very different from saying something like “schizophrenia is completely environmental”, or even “if only people had some basic critical thinking skills, they’d never become depressed”, which is how I interpreted Gatto’s claims.
For example even with a relatively low heritability rate, millions of people would still contract schizophrenia every year worldwide—especially since many of the adverse life experiences that can trigger it are unavoidable. No amount of critical thinking will reduce the number of victims to zero. And that’s just one specific disease among many, and we’re not even getting into more severe cases such as Down’s Syndrome. If Gatto thinks otherwise, then he’s being hopelessly naive.
I agree that saying “all these problems will disappear” is not the same as saying that “these problems will reduce”. I felt the need to explain why the problems would reduce because I wasn’t sure you saw the connections.
Others, such as PTSD, are caused by psychological trauma and would fell even the mighty Gatto, should he be unfortunate enough to experience it.
I have to wonder if having a really well-developed intellect might offer some amount of protection against this. Whether Gatto’s intellect is sufficiently well-developed for this is another topic.
And what’s his beef with restaurants, anyway ? That’s just… weird.
I don’t know. I love not cooking.
Do you feel the same way about fiction books, out of curiosity ?
Actually, yes. When I am fully motivated, I can spend all my evenings doing altruistic work for years, reading absolutely no fiction and watching absolutely no TV shows. That level of motivation is where I’m happiest, so I prefer to live that way.
I do occasionally watch movies during those periods, perhaps once a month, because rest is important (and because movies take less time to watch than a book takes to read, but are higher quality than television, assuming you choose them well).
I felt the need to explain why the problems would reduce because I wasn’t sure you saw the connections.
I see the connections, but I do not believe that some of the problems Gatto wants to fix—f.ex. the existence of television and restaurants—are even problems at all. Sure, TV has a lot of terrible content, and some restaurants have terrible food, but that’s not the same thing as saying that the very concept of these services is hopelessly broken.
I have to wonder if having a really well-developed intellect might offer some amount of protection against this
It probably would, but not to any great extent. I’m not a psychiatrist or a neurobiologist though, so I could be widely off the mark. In general, however, I think that Gatto is falling prey to the Dunning–Kruger effect when he talks about mental illness, economics, and many other things for that matter.
For example, the biggest tool in his school-fixing toolbox is the free market; he believes that if only schools could compete against each other with little to no government regulation, their quality would soar. In practice, such scenarios tend to work out… poorly.
When I am fully motivated, I can spend all my evenings doing altruistic work for years, reading absolutely no fiction and watching absolutely no TV shows.
That’s fair, and your preferences are consistent. However, many other people see a great deal of value in fiction; some even choose to use it as a vehicle for transmitting their ideas (f.ex. HPMOR). I do admit that, in terms of raw productivity, I cannot justify spending one’s time on reading fiction; if a person wanted to live a maximally efficient life, he would probably avoid any kind of entertainment altogether, fiction literature included. That said, many people find the act of reading fiction literature immensely useful (scientists and engineers included), and the same is true for other forms of entertainment such as music. I am fairly convinced that any person who says “entertainment is a waste of time” is committing a fallacy of false generalization.
I do not believe that some of the problems Gatto wants to fix—f.ex. the existence of television and restaurants—are even problems at all.
The existence of television technology isn’t, in my opinion, a problem. Nor is the fact that some shows are low quality. Even if all of them were low quality, I wouldn’t necessarily see that as a problem—it would still be a way of relaxing. The problem I see with television is that the average person spends 4 hours a day watching it. (Can’t remember where I got that study, sorry.) My problem with that is not that they aren’t exercising (they’d still have an hour a day which is plenty of exercise, if they want it) or that they aren’t being productive (you can only be so productive before you run out of mental stamina anyway, and the 40 hour work week was designed to use the entirety of the average person’s stamina) but that they aren’t living.
It could be argued that people need to spend hours every day imagining a fantasy. I was told by an elderly person once that before television, people would sit on a hill and daydream. I’ve also read that imagining doing a task correctly is more effective at making you better at it than practice. If that’s true, daydreaming might be a necessity for maximum effectiveness and television might provide some kind of similar benefit. So it’s possible that putting one’s brain into fantasy mode for a few hours of day really is that beneficial.
Spending four hours a day in fantasy mode is not possible for me (I’m too motivated to DO something) and I don’t seem to need anywhere near that much daydreaming. I would find it very hard to deal with if I had spent that much of my free time in fantasy. I imagine that if asked whether they would have preferred to watch x number of shows, or spent all of that free time on getting out there and living, most people would probably choose the latter—and that’s sad.
he believes that if only schools could compete against each other with little to no government regulation, their quality would soar. In practice, such scenarios tend to work out… poorly.
I think that people would also have to have read the seven lessons speech for the problems he sees to be solved. Maybe eventually things would evolve to the point where schools would not behave this way anymore without them reading it, because it’s probably not the most effective way of teaching, but I don’t see that change happening quickly without people pressuring schools to make those specific changes.
However, I’m surprised that you say “In practice, such scenarios tend to work out… poorly.” Do you mean that the free market doesn’t do much to improve quality, or do you just mean that when people want specific changes and expect the free market to implement them, the free market doesn’t tend to implement those specific changes?
I’m also very interested in where you got the information to support the idea, either way.
a vehicle for transmitting their ideas
After reading Ayn Rand’s the Fountainhead, my feeling was that even though much of the writing was brilliant and enjoyable, I could have gotten the key ideas much faster if she had only published a few lines from one of the last chapters. I’m having the same reaction to the sequences and HPMOR. I enjoy them and recognize the brilliance in the writing abilities, but I find myself doing things like reading lists of biases over and over in order to improve my familiarity and eventually memorize them. I still want to finish the sequences because they’re so important to this culture, but what I have prioritized appears to be getting the most important information in as quickly as possible. So, although entertainment is a way of transmitting ideas, I question how efficient it is, and whether it provides enough other learning benefits to outweigh the cost of wrapping all those ideas in so much text. I could walk all the way to Florida, but flying would be faster. People realize this so if they want to take vacations, they fly. Why, then, do they use entertainment to learn instead of seeking out the most efficient method?
It makes sense from the writer’s point of view. I have said before that I was very glad that Eliezer decided to popularize rationality as much as possible, as I had been thinking that somebody needed to do that for a very long time. His writing is interesting and his style is brilliant and his method has worked to attract almost twelve million hits to his site. I think that’s great. But the fact that people probably would not have flocked to the site if he had posted an efficient dissemination of cognitive biases and whatnot is curious. Maybe the way I learn is different.
I am fairly convinced that any person who says “entertainment is a waste of time” is committing a fallacy of false generalization.
I think it depends on whether you use “waste of time” to mean “absolutely no benefit whatsoever” or “nowhere near the most efficient way of getting the benefit”.
The statement “entertainment is an inefficient way to get ideas compared with other methods” seems true to me.
I enjoy them and recognize the brilliance in the writing abilities, but I find myself doing things like reading lists of biases over and over in order to improve my familiarity and eventually memorize them. I still want to finish the sequences because they’re so important to this culture, but what I have prioritized appears to be getting the most important information in as quickly as possible.
I wonder if the author would agree that that is the most important information. I suspect he would not. (So naturally if you learning goals are different to the teaching goals of the author then their material will not be optimized for your intentions.)
It seems to me that the problem is what intention one has when one begins learning and whether one can deal with accepting the fact that they’re biased, not how they go about learning them. Though, maybe Eliezer has put various protections in that get people questioning their intention and sells them on learning with the right intention. I would agree that if it did not occur to a person to use their knowledge of biases to look for their own mistakes, learning them could be really bad, but I do not think that learning a list of biases will all by itself turn me into an argument-wielding brain-dead zombie.
If it makes you feel any better to know this, I’ve been seeking a checklist of errors against which I can test my ideas.
However, I’m surprised that you say “In practice, such scenarios tend to work out… poorly.” Do you mean that the free market doesn’t do much to improve quality...
That is one big reason behind my statement, yes. Currently, it looks like many, if not most, people—in the Southern states, at least—want their schools to engage in cultural indoctrination as opposed to any kind of rationality training. The voucher programs, which were designed specifically to introduce some free market into the education system, are being used to teach things like Creationism and historical revisionism. Which is not to say that public education in states like Louisiana and Texas is any better, seeing as they are implementing the same kinds of curricula by popular vote.
In fact, most private schools are religious in nature. According to this advocacy site (hardly an unbiased source, I know), around 50% are Catholic. On the plus side, student performance tends to be somewhat better (though not drastically so) in private schools, according to CAPE as well as other sources. However, private schools are also quite a bit more expensive than public schools, with tuition levels somewhere around $10K (and often higher). This means that the students who attend them have much wealthier parents, and this fact alone can account for their higher performance.
This leads me to my second point: I believe that Gatto is mistaken when he yearns for earlier, simpler times, where education was unencumbered by any regulation whatsoever, and students were free to learn (or to avoid learning) whatever they wanted. We do not live in such times anymore. Instead, we live in a world that is saturated by technology. Literacy, along with basic numeracy, are no longer marks of high status, but an absolute requirement for daily life. Most well-paying jobs, creative pursuits, as well as even basic social interactions all rely on some form of information technology. Basic education is not a luxury, but an essential service.
Are public schools adequately providing this essential service ? No. However, we simply cannot afford to live in a world where access to it is gated by wealth—which is what would happen if schools were completely privatized. As far as I know, most if not all efforts to privatize essential services have added in disaster; this includes police, fire departments, and even prisons (in California, at least). Basic health care is a particularly glaring example.
So, in summary, existing private schools are emphasizing for indoctrination rather than critical thinking; and even if they were not, we cannot afford to restrict access to basic education based on personal wealth.
The problem I see with television is that the average person spends 4 hours a day watching it. … My problem with that is not that they aren’t exercising … or that they aren’t being productive … but that they aren’t living.
What does “living” mean, exactly ? I understand that you find your personal creative projects highly enjoyable, and that’s great. But you aren’t merely saying, “I enjoy X”, you’re saying, “enjoying Y instead of X is objectively wrong” (if I understand you correctly).
Why, then, do they use entertainment to learn instead of seeking out the most efficient method?
I address this point below, but I’d like to also point out that some people people’s goals are different from yours. They consume entertainment because it is enjoyable, or because it facilitates social contact (which they in turn find enjoyable), not because they believe it will make them more efficient (though see below).
So, although entertainment is a way of transmitting ideas, I question how efficient it is, and whether it provides enough other learning benefits to outweigh the cost of wrapping all those ideas in so much text.
Many people—yourself not among them, admittedly—find that they are able to internalize new ideas much more thoroughly if these ideas are tied into a narrative. Similarly, other people find it easier to communicate their ideas in the form of narratives; this is why Eliezer writes things like Three Worlds Collide and HPMOR instead of simply writing out the equations. This is also why he employs several tropes from fiction even in his non-fiction writing.
I’m not saying that this is the “right” way to learn, or anything; I am merely describing the situation that, as I believe, exists.
The statement “entertainment is an inefficient way to get ideas compared with other methods” seems true to me.
I am just not convinced that this statement applies to anything like a majority of “person+idea” combinations.
“Living” the way I used it means “living to the fullest” or, a little more specifically “feeling really engaged in life” or “feeling fulfilled”.
I understand that you find your personal creative projects highly enjoyable, and that’s great. But you aren’t merely saying, “I enjoy X”, you’re saying, “enjoying Y instead of X is objectively wrong” (if I understand you correctly).
I used “living” to refer to a subjective state. There’s nothing objective about it, and IMO, there’s nothing objectively right or wrong about having a subjective state that is (even in your own opinion) not as good as the ideal.
I feel like your real challenge here is more similar to Kawoomba’s concern. Am I right?
They consume entertainment because it is enjoyable,
Do you find it more enjoyable to passively watch entertainment than to do your own projects? Do you think most people do? If so, might that be because the fun was taken out of learning, or people’s creativity was reduced to the point where doing your own project is too challenging, or people’s self-confidence was made too dependent on others such that they don’t feel comfortable pursuing that fulfilling sense of having done something on their own?
or because it facilitates social contact (which they in turn find enjoyable), not because they believe it will make them more efficient (though see below).
I puzzle at how you classify watching something together as “social contact”. To me, being in the same room is not a social life. Watching the same entertainment is not quality time. The social contact I yearn for involves emotional intimacy—contact with the actual person inside, not just a sense of being in the same room watching the same thing. I don’t understand how that can be called social contact.
Many people—yourself not among them, admittedly—find that they are able to internalize new ideas much more thoroughly if these ideas are tied into a narrative.
I’ve been thinking about this and I think what might be happening is that I make my own narratives.
Similarly, other people find it easier to communicate their ideas in the form of narratives
This, I can believe about Eliezer. There are places where he could have been more incisive but is instead gets wordy to compensate. That’s an interesting point.
I am just not convinced that this statement applies to anything like a majority of “person+idea” combinations.
Okay, so to clarify, your position is that entertainment is a more efficient way to learn?
“Living” the way I used it means “living to the fullest” or, a little more specifically “feeling really engaged in life” or “feeling fulfilled”.
I understand that you do not feel fulfilled when watching TV, but other people might. I would agree with your reply on Kawoomba’s sub-thread:
Now, if you want to disagree with me on whether they think they are “really living”, that might be really interesting. I acknowledge that mind projection fallacy might be causing me to think they want what I want.
For better or for worse, passive entertainment such as movies, books, TV shows, music, etc., is a large part of our popular culture. You say:
I puzzle at how you classify watching something together as “social contact”. To me, being in the same room is not a social life.
Strictly speaking this is true, but people usually discuss the things they watch (or read, or listen to, etc.), with their friends or, with the advent of the Internet, even with random strangers. The shared narratives thus facilitate the “emotional intimacy” you speak about. Furthermore, some specific works of passive entertainment, as well as generalized common tropes, make up a huge chunk of the cultural context without which it would be difficult to communicate with anyone in our culture on an emotional level (as opposed to, say, presenting mathematical proofs or engineering schematics to each other).
For example, if you take a close look at various posts on this very site, you will find references to the genres of science fiction and fantasy, as well as media such as movies or anime, which the posters simply take for granted (sometimes too much so, IMO; f.ex., not everyone knows what “tsuyoku naritai” means right off the bat). A person who did not share this common social context would find it difficult to communicate with anyone here.
Note, though, that once again I am describing a situation that exists, not prescribing a behavior. In terms of raw productivity per unit of time, I cannot justify any kind of entertainment at all. While it is true that entertainment has been with us since the dawn of civilization, so has cancer; just because something is old, doesn’t mean that it’s good.
Okay, so to clarify, your position is that entertainment is a more efficient way to learn?
No, this phrasing is too strong. I meant what I said before: many people find it easier to internalize new ideas when they are presented as part of a narrative. This doesn not mean that entertainment is a more efficient way to learn all things for all people, or that it is objectively the best technique for learning things, or anything of the sort.
Note, though, that once again I am describing a situation that exists, not prescribing a behavior. In terms of raw productivity per unit of time, I cannot justify any kind of entertainment at all. While it is true that entertainment has been with us since the dawn of civilization, so has cancer; just because something is old, doesn’t mean that it’s good.
Why try to justify entertainment in terms of productivity per time? Is there any reason this makes more sense than, say, justifying productivity in terms of how much entertainment it allows for?
Presumably, if your goal is to optimize the world, or to affect any part of it besides yourself in a non-trivial way, you should strive to do so as efficiently as possible. This means that spending time on any activities that do not contribute to this goal is irrational. A paperclip maximizer, for example, wouldn’t spend any time on watching soap operas or reading romance novels—unless doing so would lead to more paperclips (which is unlikely).
Of course, one could argue that consumption of passive entertainment does contribute to the average human’s goals, since humans are unable to function properly without some downtime. But I don’t know if I’d go so far as to claim that this is a feature, and not a bug, just like cancer or aging or whatever else evolution had saddled us with.
Presumably, if your goal is to optimize the world, or to affect any part of it besides yourself in a non-trivial way, you should strive to do so as efficiently as possible.
A decision theory that leads to the conclusion that we should all work like slaves for a future paradise, the slightest lapse incurring a cost equivalent to untold numbers of dead babies, and the enormity of the task meaning that we shall never experience it ourselves, is prima facie a broken decision theory. I’d even call it the sort of toxic mindwaste that RationalWiki loves to mock.
Once you’ve built that optimised world, who gets to slack off and just live in it, and how will they spend their time?
A decision theory that leads to the conclusion that we should all work like slaves for a future paradise, the slightest lapse incurring a cost equivalent to untold numbers of dead babies, and the enormity of the task meaning that we shall never experience it ourselves, is prima facie a broken decision theory.
Why exactly? I mean, my intuition also tells me it’s wrong… but my intuition has a few assumptions that disagree with the proposed scenario. Let’s make sure the intuition does not react to a strawman.
For example, when in real life people “work like slaves for a future paradise”, the paradise often does not happen. Typically, the people have a wrong model of the world. (The wrong model is often provided by their leader, and their work in fact results in building their leader’s personal paradise, nothing more.) And even if their model is right, their actions are more optimized for signalling effort than for real efficiency. (Working very hard signals more virtue than thinking and coming up with a smart plan to make a lot of money and pay someone else to do more work than we could.) Even with smart and honest people, there will typically be something they ignored or could not influence, such as someone powerful coming and taking the results of their work, or a conflict starting and destroying their seeds of the paradise. Or simply their internal conflicts, or lack of willpower to finish what they started.
The lesson we should take from this is that even if we have a plan to work like a slaves for a future paradise, there is very high prior probability that we missed something important. Which means that in fact we do not work for a future paradise, we only mistakenly think so. I agree that the prior probability is so high that even the most convincing reasoning and plans are unlikely to overweight it.
However, for the sake of experiment, imagine that Omega comes and tells you that if you will work like a slave for the next 20 or 50 years, the future paradise will happen with probability almost 1. You don’t have to worry about mistakes in your plans, because either Omega verified their correctness, or is going to provide you corrections when needed and predicts that you will be able to follow those corrections successfully. Omega also predicts that it you commit to the task, you will have enough willpower, health, and other necessary resources to complete it successfully. In this scenario, is committing for the slave work a bad decision?
In other words, is your objection “in situation X the decision D is wrong”, or is it “the situation X is so unlikely that any decision D based on assumption of X will in real life be wrong”?
When Omega enters a discussion, my interest in it leaves.
To that extent that someone is unable to use established tools of thought to focus attention on the important aspects of the problem their contribution to a conversation is likely to be negative. This is particularly the case when it comes to decision theory where it correlates strongly with pointless fighting of the counterfactual and muddled thinking.
And in future, if you wish to address a comment to me, I would appreciate being addressed directly, rather than with this pseudo-impersonal pomposity.
I intended the general claim as stated. I don’t know you well enough for it to be personal. I will continue to support the use of Omega (and simplified decision theory problems in general) as a useful way to think.
For practical purposes pronouncements like this are best interpreted as indications that the speaker has nothing of value to say on the subject, not as indications that the speaker is too sophisticated for such childish considerations.
For practical purposes pronouncements like this are best interpreted as indications
For practical purposes pronouncements like this are best interpreted as saying exactly what they say. You are, of course, free to make up whatever self-serving story you like around it.
For practical purposes pronouncements like this are best interpreted as saying exactly what they say. You are, of course, free to make up whatever self-serving story you like around it.
It is counterintuitive that you should slave for people you don’t know, perhaps because you can’t be sure you are serving their needs effectively. Even if that objection is removed by bringing in an omniscient oracle,there still seems to be a problem because the prospect of one generation slaving to create paradise for another isn’t fair. the simple
version of utilitiarianism being addressed here only sums individual utilities, and us blind to things that can only be defined at the group level like justice and equaliy.
However, for the sake of experiment, imagine that Omega comes and tells you that if you will work like a slave for the next 20 or 50 years, the future paradise will happen with probability almost 1. You don’t have to worry about mistakes in your plans, because either Omega verified their correctness, or is going to provide you corrections when needed and predicts that you will be able to follow those corrections successfully. Omega also predicts that it you commit to the task, you will have enough willpower, health, and other necessary resources to complete it successfully. In this scenario, is committing for the slave work a bad decision?
For the sake of experiment, imagine that air has zero viscosity. In this scenario, would a feather and a cannon ball fall in the same time?
For the sake of experiment, imagine that air has zero viscosity. In this scenario, would a feather and a cannon ball fall in the same time?
I believe the answer is “yes”, but I had to think about that for a moment. I’m not sure how that’s relevant to the current discussion, though.
I think your real point might be closer to something like, “thought experiments are useless at best, and should thus be avoided”, but I don’t want to put words into anyone’s mouth.
My point was something like, “of course if you assume away all the things that cause slave labour to be bad then slave labour is no longer bad, but that observation doesn’t yield much of an insight about the real world”.
That makes sense, but I don’t think it’s what Viliam_Bur was talking about. His point, as far as I could tell, was that the problem with slave labor is the coercion, not the labor itself.
Yep. A morality that leads to the conclusion that we should all work like slaves for a future paradise, the slightest lapse incurring a cost equivalent to untold numbers of dead babies, and the enormity of the task meaning that we shall never experience it ourselves, is prima facie a broken morality.
A decision theory that leads to the conclusion that we should all work like slaves for a future paradise … is prima facie a broken decision theory.
Why ? I mean, I do agree with you personally, but I don’t see why such a decision theory is objectively bad. You ask,
Once you’ve built that optimised world, who gets to slack off and just live in it, and how will they spend their time?
But the answer depends entirely on your goals. These can be as relatively modest as, “the world will be just like it is today, but everyone wears a party hat”. Or it could be as ambitious as, “the world contains as many paperclips as physically possible”. In the latter case, if you asked the paperclip maximizer “who gets to slack off ?”, it wouldn’t find the question relevant in the least. It doesn’t matter who gets to do what, all that matters are the paperclips.
You might argue that a paperclip-filled world would be a terrible place, and I agree, but that’s just because you and I don’t value paperclips as much as Clippy does. Clippy thinks your ideal world is terrible too, because it contains a bunch of useless things like “happy people in party hats”, and not nearly enough paperclips.
However, imagine if we ran two copies of Clippy in a grand paperclipping race: one that consumed entertainment by preference, and one that did not. The non-entertainment version would win every time. Similarly, if you want to make the world a better place (whatever that means for you), every minute you spend on doing other things is a minute wasted (unless they are explicitly included in your goals). This includes watching TV, eating, sleeping, and being dead. Some (if not all) of such activities are unavoidable, but as I said, I’m not sure whether it’s a bug or a feature.
However, imagine if we ran two copies of Clippy in a grand paperclipping race: one that consumed entertainment by preference, and one that did not. The non-entertainment version would win every time.
This is proving the conclusion by assuming it.
Similarly, if you want to make the world a better place (whatever that means for you), every minute you spend on doing other things is a minute wasted (unless they are explicitly included in your goals). This includes watching TV, eating, sleeping, and being dead. Some (if not all) of such activities are unavoidable, but as I said, I’m not sure whether it’s a bug or a feature.
The words make a perfectly logical pattern, but I find that the picture they make is absurd. The ontology has gone wrong.
Some businessman wrote a book of advice called “Never Eat Alone”, the title of which means that every meal is an opportunity to have a meal with someone to network with. That is what the saying “he who would be Pope must think of nothing else” looks like in practice. Not wearing oneself out like Superman in the SMBC cartoon, driven into self-imposed slavery by memetic immune disorder.
BTW, for what it’s worth, I do not watch TV. And now I am imagining a chapter of that book entitled “Never Sleep Alone”.
Some businessman wrote a book of advice called “Never Eat Alone”, the title of which means that every meal is an opportunity to have a meal with someone to network with. That is what the saying “he who would be Pope must think of nothing else” looks like in practice. Not wearing oneself out like Superman in the SMBC cartoon, driven into self-imposed slavery by memetic immune disorder.
Actually, I think that the world described in that SMBC cartoon is far preferable to the standard DC comics world with Superman. I do not think that doing what Superman did there is a memetic immune disorder, but rather a (successful) attempt to make the world a better place.
I definitely wouldn’t. A single tormented child seems to me like an incredibly good tradeoff for the number of very high quality lives that Omelas supports, much better than we get with real cities.
It sucks to actually be the person whose well-being is being sacrificed for everyone else, but if you’re deciding from behind a veil of ignorance which society to be a part of, your expected well being is going to be higher in Omelas.
Back when I was eleven or so, I contemplated this, and made a precommitment that if I were ever in a situation where I’m offered a chance to improve total wellfare for everyone at the cost of personal torment, I should take it immediately without giving myself any time to contemplate what I’d be getting myself into, so in that sense I’ve effectively volunteered myself to be the tormented child.
I don’t disagree with maximally efficient altruism, just with the idea that it’s sensible to judge entertainment only as an instrumental value in service of productivity.
It sucks to actually be the person whose well-being is being sacrificed for everyone else, but if you’re deciding from behind a veil of ignorance which society to be a part of, your expected well being is going to be higher in Omelas.
You’re assuming here that the “veil of ignorance” gives you exactly equal chance of being each citizen of Omelas, so that a decision under the veil reduces to average utilitarianism.
However, in Rawls’s formulation, you’re not supposed to assume that; the veil means you’re also entirely ignorant about the mechanism used to incarnate you as one of the citizens, and so must consider all probability distributions over the citizens when choosing your society. In particular, you must assign some weight to a distribution picked by a devil (or mischievous Omega) who will find the person with the very lowest utility in your choice of society and incarnate you as that person. So you wouldn’t choose Omelas.
This seems to be why Rawls preferred maximin decision theory under the veil of ignorance rather than expected utility decision theory.
In that case, don’t use a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, it’s not the best mechanism for addressing the decision. A veil where you have an equal chance of your own child being the victim to anyone else’s (assuming you’re already too old to be the victim) is more the sort of situation anyone actually deciding whether or not to live in Omelas would face.
Of course, I would pick Omelas even under the Rawlsian veil, since as I’ve said I’m willing to be the one who takes the hit.
Ah, so you are considering the question “If Omelas already exists, should I choose to live there or walk away?” rather than the Rawlsian question “Should we create a society like Omelas in the first place?” The “veil of ignorance” meme nearly always refers to the Rawlsian concept, so I misunderstood you there.
Incidentally, I reread the story and there seems to be no description of how the child was selected in the first place or how he/she is replaced. So it’s not clear that your own child does have the same chance of being the victim as anyone else’s.
Well, as I mentioned in another comment some time ago (not in this thread,) I support both not walking away from Omelas, and also creating Omelases unless an even more utility efficient method of creating happy and functional societies is forthcoming.
Our society rests on a lot more suffering than Omelas, not just in an incidental way (such as people within our cities who don’t have housing or medical care,) but directly, through channels such as economic slavery where companies rely on workers, mainly abroad, who they keep locked in debt, who could not leave to seek employment elsewhere even if they wanted to and other opportunities were forthcoming. I can respect a moral code that would lead people to walk out on Omelas as a form of protest that would also lead people to walk out on modern society to live on a self sufficient seasteading colony, but I reject the notion that Omelas is worse than, or as bad as, our own society, in a morally relevant way.
A single tormented child seems to me like an incredibly good tradeoff for the number of very high quality lives that Omelas supports, much better than we get with real cities.
I cannot fathom why a comment like that would be upvoted by anyone but an unfeeling robot. This is not even the dust-specks-vs-torture case, given that the Omelas is not a very large city.
if I were ever in a situation where I’m offered a chance to improve total wellfare for everyone at the cost of personal torment, I should take it immediately
Imagine that it is not you, but your child you must sacrifice. Would you shrug and say “sorry, my precious girl, you must suffer until you die so that your mommy/daddy can live a happy life”? I know what I would do.
Imagine that it is not you, but your child you must sacrifice. Would you shrug and say “sorry, my precious girl, you must suffer until you die so that your mommy/daddy can live a happy life”?
I hope I would have the strength to say “sorry, my precious girl, you must suffer until you die so that everyone in the city can live a happy life.” Doing it just for myself and my own social circle wouldn’t be a good tradeoff, but those aren’t the terms of the scenario.
Considering how many of our basic commodities rely on sweatshop or otherwise extremely miserable labor, we’re already living off the backs of quite a lot of tormented children.
The Babyeaters’ babies outnumber the adults; their situation is analogous, not to the city of Omelas, but to a utopian city built on top of another, even larger, dystopian city, on which it relies for its existence.
I would rather live in a society where people loved and cherished their children, but also valued their society, and were willing to shut up and multiply and take the hit themselves, or to their own loved ones, for the sake of a common good that really is that much greater, and I want to be the sort of person I’d want others in that society to be.
I’ve never had children, but I have been in love, in a reciprocated relationship of the sort where it feels like it’s actually as big a deal as all the love songs have ever made it out to be, and I think that sacrificing someone I loved for the sake of a city like Omelas is something I’d be willing to do in practice, not just in theory (and she never would have expected me to do differently, nor would I of her.) It’s definitely not the case that really loving someone, with true depth of feeling, precludes acknowledgment that there are some things worth sacrificing even that bond for.
I’m guessing that neither have most of those who upvoted you and downvoted me. I literally cannot imagine a worse betrayal than the scenario we’ve been discussing. I can imagine one kind-of-happy society where something like this would be OK, though.
I cannot fathom why a comment like that would be upvoted by anyone but an unfeeling robot.
Sounds like you need to update your model of people who don’t have children. Also, how aggressively do you campaign against things like sweatshop labor in third-world countries, which as Desrtopa correctly points out are a substantially worse real-world analogue? Do children only matter if they’re your children?
the real problem with omelas: It totally ignores the fact that there are children suffering literally as we speak in every city on the planet. Omelas somehow managed to get it down to one child. How many other children would you sacrifice for your own?
the real problem with omelas: It totally ignores the fact that there are children suffering literally as we speak in every city on the planet.
Unlike in the fictional Omelas, there is no direct dependence or direct sacrifice. Certainly it is possible to at least temporarily alleviate suffering of others in this non-hypothetical world by sacrificing some of your fortune, but that’s the difference between active and passive approach, there is a large gap there.
Related. Nornagest put their finger on this being a conflict between the consequentially compelling (optimizing for general welfare) and the psychologically compelling (not being confronted with knowledge of an individual child suffering torture because of you). I think Nornagest’s also right that a fully specified Omelas scenario would almost certainly feel less compelling, which is one reason I’m not much impressed by Le Guin’s story.
Imagine that it is not you, but your child you must sacrifice.
The situation is not analogous, since sacrificing one’s child would presumably make most parents miserable for the rest of their days. In Omelas, however, the sacrifice makes people happy, instead.
I don’t disagree with maximally efficient altruism, just with the idea that it’s sensible to judge entertainment only as an instrumental value in service of productivity.
As I said in previous comments, I am genuinely not sure whether entertainment is a good terminal goal to have.
By analogy, I absolutely require sleep in order to be productive at all in any capacity; but if I could swallow a magic pill that removed my need for sleep (with no other side-effects), I’d do so in a heartbeat. Sleep is an instrumental goal for me, not a terminal one. But I don’t know if entertainment is like that or not.
Thus, I’m really interested in hearing more about your thoughts on the topic.
I’m not sure that I would regard entertainment as a terminal goal, but I’m very sure I wouldn’t regard productivity as one. As an instrumental goal, it’s an intermediary between a lot of things that I care about, but optimizing for productivity seems like about as worthy a goal to me as paperclipping.
Right, agreed, but “productivity” is just a rough estimate of how quickly you’re moving towards your actual goals. If entertainment is not one of them, then either it enhances your productivity in some way, or it reduces it, or it has no effect (which is unlikely, IMO).
Productivity and fun aren’t orthogonal; for example, it is entirely possible that if your goal is “experience as much pleasure as possible”, then some amount of entertainment would directly contribute to the goal, and would thus be productive. That said, though, I can’t claim that such a goal would be a good goal to have in the first place.
How so ? Imagine that you have two identical paperclip maximizers; for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that they are not capable of radical self-modification (though the results would be similar if they were). Each agent is capable of converting raw titanium to paperclips at the same rate. Agent A spends 100% of its time on making paperclips. Agent B spends 80% of its time on paperclips, and 20% of its time on watching TV. If we gave A and B two identical blocks of titanium, which agent would finish converting all of it to paperclips first ?
That is what the saying “he who would be Pope must think of nothing else” looks like in practice.
FeepingCreature addressed this better than I could in this comment . I understand that you find the idea of making paperclips (or political movements, or software, or whatever) all day every day with no breaks abhorrent, and so do I. But then, some people find polyamory abhorrent as well, and then they “polyhack” themselves and grow to enjoy it. Is entertainment your terminal value, or a mental bias ? And if it is a terminal value, is it the best terminal value that you could possibly have ?
WARNING: This comment contains explicit discussion of an information hazard.
Imagine that you have two identical paperclip maximizers
I decline to do so. What imaginary creatures would choose whose choice has been written into their definition is of no significance. (This is also a reply to the comment of FeepingCreature you referenced.) I’m more interested in the practical question of how actual human beings, which this discussion began with, can avoid the pitfall of being taken over by a utility monster they’ve created in their own heads.
This is a basilisk problem. Unlike Roko’s, which depends on exotic decision theory, this one involves nothing more than plain utilitarianism. Unlike the standard Utility Monster scenario, this one involves no imaginary entities or hypothetical situations. You just have to look at the actual world around you through the eyes of utilitarianism. It’s a very short road from the innocent-sounding “the greatest good for the greatest number” to this: There are seven billion people on this planet. How can the good you could do them possibly be outweighed by any amount of your own happiness? Just by sitting there reading LessWrong you’re killing babies! Having a beer? You’re drinking dead babies. Own a car? You’re driving on a carpet of dead babies! Murderer! Murderer! Add a dash of transhumanism and you can up the stakes to an obligation to bringing about billions of billions of future humans throughout the universe living lives billions of times better than ours.
But even Peter Singer doesn’t go that far, continuing to be an academic professor and paying his utilitarian obligations by preaching utilitarianism and donating twenty percent of his salary to charity.
This is such an obvious failure mode for utilitarianism, a philosophy at least two centuries old, that surely philosophers must have addressed it. But I don’t know what their responses are.
Christianity has the same problem, and handles it in practice by testing the vocation of those who come to it seeking to devote their whole life to the service of God, to determine whether they are truly called by God. For it is written that many are called, yet few are chosen. In non-supernatural terms, that means determining whether the applicant is psychologically fitted for the life they feel called to, and if not, deflecting their mania into some more productive route.
And then you have people like H0, who notices H2 is crazy, decides that that means that they shouldn’t even try to be altruistic, and accuses H1 of hypocrisy because she’s not like H2. (Exhibit A)
That is my expectation also. However, persuading H2 of that (“but dead babies!”) is likely to be a work of counselling or spiritual guidance rather than reason.
Well… so, if we both expect H1 to do more good than H2, it seems that if we were to look at them through the eyes of utilitarianism, we would endorse being H1 over being H2. But you seem to be saying that H2, looking through the eyes of utilitarianism, endorses being H2 over being H1. I am therefore deeply confused by your model of what’s going on here.
Oh yes, H1 is more effective, heathier, saner, more rational, etc. than H2. H2 is experiencing existential panic and cannot relinquish his death-grip on the idea.
Do you think being a utilitarian makes someone less effective, healthy, sane, rational etc.? Or do you think H2 has these various traits independent of them being a utilitarian?
WARNING: More discussion of a basilisk, with a link to a real-world example.
It’s a possible failure mode of utilitarianism. Some people succumb to it (see George Price for an actual example of a similar failure) and some don’t.
I don’t understand your confusion and this pair of questions just seems misconceived.
(shrug) OK. I certainly agree with you that some utilitarians suffer from the existential panic and inability to relinquish their death-grips on unhealthy ideas, while others don’t. I’m tapping out here.
One could reason that one is better placed to do good effectively when focussing on oneself, ones family, one’s community, etc, simply because one understands them better.
What imaginary creatures would choose whose choice has been written into their definition is of no significance.
Are you saying that human choices are not “written into their definition” in some measure ?
Also, keep in mind that a goal like “make more paperclips” does leave a lot of room for other choices. The agent could spend its time studying metallurgy, or buying existing paperclip factories, or experimenting with alloys, or attempting to invent nanotechnology, or some combination of these and many more activities. It’s not constrained to just a single path.
Just by sitting there reading LessWrong you’re killing babies! … Add a dash of transhumanism and you can up the stakes to an obligation to bringing about billions of billions of future humans throughout the universe living lives billions of times better than ours.
On the one hand, I do agree with you, and I can’t wait to see your proposed solution. On the other hand, I’m not sure what this has to do with the topic. I wasn’t talking about billions of future humans or anything of the sort, merely about a single (semi-hypothetical) human and his goals; whether entertainment is a terminal or instrumental goal; and whether it is a good goal to have.
Let me put it in a different way: if you could take a magic pill which would remove (or, at the very least, greatly reduce) your desire for passive entertainment, would you do it ? People with extremely low preferences for passive entertainment do exist, after all, so this scenario isn’t entirely fantastic (other than for the magic pill part, of course).
Are you saying that human choices are not “written into their definition” in some measure ?
What is written in to humans by evolution is hardly relevant. The point is that you can’t prove anything about humansby drawing a comparison with imaginary creatures that have had something potentially quite different written into them by their creator.
Are you saying that human choices are not “written into their definition” in some measure ?
I have no idea what that even means.
On the one hand, I do agree with you, and I can’t wait to see your proposed solution.
My only solution is “don’t do that then”. It’s a broken thought process, and my interest in it ends with that recognition. Am I a soul doctor? I am not. I seem to be naturally resistant to that failure, but I don’t know how to fix anyone who isn’t.
Let me put it in a different way: if you could take a magic pill which would remove (or, at the very least, greatly reduce) your desire for passive entertainment, would you do it ?
What desire for passive entertainment? For that matter, what is this “passive entertainment”? I am not getting a clear idea of what we are talking about. At any rate, I can’t imagine “entertainment” in the ordinary meaning of that word being a terminal goal.
FWIW, I do not watch television, and have never attended spectator sports.
People with extremely low preferences for passive entertainment do exist, after all
Are you saying that human choices are not “written into their definition” in some measure ?
I have no idea what that even means.
To rephrase: do you believe that all choices made by humans are completely under the humans’ conscious control ? If not, what proportion of our choices is under our control, and what proportion is written into our genes and is thus difficult, if not impossible, to change (given our present level of technology) ?
You objected to my using Clippy as an analogy to human behaviour, on the grounds that Clippy’s choices are “written into its definition”. My point is that a). Clippy is free to make whatever choices it wants, as long as it believes (correctly or erroneously) such choices would lead to more paperclips, and b). we humans operate in a similar way, only we care about things other than paperclips, and therefore c). Clippy is a valid analogy.
My only solution is “don’t do that then”.
Don’t do what ? Do you have a moral theory which works better than utilitarianism/consequentialism ?
What desire for passive entertainment? For that matter, what is this “passive entertainment”?
You don’t watch TV or attend sports, but do you read any fiction books ? Listen to music ? Look at paintings or sculptures (on your own initiative, that is, and not as part of a job) ? Enjoy listening to some small subclass of jokes ? Watch any movies ? Play video games ? Stare at a fire at night ? I’m just trying to pinpoint your general level of interest in entertainment.
At any rate, I can’t imagine “entertainment” in the ordinary meaning of that word being a terminal goal.
Just because you personally can’t imagine something, doesn’t mean it’s not true. For example, art and music—both of which are forms of passive entertainment—has been a part of human history ever since the caveman days, and continue to flourish today. There may be something hardcoded in our genes (maybe not yours personally, but on average) that makes us enjoy art and music. On the other hand, there are lots of things hardcoded in our genes that we’d be better off without...
To rephrase: do you believe that all choices made by humans are completely under the humans’ conscious control ? If not, what proportion of our choices is under our control, and what proportion is written into our genes and is thus difficult, if not impossible, to change (given our present level of technology) ?
The whole language is wrong here.
What does it mean to talk about a choice being “completely under the humans’ conscious control”? Obviously, the causal connections wind through and through all manner of things that are outside consciousness as well as inside. When could you ever say that a decision is “completely under conscious control”?
Then you talk as if a decision not “completely under conscious control” must be “written into the genes”. Where does that come from?
do you read any fiction books?
Why do you specify fiction? Is fiction “passive entertainment” but non-fiction something else?
There may be something hardcoded in our genes (maybe not yours personally, but on average) that makes us enjoy art and music.
What is this “us” that is separate from and acted upon by our genes? Mentalistic dualism?
My only solution is “don’t do that then”.
Don’t do what ? Do you have a moral theory which works better than utilitarianism/consequentialism ?
Don’t crash and burn. I have no moral theory and am not impressed by anything on offer from the philosophers.
To sum up, there’s a large and complex set of assumptions behind everything you’re saying here that I don’t think I share, but I can only guess at from glimpsing the shadowy outlines. I doubt further discussion will get anywhere useful.
Are you saying that human choices are not “written into their definition” in some measure ?
I think Bugmaster is equating being “written in” in the sense of a stipulation in a thought experiment with being “written in” in the sense of being the outcome of an evolutionary process.
That’s hardly objective. The challenge is to formalize that test.
Btw: the problem you’re having is not due to any decision theory but due to the goal system. You want there to be entertainment and fun and the like. However, the postulated agent had a primary goal that did not include entertainment and fun. This seems alien to us, but for the mindset of such an agent “eschew entertainment and fun” is the correct and sane behavior.
Exactly, though see my comment on a sibling thread.
Out of curiosity though, what is the “Scientology test” ? Is that some commonly-accepted term from the Less Wrong jargon ? Presumably it doesn’t involve poorly calibrated galvanic skin response meters… :-/
For better or for worse, passive entertainment such as movies, books, TV shows, music, etc., is a large part of our popular culture.
Music is only passive entertainment if you just listen at it, not if you sing it, play it, or dance at it.
Strictly speaking this is true, but people usually discuss the things they watch (or read, or listen to, etc.), with their friends or, with the advent of the Internet, even with random strangers. The shared narratives thus facilitate the “emotional intimacy” you speak about. Furthermore, some specific works of passive entertainment, as well as generalized common tropes, make up a huge chunk of the cultural context without which it would be difficult to communicate with anyone in our culture on an emotional level (as opposed to, say, presenting mathematical proofs or engineering schematics to each other).
I agree that people spend lots of time talking about these kind of things, and that the more shared topics of conversation you have with someone the easier it is to socialize with them, but I disagree that there are few non-technical things one can talk about other than what you get from passive entertainment. I seldom watch TV/films/sports, but I have plenty of non-technical things I can talk about with people—parties we’ve been to, people we know, places we’ve visited, our tastes in food and drinks, unusual stuff that happened to us, what we’ve been doing lately, our plans for the near future, ranting about politics, conspiracy theories, the freakin’ weather, whatever—and I’d consider talking about some of these topic to build more ‘emotional intimacy’ than talking about some Hollywood movie or the Champions League or similar. (Also, I take exception to the apparent implication of the parenthetical at the end of the paragraph—it is possible to entertain people by talking about STEM topics, if you’re sufficiently Feynman-esque about that.)
For example, if you take a close look at various posts on this very site, you will find references to the genres of science fiction and fantasy, as well as media such as movies or anime, which the posters simply take for granted (sometimes too much so, IMO; f.ex., not everyone knows what “tsuyoku naritai” means right off the bat). A person who did not share this common social context would find it difficult to communicate with anyone here.
I have read very little of that kind of fiction, and still I haven’t felt excluded by that in the slightest (well, except that one time when the latest HPMOR thread clogged up the top Discussion comments of the week when I hadn’t read HPMOR yet, and the occasional Discussion threads about MLP—but that’s a small minority of the time).
The problem I see with television is that the average person spends 4 hours a day watching it. (...) Spending four hours a day in fantasy mode is not possible for me (I’m too motivated to DO something) and I don’t seem to need anywhere near that much daydreaming.
What’s wrong with live and let live (for their notion of ‘living’). You can value “DO”ing something (apparently not counting daydreaming) over other activities for yourself, that’s your prerogative, but why do you get to say who is and isn’t “living”?
I imagine that if asked whether they would have preferred to watch x number of shows, or spent all of that free time on getting out there and living, most people would probably choose the latter—and that’s sad.
It’s not that I want to tell them whether they’re “really living”, it’s that I think they don’t think spending so much of their free time on TV is “really living”.
Now, if you want to disagree with me on whether they think they are “really living”, that might be really interesting. I acknowledge that mind projection fallacy might be causing me to think they want what I want.
I suspect that many people who enjoy television, if asked, would claim that socializing with freinds or other things are somehow better or more pure, but only because TV is a low status medium, and so saying that watching TV isn’t “real living” has become somewhat of a cached thought within our culture; I’d suspect you’d have a much harder time finding people who will claim that spending time enjoying art or reading classic literature or other higher status fictional media doesn’t count as “real living”.
It’s not that I want to tell them whether they’re “really living”, it’s that I think they don’t think spending so much of their free time on TV is “really living”.
I think I might actually expect people to endorse different activities in this context at different levels of abstraction.
That is, if you asked J. Random TV Consumer to rank (say) TV and socialization, or study, or some other venue for self-improvement, I wouldn’t be too surprised if they consistently picked the latter. But if you broke down these categories into specific tasks, I’d expect individual shows to rate more highly—in some cases much more highly—than implied by the category rating.
I’m not sure what this implies about true preferences.
Well, for example, I wouldn’t be too surprised to find the same person saying both “I’d rather socialize than watch TV” and “I’d rather watch Game of Thrones [or other popular TV show] than call my friend for dinner tonight”.
Of course that’s just one specialization, and the plausibility of a particular scenario depends on personality and relative appeal.
Offtopic: Does anyone know where you can find that speech in regular HTML format? I defenitely read it in that format, but I can’t find it again.
Ontopic: While I appreciate (and agree with) the point he’s making, overall, he uses a lot of exaggeration and hyperbole, at best. It seems pretty clear that specific teachers can make a difference to individuals, even if they can’t enact structural change.
I could’ve sworn that I saw his entire book in HTML format somewhere, a long time ago, but now I can’t find it. Perhaps I only imagined it.
From what I recall, in the later chapters he claims that our current educational system was deliberately designed in meticulous detail by a shadowy conspiracy of statists bent on world (or, at the very least, national) domination. Again, my recollection could be widely off the mark, but I do seem to remember staring at my screen and thinking, “Really, Gatto ? Really ?”
I read Dumbing Us Down, which might not be the book you’re thinking of—if memory serves, he’s written a few—but I don’t remember him ever quite going with the conspiracy theory angle.
He skirts the edges of it pretty closely, granted. In the context of history of education, his thesis is basically that the American educational system is an offshoot of the Prussian system and that that system was picked because it prioritizes obedience to authority. Even if we take that all at face value, though, it doesn’t require a conspiracy—just a bunch of 19th- and early 20th-century social reformers with a fondness for one of the more authoritarian regimes of the day, openly doing their jobs.
Now, while it’s pretty well documented that Horace Mann and some of his intellectual heirs had the Prussian system in mind, I’ve never seen historical documentation giving exactly those reasons for choosing it. And in any case the systems diverged in the mid-1800s and we’d need to account for subsequent changes before stringing up the present-day American school system on those charges. But at its core it’s a pretty plausible hypothesis—many of the features that after two World Wars make the Prussians look kind of questionable to us were, at the time, being held up as models of national organization, and a lot of that did have to do with regimentation of various kinds.
For information regarding religion, I recommend the blog of a former Christian (Luke Muehlhauser) as an addition to your reading list. That is here: Common Sense Atheism. I recommend this in particular because he completed the process you’ve started—the process of reviewing Christian beliefs—so Luke’s writing may be able to save you significant time and provide you with information you may not encounter in other sources.
Speaking as a rationalist and a Christian, I’ve always found that a bit too propaganda-ish for my tastes. And I wouldn’t call Luke’s journey “completed”, exactly. Still, it can be valuable to see what others have thought in similar positions to you, in a shoulders-of-giants sort of way.
I think it would be better to focus on improving your rationality, rather than seeking out tracts that disagree with you. There’s nothing wrong with reading such tracts, as long as you’re rational enough not to internalize mistakes from it (on either side) but I wouldn’t make it your main goal.
I’d interpret it as “evidence which bears on the question X” as opposed to “Evidence which supports answer Y to question X.”
For instance, if you wanted to know whether anthropogenic climate change was occurring, you would want to search for “evidence about anthropogenic climate change” rather than “evidence for anthropogenic climate change.”
I’m Robby Oliphant. I started a few months ago reading HP:MoR, which led me to the Sequences, which led me here about two weeks ago. So far I have read comments and discussions solely as a spectator. But finally, after developing my understanding and beginning on the path set forth by the sequences, I remain silent no more.
I am fresh out of high school, excited about life and plan to become a teacher, eventually. My short-term plans involve going out and doing missionary work for my church for the next two years. When I came head on against the problem of being a rationalist and a missionary for a theology, I took a step back and had a crisis of belief, not the first time, but this time I followed the prescribed method and came to a modified conclusion, though I still find it rational and advantageous to serve my 2 year mission.
I find some of this difficult, some of this intuitive and some of this neither difficult or intuitive, which is extremely frustrating, how something can appears simple but defy my efforts to intuitively work it. I will continue to work at it because rationality seems to be praiseworthy and useful. I hope to find the best evidence about theology here. I don’t mean evidence for or against, just the evidence about the subject.
Hahaha! I find it heartening that that is your response to me wanting to be a teacher. I am quite aware that the system is broken. My personal way of explaining it: The school system works for what it was made to work for; avoiding responsibility for a failed product.
The parents are not responsible; the school taught their kids.
The students are not socially responsible; everything was compulsory, they had no choice to make.
Teachers are not to blame; they teach what they are told to teach and have the autonomy of a pre-AI computer intelligence.
The administrators are not to blame; They are not the students’ parents or teachers.
The faceless, nameless committees that set the curriculum are not responsible, they formed then separated after setting forth the unavoidably terrible standards for all students of an arbitrary age everywhere.
So the product fails but everyone did they’re best. No nails stick out, no one gets hammered.
I have high dreams of being the educator that takes down public education. If a teacher comes up with a new way of teaching or an important thing to teach, he can go to class the next day and test it. I have a hope of professional teachers; either trusted with the autonomy of being professionals, or actual professionals in their subject, teaching only those that want to learn.
Also the literature on Mormons fromDesrtopa, Ford and Nisan I am thankful for. I enjoyed the Mormonism organizational post because I have also noticed how well the church runs. It is one reason I stay a Latter-Day Saint in this time of Atheism mainstreaming. The church is winning, it is well organized, service and family-oriented, and supports me as I study rationality and education. I can give examples, but I will leave my deeper insights for my future posts; I feel I am well introduced for now.
I would be quite interested to see a more detailed post regarding that last part. Of course, I am just some random guy on the Internet, but still :-)
I’d like to know how they [=consequentialist deists stuck in religions with financial obligations] justify tithing so much of their income to an ineffective charity.
The Education system in the US, or the education system everywhere?
Can’t speak for Everywhere, but it’s certainly not just the US. Ireland has much the same problem, although I think it’s not quite as bad here.
In Italy it’s also very bad, but the public opinion does have a culprit in mind (namely, politics).
I love Mormonism.
Possibly because I love Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Mormonism seems to be at least partially inspired by it.
That seems rather unlikely, inasmuch as the first English translation was in 1896 - by which point Smith had preached, died, the Mormons evacuated to Utah, begun proselytizing overseas and baptism of the dead, set up a successful state, disavowed polygamy, etc.
There’s also the fact that it wasn’t even written until after Joseph Smith had died, translation not even being an issue. (In point of fact, Nietzsche was born the same year that Joseph Smith died.)
Nonetheless! I am convinced a time traveler gave Joseph Smith the book.
I don’t think you’ll find much discussion of theology here, since in these parts religion is generally treated as an open and shut case. The archives of Luke Muelhauser’s blog, Common Sense Atheism, are probably a much more abundant resource for rational analysis of theology; it documents his (fairly extensive) research into theological matters stemming from his own crisis of faith, starting before he became an atheist.
Obviously, the name of the site is rather a giveaway as to the ultimate conclusion that he drew (I would have named it differently in his place,) and the foregone conclusion might be a bit mindkilling, but I think the contents will probably be a fair approximation of the position of most of the community here on religious theological matters, made more explicit than they generally are on Less Wrong.
I would love to hear more details, both about the process and about the conclusion, if you are brave/foolish enough to share.
I appreciate your altruistic spirit and your goal of gathering objective evidence regarding your religion. I’m glad to see you beginning on the path of improving your rationality! If you haven’t encountered the term “effective altruist” yet or have not yet investigated the effective altruist organizations, I very much encourage you to investigate them! As a fellow altruistic rationalist, I can say that they’ve been inspiring to me and hope they’re inspiring to you as well.
I feel it necessary to inform you of something important yet unfortunate about your goal of becoming a teacher. I’m not happy to have to tell you this, but I am quite glad that somebody told you about it at the beginning of your adulthood:
The school system is broken in a serious way. The problem is with the fundamental system, so it’s not something teachers can compensate for.
If you wish to investigate alternatives to becoming a standard school teacher, I would highly recommend considering becoming involved with effective altruists. An organization like THINK or 80,000 hours may be very helpful to you in determining what sorts of effective and altruistic things you might do with your skills. THINK does training for effective altruists and helps them figure out what to do with themselves. 80,000 hours helps people figure out how to make the most altruistic contribution with careers they already have.
For information regarding religion, I recommend the blog of a former Christian (Luke Muehlhauser) as an addition to your reading list. That is here: Common Sense Atheism. I recommend this in particular because he completed the process you’ve started—the process of reviewing Christian beliefs—so Luke’s writing may be able to save you significant time and provide you with information you may not encounter in other sources. Also, due to the fact that he began as a Christian, I’m guessing that his reasoning was not unnecessarily harsh toward Christian ideas like they might have been otherwise. The sampling of his blog that I’ve read is of good quality. He’s a rationalist, so that might be part of why.
See also Lockhart’s Lament (PDF link) . That said, in my own case, competent teachers (such as Lockhart appears to be) did indeed make a difference. Though my IQ is much closer to the population than the IQ of an average LWer’s, so maybe my anecdotal evidence does not apply (not that it ever does, what with being anecdotal and all).
I can’t fathom that you’d say that if you had read Gatto’s speech.
I am very interested in the reaction you have to the speech (It’s called The Seven Lesson School Teacher, and it’s in the beginning of chapter 1).
Would you indulge me?
Also:
Failing to teach reasoning skills in school is a crime against humanity.
I have, in fact, read the Speech before, quite some time ago. My point is that outstanding teachers can make a big positive difference in the students’ lives (at least, that was the case for me), largely by deliberately avoiding some or all of the anti-patterns that Gatto lists in his Speech. We were also taught the basics of critical thinking in an English class (of all places), though this could’ve been a fluke (or, once again, a teacher’s personal initiative).
I should also point out that these anti-patterns are not ubiquitous. I was lucky enough to attend a school in another country for a few of my teenage years (a long, long time ago). During a typical week, we’d learn how to solve equations in Math class, apply these skills to exercises in Statistics, stage an experiment and record the results in Physics, then program in the statistics formulae and run them on our experimental results in Informatics (a.k.a. Computer Science). Ideas tend to make more sense when connections between them are revealed.
I haven’t seen anything like this in US-ian education, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some school somewhere in the US is employing such an approach.
Edited to add:
I share your frustration, but there’s no need to overdramatize.
I should also point out that, while Gatto makes some good points, his overall thesis is hopelessly lost in all the hyperbole, melodrama, and outright conspiracy theorizing. He does his own ideas a disservice by presenting them the way he does. For example, I highly doubt that mental illnesses, television broadcasts, and restaurants would all magically disappear (as Gatto claims on pg. 8) if only we could teach our children some critical thinking skills.
Connection between education and sanity
Check out Ed DeBono’s CORT thinking system. His research (I haven’t thoroughly reviewed it, just reciting from memory) shows that by increasing people’s lateral thinking / creativity, it decreases things like their suicide rate. If you have been taught to see more options, you’re less likely to choose to behave desperately and destructively. If you’re able to reason things out, you’re less likely to feel stuck and need help. If you’re able to analyze, you’re less likely to believe something batty. Would mental illness completely disappear? I don’t think so. Sometimes conditions are mostly due to genes or health issues. But there are connections, definitely, between one’s ability to think and one’s sanity.
If you don’t agree with this, then do you also criticize Eliezer’s method of raising the sanity waterline by encouraging people to refine their rationality?
Connection between education and indulging in passive entertainment
As for television, I think he’s got a point. When I was 17, I realized that I was spending most of my free time watching someone else’s life. I wasn’t spending my time making my own life. If the school system makes you dependent like he says (and I believe it does) then you’ll be a heck of a lot less likely to take initiative and do something. If your self-confidence depends on other expert’s approval, it becomes hard to take a risk and go do your own project. If your creativity and analytical abilities are reduced, so too will be your ability to imagine projects for yourself to do and guide yourself while doing them. If your love for learning and working is destroyed, why would you want to do self-directed projects in the first place? And if you aren’t doing your own projects your own way, that sucks a lot of the life and pleasure out of them. Fortunately, for me, a significant amount of my creativity, analytical abilities, and a significant amount of my passion for learning and working survived school. That gave me the perspective I needed to make the choice between living an idle life of passive entertainment, and making my own life. Making my own life is more engaging than passive entertainment because it’s tailored to my interests exactly, more fulfilling than accomplishing nothing could ever be, more exciting than fantasy can be because it is real, and more beneficial and rewarding in both emotional and practical ways than entertainment can be due to the fact that learning and working opens up new social and career opportunities.
If the choice you are making is between “watch TV” and “not watch TV” you’re probably going to watch it.
But if you have a busy mind full of ideas and thoughts and passions, that’s not the choice you’re perceiving. You’ve got the choice between “watch character’s lives” and “make my own life awesome and watch that”. If you felt strongly that you could make your own life awesome, is there anything that could convince you to watch TV instead?
Gatto doesn’t do a good job of giving you perspective so you can understand his point of view here. He didn’t explain how incredible it can feel to have a mind that is on, how engaging it can be to learn something you’re interested in, how satisfying it is to do your own d project your own d way and see it actually work! He doesn’t do a good job of helping you imagine how much more motivation you would experience if your creativity and analytical abilities were jacked up way beyond what they are. If your life was packed full of thoughts and ideas and self-confidence, could you spend half your free time in front of a show? If you had the kind of motivation it causes to feel like you’re in the process of building an amazing life, would you be able to still your mind and focus on sitcoms?
I wouldn’t. I can’t. It is as if I am possessed by this supernova sized drive to DO THINGS.
Restaurants and education
I honestly don’t know anything about whether these are connected. My best guess is that Gatto loves to cook, but had found not being taught how to cook to be a rather large obstacle in the way of enjoying it.
I mostly agree with the things you say, but these are not the things that Gatto says. Your position is a great deal milder than his.
In a single sentence, he claims that if only we could set up our schools the way he wants them to be set up, then social services would utterly disappear, the number of “psychic invalids” would drop to zero, “commercial entertainment of all sorts” would “vanish”, and restaurants would be “drastically down-sized”.
This is going beyound hyperbole; this borders on drastic ignorance.
For example, not all mental illnesses are caused by a lack of gumption. Many, such as clinical depression and schizophrenia, are genetic in nature, and will strike their victims regardless of how awesomely rational they are. Others, such as PTSD, are caused by psychological trauma and would fell even the mighty Gatto, should he be unfortunate enough to experience it.
While it’s true that most of the “commercial entertainment of all sorts” is junk, some of it is art; we know this because a lot of it has survived since ancient times, despite the proclamations of people who thought just like Gatto (only referring to oil paintings, phonograph records, and plain old-fashioned writing instead of electronic media). As an English teacher, it seems like Gatto should know this.
And what’s his beef with restaurants, anyway ? That’s just… weird.
Do you feel the same way about fiction books, out of curiosity ?
If Eliezer claimed that raising the sanity waterline is the one magic bullet that would usher us into a new Golden Age, as we reclaim the faded glory of our ancestors, then yes, I would disagree with him too. But, AFAIK, he doesn’t claim this—unlike Gatto.
I’m afraid this account has swung to the opposite extreme—to the extent that it is quite possibly further from the truth and more misleading than Gatto’s obvious hyperbole.
Schizophrenia is one of the most genetically determined of the well known mental health problems but even it is heavily dependent on life experiences. In particular, long term exposure to stressful environments or social adversity dramatically increases the risk that someone at risk for developing the condition will in fact do so.
As for clinical depression, the implication that due to being ‘genetic in nature’ means that the environment in which an individual spends decades of growth and development in is somehow not important is utterly absurd. Genetics is again relevant in determining how vulnerable the individual is but the social environment is again critical for determining whether problems will arise.
That’s a good point, I did not mean to imply that these mental illnesses are completely unaffected by environmental factors. In addition, in case of some illnesses such as depression, there are in fact many different causes that can lead to similar symptoms, so the true picture is a lot more complex (and is still not entirely well understood).
However, this is very different from saying something like “schizophrenia is completely environmental”, or even “if only people had some basic critical thinking skills, they’d never become depressed”, which is how I interpreted Gatto’s claims.
For example even with a relatively low heritability rate, millions of people would still contract schizophrenia every year worldwide—especially since many of the adverse life experiences that can trigger it are unavoidable. No amount of critical thinking will reduce the number of victims to zero. And that’s just one specific disease among many, and we’re not even getting into more severe cases such as Down’s Syndrome. If Gatto thinks otherwise, then he’s being hopelessly naive.
I agree that saying “all these problems will disappear” is not the same as saying that “these problems will reduce”. I felt the need to explain why the problems would reduce because I wasn’t sure you saw the connections.
I have to wonder if having a really well-developed intellect might offer some amount of protection against this. Whether Gatto’s intellect is sufficiently well-developed for this is another topic.
I don’t know. I love not cooking.
Actually, yes. When I am fully motivated, I can spend all my evenings doing altruistic work for years, reading absolutely no fiction and watching absolutely no TV shows. That level of motivation is where I’m happiest, so I prefer to live that way.
I do occasionally watch movies during those periods, perhaps once a month, because rest is important (and because movies take less time to watch than a book takes to read, but are higher quality than television, assuming you choose them well).
I see the connections, but I do not believe that some of the problems Gatto wants to fix—f.ex. the existence of television and restaurants—are even problems at all. Sure, TV has a lot of terrible content, and some restaurants have terrible food, but that’s not the same thing as saying that the very concept of these services is hopelessly broken.
It probably would, but not to any great extent. I’m not a psychiatrist or a neurobiologist though, so I could be widely off the mark. In general, however, I think that Gatto is falling prey to the Dunning–Kruger effect when he talks about mental illness, economics, and many other things for that matter.
For example, the biggest tool in his school-fixing toolbox is the free market; he believes that if only schools could compete against each other with little to no government regulation, their quality would soar. In practice, such scenarios tend to work out… poorly.
That’s fair, and your preferences are consistent. However, many other people see a great deal of value in fiction; some even choose to use it as a vehicle for transmitting their ideas (f.ex. HPMOR). I do admit that, in terms of raw productivity, I cannot justify spending one’s time on reading fiction; if a person wanted to live a maximally efficient life, he would probably avoid any kind of entertainment altogether, fiction literature included. That said, many people find the act of reading fiction literature immensely useful (scientists and engineers included), and the same is true for other forms of entertainment such as music. I am fairly convinced that any person who says “entertainment is a waste of time” is committing a fallacy of false generalization.
The existence of television technology isn’t, in my opinion, a problem. Nor is the fact that some shows are low quality. Even if all of them were low quality, I wouldn’t necessarily see that as a problem—it would still be a way of relaxing. The problem I see with television is that the average person spends 4 hours a day watching it. (Can’t remember where I got that study, sorry.) My problem with that is not that they aren’t exercising (they’d still have an hour a day which is plenty of exercise, if they want it) or that they aren’t being productive (you can only be so productive before you run out of mental stamina anyway, and the 40 hour work week was designed to use the entirety of the average person’s stamina) but that they aren’t living.
It could be argued that people need to spend hours every day imagining a fantasy. I was told by an elderly person once that before television, people would sit on a hill and daydream. I’ve also read that imagining doing a task correctly is more effective at making you better at it than practice. If that’s true, daydreaming might be a necessity for maximum effectiveness and television might provide some kind of similar benefit. So it’s possible that putting one’s brain into fantasy mode for a few hours of day really is that beneficial.
Spending four hours a day in fantasy mode is not possible for me (I’m too motivated to DO something) and I don’t seem to need anywhere near that much daydreaming. I would find it very hard to deal with if I had spent that much of my free time in fantasy. I imagine that if asked whether they would have preferred to watch x number of shows, or spent all of that free time on getting out there and living, most people would probably choose the latter—and that’s sad.
I think that people would also have to have read the seven lessons speech for the problems he sees to be solved. Maybe eventually things would evolve to the point where schools would not behave this way anymore without them reading it, because it’s probably not the most effective way of teaching, but I don’t see that change happening quickly without people pressuring schools to make those specific changes.
However, I’m surprised that you say “In practice, such scenarios tend to work out… poorly.” Do you mean that the free market doesn’t do much to improve quality, or do you just mean that when people want specific changes and expect the free market to implement them, the free market doesn’t tend to implement those specific changes?
I’m also very interested in where you got the information to support the idea, either way.
After reading Ayn Rand’s the Fountainhead, my feeling was that even though much of the writing was brilliant and enjoyable, I could have gotten the key ideas much faster if she had only published a few lines from one of the last chapters. I’m having the same reaction to the sequences and HPMOR. I enjoy them and recognize the brilliance in the writing abilities, but I find myself doing things like reading lists of biases over and over in order to improve my familiarity and eventually memorize them. I still want to finish the sequences because they’re so important to this culture, but what I have prioritized appears to be getting the most important information in as quickly as possible. So, although entertainment is a way of transmitting ideas, I question how efficient it is, and whether it provides enough other learning benefits to outweigh the cost of wrapping all those ideas in so much text. I could walk all the way to Florida, but flying would be faster. People realize this so if they want to take vacations, they fly. Why, then, do they use entertainment to learn instead of seeking out the most efficient method?
It makes sense from the writer’s point of view. I have said before that I was very glad that Eliezer decided to popularize rationality as much as possible, as I had been thinking that somebody needed to do that for a very long time. His writing is interesting and his style is brilliant and his method has worked to attract almost twelve million hits to his site. I think that’s great. But the fact that people probably would not have flocked to the site if he had posted an efficient dissemination of cognitive biases and whatnot is curious. Maybe the way I learn is different.
I think it depends on whether you use “waste of time” to mean “absolutely no benefit whatsoever” or “nowhere near the most efficient way of getting the benefit”.
The statement “entertainment is an inefficient way to get ideas compared with other methods” seems true to me.
I wonder if the author would agree that that is the most important information. I suspect he would not. (So naturally if you learning goals are different to the teaching goals of the author then their material will not be optimized for your intentions.)
It seems to me that the problem is what intention one has when one begins learning and whether one can deal with accepting the fact that they’re biased, not how they go about learning them. Though, maybe Eliezer has put various protections in that get people questioning their intention and sells them on learning with the right intention. I would agree that if it did not occur to a person to use their knowledge of biases to look for their own mistakes, learning them could be really bad, but I do not think that learning a list of biases will all by itself turn me into an argument-wielding brain-dead zombie.
If it makes you feel any better to know this, I’ve been seeking a checklist of errors against which I can test my ideas.
Whoo! my post got the most recursion. Do I get a reward? If I get a few more layers it will be more siding than post.
That is one big reason behind my statement, yes. Currently, it looks like many, if not most, people—in the Southern states, at least—want their schools to engage in cultural indoctrination as opposed to any kind of rationality training. The voucher programs, which were designed specifically to introduce some free market into the education system, are being used to teach things like Creationism and historical revisionism. Which is not to say that public education in states like Louisiana and Texas is any better, seeing as they are implementing the same kinds of curricula by popular vote.
In fact, most private schools are religious in nature. According to this advocacy site (hardly an unbiased source, I know), around 50% are Catholic. On the plus side, student performance tends to be somewhat better (though not drastically so) in private schools, according to CAPE as well as other sources. However, private schools are also quite a bit more expensive than public schools, with tuition levels somewhere around $10K (and often higher). This means that the students who attend them have much wealthier parents, and this fact alone can account for their higher performance.
This leads me to my second point: I believe that Gatto is mistaken when he yearns for earlier, simpler times, where education was unencumbered by any regulation whatsoever, and students were free to learn (or to avoid learning) whatever they wanted. We do not live in such times anymore. Instead, we live in a world that is saturated by technology. Literacy, along with basic numeracy, are no longer marks of high status, but an absolute requirement for daily life. Most well-paying jobs, creative pursuits, as well as even basic social interactions all rely on some form of information technology. Basic education is not a luxury, but an essential service.
Are public schools adequately providing this essential service ? No. However, we simply cannot afford to live in a world where access to it is gated by wealth—which is what would happen if schools were completely privatized. As far as I know, most if not all efforts to privatize essential services have added in disaster; this includes police, fire departments, and even prisons (in California, at least). Basic health care is a particularly glaring example.
So, in summary, existing private schools are emphasizing for indoctrination rather than critical thinking; and even if they were not, we cannot afford to restrict access to basic education based on personal wealth.
What does “living” mean, exactly ? I understand that you find your personal creative projects highly enjoyable, and that’s great. But you aren’t merely saying, “I enjoy X”, you’re saying, “enjoying Y instead of X is objectively wrong” (if I understand you correctly).
I address this point below, but I’d like to also point out that some people people’s goals are different from yours. They consume entertainment because it is enjoyable, or because it facilitates social contact (which they in turn find enjoyable), not because they believe it will make them more efficient (though see below).
Many people—yourself not among them, admittedly—find that they are able to internalize new ideas much more thoroughly if these ideas are tied into a narrative. Similarly, other people find it easier to communicate their ideas in the form of narratives; this is why Eliezer writes things like Three Worlds Collide and HPMOR instead of simply writing out the equations. This is also why he employs several tropes from fiction even in his non-fiction writing.
I’m not saying that this is the “right” way to learn, or anything; I am merely describing the situation that, as I believe, exists.
I am just not convinced that this statement applies to anything like a majority of “person+idea” combinations.
“Living” the way I used it means “living to the fullest” or, a little more specifically “feeling really engaged in life” or “feeling fulfilled”.
I used “living” to refer to a subjective state. There’s nothing objective about it, and IMO, there’s nothing objectively right or wrong about having a subjective state that is (even in your own opinion) not as good as the ideal.
I feel like your real challenge here is more similar to Kawoomba’s concern. Am I right?
Do you find it more enjoyable to passively watch entertainment than to do your own projects? Do you think most people do? If so, might that be because the fun was taken out of learning, or people’s creativity was reduced to the point where doing your own project is too challenging, or people’s self-confidence was made too dependent on others such that they don’t feel comfortable pursuing that fulfilling sense of having done something on their own?
I puzzle at how you classify watching something together as “social contact”. To me, being in the same room is not a social life. Watching the same entertainment is not quality time. The social contact I yearn for involves emotional intimacy—contact with the actual person inside, not just a sense of being in the same room watching the same thing. I don’t understand how that can be called social contact.
I’ve been thinking about this and I think what might be happening is that I make my own narratives.
This, I can believe about Eliezer. There are places where he could have been more incisive but is instead gets wordy to compensate. That’s an interesting point.
Okay, so to clarify, your position is that entertainment is a more efficient way to learn?
I understand that you do not feel fulfilled when watching TV, but other people might. I would agree with your reply on Kawoomba’s sub-thread:
For better or for worse, passive entertainment such as movies, books, TV shows, music, etc., is a large part of our popular culture. You say:
Strictly speaking this is true, but people usually discuss the things they watch (or read, or listen to, etc.), with their friends or, with the advent of the Internet, even with random strangers. The shared narratives thus facilitate the “emotional intimacy” you speak about. Furthermore, some specific works of passive entertainment, as well as generalized common tropes, make up a huge chunk of the cultural context without which it would be difficult to communicate with anyone in our culture on an emotional level (as opposed to, say, presenting mathematical proofs or engineering schematics to each other).
For example, if you take a close look at various posts on this very site, you will find references to the genres of science fiction and fantasy, as well as media such as movies or anime, which the posters simply take for granted (sometimes too much so, IMO; f.ex., not everyone knows what “tsuyoku naritai” means right off the bat). A person who did not share this common social context would find it difficult to communicate with anyone here.
Note, though, that once again I am describing a situation that exists, not prescribing a behavior. In terms of raw productivity per unit of time, I cannot justify any kind of entertainment at all. While it is true that entertainment has been with us since the dawn of civilization, so has cancer; just because something is old, doesn’t mean that it’s good.
No, this phrasing is too strong. I meant what I said before: many people find it easier to internalize new ideas when they are presented as part of a narrative. This doesn not mean that entertainment is a more efficient way to learn all things for all people, or that it is objectively the best technique for learning things, or anything of the sort.
Why try to justify entertainment in terms of productivity per time? Is there any reason this makes more sense than, say, justifying productivity in terms of how much entertainment it allows for?
Presumably, if your goal is to optimize the world, or to affect any part of it besides yourself in a non-trivial way, you should strive to do so as efficiently as possible. This means that spending time on any activities that do not contribute to this goal is irrational. A paperclip maximizer, for example, wouldn’t spend any time on watching soap operas or reading romance novels—unless doing so would lead to more paperclips (which is unlikely).
Of course, one could argue that consumption of passive entertainment does contribute to the average human’s goals, since humans are unable to function properly without some downtime. But I don’t know if I’d go so far as to claim that this is a feature, and not a bug, just like cancer or aging or whatever else evolution had saddled us with.
A decision theory that leads to the conclusion that we should all work like slaves for a future paradise, the slightest lapse incurring a cost equivalent to untold numbers of dead babies, and the enormity of the task meaning that we shall never experience it ourselves, is prima facie a broken decision theory. I’d even call it the sort of toxic mindwaste that RationalWiki loves to mock.
Once you’ve built that optimised world, who gets to slack off and just live in it, and how will they spend their time?
Why exactly? I mean, my intuition also tells me it’s wrong… but my intuition has a few assumptions that disagree with the proposed scenario. Let’s make sure the intuition does not react to a strawman.
For example, when in real life people “work like slaves for a future paradise”, the paradise often does not happen. Typically, the people have a wrong model of the world. (The wrong model is often provided by their leader, and their work in fact results in building their leader’s personal paradise, nothing more.) And even if their model is right, their actions are more optimized for signalling effort than for real efficiency. (Working very hard signals more virtue than thinking and coming up with a smart plan to make a lot of money and pay someone else to do more work than we could.) Even with smart and honest people, there will typically be something they ignored or could not influence, such as someone powerful coming and taking the results of their work, or a conflict starting and destroying their seeds of the paradise. Or simply their internal conflicts, or lack of willpower to finish what they started.
The lesson we should take from this is that even if we have a plan to work like a slaves for a future paradise, there is very high prior probability that we missed something important. Which means that in fact we do not work for a future paradise, we only mistakenly think so. I agree that the prior probability is so high that even the most convincing reasoning and plans are unlikely to overweight it.
However, for the sake of experiment, imagine that Omega comes and tells you that if you will work like a slave for the next 20 or 50 years, the future paradise will happen with probability almost 1. You don’t have to worry about mistakes in your plans, because either Omega verified their correctness, or is going to provide you corrections when needed and predicts that you will be able to follow those corrections successfully. Omega also predicts that it you commit to the task, you will have enough willpower, health, and other necessary resources to complete it successfully. In this scenario, is committing for the slave work a bad decision?
In other words, is your objection “in situation X the decision D is wrong”, or is it “the situation X is so unlikely that any decision D based on assumption of X will in real life be wrong”?
When Omega enters a discussion, my interest in it leaves.
To that extent that someone is unable to use established tools of thought to focus attention on the important aspects of the problem their contribution to a conversation is likely to be negative. This is particularly the case when it comes to decision theory where it correlates strongly with pointless fighting of the counterfactual and muddled thinking.
Omega has its uses and its misuses. I observe the latter on LW more often than the former. The present example is one such.
And in future, if you wish to address a comment to me, I would appreciate being addressed directly, rather than with this pseudo-impersonal pomposity.
I intended the general claim as stated. I don’t know you well enough for it to be personal. I will continue to support the use of Omega (and simplified decision theory problems in general) as a useful way to think.
For practical purposes pronouncements like this are best interpreted as indications that the speaker has nothing of value to say on the subject, not as indications that the speaker is too sophisticated for such childish considerations.
For practical purposes pronouncements like this are best interpreted as saying exactly what they say. You are, of course, free to make up whatever self-serving story you like around it.
This is evidently not a behavior you practice.
It is counterintuitive that you should slave for people you don’t know, perhaps because you can’t be sure you are serving their needs effectively. Even if that objection is removed by bringing in an omniscient oracle,there still seems to be a problem because the prospect of one generation slaving to create paradise for another isn’t fair. the simple version of utilitiarianism being addressed here only sums individual utilities, and us blind to things that can only be defined at the group level like justice and equaliy.
For the sake of experiment, imagine that air has zero viscosity. In this scenario, would a feather and a cannon ball fall in the same time?
I believe the answer is “yes”, but I had to think about that for a moment. I’m not sure how that’s relevant to the current discussion, though.
I think your real point might be closer to something like, “thought experiments are useless at best, and should thus be avoided”, but I don’t want to put words into anyone’s mouth.
My point was something like, “of course if you assume away all the things that cause slave labour to be bad then slave labour is no longer bad, but that observation doesn’t yield much of an insight about the real world”.
That makes sense, but I don’t think it’s what Viliam_Bur was talking about. His point, as far as I could tell, was that the problem with slave labor is the coercion, not the labor itself.
“Decision theory” doesn’t mean the same thing as “value system” and we shouldn’t conflate them.
Yep. A morality that leads to the conclusion that we should all work like slaves for a future paradise, the slightest lapse incurring a cost equivalent to untold numbers of dead babies, and the enormity of the task meaning that we shall never experience it ourselves, is prima facie a broken morality.
Why ? I mean, I do agree with you personally, but I don’t see why such a decision theory is objectively bad. You ask,
But the answer depends entirely on your goals. These can be as relatively modest as, “the world will be just like it is today, but everyone wears a party hat”. Or it could be as ambitious as, “the world contains as many paperclips as physically possible”. In the latter case, if you asked the paperclip maximizer “who gets to slack off ?”, it wouldn’t find the question relevant in the least. It doesn’t matter who gets to do what, all that matters are the paperclips.
You might argue that a paperclip-filled world would be a terrible place, and I agree, but that’s just because you and I don’t value paperclips as much as Clippy does. Clippy thinks your ideal world is terrible too, because it contains a bunch of useless things like “happy people in party hats”, and not nearly enough paperclips.
However, imagine if we ran two copies of Clippy in a grand paperclipping race: one that consumed entertainment by preference, and one that did not. The non-entertainment version would win every time. Similarly, if you want to make the world a better place (whatever that means for you), every minute you spend on doing other things is a minute wasted (unless they are explicitly included in your goals). This includes watching TV, eating, sleeping, and being dead. Some (if not all) of such activities are unavoidable, but as I said, I’m not sure whether it’s a bug or a feature.
This is proving the conclusion by assuming it.
The words make a perfectly logical pattern, but I find that the picture they make is absurd. The ontology has gone wrong.
Some businessman wrote a book of advice called “Never Eat Alone”, the title of which means that every meal is an opportunity to have a meal with someone to network with. That is what the saying “he who would be Pope must think of nothing else” looks like in practice. Not wearing oneself out like Superman in the SMBC cartoon, driven into self-imposed slavery by memetic immune disorder.
BTW, for what it’s worth, I do not watch TV. And now I am imagining a chapter of that book entitled “Never Sleep Alone”.
Actually, I think that the world described in that SMBC cartoon is far preferable to the standard DC comics world with Superman. I do not think that doing what Superman did there is a memetic immune disorder, but rather a (successful) attempt to make the world a better place.
You would, then, not walk away from Omelas?
I definitely wouldn’t. A single tormented child seems to me like an incredibly good tradeoff for the number of very high quality lives that Omelas supports, much better than we get with real cities.
It sucks to actually be the person whose well-being is being sacrificed for everyone else, but if you’re deciding from behind a veil of ignorance which society to be a part of, your expected well being is going to be higher in Omelas.
Back when I was eleven or so, I contemplated this, and made a precommitment that if I were ever in a situation where I’m offered a chance to improve total wellfare for everyone at the cost of personal torment, I should take it immediately without giving myself any time to contemplate what I’d be getting myself into, so in that sense I’ve effectively volunteered myself to be the tormented child.
I don’t disagree with maximally efficient altruism, just with the idea that it’s sensible to judge entertainment only as an instrumental value in service of productivity.
You’re assuming here that the “veil of ignorance” gives you exactly equal chance of being each citizen of Omelas, so that a decision under the veil reduces to average utilitarianism.
However, in Rawls’s formulation, you’re not supposed to assume that; the veil means you’re also entirely ignorant about the mechanism used to incarnate you as one of the citizens, and so must consider all probability distributions over the citizens when choosing your society. In particular, you must assign some weight to a distribution picked by a devil (or mischievous Omega) who will find the person with the very lowest utility in your choice of society and incarnate you as that person. So you wouldn’t choose Omelas.
This seems to be why Rawls preferred maximin decision theory under the veil of ignorance rather than expected utility decision theory.
In that case, don’t use a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, it’s not the best mechanism for addressing the decision. A veil where you have an equal chance of your own child being the victim to anyone else’s (assuming you’re already too old to be the victim) is more the sort of situation anyone actually deciding whether or not to live in Omelas would face.
Of course, I would pick Omelas even under the Rawlsian veil, since as I’ve said I’m willing to be the one who takes the hit.
Ah, so you are considering the question “If Omelas already exists, should I choose to live there or walk away?” rather than the Rawlsian question “Should we create a society like Omelas in the first place?” The “veil of ignorance” meme nearly always refers to the Rawlsian concept, so I misunderstood you there.
Incidentally, I reread the story and there seems to be no description of how the child was selected in the first place or how he/she is replaced. So it’s not clear that your own child does have the same chance of being the victim as anyone else’s.
Well, as I mentioned in another comment some time ago (not in this thread,) I support both not walking away from Omelas, and also creating Omelases unless an even more utility efficient method of creating happy and functional societies is forthcoming.
Our society rests on a lot more suffering than Omelas, not just in an incidental way (such as people within our cities who don’t have housing or medical care,) but directly, through channels such as economic slavery where companies rely on workers, mainly abroad, who they keep locked in debt, who could not leave to seek employment elsewhere even if they wanted to and other opportunities were forthcoming. I can respect a moral code that would lead people to walk out on Omelas as a form of protest that would also lead people to walk out on modern society to live on a self sufficient seasteading colony, but I reject the notion that Omelas is worse than, or as bad as, our own society, in a morally relevant way.
I cannot fathom why a comment like that would be upvoted by anyone but an unfeeling robot. This is not even the dust-specks-vs-torture case, given that the Omelas is not a very large city.
Imagine that it is not you, but your child you must sacrifice. Would you shrug and say “sorry, my precious girl, you must suffer until you die so that your mommy/daddy can live a happy life”? I know what I would do.
I hope I would have the strength to say “sorry, my precious girl, you must suffer until you die so that everyone in the city can live a happy life.” Doing it just for myself and my own social circle wouldn’t be a good tradeoff, but those aren’t the terms of the scenario.
Considering how many of our basic commodities rely on sweatshop or otherwise extremely miserable labor, we’re already living off the backs of quite a lot of tormented children.
And there I thought that Babyeaters lived only in the Eliezer’s sci-fi story...
The Babyeaters’ babies outnumber the adults; their situation is analogous, not to the city of Omelas, but to a utopian city built on top of another, even larger, dystopian city, on which it relies for its existence.
I would rather live in a society where people loved and cherished their children, but also valued their society, and were willing to shut up and multiply and take the hit themselves, or to their own loved ones, for the sake of a common good that really is that much greater, and I want to be the sort of person I’d want others in that society to be.
I’ve never had children, but I have been in love, in a reciprocated relationship of the sort where it feels like it’s actually as big a deal as all the love songs have ever made it out to be, and I think that sacrificing someone I loved for the sake of a city like Omelas is something I’d be willing to do in practice, not just in theory (and she never would have expected me to do differently, nor would I of her.) It’s definitely not the case that really loving someone, with true depth of feeling, precludes acknowledgment that there are some things worth sacrificing even that bond for.
I’m guessing that neither have most of those who upvoted you and downvoted me. I literally cannot imagine a worse betrayal than the scenario we’ve been discussing. I can imagine one kind-of-happy society where something like this would be OK, though.
Sounds like you need to update your model of people who don’t have children. Also, how aggressively do you campaign against things like sweatshop labor in third-world countries, which as Desrtopa correctly points out are a substantially worse real-world analogue? Do children only matter if they’re your children?
the real problem with omelas: It totally ignores the fact that there are children suffering literally as we speak in every city on the planet. Omelas somehow managed to get it down to one child. How many other children would you sacrifice for your own?
Unlike in the fictional Omelas, there is no direct dependence or direct sacrifice. Certainly it is possible to at least temporarily alleviate suffering of others in this non-hypothetical world by sacrificing some of your fortune, but that’s the difference between active and passive approach, there is a large gap there.
Related. Nornagest put their finger on this being a conflict between the consequentially compelling (optimizing for general welfare) and the psychologically compelling (not being confronted with knowledge of an individual child suffering torture because of you). I think Nornagest’s also right that a fully specified Omelas scenario would almost certainly feel less compelling, which is one reason I’m not much impressed by Le Guin’s story.
The situation is not analogous, since sacrificing one’s child would presumably make most parents miserable for the rest of their days. In Omelas, however, the sacrifice makes people happy, instead.
And I thought that the Babyeaters only existed in Eliezer’s fiction...
As I said in previous comments, I am genuinely not sure whether entertainment is a good terminal goal to have.
By analogy, I absolutely require sleep in order to be productive at all in any capacity; but if I could swallow a magic pill that removed my need for sleep (with no other side-effects), I’d do so in a heartbeat. Sleep is an instrumental goal for me, not a terminal one. But I don’t know if entertainment is like that or not.
Thus, I’m really interested in hearing more about your thoughts on the topic.
I’m not sure that I would regard entertainment as a terminal goal, but I’m very sure I wouldn’t regard productivity as one. As an instrumental goal, it’s an intermediary between a lot of things that I care about, but optimizing for productivity seems like about as worthy a goal to me as paperclipping.
Right, agreed, but “productivity” is just a rough estimate of how quickly you’re moving towards your actual goals. If entertainment is not one of them, then either it enhances your productivity in some way, or it reduces it, or it has no effect (which is unlikely, IMO).
Productivity and fun aren’t orthogonal; for example, it is entirely possible that if your goal is “experience as much pleasure as possible”, then some amount of entertainment would directly contribute to the goal, and would thus be productive. That said, though, I can’t claim that such a goal would be a good goal to have in the first place.
How so ? Imagine that you have two identical paperclip maximizers; for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that they are not capable of radical self-modification (though the results would be similar if they were). Each agent is capable of converting raw titanium to paperclips at the same rate. Agent A spends 100% of its time on making paperclips. Agent B spends 80% of its time on paperclips, and 20% of its time on watching TV. If we gave A and B two identical blocks of titanium, which agent would finish converting all of it to paperclips first ?
FeepingCreature addressed this better than I could in this comment . I understand that you find the idea of making paperclips (or political movements, or software, or whatever) all day every day with no breaks abhorrent, and so do I. But then, some people find polyamory abhorrent as well, and then they “polyhack” themselves and grow to enjoy it. Is entertainment your terminal value, or a mental bias ? And if it is a terminal value, is it the best terminal value that you could possibly have ?
WARNING: This comment contains explicit discussion of an information hazard.
I decline to do so. What imaginary creatures would choose whose choice has been written into their definition is of no significance. (This is also a reply to the comment of FeepingCreature you referenced.) I’m more interested in the practical question of how actual human beings, which this discussion began with, can avoid the pitfall of being taken over by a utility monster they’ve created in their own heads.
This is a basilisk problem. Unlike Roko’s, which depends on exotic decision theory, this one involves nothing more than plain utilitarianism. Unlike the standard Utility Monster scenario, this one involves no imaginary entities or hypothetical situations. You just have to look at the actual world around you through the eyes of utilitarianism. It’s a very short road from the innocent-sounding “the greatest good for the greatest number” to this: There are seven billion people on this planet. How can the good you could do them possibly be outweighed by any amount of your own happiness? Just by sitting there reading LessWrong you’re killing babies! Having a beer? You’re drinking dead babies. Own a car? You’re driving on a carpet of dead babies! Murderer! Murderer! Add a dash of transhumanism and you can up the stakes to an obligation to bringing about billions of billions of future humans throughout the universe living lives billions of times better than ours.
But even Peter Singer doesn’t go that far, continuing to be an academic professor and paying his utilitarian obligations by preaching utilitarianism and donating twenty percent of his salary to charity.
This is such an obvious failure mode for utilitarianism, a philosophy at least two centuries old, that surely philosophers must have addressed it. But I don’t know what their responses are.
Christianity has the same problem, and handles it in practice by testing the vocation of those who come to it seeking to devote their whole life to the service of God, to determine whether they are truly called by God. For it is written that many are called, yet few are chosen. In non-supernatural terms, that means determining whether the applicant is psychologically fitted for the life they feel called to, and if not, deflecting their mania into some more productive route.
Consider two humans, H1 and H2, both utilitarians.
H1 looks at the world the way you describe Peter Singer here.
H2 looks at the world “through the eyes of utilitarianism” as you describe it here.
My expectation is that H1 will do more good in their lifetime than H2.
What’s your expectation?
And then you have people like H0, who notices H2 is crazy, decides that that means that they shouldn’t even try to be altruistic, and accuses H1 of hypocrisy because she’s not like H2. (Exhibit A)
That is my expectation also. However, persuading H2 of that (“but dead babies!”) is likely to be a work of counselling or spiritual guidance rather than reason.
Well… so, if we both expect H1 to do more good than H2, it seems that if we were to look at them through the eyes of utilitarianism, we would endorse being H1 over being H2.
But you seem to be saying that H2, looking through the eyes of utilitarianism, endorses being H2 over being H1.
I am therefore deeply confused by your model of what’s going on here.
Oh yes, H1 is more effective, heathier, saner, more rational, etc. than H2. H2 is experiencing existential panic and cannot relinquish his death-grip on the idea.
You confuse me further with every post.
Do you think being a utilitarian makes someone less effective, healthy, sane, rational etc.?
Or do you think H2 has these various traits independent of them being a utilitarian?
There’s a lot of different kinds of utilitarian.
WARNING: More discussion of a basilisk, with a link to a real-world example.
It’s a possible failure mode of utilitarianism. Some people succumb to it (see George Price for an actual example of a similar failure) and some don’t.
I don’t understand your confusion and this pair of questions just seems misconceived.
(shrug) OK.
I certainly agree with you that some utilitarians suffer from the existential panic and inability to relinquish their death-grips on unhealthy ideas, while others don’t.
I’m tapping out here.
One could reason that one is better placed to do good effectively when focussing on oneself, ones family, one’s community, etc, simply because one understands them better.
(Warning: replying to discussion of a potential information hazard.)
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Infohazard reference with no warning sign. Edit and reply to this so I can restore.
Done. Sorry this took so long, I’ve been taken mostly offline by a biohazard for the last week.
Are you saying that human choices are not “written into their definition” in some measure ?
Also, keep in mind that a goal like “make more paperclips” does leave a lot of room for other choices. The agent could spend its time studying metallurgy, or buying existing paperclip factories, or experimenting with alloys, or attempting to invent nanotechnology, or some combination of these and many more activities. It’s not constrained to just a single path.
On the one hand, I do agree with you, and I can’t wait to see your proposed solution. On the other hand, I’m not sure what this has to do with the topic. I wasn’t talking about billions of future humans or anything of the sort, merely about a single (semi-hypothetical) human and his goals; whether entertainment is a terminal or instrumental goal; and whether it is a good goal to have.
Let me put it in a different way: if you could take a magic pill which would remove (or, at the very least, greatly reduce) your desire for passive entertainment, would you do it ? People with extremely low preferences for passive entertainment do exist, after all, so this scenario isn’t entirely fantastic (other than for the magic pill part, of course).
What is written in to humans by evolution is hardly relevant. The point is that you can’t prove anything about humansby drawing a comparison with imaginary creatures that have had something potentially quite different written into them by their creator.
I have no idea what that even means.
My only solution is “don’t do that then”. It’s a broken thought process, and my interest in it ends with that recognition. Am I a soul doctor? I am not. I seem to be naturally resistant to that failure, but I don’t know how to fix anyone who isn’t.
What desire for passive entertainment? For that matter, what is this “passive entertainment”? I am not getting a clear idea of what we are talking about. At any rate, I can’t imagine “entertainment” in the ordinary meaning of that word being a terminal goal.
FWIW, I do not watch television, and have never attended spectator sports.
Quite.
To rephrase: do you believe that all choices made by humans are completely under the humans’ conscious control ? If not, what proportion of our choices is under our control, and what proportion is written into our genes and is thus difficult, if not impossible, to change (given our present level of technology) ?
You objected to my using Clippy as an analogy to human behaviour, on the grounds that Clippy’s choices are “written into its definition”. My point is that a). Clippy is free to make whatever choices it wants, as long as it believes (correctly or erroneously) such choices would lead to more paperclips, and b). we humans operate in a similar way, only we care about things other than paperclips, and therefore c). Clippy is a valid analogy.
Don’t do what ? Do you have a moral theory which works better than utilitarianism/consequentialism ?
You don’t watch TV or attend sports, but do you read any fiction books ? Listen to music ? Look at paintings or sculptures (on your own initiative, that is, and not as part of a job) ? Enjoy listening to some small subclass of jokes ? Watch any movies ? Play video games ? Stare at a fire at night ? I’m just trying to pinpoint your general level of interest in entertainment.
Just because you personally can’t imagine something, doesn’t mean it’s not true. For example, art and music—both of which are forms of passive entertainment—has been a part of human history ever since the caveman days, and continue to flourish today. There may be something hardcoded in our genes (maybe not yours personally, but on average) that makes us enjoy art and music. On the other hand, there are lots of things hardcoded in our genes that we’d be better off without...
The whole language is wrong here.
What does it mean to talk about a choice being “completely under the humans’ conscious control”? Obviously, the causal connections wind through and through all manner of things that are outside consciousness as well as inside. When could you ever say that a decision is “completely under conscious control”?
Then you talk as if a decision not “completely under conscious control” must be “written into the genes”. Where does that come from?
Why do you specify fiction? Is fiction “passive entertainment” but non-fiction something else?
What is this “us” that is separate from and acted upon by our genes? Mentalistic dualism?
Don’t crash and burn. I have no moral theory and am not impressed by anything on offer from the philosophers.
To sum up, there’s a large and complex set of assumptions behind everything you’re saying here that I don’t think I share, but I can only guess at from glimpsing the shadowy outlines. I doubt further discussion will get anywhere useful.
I think Bugmaster is equating being “written in” in the sense of a stipulation in a thought experiment with being “written in” in the sense of being the outcome of an evolutionary process.
If he is, he shouldn’t. These are completely different concepts.
That has no relevance to morality. Morality is not winning, is not efficiently fulfilling an arbitrary UF.
This decision theory is bad because it fails the “Scientology test.”
That’s hardly objective. The challenge is to formalize that test.
Btw: the problem you’re having is not due to any decision theory but due to the goal system. You want there to be entertainment and fun and the like. However, the postulated agent had a primary goal that did not include entertainment and fun. This seems alien to us, but for the mindset of such an agent “eschew entertainment and fun” is the correct and sane behavior.
Exactly, though see my comment on a sibling thread.
Out of curiosity though, what is the “Scientology test” ? Is that some commonly-accepted term from the Less Wrong jargon ? Presumably it doesn’t involve poorly calibrated galvanic skin response meters… :-/
Not the commenter, but I think it’s just “it makes you do crazy things, like scientologists”. It’s not a standard LW thing.
Optimize it for what?
That is kind of up to you. That’s the problem with terminal goals...
I agree that people spend lots of time talking about these kind of things, and that the more shared topics of conversation you have with someone the easier it is to socialize with them, but I disagree that there are few non-technical things one can talk about other than what you get from passive entertainment. I seldom watch TV/films/sports, but I have plenty of non-technical things I can talk about with people—parties we’ve been to, people we know, places we’ve visited, our tastes in food and drinks, unusual stuff that happened to us, what we’ve been doing lately, our plans for the near future, ranting about politics, conspiracy theories, the freakin’ weather, whatever—and I’d consider talking about some of these topic to build more ‘emotional intimacy’ than talking about some Hollywood movie or the Champions League or similar. (Also, I take exception to the apparent implication of the parenthetical at the end of the paragraph—it is possible to entertain people by talking about STEM topics, if you’re sufficiently Feynman-esque about that.)
I have read very little of that kind of fiction, and still I haven’t felt excluded by that in the slightest (well, except that one time when the latest HPMOR thread clogged up the top Discussion comments of the week when I hadn’t read HPMOR yet, and the occasional Discussion threads about MLP—but that’s a small minority of the time).
This article, courtesy of the recent Seq Rerun, seems serendipitous:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/yf/moral_truth_in_fiction/
What’s wrong with live and let live (for their notion of ‘living’). You can value “DO”ing something (apparently not counting daydreaming) over other activities for yourself, that’s your prerogative, but why do you get to say who is and isn’t “living”?
That was addressed here:
It’s not that I want to tell them whether they’re “really living”, it’s that I think they don’t think spending so much of their free time on TV is “really living”.
Now, if you want to disagree with me on whether they think they are “really living”, that might be really interesting. I acknowledge that mind projection fallacy might be causing me to think they want what I want.
I suspect that many people who enjoy television, if asked, would claim that socializing with freinds or other things are somehow better or more pure, but only because TV is a low status medium, and so saying that watching TV isn’t “real living” has become somewhat of a cached thought within our culture; I’d suspect you’d have a much harder time finding people who will claim that spending time enjoying art or reading classic literature or other higher status fictional media doesn’t count as “real living”.
I think I might actually expect people to endorse different activities in this context at different levels of abstraction.
That is, if you asked J. Random TV Consumer to rank (say) TV and socialization, or study, or some other venue for self-improvement, I wouldn’t be too surprised if they consistently picked the latter. But if you broke down these categories into specific tasks, I’d expect individual shows to rate more highly—in some cases much more highly—than implied by the category rating.
I’m not sure what this implies about true preferences.
I think I need an example of this to understand your point here.
Well, for example, I wouldn’t be too surprised to find the same person saying both “I’d rather socialize than watch TV” and “I’d rather watch Game of Thrones [or other popular TV show] than call my friend for dinner tonight”.
Of course that’s just one specialization, and the plausibility of a particular scenario depends on personality and relative appeal.
Offtopic: Does anyone know where you can find that speech in regular HTML format? I defenitely read it in that format, but I can’t find it again.
Ontopic: While I appreciate (and agree with) the point he’s making, overall, he uses a lot of exaggeration and hyperbole, at best. It seems pretty clear that specific teachers can make a difference to individuals, even if they can’t enact structural change.
Also:
What do you mean by “crime against humanity”?
I could’ve sworn that I saw his entire book in HTML format somewhere, a long time ago, but now I can’t find it. Perhaps I only imagined it.
From what I recall, in the later chapters he claims that our current educational system was deliberately designed in meticulous detail by a shadowy conspiracy of statists bent on world (or, at the very least, national) domination. Again, my recollection could be widely off the mark, but I do seem to remember staring at my screen and thinking, “Really, Gatto ? Really ?”
I read Dumbing Us Down, which might not be the book you’re thinking of—if memory serves, he’s written a few—but I don’t remember him ever quite going with the conspiracy theory angle.
He skirts the edges of it pretty closely, granted. In the context of history of education, his thesis is basically that the American educational system is an offshoot of the Prussian system and that that system was picked because it prioritizes obedience to authority. Even if we take that all at face value, though, it doesn’t require a conspiracy—just a bunch of 19th- and early 20th-century social reformers with a fondness for one of the more authoritarian regimes of the day, openly doing their jobs.
Now, while it’s pretty well documented that Horace Mann and some of his intellectual heirs had the Prussian system in mind, I’ve never seen historical documentation giving exactly those reasons for choosing it. And in any case the systems diverged in the mid-1800s and we’d need to account for subsequent changes before stringing up the present-day American school system on those charges. But at its core it’s a pretty plausible hypothesis—many of the features that after two World Wars make the Prussians look kind of questionable to us were, at the time, being held up as models of national organization, and a lot of that did have to do with regimentation of various kinds.
Speaking as a rationalist and a Christian, I’ve always found that a bit too propaganda-ish for my tastes. And I wouldn’t call Luke’s journey “completed”, exactly. Still, it can be valuable to see what others have thought in similar positions to you, in a shoulders-of-giants sort of way.
I think it would be better to focus on improving your rationality, rather than seeking out tracts that disagree with you. There’s nothing wrong with reading such tracts, as long as you’re rational enough not to internalize mistakes from it (on either side) but I wouldn’t make it your main goal.
What does “evidence about X” mean, as opposed to “evidence for X” ?
My interpretation is “evidence that was not obtained in the service of a particular bottom line.”
I’d interpret it as “evidence which bears on the question X” as opposed to “Evidence which supports answer Y to question X.”
For instance, if you wanted to know whether anthropogenic climate change was occurring, you would want to search for “evidence about anthropogenic climate change” rather than “evidence for anthropogenic climate change.”
Fair enough, that makes sense. I guess I just wasn’t used to seeing this verbal construct before.
The former means that log(P(E|X)/P(E|~X)) is non-negligible, the latter means that it is positive.
You may find this story (a scientist dealing with evidence that conflicts with his religion) interesting.
http://www.exmormonscholarstestify.org/simon-southerton.html
Sam Bhagwat has served a mission and has posted here about how to emulate the Latter-day Saints’ approach to community-building..