That comment made me come up with another question (to Eliezer or whomever feels he can answer):
What do you mean by ‘need’ and ‘ought’ here? Is there an ultimate, objective, ontological justification for carrying such a sense of duty? Doesn’t ‘need to’ imply guilt and sacrifice?
Or maybe I’m just restating the is–ought problem.
Oh!, I’ve done impro myself and I agree.
Well, partly.
The dynamics of what works and doesn’t has lots of explanation behind it, and the storytelling is all pretty structured. However, when you’re right on the scene there’s not room for explicit rational analysis, sure.
I liked it, good job!
Mathematically, I have to agree with your reply: you either have no molecules or at least one. And then, your calculations hold true. And I’m wrong.
Physiologically, though, my argument is that the “nanoutility” that this molecule would add would have such a negligible effect that nothing would change in the person’s life measured by any practical purposes. It will pass completely unnoticed (zero!) — for each person in the 3^^^3 generations.
I assume a fuzzy scale of flu, so that no single molecule would turn sure-flu to sure-non-flu. As I assumed with the specks.
almost certain that many people will receive significant doses of vitamin C
Not what I said.
Each person will receive vitamin C diluted in the ratio of 10^(-60) (see reference here). The amount is the same for everyone, constant. Strictly one dose per person (as it was one speck per person).
But the number of persons are all people alive in the next 3^^^3 generations.
If there is any causal relationship at all between receiving a dose of vitamin C and flu resistance
...which wouldn’t mean it is linear at all. Above a certain dose can be lethal; below, can have no effect.
Does it sound reasonable that if you eat one nanogram of bread during severe starvation, it would retard your death in precisely zero seconds?
Very-Related Question: Typical homeopathic dilutions are 10^(-60). On average, this would require giving two billion doses per second to six billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any patient.
Could one argue that if we administer a homeopathic pill of vitamin C in the above dilution to every living person for the next 3^^^3 generations, the impact would be a humongous amount of flu-elimination?
If anyone convinces me that yes, I might accept to be a Torturer. Otherwise, I assume that the negligibility of the speck, plus people’s resilience, would make no lasting effects. Disutility would vanish in miliseconds. If they wouldn’t even notice or have memory of the specks after a while, it’d equate to zero disutility.
It’s not that I can’t do the maths. It’s that the evil of the speck seems too diluted to do harm.
Just like homeopathy is too diluted to do good.
Never underestimate the difficulty of changing false beliefs by facts. —Harvard economist Henry Rosovsky
What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so. —Mark Twain
Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned. —Avicenna (980–1037 AD)
You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. —Daniel Moyniham
It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear. —Nicholas Nassim Taleb
(i.e.: don’t forget to put, in your utility functions, the damn appropriate weight of those highly-improbable-but-high-negative-impact tragedies!)
The problem is, excessively liking propositional knowledge over procedural is a bias that harms us every day. Though some information is directly useful, most of it is worthless.
Worthless to whom?
Passionate truth-seekers find enjoyment in their growing ability to see things as they are, in making the world make sense. It’s an autotelic activity for them. If the value sought is simply to understand a phenomenon, it’s not worthless.
Some people like watching TV; some people like reading about comonads. If you don’t starve to death because of it, and if there is nothing else you’d rather be doing than the task in question, fine! Go for it.
Harm to whom?
The harm seems to appear when you have an objective goal, project or task which is important from the perspective of your utility function, and then you jeopardize deadline or quality by avoiding to follow the required steps to complete it.
You don’t work objectively from the perspective of the end-product, consuming theory as necessary; instead, you diverge aimlessly. It may be a sign of risk-aversion and need for control — you can never screw up too much by reading books.
In any case, harm should be viewed in the light of your utility function.
I’ve read Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week, and his proposal of a low-information diet made me think. I cut down my newspaper-reading to zero. Not even online. And I am very grateful that I did — I don’t miss it at all.
...and then I’ve run across this quote from Thomas Jefferson: “I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.”
I laughed out loud. The idea wasn’t so new.
Then I leveraged the time I earned by overindulging in Lesswrong, Overcomingbias, Wikipedia and other precious sources. And reading more books.
Still propositional knowledge, but clearly more enlightening than the daily fix of murders and gossips.
I admit I don’t remember any case of people publicly affirming, out of the blue: “I am damn wrong, big time!”.
No homeopath waking up in a regular Tuesday and declaring “Gee!, I’m sorry, I’ve read an article and realized I’ve been medicating people with this placebo ‘Styrofoam’ little balls for the last five years and now I see this was insane. I am publicly apologizing for my patients. I quit. But I am happy that I can see it now, and can still become a specialist in something else.”
Confirmation bias seems to grow stronger the more the time passes, and the more public their opinion gets.
(I know this is an ooooold post, but since I thought about it, why not reply?)
This is a case of availability heuristic, if I understand what you’re saying. That people who screw up and admit only in the end gets into the news; those who admit big mistakes early do not.
Sounds reasonable. But this example is not really about mistakes, just an adjustment of ambitions and expectations, which might even be subconscious. It’s not really about right or wrong, as I see it.
It’s too damn hard to be a tapper.
In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “tappers” or “listeners.” Tappers received a list of twenty-five well-known songs, such as “Happy Birthday to You” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table). The listener’s job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped.
The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they were getting their message across 1 time in 2. Why?
Because it’s hard to be a tapper. The tapper is humming the song in her head while tapping, she is seeing the whole picture, it’s so clear! Putting yourself in the listener’s shoes and pretending to be someone who doesn’t know what you do and do know lots of stuff that you don’t is extremely difficult.
In my experience, being aware of this, alone, is a powerful piece of information to improve the dialogue. For the tapper, to explore being clear and explicit in what is said and take the other person’s knowledge into account. For the listener — well, to shut up, listen, and ask exploratory questions.
This experiment is cited in the excellent book Made to Stick.
Excellent distinction, Yasser.
I would add one more case:
Wrongness is when the output of the “program” doesn’t correlate reliably with reality. But this could happen not only because the algorithm is flawed (wrong because crazy), but also because of insufficient or incorrect input. I think this is an important distinction, because the person can be smart (non-stupid) and rational (non-irrational = non-crazy) but still wrong nevertheless — and those around would call him “crazy” or “stupid” undeservedly.
Example: CEOs taking calculated risks but being fired because the company, guided by him, flipped the coin and got head instead of the desired tail. Stakeholders expected him to be omniscient.
Those CEOs who get it right will be perceived as omniscient gurus. Hindsight bias will make them write books on how to be successful; survivorship bias will lure people into buying them.
Not being crazy makes your output less wrong. But doesn’t guarantee it to be right, either.
If I didn’t get it wrong in my analysis above (puns intended), would it be fair to say that this community, having the mission to fix the biases in our algorithms, should be even more appropriately called Less Crazy instead?
I’ve come to think that way years ago, and am happy to read such a clear exposition on the point.
What’s ironic is that the first time the issue actually called my attention was while reading the famous How to Win Friends and Influence People. Now, the book is about winning, not truth, and the point of the chapter was saying to people “If I were in your position, I would have done the same thing” as a strategy to win their sympathy. Functional and teleological friend-winning strategy, sure. But when afterward Carnegie made the point that saying this wasn’t a lie — since if you were born in the same conditions and had had the same life as the other, you’d be just like him —, I couldn’t argue against it. So, surprisingly, the winning strategy did have some philosophical depth to back it up.
The kinda cheap, new age self-help book The Four Agreements also got it right with his “Don’t Take Anything Personally: Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream.”
Don’t read the book, though: the twisted reasoning(?) that got the author to this rather sensible conclusion would make you want to scream. Of course, this reaction wouldn’t make much sense, ‘cause y’know, if you were a 57-year-old Mexican shaman with his exact same genetics and life experiences...’
Making us reap good feelings from downward social comparison.
Naughty brains, love those tricks.
Do you feel lonely often? How bad (or important) is it?
(Above questions are a corollary of:) Do you feel that — as you improve your understanding of the world more and more —, there are fewer and fewer people who understand you and with whom you can genuinely relate in a personal level?