Academian

Karma: 2,830

Academian Jan 5, 2013, 5:33 AM
5 points
in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: Second-Order Logic: The Controversy

I also wish both participants in the dialogue would take ultrafinitism more seriously.

For what it’s worth, I’m an ultrafinitist. Since 2005, at least as far as I’ve been able to tell.

Academian Jan 4, 2013, 7:41 AM
0 points
on: Attention control is critical for changing/increasing/altering motivation
If you want to make this post even better (since apparently it’s attracting massive viewage from the web-at-large!), here is some feedback:

I didn’t find your description of the owl monkey experiment very compelling,

If a monkey was trained to keep a hand on the wheel that moved just the same, but he did not have to pay attention to it… the cortical map remained the same size.

because it wasn’t clear that attention was causing the plasticity; the temporal association of subtle discriminations with rewards could plausibly cause plasticity directly, without attentional control being an intermediate causal link. I.e., because attention is a latent variable in the monkeys, either of the following could explain the observations:

(1) {attention} <-- {discrimination associated with reward} --> {plasticity}

(2) {discrimination associated with reward} --> {attention} --> {plasticity}

It’s the human studies you cited but didn’t describe, e.g. Heron et al (2010), that really pin down the {attention} --> {plasticity} arrow, because we can verbally direct humans to pay attention to something without requiring more discrimination from that group compared to a non-attentive group. In particular, Heron et al didn’t just replicate the findings in the monkeys as you said...

This finding has since been replicated in humans, many times (for instance [5, 6]).

… they actually tested a direct causal link from {attention} to {co-opting neurons}, which makes your point much more convincing, I think :)

So if you’re reading this, I suggest editing in the human study! And also this helpful comment you wrote.

Academian Jan 4, 2013, 4:44 AM
9 points
on: Interpersonal and intrapersonal utility comparisons

I’m pretty sure that the idea of the previous two paragraphs has been talked about before, but I can’t find where.

On LessWrong: VNM expected utility theory: uses, abuses, and interpretation (shameless self-citation ;)

On Wikipedia: Limitations of the VNM utility theorem

Academian Jan 4, 2013, 3:59 AM
4 points
in reply to: ThisDan’s comment on: Narrative, self-image, and self-communication
+1 for sharing; you seem the sort of person my post is aimed at: so averse to being constrained by self-image that you turn a blind eye when it affects you. It sounds to me like you that you are actively trying to suppress having beliefs about yourself:

People around me have a model of what Dan apparently is which is empathetic, nice, generous etc. I’m always the first to point out a bias such as racism or nonfactual emotional opinions etc. I don’t have to see myself as any of those things though.

I’ve been there, and I can think of a number of possible causes of this aversion:

Possibility #1: You see that other people are biased by their self-images in harmful ways, so you try not to have any self image that might resemble one that they would have. What you end up with is something like a “moral calculator” self-image, or a “really objective guy” self-image:

All I have to do is keep asking questions properly and at the right time and then output a response. No i’m not a calculator but the results are good according to everyone I meet and interact with.

This distinguishes you from others in a way that doesn’t activate your “don’t screw up like them” alarm bells.

Possibility #2. You are mildly disgusted by human biases and limitations, and find using the story-like heuristics of “common people” quaint but distasteful. This gives you a “too good for that silly human-think” self-image, which biases you to ignore methods of thinking that are especially useful for humans if employed correctly (i.e., as moderate-bias-high-accuracy estimators). No one is saying go think like all your wrong friends now or stop having real-time assessments of things, and the fact that you interpreted the post in that way suggests that you are somewhat sensitive to this issue. I’m saying to spend some time understanding the strengths of common emotional heuristics like narrative, not just their weaknesses, so you can make a better decision about when and how to use them.

One final comment:

I do make decisions as they come up and if I ever was to base one off the fact that “that’s what Dan would do” then that throws up a red flag to me.

It should. This should also throw up a red flag:

I don’t decide what is right in advance because if i do anything to predetermine my answer before a question arises then i’m starting off with a bias.

You are not going to escape having to cache some of your thoughts. Computers do it, AIs are going to do it, people do it, and you do it. When I learned linear algebra, I made myself re-derive every theorem and its dependencies, back to the field axioms, in my head every time I used them… but eventually I had to stop in order to follow seminar talks that’ll use 5 major results results in a span of 10 seconds. It was inevitable. And really, you don’t add 12 to itself 12 times every time you compute 12x12, even if you feel like a calculator. You don’t re-derive the distributive law from first principles every time you use a multiplication algorithm. And if you do, you’re going to be unnecessarily—dare I say irrationally—slower than otherwise ;)

The best thing to do is accept this fact, so that you can start caching instructions like keep an eye out for the following exception to this other cached instruction or watch out I don’t think I’m a calculator and assume I’m immune to biases arising from my own self-image.

Academian Jan 3, 2013, 3:27 AM
6 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Applied Rationality Workshops: Jan 25-28 and March 1-4
If you’re a “people-hater” who is able to easily self-modify, why do you still “hate” people? Are you sure you’re not rationalizing the usefulness of your dislike of others? What do you find yourself saying to yourself and others about what being a “people-hater” achieves for you. Are there other ways for you to achieve those without hating people? What do you find yourself saying to yourself and others about why it’s hard to change? What if in a group of 20+ people interested in rationality, someone has a cool trick you haven’t tried?

Even if you’re 90% sure you should hate people, you’re 10% sure you shouldn’t. Supposing you were wrong, what would it be worth to you, e.g. in hours of happiness or positive effects on others, integrated over the rest of your life, to find that out? You’d have an interesting chance of finding that out immersed for a few days in a group of people who could produce interesting arguments for both sides of the issue.

I say this as someone who used to dislike people a lot, changed on purpose, and am now happier and doing better for it ;)

ETA But I think I see what Anna is saying about not attending if you hate being near people...

Academian Jan 1, 2013, 7:16 PM
45 points
on: You can’t signal to rubes
You’re describing costly signaling. Contrary to your opening statement,

The word ‘signalling’ is often used in Less Wrong, and often used wrongly.

people on LessWrong are usually using the term “signalling” consistently with its standard meaning in economics and evolutionary biology. From Wikipedia,

In economics, more precisely in contract theory, signalling is the idea that one party credibly conveys some information about itself to another party

Within evolutionary biology, signalling theory is a body of theoretical work examining communication between individuals. The central question is when organisms with conflicting interests should be expected to communicate “honestly”.

In particular, the ev bio article even includes a section on dishonest signalling, which seems to be what you’re complaining about here:

Seriously though, “signalling” is being used to mean “tricking people in to thinking that you are”.

This post is still interesting as a highlight reel of different examples of signalling, and shows that the term is, in its standard usage, rather non-specific. It’s just not an illustration that people here are using it wrongly.
What links here?
- wedrifid's comment on You can’t signal to rubes by Patrick (Jan 2, 2013, 2:35 AM; 16 points)
- ahartell's comment on Suggestion: site-wide taboos by [deleted] (Jan 16, 2013, 3:18 AM; 4 points)

Academian Dec 31, 2012, 11:26 PM
22 points
on: The limits of introspection
tl;dr: I was excited by this post, but so far I find reading the cited literature uncompelling :( Can you point us to a study we can read where the authors reported enough of their data and procedure that we can all tell that their conclusion was justified?

I do trust you, Yvain, and I know you know stats, and I even agree with the conclusion of the post—that people are imperfect introspectors—but I’m discouraged to continue searching through the literature myself at the moment because the first two articles you cited just weren’t clear enough on what they were doing and measuring for me to tell if their conclusions were justified, other than by intuition (which I already share).

For example, none of your summaries says whether the fraction of people noticing the experimenters’ effect on their behavior was enough to explain the difference between the two experiment groups, and this seems representative of the 1977 review article you cited as your main source as well.

I looked in more detail at your first example, the electric shocks experiment (Nisbett & Schachter, 1966), on which you report

… people who took the pill tolerated four times as strong a shock as controls … Only three of twelve subjects made a connection between the pill and their shock tolerance …

I was wondering, did the experimenters merely observe

(1) a “Statistically Significant” difference between PILL-GROUP and CONTROL-GROUP? And then say “Only 3 of 12 people in the pill group managed to detect the effect of the placebo on themselves?”

Because that’s not a surprise, given the null hypothesis that people are good introspectors… maybe just those three people were affected, and that caused the significant difference between the groups! And jumping to conclusions from (1) is a kind of mistake I’ve seen before from authors assuming (if not in their minds, at least in their statistical formulae) that an effect is uniform across people, when it clearly probably isn’t.

Or, did the experimenters observe that

(2) believing that only those three subjects were actually affected by (their knowledge of) the pill was not enough to explain the difference between the groups?

To see what the study really found, after many server issues with the journal website I tracked down the original 1966 article, which I’ve made available here. The paper doesn’t mention anything about people’s assessments of whether being (told they were) given a pill may have affected their pain tolerance.

Wondering why you wrote that, I went to the 1977 survey article you read, which I’ve made available as a searchable pdf here. There they say, at the bottom left of page 237, that their conclusion about the electric shocks vs pills was based on “additional unpublished data, collected from … experiments by Nisbett and Schachter (1966)”. But their description of that was almost as terse as your summary, and in particular, included no statistical reasoning.

Like I said, I do intuitively agree with the conclusion that people are imperfect introspectors, but I worry that the authors and reviewers of this article may have been sloppy in finding clear, quantitative evidence for this perspective, perhaps by being already too convinced of it...

Academian Dec 31, 2012, 4:11 AM
0 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Narrative, self-image, and self-communication

Sometimes I have days of low morale where I don’t get much done, and don’t try to force myself to do things because I know my morale is low and I’ll likely fail. I’m experimenting with a few different strategies for cutting down on low-morale days… I’d like to have … better motivation (which might allow me to work on things with less willpower/energy expenditure),

Morale, and reducing the need for willpower / conscious effort, are things I’ve had success with using self-image changes, e.g. inspired by Naruto :) So...

those things seem to me to be more about trying out a wide variety of techniques and empirically determining what works.

… I’d say paying close attention to how you see yourself and your place in the world during times of low morale is definitely worth experimenting with. I’d actually be quite surprised if there aren’t variables at play there which, if changed, would cause changes in your morale.

I avoid listening to Britney Spears, for instance, because I don’t want to be the sort of person who likes Britney Spears.

Hah! It’s funny you should mention that! Liking Britney Spears was one of the first intentional changes I made to myself at the time I mentioned in the post when I was 16 and trying to be self-image-free. It worked; I realized I naturally quite liked most of her hits, and I always perk up when her music comes on the radio. It’s nice not to have to hate it :)

Academian Dec 31, 2012, 12:28 AM
11 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Ritual Report 2012: Life, Death, Light, Darkness, and Love.
I’m not saying rationalists should avoid engaging in ritual like the plague; but I do a lot of promoting of CFAR and rationality to non-LW-readers, and I happen to know from experience that a post like this in Main sends bad vibes to a lot of people. Again, I think it’s sad to have to worry so much about image, but I think it’s a reality.

Academian Dec 30, 2012, 11:55 PM
5 points
in reply to: quiet’s comment on: Ritual Report 2012: Life, Death, Light, Darkness, and Love.
Thanks for sharing this, Quiet; I’m sad to say I agree with you. I think rationality as a movement can’t afford to be associated with ritual. It’s just too hard to believe that it’s not a failure mode. I personally find Raemon’s perspective inspiring and convincing. Raemon, it seems to me that you have a very sane perspective on the role of ritual in people’s lives. And I’m all about trying to acknowledge and work with our own emotional needs, e.g. in this post. But I personally think openly associating with Ritual with a Capital R is just too sketchy looking for the community. It saddens me to have to worry about such alarm bells going off, but I think it’s the reality.

Of course there are other easier-to-worry-about negative effects of ritual than simply appearances; what I’m saying is that, Raemon, even if you are able to avoid those failure modes—and I have to say, to me, you seem very trustworthy in this regard—I think strong ritual associations are worth avoiding for signaling alone.

Academian Dec 30, 2012, 9:28 PM
4 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Bedrock of Fairness

I would still tend to say that ¹⁄₃ apiece is the fair division

I’m curious why you personally just chose to use the norm-connoting term “fair” in place of the less loaded term “equal division” … what properties does equal division have that make you want to give it special normative consideration? I could think of some, but I’m particularly interested in what your thoughts are here!

Academian Dec 30, 2012, 9:20 PM
0 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Three kinds of moral uncertainty

Kind of, though “intrinsic uncertainty” also suggests the possibility that the subsystems might be generating moral intuitions which simply cannot be reconciled and that the conflict might be unresolvable unless one is willing to completely cut away or rewrite parts of their own mind.

Don’t you think that things being perfectly balanced in a way such that there is no resolution is sort of a measure zero set of outcomes? In drift-diffusion models of neural groups in human and animal brains arrive at decisions/actions (explained pretty well here), even if the drift term (tendency to eventually favor one outcome) is zero, the diffusion term (tendency to randomly select some outcome) would eventually result in a decision being made, with probability 1, where more subtle conflicts tend to take more time to resolve.

This is why I prefer to think of those situations as “not finished computing” rather than “intrinsically unresolvable”.

Do you maybe have a different notion of resolving a conflict, that makes unresolvedness a sustainable situation?

Academian Dec 30, 2012, 4:58 PM
5 points
on: Three kinds of moral uncertainty
Nice post. Do I understand you correctly that what you call “Intrinsic Moral Uncertainty” is the feeling of unresolved conflict between subsystems of our moral-intuition-generators? If so, I’d suggest calling it “Mere internal conflict” or “Not finished computing” or something more descriptive than “Intrinsic”.

Academian Dec 28, 2012, 10:48 AM
9 points
in reply to: bryjnar’s comment on: The Relation Projection Fallacy and the purpose of life

The Linguistic Consistency Fallacy: claiming, implicitly or otherwise, that a word must be used in the same way in all instances.

I’m definitely talking about the concept of purpose here, not the word.

in my experience they tend to say something like “Not for anyone in particular, just sort of “ultimate” purpose”… That said, the fact that everywhere else we use the word “purpose” it is three-place is certainly a useful observation. It might make us think that perhaps the three-place usage is the original, well-supported version, and the other one is a degenerate one that we are only using because we’re confused. But the nature of that mistake is quite different. … If you think I’m splitting hairs here,

I don’t think you’re splitting hairs; this is not a word game, and perhaps I should say in the post that I don’t think just saying “Purpose to whom?” is the way to address this problem in someone else. In my experience, saying something like this works better:

“The purpose of life is a big question, and I think it helps to look at easier examples of purpose to understand why you might be looking for a purpose of life. First of all, you may be lacking satisfaction in your life for some reason, and framing this to yourself in philosophical terms like “Life has no purpose, because .” If that’s true, it’s quite likely that you’d feel differently if your emotional needs as a social primate were being met, and in that sense the solution is not an “answer” but rather some actions that will result in these needs being met.

Still, that does not address the . So because “What’s the purpose of life” may be a hard question, let’s look at easier examples of purpose and see how they work. Notice how they all have someone the purpose is to? And how that’s missing in your “purpose of life” question? That means you could end up feeling one of two ways:

(1) Satisfied, because now you can just ask “What could be the purpose of my life to ”, etc, and come up with answers, or

(2) unsatisfied because there is no agent to ask about such that the answer would satisfy you.

And I claim that whether you end up at (1) or (2) is a function of whether your social primate emotional needs are being met than any particular philosophical argument.”

Academian Dec 28, 2012, 4:43 AM
1 point
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: The Relation Projection Fallacy and the purpose of life
Done :)

Academian Dec 28, 2012, 4:33 AM
7 points
in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: When Truth Isn’t Enough
I actually think people who say “Life has no meaning and everything I do is pointless” are actually making a deeper mistake than confusing connotations with denotations… I think they’re actually making a denotational error in missing that e.g. “purpose” or “pointfulness” typically denotes ternary relationships of the form “The purpose of X to Y is Z.” In other words, one must ask or tacitly understand “purpose to whom?” and “meaning to whom” before the statement makes any sense.

My favorite connotationally-heavy follow-up to this is that “My life has as many purposes as there are agents it has a purpose to.”

I’ve been wanting to post on this under the name “Relation Projection Fallacy” for a while now, so I just did :)

The Relation Projection Fallacy and the purpose of life

AcademianDec 28, 2012, 4:14 AM

129 points

42 comments3 min readLW link

Academian Dec 27, 2012, 4:47 PM
7 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Narrative, self-image, and self-communication
It would help you and other commenters to have an example in mind of something you want to change about yourself, and what methods you’ve already tried. Do you already do everything that you think you should? Do you ever procrastinate? Do you ever over-weight short-term pains against long-term gains? Is there anything you don’t enjoy such that people who enjoy that thing have better lives than you, in your estimation?

If you answer one of these questions positively, and you have not been paying attention to conscious and unconscious aspects of self-image, I’d expect low hanging fruit there to get yourself to change. If you’re comfortable posting what you want to change and what you’ve already tried, especially to one of the commenters who seems to take benefit from using narrative to motivate themselves, maybe they’ll offer you some ideas.

(I’m not saying that self image is the most important factor here, only that it might be an important marginal factor if you have been ignoring it.)

Academian Dec 27, 2012, 7:01 AM
5 points
on: UFAI cannot be the Great Filter
The relevant notion of intelligence for a singularity is optimization power, and it’s not obvious that we aren’t already witnessing the expansion of such an intelligence. You may have already had these thoughts, but you didn’t mention them, and I think they’re important to evaluating the strength of evidence we have against UFAI explosions:

What do agents with extreme optimization power look like? One way for them to look is a rapidly-expanding-space-and-resource-consuming process which at some point during our existence engulfs our region of space destroys us, which we haven’t seen happen yet. Another way for them to look is such an optimization process that has already engulfed our region of space. And if that were the case, we would necessarily be a byproduct of or noise term in that process, and the laws of physics actually meet that description.

(I had this thought when I first asked myself to look for naturally-occurring examples of extremely powerful optimization processes, and the laws of physics were the best examples I could think of. E.g., an agent wishing to minimize the L^2 norm of the differential of energy with respect to time would produce an environment that conserves energy.)

It’s difficult and conjunction-fallacious to come with an agent whose utility function would exactly be to have an environment that follows our particular laws of physics with our particular initial conditions, so one should not update heavily in favor of this idea based on observing the laws of physics to be true. What I’m saying is that we only have seen evidence against UFAIs that could have expanded from regions of nearby space and interrupted human progress, not UFAIs that could have expanded before and perhaps caused the existence of the observable universe.

Academian Dec 27, 2012, 6:08 AM
1 point
on: Morality Isn’t Logical
I like this post, and here is some evidence supporting your fear that some people may over-use the morality=logic metaphor, i.e., copy too many anticipations about how logical reasoning works over to their anticipations about how moral reasoning works… The comment is already downvoted to −2, suggesting the community realizes this (please don’t downvote it further so as to over-punish the author), but the fact that someone made it is evidence that your point here is valuable one.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/g0e/narrative_selfimage_and_selfcommunication/83ag

Academian

The Re­la­tion Pro­jec­tion Fal­lacy and the pur­pose of life

The Relation Projection Fallacy and the purpose of life