g

Karma: 550

g Oct 14, 2008, 8:06 PM
3 points
on: Why Does Power Corrupt?
To those who are saying things like “Eliezer, someone will get power anyway and they’ll probably be worse than you, so why not grab power for yourself?”, and assuming for the sake of argument that we’re talking about some quantity of power that Eliezer is actually in a position to grab: If you grab power and it corrupts you, that’s bad not only for everyone else but also for you and whatever your goals were before you got corrupted. Observing that other people would be corrupted just as badly defuses the first of those objections to power-grabbing, but not the second.

g Oct 10, 2008, 11:47 PM
13 points
0
on: Crisis of Faith
Bo, the point is that what’s most difficult in these cases isn’t the thing that the 10-year-old can do intuitively (namely, evaluating whether a belief is credible, in the absence of strong prejudices about it) but something quite different: noticing the warning signs of those strong prejudices and then getting rid of them or getting past them. 10-year-olds aren’t specially good at that. Most 10-year-olds who believe silly things turn into 11-year-olds who believe the same silly things.

Eliezer talks about allocating “some uninterrupted hours”, but for me a proper Crisis of Faith takes longer than that, by orders of magnitude. If I’ve got some idea deeply embedded in my psyche but am now seriously doubting it (or at least considering the possibility of seriously doubting it), then either it’s right after all (in which case I shouldn’t change my mind in a hurry) or I’ve demonstrated my ability to be very badly wrong about it despite thinking about it a lot. In either case, I need to be very thorough about rethinking it, both because that way I may be less likely to get it wrong and because that way I’m less likely to spend the rest of my life worrying that I missed something important.

Yes, of course, a perfect reasoner would be able to sit down and go through all the key points quickly and methodically, and wouldn’t take months to do it. (Unless there were a big pile of empirical evidence that needed gathering.) But if you find yourself needing a Crisis of Faith, then ipso facto you aren’t a perfect reasoner on the topic in question.

Wherefore, I at least don’t have the time to stage a Crisis of Faith about every deeply held belief that shows signs of meriting one.

I think there would be value in some OB posts about resource allocation: deciding which biases to attack first, how much effort to put into updating which beliefs, how to prioritize evidence-gathering versus theorizing, and so on and so forth. (We can’t Make An Extraordinary Effort every single time.) It’s a very important aspect of practical rationality.

g Aug 4, 2008, 8:00 AM
7 points
on: No Logical Positivist I
Unfortunately, the capabilities of an omnipotent being are themselves not very well defined. Suppose we want to determine whether “The Absolute is an uncle” is meaningful. Well, says the deranged Hegelian arguing the affirmative, of course it is: we just ask our omnipotent being to take a look and see whether the Absolute is an uncle or not.

Butbutbutbut, you say, we can’t tell it how to do that, whereas we can tell it how to check whether there’s a spaceship past the cosmological horizon. But can we really? I mean, it’s not like we know how to make that observation, or we’d be able to make it ourselves. What’s the difference between this and checking whether the Absolute is an uncle? “Well, we know what it means to check whether there’s a spaceship past the cosmological horizon, but not what it means for the Absolute to be an uncle.” Circular argument alert!

It does feel like there’s a difference that we can use, but trying to formulate it exactly seems to lead to a circular definition.

(No one is really going to defend “The Absolute is an uncle”, but there certainly are people prepared to claim that the existence of an afterlife is testable because dead people might discover it, or because God could tell you whether it’s there or not; and I don’t think any sort of logical positivist would agree.)

g May 27, 2008, 12:34 PM
2 points
on: Timeless Physics
Interesting aesthetic question raised by Caledonian’s comment: “not beckoning, but drowning” versus “not wading, but drowning”. I think the latter would have worked much better, but presumably C. thought it too obvious and wanted to preserve more of Stevie Smith’s semantics. :-)

Arthur, what would keeping a time coordinate buy you in your scenario? Suppose, simplifying for convenience, we have A → B → C → B [cycle], and suppose each state completely determines its successor. What advantage would there be to labelling our states (A,0), (B,1), (C,2), (B,3), (C,4), etc., instead of just A,B,C? Note that there’s no observable difference between, say, (B,1) and (B,3); in particular, no memory or record of the past can distinguish them because those things would have to be part of state B itself.

I think David Deutsch has a similar unsorted-pile-of-block-slices view of the world. I don’t know if either was influenced by the other.

g May 26, 2008, 11:29 AM
8 points
on: Relative Configuration Space
You can make positions relative in ways other than using pairwise distances as your coordinates. For instance, just take R^4n (or R^11n or whatever) and quotient by the appropriate group of isometries of R^4 or R^11 or whatever. That way you get a dimension linear in the number of particles. The space might be more complicated topologically, but if you take general relativity seriously then I think you have to be prepared to cope with that anyway.

So, in Eliezer’s example of triangles in 2-space, we start off with R^6; letting E be the group of isometries of R^2 (three-dimensional: two dimensions for translation, one for rotation, and we also have two components because we can either reflect or not), it acts on R^6 by applying each isometry uniformly to three pairs of dimensions; quotienting R^6 by this action of E, you’re left with a 2-dimensional quotient space.

Of course you end up with the same result (up to isomorphism) this way as you would by considering pairwise distances and then noticing that you’re working in a small subset of the O(N^2)-dimensional space defined by distances. But you don’t have to go via the far-too-many-dimensional space to get there.

But … suppose the laws of physics are defined over a quotient space like this. From the anti-epiphenomenal viewpoint, I wonder whether we should consider the quantities in the original un-quotiented space to be “real” or not. Consider quantum-mechanical phase or magnetic vector potential, which aren’t observable (though other things best thought of as quotients of them are). Preferring to see the quotiented things as fundamental seems to me like the same sort of error as Eliezer (I think rightly) accuses single-world-ists of.

But … the space of distance-tuples (appropriately subsetted) and the space of position-tuples (appropriately quotiented) are the same space, as I mentioned earlier. So, how to choose? Simplicity, of course. And, so far as we can currently tell, the laws of physics are simpler when expressed in terms of positions than when expressed in terms of distances. So, for me and pending the discovery of some newer better way of expressing the state space that supports our churning quantum mist, sticking with absolute positions seems better for now.

g Feb 16, 2008, 12:59 AM
16 points
on: Taboo Your Words
Yeah, but when playing actual Taboo “rational agents should WIN” (Yudkowsky, E.) and therefore favour “nine innings and three outs” over your definition (which would also cover some related-but-different games such as rounders, I think). I suspect something like “Babe Ruth” would in fact lead to a quicker win.

None of which is relevant to your actual point, which I think a very good one. I don’t think the tool is all that nonstandard; e.g., it’s closely related to the positivist/verificationist idea that a statement has meaning only if it can be paraphrased in terms of directly (ha!) observable stuff.

g Feb 7, 2008, 8:56 PM
8 points
on: Typicality and Asymmetrical Similarity
Lee, I’m confident that you’d find that “97 is approximately 100” seems more natural to most people than “100 is approximately 99″. As for the percentage differences, (1) why should the percentage difference be the thing to focus on rather than the absolute difference, and (2) why do it that way around? (Only, I think, because of the effect I mentioned above: when you say “X is approximately Y” you’re implicitly suggesting Y as a standard of comparison, because it’s useful for that purpose one way or another.)

g Feb 7, 2008, 11:58 AM
7 points
on: Typicality and Asymmetrical Similarity
Tiiba, I don’t think what I described is a bias, but perhaps I didn’t explain it well. I’m proposing that in phrases like “X is approximately Y” and “X is like Y”, the connectives are not intended to be taken as symmetrical relations like “differs little from”; rather, they mean something like “If you want to know about X, it may be useful to think about Y instead”. And I don’t see anything wrong with that, as such.

Let me give an analogy from a field where bias is quite effectively eliminated: pure mathematics. Mathematicians have various notations they use to express relationships of the form “this function is bigger than that one for large x”. One of them, written something like “f ~ g”, means “the ratio f/g tends to 1 in whatever limiting case we’re interested in” (n → oo, x → 0, whatever). This really is a symmetrical relation; f ~ g if and only if g ~ f. But if you ask mathematicians which of “x^3+17x^2-25x+1 ~ x^3″ and “x^3 ~ x^3+17x^2-25x+1” is more natural then I bet they’ll quite consistently go for the former.

Now, if you want to call it a “bias” every time some term that looks symmetrical is used asymmetrically as a matter of convention or convenience, fair enough. I’d prefer to reserve “bias” for cases where the asymmetrical usage actually causes, or is a symptom of, error. As I say, I’m sure there’s plenty of error caused by typicality heuristics; but I don’t see that the asymmetry in the use of phrases like “is like” is, or indicates, an error.

(What “wrong question” do you think is being answered here?)

g Feb 6, 2008, 10:46 PM
13 points
0
on: Typicality and Asymmetrical Similarity
Has it been established that people who prefer “98 is approximately 100” to “100 is approximately 98″ or “Mexico is like the US” to “the US is like Mexico” do so because, e.g., they think 98 is nearer to 100 than vice versa? It seems to me that “approximately 100” and “like the US” have an obvious advantage over “approximately 98” and “like Mexico”: 100 is a nice-round-number, one that people are immediately familiar with the rough size of and that’s easy to calculate with; the US is a nation everyone knows (or thinks they do).

I bet there really is a bias here, but that observation doesn’t strike me as very good evidence for it. The rival explanations are too good. (The example about disease in ducks and robins is much better.)

g Feb 5, 2008, 10:33 PM
1 point
on: Torture vs. Dust Specks
Jeffrey wrote: To me, this specific exercise reduces to a simpler question: Would it be better (more ethical) to torture individual A for 50 years, or inflict a dust speck on individual B? Gosh. The only justification I can see for that equivalence would be some general belief that badness is simply independent of numbers. Suppose the question were: Which is better, for one person to be tortured for 50 years or for everyone on earth to be tortured for 49 years? Would you really choose the latter? Would you not, in fact, jump at the chance to be the single person for 50 years if that were the only way to get that outcome rather than the other one?

In any case: since you now appear to be conceding that it’s possible for someone to prefer TORTURE to SPECKS for reasons other than a childish desire to shock, are you retracting your original accusation and analysis of motives? … Oh, wait, I see you’ve explicitly said you aren’t. So, you know that one leading proponent of the TORTURE option actually does care about humanity; you agree (if I’ve understood you right) that utilitarian analysis can lead to the conclusion that TORTURE is the less-bad option; I assume you agree that reasonable people can be utilitarians; you’ve seen that one person explicitly said s/he’d be willing to be the one tortured; but in spite of all this, you don’t retract your characterization of that view as shocking; you don’t retract your implication that people who expressed a preference for TORTURE did so because they want to show how uncompromisingly rationalist they are; you don’t retract your implication that those people don’t appreciate that real decisions have real effects on real people. I find that … well, “fairly shocking”, actually.

(It shouldn’t matter, but: I was not one of those advocating TORTURE, nor one of those opposing it. If you care, you can find my opinions above.)

g Feb 5, 2008, 1:24 AM
3 points
on: Torture vs. Dust Specks
And we should be wary to select something orthodox for fear of provoking shock and outrage. Do you have any reason to believe that the people who say they prefer TORTURE to SPECKS are motivated by the desire to prove their rationalist credentials, or that they don’t appreciate that their decisions have real consequences?

g Jan 11, 2008, 2:00 AM
0 points
on: Beautiful Math
Josh, if you think about a picture like the one Eliezer drew (but in however many dimensions you like) it’s kinda obvious that the leading term in the difference between two n-cubes consists of n (n-1)-cubes, one per dimension. So the leading term in the next difference is n(n-1) (n-2)-cubes, and so on. But that doesn’t really give the n! thing at a glance. I’m not convinced that anything to do with nth differences can really be seen at a glance without some more symbolic reasoning intervening.

James Bach, I suspect that the really good mathematicians can’t be had for cheap because doing mathematics is so important to them, and the quite good mathematicians can’t be had for cheap because they’ve taken high-paying jobs in finance or software or other domains where a mathematical mind is useful. But maybe it depends on what you count as “cheap” and what fraction of the mathematician’s time you want to take up with tutoring...

Isabel, I think perhaps differentiation really is easier in some sense than differencing, not least because the formulae are simpler. Maybe that stops being true if you take as your basic objects not n^k but n(n-1)...(n-k+1) or something, but it’s hard to see the feeling that n^k is simpler than that as mere historical accident.

g Jan 8, 2008, 11:47 PM
2 points
on: Absolute Authority
Eliezer’s use of “the one” is not an error or a Matrix reference, it’s a deliberate echo of an ancient rabbinical trope. (Right, Eliezer?)

g Dec 31, 2007, 1:07 AM
1 point
on: Cultish Countercultishness
denis bider, I thought Eliezer’s use of “the one” was a deliberate echo of a rabbinical or Talmudic idiom, though I’m not sure how I got that idea and my google-fu isn’t sufficient to verify or refute it. … Ah, but take a look e.g. at page 8 of this book.

g Dec 31, 2007, 12:53 AM
1 point
on: My Strange Beliefs
Incidentally, Al Cellier, what on earth is scientology doing in your list? It has (so far as I can see) nothing in common with the other items in the list, either in terms of shared beliefs or shared adherents. Are you just trying to annoy any singularitarians and transhumanists who are reading what you write?

g Dec 31, 2007, 12:51 AM
1 point
on: My Strange Beliefs
Eliezer, I don’t think your story would have been appreciably weakened if you’d just deleted the words “to talk about the Singularity”. On the other hand, I also don’t see any reason why you should have to avoid mentioning Your Strange Beliefs either. Also: surely the conjunction fallacy is not a bias, but a symptom of a bias. (The bias in question being more or less a special case of the availability heuristic: the more detail we’re provided with, the easier it is to imagine whatever-it-is.)

burger flipper and Zubon, I think (1) Eliezer’s thought processes are quite unusual and (2) his claimed thought processes on the two occasions mentioned by bf are (no more than) quite unusual, which to my mind makes them unsurprising and unsuspicious.

Overcoming Cryonics, singularitarianism seems to me to lack a number of important characteristics that almost all things commonly called religions share, so however wrong or irrational it may be the term “religion” seems unhelpful. (I find that applying the term “religion” to things that aren’t commonly regarded as religions generally produces more heat than light.) Likewise for cryonics, life-extensionism and transhumanism more generally. All of which, incidentally, seem to me to be quite separate things, which I agree makes it interesting that they seem usually to get accepted or rejected as a group.

… If they do, that is; I realise that my evidence for this is very thin. Anyone have any figures, or even more extensive anecdotal evidence? Do people who sign up for cryonics believe in the Singularity more often than they should if the only factor is that the Singularity might make signing up for cryonics a better bet? (Etc.)

g Dec 26, 2007, 12:16 PM
0 points
on: The Amazing Virgin Pregnancy
K Larson, I think Eliezer was wrong about bad political jokes, for two reasons. Firstly, a joke depends on its context, and it may not be possible to depoliticize a joke without losing something essential in the context. Secondly, like it or not, most of us do find it funny to see a disliked powerful figure get their comeuppance, which means that when assessing how good a joke is it’s an error to penalize it for getting some of its laughs that way.

(But he was right when he said that finding what would otherwise be a bad joke funny is evidence that its target is playing the Hated Enemy role for you. Eliezer has been quite open about the fact that he greatly dislikes religion.)

And, for what it’s worth, I think Eliezer’s little drama does introduce one idea that not everyone’s thought of (I don’t claim that it’s new, but novelty as such isn’t all that valuable): that preservation of self-esteem might be an element in why the virgin-birth story succeeded. For what it’s worth, though, I think it much more likely to have arisen some time after the events themselves than to have been made up on the spot.)

g Dec 26, 2007, 12:38 AM
1 point
on: The Amazing Virgin Pregnancy
Joseph, I think the externals of the Christmas and Easter stories (virgin birth arranged by God; agony, death, resurrection, again arranged by God) are pretty much equally coherent. (Coherence isn’t their problem.) But the point of each story, for Christians, is something much harder to swallow: Christmas is supposed to be about the Incarnation (with Jesus somehow being entirely human, just as much as we are, and entirely God, etc.) and Easter about the Atonement (where the whole death-and-resurrection thing somehow enables God to forgive the sins of humanity when he couldn’t before). Both seem pretty incoherent to me.

They both make good stories, if you don’t think too hard about how they’re supposed to work. I’m not sure that has much to do with their coherence. (Take a look at the “explanation” in TLTWATW for the Easter-like event. Lewis isn’t even trying to deal with the really doubtfully-coherent bits, but he still resorts to entirely arbitrary stuff about Deep Magic and Deeper Magic.)

It’s quite well established that stories tend to feel more plausible if they include a wealth of details, even though the presence of those details actually makes the story less probable. (It’s more likely that you’ll be abducted by aliens than that you’ll be abducted by aliens so that they can perform weird sexual experiments on you.) So I’d be very hesitant about taking the fact that a story can be told satisfyingly as a sign that it’s less improbable, or more coherent, than a story that can’t be told so satisfyingly.

g Dec 25, 2007, 7:35 PM
3 points
on: The Amazing Virgin Pregnancy
Jey, I think the dichotomy between religious and other beliefs (in how much offence disagreement causes) isn’t so stark as it’s sometimes painted. Random example: US politics; how would a staunch Reaganite Republican react to the suggestion that Reagan’s policies were all deliberately designed simply to funnel money to his big-business pals? For that matter, how do biologists generally react when creationists accuse them (in effect) of a gigantic conspiracy to suppress the truth? I think there’s at least some offence taken in both cases, and those accusations (rather than mere disagreement) seem to me to be parallel to Eliezer’s story.

Caledonian, we should respect people who have daft beliefs for the same reason(s) as we respect other people for. Someone who views people as mere repositories of beliefs, and doles out respect solely on that basis, should not respect people whose beliefs are, on balance, daft. I don’t think that’s how most people operate. And having some daft beliefs isn’t the same as having daft-on-balance beliefs.

Eliezer, I think you improved the story when you softened the suggestion of extreme promiscuity on Mary’s part. The bit about crucifixion is (to my taste) an unsuccessful flourish, not least because (apologies for literal-mindedness here) the Romans would not have crucified someone for having his mother claim he was conceived by direct divine intervention. But having the friend be called Betty is a nice touch. (Wasn’t she supposed to be a relation, not just a friend?)

g Dec 22, 2007, 1:08 PM
9 points
0
on: False Laughter
Only because you think of Japanese schoolgirls and tentacle monsters once a minute.