Jeff Kottalam, I’d also like to be directed to such claims and claim justifications (there’s a protean claim justification on my blog). I’ll resist the temptation of the thread-jacking bait that constitutes your last sentence, and encourage you -and Eliezer- to join me on my blog to continue the conversation on this topic.
Hopefully_Anonymous2
Karma: 69
Eliezer, not bothering to go after a goal may fall into that category. For example, it’s reasonable to choose to live an average life, because one is probably mistaken if one thinks one is likely to have strongly positively deviant outcomes in life, such as becoming a billionaire, or procreating with a 1 in a million beauty, or winning a nobel prize for one’s academic contributions, or becoming an A list celebrity. So one may choose never to invest in going after these goals, and devote the balance of one’s time and energy to optimizing one’s odds of maintaining a median existence, in terms of achievements and experiences. I could name people who seem to be doing that, but you’ve never heard of them.
Eliezer, Actually, I’d like to read good critiques of descriptions of corporations as superintelligent (or more nuanced versions of that assertion/theory, such as that some corporations may be intelligent, and more intelligent than individual humans).
Where can I find such critiques?
Eliezer, I’m using transparency to mean people wearing lab coats, or making great public displays of doubt being open and honest to themselves and others about why they’re doing so. I think it’s a standard usage of the word.
Eliezer,
http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/174_07_020401/mvdw/mvdw.html
Particularly scary sentence:
“And yet, the practice of medicine involves more than its subservience to evidence or science. It also involves issues such as the meaning of service and feelings of professional pride.”
PS I love this line for the double scoop of transparency: “Making a great public display of doubt to convince yourself that you are a rationalist, will do around as much good as wearing a lab coat.”
A great post (in a series of great recent posts from Eliezer), and so far the comments on this post are very strong too.
Great post.
Richard, I share your concerns, as expressed in past posts to this blog. Great to see someone else (non-anonymously?) expressing them. I have a longer response on my anonymous blog.
Eliezer, it’s a good point, and hopefully writings like these will get the skeptic community (much larger than the reduce existential risk community) buzzing about “bayesian reasoning” as the proper contrast to religion. But it seems to me that religion has already been slayed many, many times by public intellectuals. The cutting edge areas to address, the “hard” areas, are things like universal adult enfranchisement to select policy makers and juries as finders of fact.
Bob, I take it you’re not the deceased kiwi atmospheric scientist Robert “Bob” Unwin. But very high quality commentary. I hope that you start an blog to consolidate your observations under this name/pseudonym (as I have done with mine).
Michael, how about the point that you’re (rather explicitly now) picking a point upon which to manufacture in-groups and out-groups. In-group: those of us who get motivations for execution. Out-group: those who get honor killings.
The in-groups and out-groups change if the point to get is abrahamic monotheism, or if the point to get is state-sanctioned punitive killings. It seems to me that you’re picking one that’s particularly salient either to you or to what you imagine your audience to be. I think this gets to the belief as attire/beliefs as cheers for teams. It’s an attempt to pick teams, but I think the implied in-groups and out-groups are at least in theory contestible.
A bit tangentially, I think teams themselves can be an effective (the most effective?) way to construct hierarchical privilege. The people on the field vs. the people on the bench (or the people regulated to the audience) of the two teams.
In terms of overcoming bias, I think understanding and when necessary countering these phenomena is important primarily to the degree that they warp decision-making or increase economic waste/existential risk.
Michael, I think your example is interestingly rooted in an implied in-group/out-group construction that construction Americans in a flattering way. Consider that you contrast honor killings with forcing kids to go to law school or day camp -that won’t necessarily result in their death. It’s a flattering contrast that I think constructs America as Western and honor killers as culturally Middle Eastern. But, if we contrasts cultures that approve of state-sanctioned killing of people for moral transgressions, America and the nations of the honor-killers are now in the same group, with Western Europe (and much of the rest of the world) in the other group. Incidentally, I’m not opposed to state-sanctioned killing, but I think it would be more rational for the penalty to start with doing it to to individuals to the extent it will prevent future great economic waste/increase in existential risk, rather than to punish premeditated murder of a small number of people or purported extramarital/premarital sex.
I think questioning the Alabama bar analogy is useful within the context of this post. Whose attire is a belief in the value of giving primacy skepticism, critical thinking, etc.? According to Eliezer’s performance in the OP, it’s not the attire of either Alabama bar patrons or “muslim terrorist suicide bombers” -and both of those may signal more generally, the losers of the American Civil War and non-white brown people. In short, I think there may be a gentrification of critical thinking: it’s reserved for an in-group, perhaps in particular northeastern anglo-saxon and ashkenazi jewish male intellectuals, or an even more narrow archetypal definition that might be reducible to zero actual people. I’m interested in the degree to which our behavior might be governed by aligning with and contesting these archetypes. Including which beliefs as attire to wear (it’s perhaps an archetype alignment for Steven Hawkings and Richard Dawkins to claim to be skeptical about religion. It would probably not be an archetype alignment for Oprah to publicly wear such belief attire, even if in fact she was a crypto-skeptic).
This post may meander a bit but I think Eliezer’s post (and some of the criticisms of it) are thought provoking and may be getting us closer to a more real world, real time model of how bias and belief is operating in the world we live in.
Silas, My opinion: you seem invested in using “muslim terrorists” for in-group/out-group construction, and I think it’s coloring (biasing?) your analysis.
Michael, great criticism of an element of Eliezer’s post.
Eliezer, Brilliant post, in my opinion. Clarifying and edifying. I’m looking forward to where you’re going to go with this analysis of how bias and belief operate.
Eliezer, first, really great topic. I think it will help move this blog to new and fertile ground. Secondly, in this particular case, I think Cole has a very plausible theory. If this person wanted to rise above being just one person on a panel, to a person in the key diaelectical exchange with the entire room, it might have been a good strategy for them to try to bait the room by professing, to the point of mass irritation, a contrarian stance.
It would be interesting to see she would adjust strategies in a room filled with pagan scientists. If she’s completely flexible in external presentation of self, and attention-maximizing, she might then claim to be a fundamentalist christian?
Good catch, Pseudonymous. Robin, my guess is that they’re crypto-skeptics, performing for their self-perceived comparative economic/social advantage. Eliezer, please don’t make something that will kill us all.
Eliezer, Very interesting post. I’ll try to respond when I’ve had time to read it more closely and to digest it.
well, I googled superintelligence and corporations and this came up with the top result for an articulated claim that corporations are superintelligent:
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/2005/07/understanding-coming-singularity.html#112232394069813120
The top result for an articulated claim that corporations are not superintelligent came from our own Nick Bostrom:
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:4SF3hsyMvasJ:www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai.pdf+corporations+superintelligent&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us
Nick Bostrom “A superintelligence is any intellect that is vastly outperforms the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom, and social skills.1This definition leaves open how the superintelligence is implemented – it could be in a digital computer, an ensemble of networked computers, cultured cortical tissue, or something else.”
If one is defining superintelligent as able to beat any human in any field, then I think it’s reasonable to say that no corporations currently behave in a superintelligent manner. But that doesn’t mean that the smartest corporations aren’t smarter than the smartest humans. It may mean that it’s just not rational for them to engage in those specific tasks. Anyways, the way corporations operate, one wouldn’t attempt, as a unit, to be more socially skilled than Bill Clinton. It would just pay to utilize Bill Clinton’s social skills.
So Nick’s point is interesting, but I don’t think it’s an ending point, it’s a starting or midway point in the analysis of networked groups of humans (and nonhuman computers, etc.) as potentially distinct intelligences, in my opinion.
Here are some more personal thoughts on this in a recent blog post of mine:
http://hopeanon.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/08/do-archetypes-e.html