I am the co founder of and researcher at the quantitative long term strategy organization Convergence (see here for our growing list of publications). Over the last sixteen years I have worked with MIRI, CFAR, EA Global, and Founders Fund, and done work in EA strategy, fundraising, networking, teaching, cognitive enhancement, and AI safety research. I have a MS degree in computer science and BS degrees in computer science, mathematics, and physics.
JustinShovelain
Karma: 601
Causes of disagreements
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
-- Albert Einstein
Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven.
-- Edward de Bono
In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.
-- Edward de Bono
Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled ‘wrong’.
-- Raymond Smullyan
From pwno: “Aren’t true theories defined by how useful they are in some application?”
My definition of “usefulness” was built with the express purpose of relating the truth of theories to how useful they are and is very much a context specific temporary definition (hence “define:”). If I had tried to deal with it directly I would have had something uselessly messy and incomplete, or I could have used a true but also uninformative expectation approach and hid all of the complexity. Instead, I experimented and tried to force the concepts to unify in some way. To do so I stretched the definition of usefulness pretty much to the breaking point and omitted any direct relation to utility functions. I found it a useful thought to think and hope you do as well even if you take issue with my use of the name “usefulness”.
define: A theory’s “truthfulness” as how much probability mass it has after appropriate selection of prior and applications of Bayes’ theorem. It works as a good measure for a theory’s “usefulness” as long as resource limitations and psychological side effects aren’t important.
define: A theory’s “usefulness” as a function of resources needed to calculate its predictions to a certain degree of accuracy, the “truthfulness” of the theory itself, and side effects. Squinting at it, I get something roughly like: usefulness(truthfulness, resources, side effects) = truthfulness * accuracy(resources) + messiness(side effects)
So I define “usefulness” as a function and “truthfulness” as its limiting value as side effects go to 0 and resources go to infinity. Notice how I shaped the definition of “usefulness” to avoid mention of context specific utilities; I purposefully avoided making it domain specific or talking about what the theory is trying to predict. I did this to maintain generality.
(Note: For now I’m polishing over the issue of how to deal with abstracting over concrete hypotheses and integrating the properties of this abstraction with the definitions)
I agree that it may plausibly be argued that the difference should rarely fall into the small margin: U(good name) - U(bad name) (up to varying priors, utility functions, …). However, should people calculate to the point that they can resolve differences of that order of magnitude? A fast and dirty heuristic may be the way to go practically speaking; the difference in utility would be less than the utility lost in calculating it.
Is this whole bias caused by the exposure effect? Would there be any obstacle in unifying the two? Do people also prefer to live in towns that are associated with their parents’ names? Do people who fall for this effect also name their pets or children after themselves to a greater extent?
I do not agree with all interpretations of the quote but primed by:
I interpreted it charitably with “critical” loosely implying “worth thinking about” in contrast to vague ideas that are not even wrong. Furthermore, from thefreedictionary.com definition of critical, “1. Inclined to judge severely and find fault.”, vague statements may be considered useless and so judged severely but much of the time they are also slippery in that they must be broken down into precise disjoint “meaning sets” where faults can be found. So vague ideas cannot necessarily be criticized directly in the fault finding sense. (Wide concepts that have useful delimitations in contrast to arbitrary ill-formed vague ones can be useful and are a powerful tool in generalization. In informal contexts these two meanings of vague overlap).