Mass_Driver

• Mass_DriverSep 8, 2014, 9:37 PM

  21 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Septem­ber 2014

  It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the human condition.

  On top of this knowledge, a liberal education should make certain habits of rationality second nature. Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.

  Steven Pinker, The New Republic 9/​4/​14

• Mass_DriverJul 22, 2014, 6:53 AM

  11 points

  in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes July 2014

  You’re...welcome? For what it’s worth, mainstream American legal ethics try to strike a balance between candor and advocacy. It’s actually not OK for lawyers to provide unabashed advocacy; lawyers are expected to also pay some regard to epistemic accuracy. We’re not just hired mercenaries; we’re also officers of the court.

  In a world that was full of Bayesian Conspiracies, where people routinely teased out obscure scraps of information in the service of high-stakes, well-concealed plots, I would share your horror at what you describe as “disclosing personal information.” Mathematically, you’re obviously correct that when I say anything about my client(s) that translates as anything other than a polite shrug, it has the potential to give my clients’ enemies valuable information. As a practical matter, though, the people I meet at dinner parties don’t know or care about my clients. They can’t be bothered to hack into my firm’s database, download my list of clients, hire an investigator to put together dossiers on each client, and then cross-reference the dossier with my remarks to revise their probability estimate that a particular client is faking his injury. Even if someone chose to go to all that trouble, nobody would buy the resulting information—the defense lawyers I negotiate with are mathematically illiterate. Finally, even if someone bought the resulting information, it’s not clear what the defense lawyers would do if they could confidently upgrade their estimate of the chance that Bob was faking his injury from 30% up to 60% -- would they tail him with a surveillance crew? They do that anyway. Would they drive a hard bargain in settlement talks? They do that anyway. Civil legal defense tactics aren’t especially sensitive to this kind of information.

  All of which is to say that I take my duties to my clients very seriously, and I would never amuse myself at a cocktail party in ways that I thought had more than an infinitesimal chance of harming them. If you prefer your advocates to go beyond a principle of ‘do no harm’ and live by a principle of ‘disclose no information’, and you are willing to pay for the extra privacy, then more power to you—but beware of lawyers who smoothly assure you that they would never disclose any client info under any circumstances. It’s a promise that’s easy to make and hard to verify.

• Mass_DriverJul 21, 2014, 11:34 PM

  17 points

  in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes July 2014

  Is that revelation grounds for a lawsuit, a criminal offense or merely grounds for disbarment?

  None of the above, really, unless you have so few murder cases that someone could plausibly guess which one you were referring to. I work with about 100 different plaintiffs right now, and my firm usually accepts any client with a halfway decent case who isn’t an obvious liar. Under those conditions, it’d be alarming if I told you that 100 out of 100 were telling the truth—someone’s bound to be at least partly faking their injury. I don’t think it undermines the justice system to admit as much in the abstract.

  If you indiscreetly named a specific client who you thought was guilty, though, that could get you a lawsuit, a criminal offense, and disbarment.

• Mass_DriverJul 11, 2014, 10:10 PM

  5 points

  in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Too good to be true

  I’m confused about how this works.

  Suppose the standard were to use 80% confidence. Would it still be surprising to see 60 of 60 studies agree that A and B were not linked? Suppose the standard were to use 99% confidence. Would it still be surprising to see 60 of 60 studies agree that A and B were not linked?

  Also, doesn’t the prior plausibility of the connection being tested matter for attempts to detect experimenter bias this way? E.g., for any given convention about confidence intervals, shouldn’t we be quicker to infer experimenter bias when a set of studies conclude (1) that there is no link between eating lithium batteries and suffering brain damage vs. when a set of studies conclude (2) that there is no link between eating carrots and suffering brain damage?

• Mass_DriverAug 5, 2013, 7:06 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: DanielH’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 25, chap­ter 96

  Yes, Voldemort could probably teach DaDA without suffering from the curse, and a full-strength Voldemort with a Hogwarts Professorship could probably steal the stone.

  I’m not sure either of those explains how Voldemort got back to full-strength in the first place, though. Did Voldemort fake the charred hulk of his body? And Harry forgot that apparent charred bodies aren’t perfectly reliable evidence of a dead enemy because his books have maxims like “don’t believe your enemy is dead until you see the body?” But then what was Voldemort doing between 1975 and 1990? He was winning the war until he tackled Harry; why would he suddenly decide to stop?

• Mass_DriverAug 2, 2013, 9:11 PM

  1 point

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 25, chap­ter 96

  Puzzle:

  Who is ultimately in control of the person who calls himself Quirrell?

  • Voldemort

  If Voldemort is possessing the-person-pretending-to-be-Quirrell using the path Dumbledore & co. are familiar with, or for that matter by drinking unicorn blood, then why isn’t Voldy’s magic noticeably weaker than before? Quirrell seems like he could at least hold his own against Dumbledore, and possibly defeat him.

  If Voldemort took control of the-person-pretending-to-be-Quirrell’s body outright using incredibly Dark magic, then why would Quirrell openly suggest that possibility to the DMLE Auror in Taboo Tradeoffs I?

  If Voldemort returned to life via the Philosopher’s Stone, then how did he get past the ‘legendary’ and ‘fantastic’ wards on the forbidden corridor without so much as triggering an alarm?

  • David Monroe

  If Monroe disappeared on purpose in 1975, and has been having random other international adventures since then, and has only just now decided to teach Battle Magic at Hogwarts (thereby ensuring his demise, per the Dark Lord’s curse on the position) because his zombie syndrome is worsening and he is worried about living out the year, then what is his purpose in teaching Battle Magic? Is it just for the fun of it? This seems unlikely; he is very serious about his subject and rarely indulges in jokes or in irrelevant scholastic diversions.

  Is it because he expects that teaching the students Battle Magic will help them learn to fight back and resist Dark wizards? Then why did he plan so poorly for his big Yuletide speech about resistance and unity as to allow Harry to seriously disrupt it? Could someone as intelligent as Monroe, whose major goal is to sway political opinion, really only give one big political speech and then, at that speech, fail to prevent one (admittedly precocious) student from giving a moderately persuasive opposing speech? Why not, e.g., cast a silent, wandless Silencio charm on Harry? Or simply inform him that he has 30 words in which to state his backup wish, or else it is forfeit? Or pretend to honor the wish that he would teach Defense against the Dark Arts next year? All of these alternatives (plus others) seem obviously better to me than tolerating such blatant interference with his primary goal.

  • Lucius Malfoy

  If he had those kinds of powers, he would wield them openly and just take over Britain. Also, it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t have been keeping a closer watch on his son, to the point where he would know if his son was involved in a duel and/​or sitting around freezing for six to eight hours.

  • Slytherin’s Monster

  It has mysteriously powerful lore from the ancient past, and there’s no firm evidence that it was killed or locked back in the Chamber of Secrets after Voldy broke in. In fact, the person who claims that Voldy’s last words to the Monster would have been Avada Kedavra is...Quirrell. Not exactly a trustworthy source if Quirrell is the Monster.

  OTOH, this would be ludicrously under-foreshadowed—canon!Monster was a non-sentient beast, and the only HPMOR foreshadowing for the Monster focused on its being very long lived and able to speak Parseltongue. It’s not clear how a rationalist would deduce, from available information, that the Monster was responsible—we have very little data on what the Monster is like, so it’s very hard to strongly match the actions we observe to the actions we expect from the Monster.

  • Albus Dumbledore

  Lots of pieces of weak evidence point here; Dumbledore and Quirrell are two of the highest-powered wizards around, and are two of the weirdest wizards around, and have roughly the same power level, so the hypothesis that says they are both caused by the same phenomenon gets a simplicity bonus. Dumbledore is frequently absent without a good explanation; Quirrell is frequently zombie-ish without a good explanation; Quirrell is zombieish more often as Dumbledore starts to get more energetic and activate the Order of the Pheonix; I cannot think of any scenes where both Dumbledore and Quirrell are being very active at exactly the same time. Sometimes Dumbledore expresses skepticism at something Quirrell says, but I cannot think of any examples of them engaging in magical cooperation or confrontation. If they are the same person, then it is convenient that Quirrell made Dumbledore promise not to investigate who Quirrell is.

  We know Dumbledore snuck into Harry’s room (in his own person) and left messages for Harry warning Harry not to trust Dumbledore; perhaps Dumbledore also turns into Quirrell and warns Harry in Quirrell’s body not to trust Dumbledore. It is a little unclear why Dumbledore would want to limit Harry’s trust in him, but it could have to do with the idea of heroic responsibility (nihil supernum) or even just standard psychology—if Quirrell and Dumbledore agree on something, even though Quirrell says not to trust Dumbledore, then Harry is very likely to believe it.

  It is hard to imagine Dumbledore murdering Hermione in cold blood, but, as Harry has been musing, you can only say “that doesn’t seem like his style” so many times before the style defense becomes extremely questionable. Dumbledore prevents Hermione from receiving a Time-Turner, was suspiciously absent at the time of the troll attack (but showed up immediately after it was complete, with just enough time in between to have obliviated Fred and George, who, conveniently, handed the Marauder’s map over to the Headmaster and then forgot all about it).

  OTOH, having Hermione attempt to kill Draco and then having the troll kill Hermione on school grounds is terrible for Dumbledore’s political agenda—he winds up losing support from the centrists over the attack on Draco, and losing support from everyone over incompetent security. The school, where he has been Headmaster for decades and where he must keep the Philosopher’s Stone, might even be closed. It’s hard to understand how putting his entire power base in grave jeopardy could be a deliberate plot on his part, nor is it easily explained in terms of feeling plot-appropriate (it doesn’t) or Dumbledore’s insanity (a fully general explanation).

Re­minder Memes

• Mass_DriverMay 13, 2013, 4:20 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: jtolds’s comment on: Post ridicu­lous munchkin ideas!

  Is there more to the Soylent thing than mixing off-the-shelf protein shake powder, olive oil, multivitamin pills, and mineral supplement pills and then eating it?

• Mass_DriverMay 10, 2013, 9:15 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes May 2012

  Isn’t there a very wide middle ground between (1) assigning 100% of your mental probability to a single model, like a normal curve and (2) assigning your mental probability proportionately across every conceivable model ala Solomonoff?

  I mean the whole approach here sounds more philosophical than practical. If you have any kind of constraint on your computing power, and you are trying to identify a model that most fully and simply explains a set of observed data, then it seems like the obvious way to use your computing power is to put about a quarter of your computing cycles on testing your preferred model, another quarter on testing mild variations on that model, another quarter on all different common distribution curves out of the back of your freshman statistics textbook, and the final quarter on brute-force fitting the data as best you can given that your priors about what kind of model to use for this data seem to be inaccurate.

  I can’t imagine any human being who is smart enough to run a statistical modeling exercise yet foolish enough to cycle between two peaks forever without ever questioning the assumption of a single peak, nor any human being foolish enough to test every imaginable hypothesis, even including hypotheses that are infinitely more complicated than the data they seek to explain. Why would we program computers (or design algorithms) to be stupider than we are? If you actually want to solve a problem, you try to get the computer to at least model your best cognitive features, if not improve on them. Am I missing something here?

• Mass_DriverFeb 2, 2013, 8:20 AM

  18 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Fe­bru­ary 2013

  What’s the percent chance that I’m doing it wrong?

• Mass_DriverJan 25, 2013, 10:00 PM

  24 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Jan­uary 2013

  I once heard a story about the original writer of the Superman Radio Series. He wanted a pay rise, his employers didn’t want to give him one. He decided to end the series with Superman trapped at the bottom of a well, tied down with kryptonite and surrounded by a hundred thousand tanks (or something along these lines). It was a cliffhanger. He then made his salary demands. His employers refused and went round every writer in America, but nobody could work out how the original writer was planning to have Superman escape. Eventually the radio guys had to go back to him and meet his wage demands. The first show of the next series began “Having escaped from the well, Superman hurried to...” There’s a lesson in there somewhere, but I’ve no idea what it is.

  -http://​​writebadlywell.blogspot.com/​​2010/​​05/​​write-yourself-into-corner.html

  I would argue that the lesson is that when something valuable is at stake, we should focus on the simplest available solutions to the puzzles we face, rather than on ways to demonstrate our intelligence to ourselves or others.

• Mass_DriverJan 25, 2013, 9:58 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: Mass_Driver’s comment on: Mo­ral­ity is Awesome

  Ironically, this is my most-upvoted comment in several months.

• Mass_DriverJan 25, 2013, 9:57 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: deathpigeon’s comment on: Mo­ral­ity is Awesome

  OK, so how else might we get people to gate-check the troublesome, philosophical, misleading parts of their moral intuitions that would have fewer undesirable side effects? I tend to agree with you that it’s good when people pause to reflect on consequences—but then when they evaluate those consequences I want them to just consult their gut feeling, as it were. Sooner or later the train of conscious reasoning had better dead-end in an intuitively held preference, or it’s spectacularly unlikely to fulfill anyone’s intuitively held preferences. (I, of course, intuitively prefer that such preferences be fulfilled.)

  How do we prompt that kind of behavior? How can we get people to turn the logical brain on for consequentialism but off for normative ethics?

• Mass_DriverJan 8, 2013, 12:42 AM

  40 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Mo­ral­ity is Awesome

  Given at least moderate quality, upvotes correlate much more tightly with accessibility /​ scope of audience than quality of writing. Remember, the article score isn’t an average of hundreds of scalar ratings—it’s the sum of thousands of ratings of [-1, 0, +1] -- and the default rating of anyone who doesn’t see, doesn’t care about, or doesn’t understand the thrust of a post is 0. If you get a high score, that says more about how many people bothered to process your post than about how many people thought it was the best post ever.

• Mass_DriverJan 7, 2013, 8:19 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: deathpigeon’s comment on: Mo­ral­ity is Awesome

  OK, let’s say you’re right, and people say “awesome” without thinking at all. I imagine Nyan_Sandwich would view that as a feature of the word, rather than as a bug. The point of using “awesome” in moral discourse is precisely to bypass conscious thought (which a quick review of formal philosophy suggests is highly misleading) and access common-sense intuitions.

  I think it’s fair to be concerned that people are mistaken about what is awesome, in the sense that (a) they can’t accurately predict ex ante what states of the world they will wind up approving of, or in the sense that (b) what you think is awesome significantly diverges from what I (and perhaps from what a supermajority of people) think is awesome, or in the sense that (c) it shouldn’t matter what people approve of, because the ‘right’ think to do is something else entirely that doesn’t depend on what people approve of.

  But merely to point out that saying “awesome” involves no conscious thought is not a very strong objection. Why should we always have to use conscious thought when we make moral judgments?

• Mass_DriverJan 6, 2013, 8:08 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: deathpigeon’s comment on: Mo­ral­ity is Awesome

  To say that something’s ‘consequentialist’ doesn’t have to mean that it’s literally forward-looking about each item under consideration. Like any other ethical theory, consequentialism can look back at an event and determine whether it was good/​awesome. If you going white-water rafting was a good/​awesome consequence, then your decision to go white-water rafting and the conditions of the universe that let you do so were good/​awesome.

• Mass_DriverDec 7, 2012, 2:13 AM

  6 points

  in reply to: gattsuru’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes De­cem­ber 2012

  Also, this book was a horrible agglomeration of irrelevant and un-analyzed factoids. If you’ve already read any two Malcolm Gladwell books or Freakonomics, It’d be considerably more educational to skip this book and just read the cards in a Trivial Pursuit box.

• Mass_DriverDec 6, 2012, 11:36 PM

  2 points

  on: Train Philoso­phers with Pearl and Kah­ne­man, not Plato and Kant

  The undergrad majors at Yale University typically follow lukeprog’s suggestion—there will be 20 classes on stuff that is thought to constitute cutting-edge, useful “political science” or “history” or “biology,” and then 1 or 2 classes per major on “history of political science” or “history of history” or “history of biology.” I think that’s a good system. It’s very important not to confuse a catalog of previous mistakes with a recipe for future progress, but for the same reasons that general history is interesting and worthwhile for the general public to know something about, the history of a given discipline is interesting and worthwhile for students of that discipline to look into.

• Mass_DriverDec 6, 2012, 11:33 PM

  6 points

  in reply to: lavalamp’s comment on: Train Philoso­phers with Pearl and Kah­ne­man, not Plato and Kant

  I honestly have no idea which, if any, of the reddit philosphers are trolling. It’s highly entertaining reading, though.

• Mass_DriverOct 16, 2012, 6:49 PM

  −2 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Oc­to­ber 2012

  We could bemoan these legacies, but it makes more sense to confront them head on, to consider just how we should live not in light of the bodies we wish we had but instead with the ones we are born with, bodies that evolved in the wild, thanks to ancestors who only just barely got away.

  http://​​www.slate.com/​​articles/​​health_and_science/​​human_evolution/​​2012/​​10/​​evolution_of_anxiety_humans_were_prey_for_predators_such_as_hyenas_snakes.2.html