Psychohistorian

Karma: 3,417

Psychohistorian 5 Nov 2014 15:35 UTC
0 points
on: The Truth and Instrumental Rationality
I echo people’s comments about the impropriety of the just-so story.

The analogy is problematic. At best, it proves “there is an possible circumstance where a fairly poorly thought-out instrumentally rational belief is inferior to a true one. Such an example is fundamentally incapable of proving the universal claim that truth is always superior. It’s also a bizarre and unrealistic example. On top of that, it actually ends in the optimal outcome.

The actor in the hypothetical likely made the correct utilitarian decision in the terms you assume. The moral thing to do for a drowning person is save them. But if you saved these people, you’d all die anyways. If you don’t save them, it seems like they’ll almost-drown until they pass out from exhaustion, then drown. Or they’ll be killed by the approaching deadly threat. So without more information, there is no realistic possibilitythey survive anyways. This, you actually did the right thing and soared yourself the emotional anguish of making a hard decion.

Psychohistorian 2 Jan 2013 1:23 UTC
3 points
in reply to: MugaSofer’s comment on: You can’t signal to rubes
My objections would indeed not apply if a new term were used. You can define a new term however you like; that’s the point of making a new term. You can’t just declare that a commonly used term has a specific meaning without providing some justification for abandoning its other existing meanings.

If I wanted to argue that the definition of “bachelor” is “an unmarried man,” I could do so rather easily, by citing this for example. If I were arguing over what counts as “theft,” I could offer an argument as to why a particular act should or should not fit under the general definition. An argument like the OP’s could theoretically include evidence (of common usage, of confusion, etc.) or argumentation, but the OP’s post does not really seem to do this. It declares, “The definition should be X” and then rejects certain usages as not fitting the definition. If you’re using an extremely common word like “signaling,” you don’t get to arbitrarily redefine it.

Psychohistorian 2 Jan 2013 1:15 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Patrick’s comment on: You can’t signal to rubes

we’re no longer talking about signalling as it was originally conceived.

The word “signal” dates back to the 14th century. The use of the word as a verb dates back to at least the 17th century. The specific meaning you are trying to use seems to have started in the mid-to-late 20th century. That’s the issue. Signaling means what you say it means, but it also has a broader meaning. If I do an action that I wouldn’t do were it not for the fact that others observe me doing it, it seems very likely that part of my motivation is signaling. The manager clearly qualifies for this, as she would not be “acting decisively” but for the fact that she is being observed. (I also think that Gresham’s Law is the wrong one, or that you need a bit of an explanation to tie it into this behaviour, but that’s besides the point; the fact that there is a more precise name for a problem does not make that the only name for the problem.).

Unenforceable pre-commitments are still precommitments. If I promise never to cheat on my spouse again, despite a long history of cheating, I’ve made a commitment. It’s not a very credible commitment, but it still belongs in the set labeled, “commitments.” If you define “commitment” to only count “credible commitment,” you’ve essentially created a new word.

As with any debate over definitions, this can get circular rather quickly. My point is this: if you want people to use the word “signal” to mean something very specific, and to abandon the conventional use of the word, you need to provide a viable alternative definition, and you need to explain why it would be more productive to abandon the conventional use of the term. I do not think your definition is viable, because it necessarily involves an arbitrary cost threshold. Even if your definition were viable, I don’t see how you’ve shown that there is a problem with the conventional use of the term. Yes, there are different types of signals that differ in important ways, but I don’t see why this warrants completely changing how we use the term, rather than specifying weak vs. strong signals.

Psychohistorian 1 Jan 2013 10:08 UTC
45 points
on: You can’t signal to rubes
You’ve basically come up with four criteria that describe the use of the word “signal” in a highly specific context—traits that exist for pure signalling purposes in evolution or game theory—and then decided, arbitrarily, that this is the one true meaning of “signal.” I do not think you have provided adequate evidence or argument to back this claim up.

If everyone around me is a Republican and I am not, it might make sense that I would do things that would signal that I am a Republican, even if these are very cheap and have obvious positive returns. Your definition would not allow this—if it is cheap and has obvious positive returns, it is not “signaling” to you. What you’re saying is that if I send a birthday card to a coworker I hate, then I am not “signaling” that I like that person because it’s too cheap to send the card.

It may make sense to speak of weak or strong signals, or reliable or unreliable or misleading signals. But you’ve arbitrarily said that the word applies only when a certain arbitrary threshold is crossed (your 2 and 4).

Incidentally, your theory might actually work if 4 were eliminated and 2 read “the behaviour is more likely to occur if you possess a certain characteristic than if you do not.” This would cover my birthday card example—it’s cheap, but I’m more likely to do it if I like the person, so it does signal liking the person. But this change would also fix the counter-productive manager. She’s doing things that she is more likely to do if she is decisive and in charge. Since she’s being evaluated on those criteria, and not “good manager-ness”—which is not generally observable—it would make sense that she would choose to give those signals rather than not. But revising the theory appropriately seems to nullify most or all of your objections.
What links here?
- Vaniver's comment on You can’t signal to rubes by Patrick (1 Jan 2013 16:57 UTC; 14 points)

Psychohistorian 11 Dec 2012 6:01 UTC
17 points
on: Replaceability as a virtue
Tl;dr—rent seeking is bad, m’kay?

This was a interesting read, but it’s rather narrowly focused. If Anne were a doctor, then the greater her skill at surgery, the less replaceable she would be. For any occupation, the more skilled a person, the less replaceable she becomes. Replace ability isn’t really the relevant metric. Rather, Dr. Anne may have the option to teach other people her surgical skill, increasing her replaceability and reducing theirs. But teaching people a useful skill is obviously altruistic; this doesn’t turn on replaceability. Likewise, doing a good job is more altruistic than doing a bad job (when there’s no reward). Hence, complex database Anne is less altruistic than friendly database Anne because she’s doing her job worse. The reason replaceability isn’t discussed is because I don’t think it really adds much, especially since one should, generally, act to become more skilled and thus less replaceable.

Psychohistorian 10 Jul 2012 19:20 UTC
34 points
on: What Is Signaling, Really?
A simple, interesting, complementary fact is that the cigarette manufacturers all saw profits skyrocket when laws started banning cigarette ads on TV. All of their products are largely interchangeable, so advertising doesn’t tell you anything new about the product, it just builds brand loyalty. So it saves everyone costly signalling.

It’s also extremely difficult for new cigarette manufacturers to break into the market. It’s very hard to use a really clever ad campaign to increase your market share when you’re not allowed to advertise on TV. Curiously, this may actually harm consumers, in that it prevents competition from lowering cigarette prices. I suppose this analogizes to the idea that if everyone were suddenly banned from displaying their wealth, it would be very difficult to woo Helen of Troy unless you had clearly shown your wealth prior to the ban. Thus, banning signalling can lead to losses, as the wealthiest suitor may be unable to woo Helen if he came to the game too late.

Psychohistorian 19 Mar 2012 21:54 UTC
9 points
on: Fallacies as weak Bayesian evidence
I don’t think this is an adequate rendition of a circular argument. A circular argument is one that contains a conclusion that is identical to a premise; it should in principle be very easy to detect, provided your argument-evaluator is capable of comprehending language efficiently.

“God exists because the Bible says so, and the Bible is the word of God,” is circular, because the Bible can’t be the word of God unless God exists. This is not actually the argument you evaluate however; the one you evaluate is, “The bible exists and claims to be the word of God; therefore it is more likely that God exists.” That argument is not circular (though it is not very strong).

The other argument is just… weirdly phrased. Cloud-trails are caused by things. Significant other evidence suggests those things also have certain properties. We call those things “electrons.” There’s nothing circular about that. You’ve just managed to phrase it in an odd manner that is structurally similar to a circular argument by ignoring the vast network of premises that underlies it.

Similarly, slippery slopes simply fail because they don’t articulate probabilities or they assign far higher probabilities than are justified by the evidence. “Legalizing marijuana may herald the Apocalypse” is true for certain, extremely small values of “may.” If you say it will do so, then your argument should fail because it simply lacks supporting evidence. I’m not sure there’s as much action here as you say.

Psychohistorian 18 Feb 2012 21:12 UTC
5 points
in reply to: taw’s comment on: Hearsay, Double Hearsay, and Bayesian Updates
If your point is that there are a lot of people locked up for violating laws that are basically stupid, you’re absolutely right.

But that issue is largely irrelevant to the subject of the primary post, which is the accuracy of courts. If the government bans pot, the purpose of evidence law is to determine whether people are guilty of that crime with accuracy.

In other words, your criticism of the normative value of the American legal system is spot-on; we imprison far more people than we should and we have a lot of stupid statutes. But since this context is a discussion of the accuracy of evidentiary rules and court procedure, your criticism is off-topic.

Psychohistorian 18 Feb 2012 7:50 UTC
2 points
in reply to: taw’s comment on: Hearsay, Double Hearsay, and Bayesian Updates
It is self contradictory on its face . Compare these statements:

Literally 100% of people who ever lived have done multiple things which unfriendly legal system might treat as crimes, starting from simple ones like watching youtube videos uploaded without consent of their copyright owners, making mistakes on tax forms, reckless driving, defamation, hate speech, and going as far as the legal system wants to go.

US has extraordinarily high number of prisoners per capita. Looking at crime rates alone, it does not have extraordinarily high levels of serious crime per capita. There’s no way most people in prisons can be anything but innocent (or “guilty” of minor and irrelevant “crimes” pretty much everybody is “guilty” of and persecuted on legal system’s whims).

Unless you believe that young black men in US are the most criminal group in history of the world, most of them who are in prisons must be innocent by pure statistics.

The first statement provides a complete alternative explanation for the second two. It is entirely possible to believe that (A) there are far too many crimes, (B) police and prosecutors are biased against black people, and this fully explains why there are so many black people in prison without a single one of them needing to be innocent. Similarly, you say that, given crime rates and incarceration rates, some people must be innocent. Again, this is undermined by the fact that you say everyone is guilty of something. You just can’t argue that everyone is a criminal, and then argue that high incarceration rates must necessarily be attributable to a high rate of convicting innocent persons. They may both be true, but you have no basis to infer the latter given the former.

To the extent that you disclaim this by saying that people are “guilty” of minor “crimes,” your argument becomes largely circular, and is still not supported by evidence. What percentage of thieves/murderers/rapists/etc. are actually caught? How long are sentences? Combine a higher crime rate with a higher catch rate and longer sentences and you easily get a huge prison population without innocent people being convicted. I don’t claim to know if this is the case, but you do, so you need to back it up.

There are good reasons to believe few trials that happen are extremely far from any kind of fairness, and they’re stacked to give persecution an advantage. Just compare massive funding of police and prosecutors with puny funding of defense attorneys.

Psychohistorian 17 Feb 2012 20:17 UTC
4 points
in reply to: taw’s comment on: Hearsay, Double Hearsay, and Bayesian Updates
You confuse different parts of the justice system, and your criticism is internally self-contradictory. If everyone who ever lived is guilty of something, then high or racially disparate incarceration rates need not catch innocent people. The fact that this occurs is more an indictment of the laws in place and the people who prosecute them, not the courts that adjudicate them.

Put another way, if breathing were a crime, then everyone convicted of it would in fact be guilty. If there were a lot of black men convicted of it, more so than other races, it would likely be due to different rates of prosecution, given how easy the charge would be to prove this is bad, but it is a criticism of the wrong part of the government. It would be like blaming the mayor for the ineffectiveness of the postal service (the former is the city government, the latter is federal).

Edited to clarify: I am referring to the value of our adversarial method and our rules of evidence / constitutional protections—the mechanics of how a trial works. There is an entirely separate issue of prosecutorial discretion and unequal police enforcement and overly draconian laws, which certainly lead to the problems being discussed here. But the entire purpose of evidence law and courtroom proceedings generally is to determine if the person charged is in fact guilty. It is not to determine if the prosecution is charging the right people or if the laws are just or justly enforced. So this criticism seems misplaced.

Psychohistorian 17 Feb 2012 14:10 UTC
20 points
0
on: Hearsay, Double Hearsay, and Bayesian Updates
I am sorry I did not manage to comment on this earlier; I did not suspect it would get promoted.

In short, your treatment of hearsay, and how the legal system addresses it, is simply wrong. Most of what you talk about is actually about the Confrontation Clause. I don’t know if this is due to an intentional simplification of your examples, but the cases you use just don’t work that way.

The main case you talk about, Davis v. Washington, is not a case about hearsay; just look at the wikipedia summary. It is a case about the confrontation clause. This is a clause that says that those accused of crimes have the right to confront the witnesses against them; if someone talks to the police under certain circumstances, that testimony may not be entered. It does not matter how reliable it is. See Crawford v. Washington. The “indicia of reliability test” was abandoned in Crawford, because it was completely circular—it was compared to doing away with a jury trial because the defendant was obviously guilty.

More generally, there is almost never a balancing test in hearsay. Hearsay is a series of rules that are applied systematically. Out of court statements are considered unreliable principally because the declarant is not under oath; there is no particular reason to believe they were being truthful. There is a series of rules that allow certain statements in for this purpose. The idea behind these rules is that they indicate the evidence is reliable. However, they operate purely formalistically: if something someone said was a statement for the purpose of medical diagnosis, it is admissible hearsay, even if the circumstances strongly demonstrate they were lying. The jury is permitted to figure that out.

The basic idea behind hearsay, and indeed behind evidence law generally, is that certain statement are more likely to mislead the jury than to aid in finding the truth. However, your whole discussion of “indicia of reliability” seems to me to address an obsolete doctrine on the Confrontation Clause. Hearsay, in the vast majority of circumstances, does not involve any kind of balancing test or similar determination. It either meets a rule, or it doesn’t (though there is catch-all rule that gives the court some discretion—it can actually be somewhat problematic, because courts often get things wrong).

As to the issue of double hearsay—which I am used to hearing referred to as “hearsay within hearsay,” a per se rule against a certain number of levels doesn’t make a lot of sense. In the example you use, the bottom level of hearsay is very likely inadmissible; that’s enough to keep it out. But the circumstances under which one could admit multi-layer hearsay are pretty limited; it would have to have an applicable exception for every level. You don’t discuss any inadequacies with the exceptions, so I just don’t see why it follows that their repeat application should be unreliable.

Psychohistorian 4 Feb 2012 16:36 UTC
1 point
on: Is Sunk Cost Fallacy a Fallacy?
Content aside, you should generally avoid the first person as well as qualifiers and you should definitely avoid both, e.g. “I think it is interesting.” Where some qualifiers are appropriate, you often phrase them too informally, e.g. “perhaps it is more like,” would read much better as, “It is possible that,” or, “a possible explanation is.” Some first person pronouns are acceptable, but they should really only be used when the only alternative is an awkward or passive sentence.

The beginning paragraph of each subsection should give the reader a clear idea of the ultimate point of that subsection, and you would do well to include a roadmap of everything you plan to cover at the beginning.

I don’t know if this is the feedback you’re searching for or if the writing style is purposeful, just my two cents.

Psychohistorian 3 Feb 2012 5:19 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Risk aversion vs. concave utility function
I don’t mean obvious in the, “Why didn’t I think of that?” sense. I mean obvious in the trivial sense. When I say that it is circular, I don’t mean simply that the conclusion follows logically from the premises. That is the ultimate virtue of an argument. What I mean is that the conclusion is one of the premises. The definition of a rational person is one who maximizes their expected utility. Therefore, someone who is risk-averse with respect to utility is irrational; our definition of rational guarantees that this be so.

I certainly see why the overall issue leads to confusion and why people don’t see the problem instantly—the language is complex, and the concept of “utilons” folds a lot of concepts into itself so that it’s easy to lose track of what it really means. I don’t think this post really appreciates this issue, and it seems to me to be the deepest problem with this discussion. It reads like it is analyzing an actual problem, rather than unpacking an argument to show how it is circular, and I think the latter is the best description of the actual problem.

In other words, the article makes it easy to walk away without realizing that it is impossible for a rational person to be risk averse towards utility because it contradicts what we mean by “rational person.” That seems like the key issue here to me.

Psychohistorian 3 Feb 2012 3:54 UTC
2 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Risk aversion vs. concave utility function

Perhaps the point being made is less obvious to some others than it is to you. The same applies to many posts.

This is like a dismissive… compliment? I’m not sure how to feel!

Seriously, though, it doesn’t undermine my point. This article ultimately gets to the same basic conclusion, but does it in a very roundabout way. The definition of “utilitons,” converting outcomes into utilons eliminates risk-aversion. This extensive discussion ultimately makes the point that it’s irrational to be utilon risk averse, but it doesn’t really hit the bigger point that utilon risk aversion is fundamentally non-sensical. The fact that people don’t realize that there’s circular reasoning going on is all the more reason to point out that it is happening.

Psychohistorian 1 Feb 2012 6:15 UTC
2 points
on: Risk aversion vs. concave utility function
Your claim that a risk-averse agent cannot be rational is trivially true because it is purely circular.

You’ve defined a risk-averse agent as someone who does not maximize their expected utilons. The meaning of “rational” around these parts is, “maximizes expected utilons.” The fact that you took a circuitous route to make this point does not change the fact that it is trivial.

I’ll break down that point in case it’s non-obvious. Utilons do not exist in the real world—there is no method of measuring utilons. Rather, they are a theoretical construct you are employing. You’ve defined a rational agent as the one who maximizes the amount of utilons he acquires. You’ve specified a function as to how he calculates these, but the specifics of that function are immaterial. You’ve then shown that someone who does not rationally maximize these utilons is not a rational utilon maximizer.

Risk aversion with respect to paper clips or dollars is an empirical claim about the world. Risk aversion with respect to utilons is a claim about preference with respect to a theoretical construct that is defined by those preferences. It is not a meaningful discuss it, because the answer follows logically from the definition you have chosen.

Psychohistorian 30 Nov 2011 20:47 UTC
2 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]

“They are extremely rich and do either do not want a prenup or offer a desirable prenup package.”. In that case you either get a great marriage in the long term or you get a truckload of money in the somewhat shorter term.

This is not actually how it works if you get married without a prenup. You only get income made after the marriage; if they have lots of investments and don’t work, you probably get nothing. If they have a high salary, you may get a lot. If, that is, you’re in a community property state. If you’re not, you may not get a dime.

My phrasing was admittedly imprecise because my interest was “Will we have a stable marriage?” not “Will this marriage materially benefit me?” Obviously, “Someone credibly threatens to murder tens of thousands of people if you do not get married,” might also be a great reason, but I think from the context it’s obvious I wasn’t discounting such creative issues. Still, your “obvious” is, as a legal matter, not correct, and therefore hopefully not obvious.

Psychohistorian 30 Nov 2011 20:43 UTC
4 points
on: Uncertainty
While the probabilistic reasoning employed in the card question is correct and fits in with your overall point, it’s rather labor-intensive to actually think through.

In order to get two red cards, you need to pick the right pair of cards. Only one pair will do. There are six ways to pick a pair of cards out of a group of 4 (when, as here, order doesn’t matter). Therefore, the odds are ¹⁄₆, as one out of the six possible pairs you’ll pick will be the correct pair.

Similarly, we know the weatherperson correctly predicts 12.5% of days that will be rainy. We know that 20% of days will actually be raining. That gives us “12.5/20 = 5/8” pretty quickly. Grinding our way through all the P(X [ ~X) representation makes a simple and intuitive calculation look really intimidating.

I’m not entirely sure of your purpose in this sequence, but it seems to be to improve people’s probabilistic reasoning. Explaining probabilities through this long and detailed method seems guaranteed to fail. People who are perfectly comfortable with such complex explanations generally already get their application. People who are not so comfortable throw up their hands and stick with their gut. I suspect that a large part of the explanation of mathematical illiteracy is that people aren’t actually taught how to apply mathematics in any practical sense; they’re given a logically rigorous and formal proof in unnecessary detail which is too complex to use in informal reasoning.

Psychohistorian 20 Nov 2011 2:32 UTC
2 points
on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]

However, four months into the relationship, before much of this had happened, I proposed to her. I was always big on commitments. I felt that if you were dating someone, it was to eventually get married, assuming they were right for you.

I think a pretty good heuristic would be to never marry someone you have known less than a year. The only exceptions are if you’ve been married before or have been dating a rather long time and thus have a clear sense of what you’re looking for. Of course, plenty of people don’t know this.

Psychohistorian 3 Nov 2011 23:17 UTC
4 points
on: Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics
The whole goth guy/ alternative look point misses a significant part of the appeal. People (particularly men) who prominently display membership in a subculture often have a strong sense of self. This kind of self-confidence is generally attractive to women, so those who aren’t immediately put off by his group identity are likely attracted to that confidence and the charisma that goes with it.

Practically, this means that alternative styles only tend to work when they’re genuine and you’re comfortable with them. Someone who feels most natural in more conservative clothing may actually hurt themselves by trying niche appeal, because they need to belong to that niche.

Psychohistorian 31 Oct 2011 5:16 UTC
5 points
on: Amanda Knox: post mortem
Since I was randomly chosen to comment on this, I’ll throw in my two cents. I haven’t thought about too much and my first instinct was to trust whatever value judgements I had made at the time, which I thought were something like 5-5-95, but were actually 1-1-99. Since me-at-the-time was much more familiar than me-right-now, I’d still probably defer to his judgement; if anything, her exoneration and other evidence should move those numbers slightly closer to the extremes.