Ronak

Karma: 263

Ronak 7 Jun 2015 20:10 UTC
0 points
on: Rationality is about pattern recognition, not reasoning
Oh this is nice. I’ve also come to realise this over time, ,in different words, and my mind is extremely tickled by how your formulation puts it on an equal footing with other non-explicit-rationality avenues of thought.

I would love to help you. I am very interested in a passion project right now. And we seem to be classifying similar things as hard-won realisations, though we have very different timelines for different things; talking to you might be all-round interesting for me.

Ronak 29 Nov 2014 9:18 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ike’s comment on: The Hostile Arguer
My steelman is this (without having read anything downstairs, so I apologise if there’s a better on extant): the world is a complicated place, and we all form beliefs based on the things we think are important in the world; and since we are all horrible reasoners, it’s impossible to believe about some things that they are important movers of the world without seeing it actually happen and viscerally feeling it change things.

Cognitive biases in yourself are like this, methinks. Your thought processes really need to be broken down repeatedly for you to be able to start seeing the subtle shifts happening inside you—and anticipating that they happen even when you don’t see them (generalising from many examples here, but not nearly enough).

Another difficult tripping point for me was intuitive reasoning. Till I saw people who couldn’t make any sense do significantly better than me I could not possibly believe it, even fighting against people who told me I over-analysed and spoke too much.

I’m slowly coming around on dishonest rhetorical stances, because of the amount of time I’ve spent trying to convince hostile arguers. Let me soothe the raised hackles of your inner LW-cat by saying that I can’t endorse anything like this without finding a Schelling fence,* and am willing to consider anyone who takes such a stance on LW (or in LW-related contexts) evil.

*In fact, based on the world being as it is, I strongly suspect there isn’t one.

Ronak 24 Oct 2014 8:50 UTC
75 points
on: 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
I took it. If it’s anything like last year, officially ²⁄₅ of my karma will be from surveys.

Ronak 21 Sep 2014 0:02 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Azathoth123’s comment on: What are your contrarian views?
So, Romila Thapar is not a Dalit activist, just a historian (I’m guessing this is a source of confusion; I could be wrong).

I’m saying they should have read up before starting their project.

I can’t find the study for some reason, so I’ll try and do it from memory. They randomly picked from a city Dalits (Dalit is a catch-all term coined by B R Ambedkar for people of the lowest castes, and people outside the caste system, all of whom were treated horribly) and people from the merchant castes to look for genetic differences. Which is all fine and dandy—but for the fact that neither ‘Dalit’ not ‘merchant-caste’ is an actual caste; there are many castes which come into those two categories. So, assuming a simple no-inter-caste-marriage model of caste, a merchant family from village A thousands of kilometres from village B has about as much (or, considering marginal things like babies born out of rape, even less) genetic material in common than a merchant and Dalit family from the same village—unless there’s a common genetic ancestor to all merchant families. And that’s where reading historical literature comes in—the history of caste is much more complicated, involving for example periods when it was barely enforced and shuffling and all sorts of stuff. So, they will find differences in their study, but it won’t reflect actual caste differences.

Ronak 20 Sep 2014 20:30 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Azathoth123’s comment on: What are your contrarian views?
Actually, with the caveat that I don’t have any object-level research, I doubt it; they assign a rigidity to the whole thing that seems hard to institute. My point was that ‘do there exist genetic differences’ is not the issue here.

Ronak 20 Sep 2014 13:25 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Azathoth123’s comment on: What are your contrarian views?
a) Actually Thapar’s point wasn’t that there were no genetic differences (in fact, the theory of caste promulgated by Dalit activists is that it’s created by the prohibition of inter-caste marriage and therefore pretty much predicts genetic differences) - but that the groupings done by the researchers wasn’t the correct one.

b) I should actually check that what I surmised is what she said. Thanks for alerting me to the possibility.

Ronak 19 Sep 2014 2:21 UTC
3 points
in reply to: polymathwannabe’s comment on: What are your contrarian views?
When I said humanities I didn’t mean social sciences; in fact, I thought social sciences explicitly followed the scientific method. Maybe the word points to something different in your head, or you slipped up. Either way, when I say humanities, I actually mean fields like philosophy and literature and sociology which go around talking about things by taking the human mind as a primitive.

The whole point of the humanities is that it’s a way of doing things that isn’t the scientific method. The disgraceful thing is the refusal to interface properly with scientists and scientific things—but there’s no shortage of scientists who refuse to interface with humanities either, when you come down to it. My head’s canonical example is Indian geneticists who try to go around finding genetic caste differences; Romila Thapar once gave an entertaining rant about how anything they found they’d be reading noise as signal because the history of caste was nothing like these people imagined.

And, on the other hand, we have many Rortys and Bostroms and Thapars in the humanities who do interface.

Ronak 19 Sep 2014 2:10 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Azathoth123’s comment on: What are your contrarian views?
In the abstract. Though, undoubtedly, many of the people can do wonders too.

Ronak 18 Sep 2014 21:50 UTC
1 point
in reply to: AABoyles’s comment on: What are your contrarian views?
Why? This looks as if you’re taking a hammer to Ockham’s razor.

Ronak 18 Sep 2014 21:42 UTC
10 points
on: What are your contrarian views?
[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]

Humanities is not only an useful method of knowing about the world—but, properly interfaced, ought to be able to significantly speed up science.

(I have a large interval for how controversial this is, so pardon me if you think it’s not.)

Ronak 17 Sep 2014 2:36 UTC
13 points
in reply to: spxtr’s comment on: What are your contrarian views?
Do you mind telling me how you think he’s being uncharitable? I agree mostly with your first two statements. (If you don’t want to put it on this public forum because hot debated topic etc I’d appreciate it if you could PM; I won’t take you down the ‘let’s argue feminism’ rabbit-hole.)

(I’ve always wondered if there was a way to rebut him, but I don’t know enough of the relevant sciences to try and construct an argument myself, except in syllogistic form. And even then, it seems his statements on feminists are correct.)

Ronak 17 Sep 2014 2:29 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Open thread, September 8-14, 2014
I think this is a good argument. Thanks.

After some thought on why your argument sounded unsatisfatory to me, I decided that I have a much more abstract, much less precise argument, to do with things like the beginning of epistemology.

In the logcial beginning, I know nothing about the territory. However, I notice that I have ‘experiences.’ However, I have nore ason for believing that these experiences are ‘real’ in any useful sense. So, I decide to base my idea of truth on the usefulness of helping me predict further experiences. ‘The sun rises every morning,’ in this view, is actually ‘it will seem to me that every time there’s this morning-thing I’ll see the sun rise.’ All hypotheses (liike maya and boltzmann brains) that say that these experiences are not ‘real,’ as long as I have no reason to doubt ‘reality,’ form part of this inscrutable probability noise in my probability assignments. Therefore, even if I was randomed into existence a second ago, it’s still rational to do everything and say “I have no issues with being a boltzmann brain—however it’s just part of my probability noise.′

I haven’t fleshed out precisely the connection between this reasoning and not worrying about Carroll’s argument—it seems as if I’m viewing myself as an implementation-independent process trying to reason about its implementation, and asking what reasoning holds up in that view.

Ronak 10 Sep 2014 6:47 UTC
3 points
on: Bayesianism for humans: “probable enough”
The ‘how to think of planning fallacy’ I grokked was ‘people while planning don’t simulate the scenario in enough detail and don’t see potential difficulties,’* so this is new to me. Or rather, what you say is in some sense part of the way I thought, except I didn’t simulate it in enough detail to realise that I should understand it in a probabilistic sense as well, so it’s new to me when it shouldn’t be.

*In fact, right now I’m procrastinating goign and telling my prof that an expansion I told him I’d do is infinite.

Ronak 9 Sep 2014 13:58 UTC
1 point
in reply to: chaosmage’s comment on: Open thread, September 8-14, 2014
I’m interested in your calling it ‘paying in sanity.’ Are you referring to the insanity of believing in Bengali babus, or the fact that they’re preserving their own sanity in some way by not going to a real doctor for things they know they can’t afford?

Ronak 9 Sep 2014 13:56 UTC
10 points
in reply to: chaosmage’s comment on: Open thread, September 8-14, 2014
Indeed, ‘being poor is expensive’ is related to how they frame this fact. From the end of the same chapter:

The poor seem to be trapped by the same kinds of problems that afflict the rest of us—lack of information, weak beliefs, and procrastination among them. It is true that we who are not poor are somewhat better educated and informed, but the difference is small because, in the end, we actually know very little, and almost surely less than we imagine. Our real advantage comes from the many things that we take as given. We live in houses where clean water gets piped in—we do not need to remember to add Chlorin to the water supply every morning. The sewage goes away on its own—we do not actually know how. We can (mostly) trust our doctors to do the best they can and can trust the public health system to figure out what we should and should not do. We have no choice but to get our children immunized—public schools will not take them if they aren’t—and even if we somehow manage to fail to do it, our children will probably be safe because everyone else is immunized. Our health insurers reward us for joining the gym, because they are concerned that we will not do it otherwise. And perhaps most important, most of us do not have to worry where our next meal will come from. In other words, we rarely need to draw upon our limited endowment of self-control and decisiveness, while the poor are constantly being required to do so. We should recognize that no one is wise, patient, or knowledgeable enough to be fully responsible for making the right decisions for his or her own health. For the same reason that those who live in rich countries live a life surrounded by invisible nudges, the primary goal of health-care policy in poor countries should be to make it as easy as possible for the poor to obtain preventive care, while at the same time regulating the quality of treatment that people can get. An obvious place to start, given the high sensitivity to prices, is delivering preventive services for free or even rewarding households for getting them, and making getting them the natural default option when possible. Free Chlorin dispensers should be put next to water sources; parents should be rewarded for immunizing their children; children should be given free deworming medicines and nutritional supplements at school; and there should be public investment in water and sanitation infrastructure, at least in densely populated areas. As public health investments, many of these subsidies will more than pay for themselves in the value of reduced illness and death, and higher wages—children who are sick less often go to school more and earn more as adults. This does not mean that we can assume that these will automatically happen without intervention, however. Imperfect information about benefits and the strong emphasis people put on the immediate present limit how much effort and money people are willing to invest even in very inexpensive preventive strategies. And when they are not inexpensive, there is of course always the question of money. As far as treatment is concerned, the challenge is twofold: making sure that people can afford the medicines they need (Ibu Emptat, for one, clearly could not afford the asthma medicine that her son needed), but also restricting access to medicines they don’t need as a way to prevent growing drug resistance. Because regulating who sets up a practice and decides to call himself a doctor seems to be beyond the control of most governments in developing countries, the only way to reduce the spread of antibiotic resistance and the overuse of high-potency drugs may be to put maximal effort into controlling the sale of these drugs. All this sounds paternalistic, and in a way, it certainly is. But then it is easy, too easy, to sermonize about the dangers of paternalism and the need to take responsibility for our own lives, from the comfort of our couch in our safe and sanitary home. Aren’t we, those who live in the rich world, the constant beneficiaries of a paternalism now so thoroughly embedded into the system that we hardly notice it? It not only ensures that we take care of ourselves better than we would if we had to be on top of every decision, but also, by freeing us from having to think about these issues, it gives us the mental space we need to focus on the rest of our lives. This does not absolve us of the responsibility of educating people about public health. We do owe everyone, the poor included, as clear an explanation as possible of why immunization is important and why they have to complete their course of antibiotics. But we should recognize—indeed assume—that information alone will not do the trick. This is just how things are, for the poor, as for us.

Ronak 9 Sep 2014 13:54 UTC
3 points
in reply to: CellBioGuy’s comment on: Open thread, September 8-14, 2014
Thanks for your comment.

My issue is much ‘earlier’ in terms of logic. When I started reading that post, the Boltzmann brain problem seemed like a non-problem; an inevitable conclusion that people were unwilling to accept for reasons of personal bias—analogous to how most LWers would view someone who insists on metaphysical free will.

Even if certain facts about the universe didn’t solve the issue, it seems to me that Carroll would still want to find reasons that we weren’t Boltzmann brains. Now, from my own interest in entropy and heat death, I had long ago concluded that I might, right now, be part of a random fluctuation that is gone the next moment; in fact, I had concluded that every moment of my existence turns up somewhere during heat death. That’s not an issue, as far as I can see—whatever fact we see about the universe, that would just be part of this fluctuation (I don’t know about this acceleration thing—my technical understanding of the issue is not good enough, but I’m willing to take your and Carroll’s words for it). At this level, ‘we’re part of a random fluctuation’ is one of those uninteresting hypotheses like maya that could very well be true but are unverifiable. (Continued adherence to ordered laws can’t really be considered evidence, since we may have just popped into existence a second ago with memories as we have. It truly can predict everything.)

But then, Carroll argues that believing you’re a Boltzmann brain is inconsistent, since you can’t trust your own brain which is a product of a random fluctuation. Of course, I don’t believe I’m a Boltzmann brain, I just note that no experience (modulo expanding universe) contradicts the hypothesis and therefore I should reason without giving a shit about it. However, Carroll’s argument gives me pause, and I can’t really see whether I should consider it seriously.

Ronak 9 Sep 2014 2:59 UTC
16 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Open thread, September 8-14, 2014
From Poor Economics by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Bannerjee

There is potentially another reason the poor may hold on to beliefs that might seem indefensible: When there is little else they can do, hope becomes essential. One of the Bengali doctors we spoke to explained the role he plays in the lives of the poor as follows: “The poor cannot really afford to get treated for anything major, because that involves expensive things like tests and hospitalization, which is why they come to me with their minor ailments, and I give them some little medicines which make them feel better.” In other words, it is important to keep doing something about your health, even if you know that you are not doing anything about the big problem. In fact, the poor are much less likely to go to the doctor for potentially life-threatening conditions like chest pains and blood in their urine than with fevers and diarrhea. The poor in Delhi spend as much on short-duration ailments as the rich, but the rich spend much more on chronic diseases.34 So it may well be that the reason chest pains are a natural candidate for being a bhopa disease (an older woman once explained to us the dual concepts of bhopa diseases and doctor diseases—bhopa diseases are caused by ghosts, she insisted, and need to be treated by traditional healers), as are strokes, is precisely that most people cannot afford to get them treated by doctors.

Ronak 9 Sep 2014 2:29 UTC
8 points
on: Open thread, September 8-14, 2014
From http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/08/22/the-higgs-boson-vs-boltzmann-brains/

A room full of monkeys, hitting keys randomly on a typewriter, will eventually bang out a perfect copy of Hamlet. Assuming, of course, that their typing is perfectly random, and that it keeps up for a long time. An extremely long time indeed, much longer than the current age of the universe. So this is an amusing thought experiment, not a viable proposal for creating new works of literature (or old ones).

There’s an interesting feature of what these thought-experiment monkeys end up producing. Let’s say you find a monkey who has just typed Act I of Hamlet with perfect fidelity. You might think “aha, here’s when it happens,” and expect Act II to come next. But by the conditions of the experiment, the next thing the monkey types should be perfectly random (by which we mean, chosen from a uniform distribution among all allowed typographical characters), and therefore independent of what has come before. The chances that you will actually get Act II next, just because you got Act I, are extraordinarily tiny. For every one time that your monkeys type Hamlet correctly, they will type it incorrectly an enormous number of times — small errors, large errors, all of the words but in random order, the entire text backwards, some scenes but not others, all of the lines but with different characters assigned to them, and so forth. Given that any one passage matches the original text, it is still overwhelmingly likely that the passages before and after are random nonsense.

That’s the Boltzmann Brain problem in a nutshell. Replace your typing monkeys with a box of atoms at some temperature, and let the atoms randomly bump into each other for an indefinite period of time. Almost all the time they will be in a disordered, high-entropy, equilibrium state. Eventually, just by chance, they will take the form of a smiley face, or Michelangelo’s David, or absolutely any configuration that is compatible with what’s inside the box. If you wait long enough, and your box is sufficiently large, you will get a person, a planet, a galaxy, the whole universe as we now know it. But given that some of the atoms fall into a familiar-looking arrangement, we still expect the rest of the atoms to be completely random. Just because you find a copy of the Mona Lisa, in other words, doesn’t mean that it was actually painted by Leonardo or anyone else; with overwhelming probability it simply coalesced gradually out of random motions. Just because you see what looks like a photograph, there’s no reason to believe it was preceded by an actual event that the photo purports to represent. If the random motions of the atoms create a person with firm memories of the past, all of those memories are overwhelmingly likely to be false.

This thought experiment was originally relevant because Boltzmann himself (and before him Lucretius, Hume, etc.) suggested that our world might be exactly this: a big box of gas, evolving for all eternity, out of which our current low-entropy state emerged as a random fluctuation. As was pointed out by Eddington, Feynman, and others, this idea doesn’t work, for the reasons just stated; given any one bit of universe that you might want to make (a person, a solar system, a galaxy, and exact duplicate of your current self), the rest of the world should still be in a maximum-entropy state, and it clearly is not. This is called the “Boltzmann Brain problem,” because one way of thinking about it is that the vast majority of intelligent observers in the universe should be disembodied brains that have randomly fluctuated out of the surrounding chaos, rather than evolving conventionally from a low-entropy past. That’s not really the point, though; the real problem is that such a fluctuation scenario is cognitively unstable — you can’t simultaneously believe it’s true, and have good reason for believing its true, because it predicts that all the “reasons” you think are so good have just randomly fluctuated into your head!

So, before reading the last sentence quoted I had no issue with the idea that I turned up as a random fluctuation, but that last sentence gives me pause—and my brain refuses to cross it and give useful thoughts.

Anyone have any useful comments? Thanks.

Ronak 19 Dec 2013 14:22 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Luck II: Expecting White Swans
I should have been clearer, sorry. Facebook is less inconvenient on two non-trivial counts: there are other reasons to open it (whereas a birthday diary will only have information related to birthdays and similar stuff), and it records the birthdays without any effort on your part.

Ronak 17 Dec 2013 7:31 UTC
0 points
in reply to: zerotimer’s comment on: Meetup : Mumbai Meetup
Quite well, I thought. We were talking for four or so hours.