Sideways

Karma: 408

Sideways Jul 1, 2009, 5:07 PM
0 points
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism
How about both?

If I understand your terms correctly, it may be possible for realities that are not base-level to be optimization-like without being physics-like, e.g. the reality generated by playing a game of Nomic, a game in which players change the rules of the game. But this is only possible because of interference by optimization processes from a lower-level reality, whose goals (“win”, “have fun”) refer to states of physics-like processes. I suspect that base-level reality be physics-like. To paraphrase John Donne, no optimization process is an island—otherwise how could one tell the difference between an optimization process and purely random modification?

On the other hand, the “evolution” optimization process arose in our universe without a requirement for lower-level interference. Not that I assume our universe is base-level reality, but it seems like evolution or analogous optimizations could arise at any level. So perhaps physics-like realities are also intrinsically optimization-like.

Sideways Jul 1, 2009, 4:49 AM
10 points
on: Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism

If you could show hunter-gatherers a raindance that called on a different spirit and worked with perfect reliability, or, equivalently, a desalination plant, they’d probably chuck the old spirit right out the window.

There’s no need to speculate—this has actually happened. From what I know of the current state of Native American culture (which is admittedly limited), modern science is fully accepted for practical purposes, and traditional beliefs guide when to party, how to mourn, how to celebrate rites of passage, etc.

The only people who seem to think science conflicts with Native American belief systems, are New Age converts coming from a Western religious background. From the linked article:

A Minnesota couple who refused chemotherapy for their 13-year-old son was ordered Friday to have the boy re-evaluated… Brown County District Judge John Rodenberg found Daniel Hauser has been “medically neglected” by his parents, Colleen and Anthony Hauser, who belong to a religious group that believes in using only natural healing methods practiced by some American Indians.

Sideways Jun 29, 2009, 9:27 PM
3 points
in reply to: Cyan’s comment on: Controlling your inner control circuits
‘Correctness’ in theories is a scalar rather than a binary quality. Phlogiston theory is less correct (and less useful) than chemistry, but it’s more correct—and more useful!--than the theory of elements. The fact that the modern scientific theories you list are better than their precursors, does not mean their precursors were useless.

You have a false dichotomy going here. If you know of someone who “knows how human cognition works on all scales”, or even just a theory of cognition as powerful as Newton’s theory of mechanics is in its domain, then please, link! But if such a theory existed, we wouldn’t need to be having this discussion. A strong theory of cognition will descend from a series of lesser theories of cognition, of which control theory is one step.

Unless you have a better theory, or a convincing reason to claim that “no-theory” is better than control theory, you’re in the position of an elementalist arguing that phlogiston theory should be ignored because it can’t explain heat generated by friction—while ignoring the fact that while imperfect, phlogiston theory is strictly superior to elemental theory or “no-theory”.

Sideways Jun 17, 2009, 9:02 AM
7 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Ask LessWrong: Human cognitive enhancement now?

Likewise, every other actual practice that you think would be a good thing for you to do. If you think that, and you are not doing it, why?

If you want to understand akrasia, I encourage you to take your own advice. Take a moment and write down two or three things that would have a major positive impact in your life, that you’re not doing.

Now ask yourself: why am I not doing these things? Don’t settle for excuses or elaborate System Two explanations why you don’t really need to do them after all. You’ve already stipulated that they would have a major positive impact on your life! You’re not looking for a list of all possible reasons; you’re looking for the particular reason that you don’t do those things.

If you’ve chosen the right sort of inactions to reflect on, you’ll realize that you don’t know why you don’t do them. It’s not just that you want to do these things, but don’t; it’s that you don’t know why you don’t. There is a reason for your inaction, but you aren’t consciously aware of what it is. Congratulations: you’ve discovered akrasia.

Sideways Jun 8, 2009, 1:31 AM
1 point
on: Honesty: Beyond Internal Truth
Truth-telling is necessary but not sufficient for honesty. Something more is required: an admission of epistemic weakness. You needn’t always make the admission openly to your audience (social conventions apply), but the possibility that you might be wrong should not leave your thoughts. A genuinely honest person should not only listen to objections to his or her favorite assumptions and theories, but should actively seek to discover such objections.

What’s more, people tend to forget that their long-held assumptions are assumptions and treat them as facts. Forgotten assumptions are a major impediment to rationality—hence the importance of overcoming bias (the action, not the blog) to a rationalist.

Sideways Jun 5, 2009, 9:39 PM
0 points
in reply to: rhollerith’s comment on: Mate selection for the men here

Most of those people do not know enough about how to produce lasting useful psychological change to know when a document or an author is actually worth the reader’s while.

The mere fact that you are human makes it much more probable than not that you are more skilled at self-deception and deception than at perceiving correctly the intrapersonal and interpersonal truths necessary to produce lasting change in another human being.

Probably true. But if you use those statistical facts about most people as an excuse to never listen to anyone, or even to one specific person, you’re setting yourself up for failure. How will you ever revise your probability estimate of one person’s knowledge or the general state of knowledge in a field, if you never allow yourself to encounter any evidence?

The financial success of your self-help practice is not significant evidence that you can produce lasting change in clients because again there is a plentiful supply of gullible self-help clients with money.

have you ever actually accompanied the client to a bar and observed how long it takes the client to achieve some objectively-valid sign of success (such as getting the woman’s phone number or getting the woman to follow the client out to his car)?

Is that your true rejection? If P.J. Eby said “why, yes I have,” would you change your views based on one anecdote? Since a randomized, double-blind trial is impossible (or at least financially impractical and incompatible with the self-help coach’s business model), what do you consider a reasonable standard of evidence?

I worry that your copious writings on this site will discourage contributions from those who have constructed their causal model of mental and social reality more carefully.

In my book, until I see very strong evidence to the contrary, every mental-health practitioner and self-help practitioner is with high probability deluded except those that constantly remind themselves of how little they know.

Given the vigorous dissent from you and others, I don’t think “discouraging contributions” is a likely problem! However, I personally would like to see discussion of specific claims of fact and (as much as possible) empirical evidence. A simple assertion of a probability estimate doesn’t help me understand your points of disagreement.

Sideways May 27, 2009, 4:36 PM
5 points
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Dissenting Views
Vladimir, the problem has nothing to do with strength—some of these students did very well in other classes. Nor is it about effort—some students had already given up and weren’t bothering, others were trying futilely for hours a night. Even closing the initial inferential gap that caused them to fall behind (see my reply to Daniel_Burfoot above) didn’t solve the problem.

The problem was simply that they believed “math” was impossible for them. The best way to get rid of that belief—maybe the only effective way—was to give them the experience of succeeding at math. A pep talk or verbal explanation of their problems wouldn’t suffice.

If your definition of “the dark arts” is so general that it includes giving an easy homework assignment, especially when it’s the best solution to a problem, I think you’ve diluted the term beyond usefulness.

Sideways May 27, 2009, 4:17 PM
1 point
in reply to: Daniel_Burfoot’s comment on: Dissenting Views
Unlike most other subjects, math is cumulative: students are taught one technique, they practice it for a while, and then they’re taught a second technique that builds on the previous. So there are two skills required:

The discipline to study and practice a technique until you understand it and can apply it easily. The ability to close the inferential gap between one technique and the next.

The second is the source of trouble. I can (and have) sat in on a single day’s instruction of a language class and learned something about that language. But if a student misses just one jump in math class, the rest of the year will be incomprehensible. No wonder people become convinced they’re “terrible at math” after an experience like that!

Sideways May 27, 2009, 9:44 AM
12 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Dissenting Views
For a while I tutored middle school students in algebra. Very frequently, I heard things like this from my students:

“I’m terrible at math.”

“I hate math class.”

“I’m just dumb.”

That attitude had to go. All of my students successfully learned algebra; not one of them learned algebra before she came to believe herself good at math. One strategy I used to convince them otherwise was giving out easy homework assignments—very small inferential gaps, no “trick questions”.

Now, the “I’m terrible at math” attitude was, in some sense, correct. You could look at their grades and their standardized test scores and see that they were in the lowest quartile of their class. But when my students started seeing A’s on their homework papers—when they started to believe that maybe they were good at math, after all—the difference in their confidence and effort was night and day. It was the false belief that enabled them to “take the first steps.”

Sideways May 27, 2009, 4:39 AM
3 points
in reply to: loqi’s comment on: Dissenting Views
Agreed—most of the arguments in good faith that I’ve seen or participated in were caused by misunderstandings or confusion over definitions.

I would add that once you know the jargon that describes something precisely, it’s difficult to go back to using less precise but more understandable language. This is why scientists who can communicate their ideas in non-technical terms are so rare and valuable.

Sideways Apr 7, 2009, 8:24 PM
3 points
in reply to: steven0461’s comment on: Rationalists should beware rationalism
If I correctly understand the distinction you’re making between “untestable” and “meaningless”, then the hypothesis “God rewards Christians with Heaven and everyone else goes to Hell” is untestable but not meaningless, correct?

I don’t bother to work Bayes’ Theorem on untestable hypotheses, simply because there are an infinite number of untestable hypotheses and I don’t have time to formally do math on them all. This is more or less equivalent to assigning them zero probability.

I stand by my claim that it’s improper to say that an untestable hypothesis is “more likely” or “less likely” than a testable hypothesis, or another untestable one. Just because people are known to assign arbitrary probabilities to untestable hypotheses, doesn’t make it a good or useful thing to do.

Sideways Apr 7, 2009, 8:04 PM
0 points
in reply to: janos’s comment on: Rationalists should beware rationalism
Bayes’ Theorem is undefined if p(X) is undefined.

Suppose our untestable-in-principle hypothesis is that undetectable dragons in your garage cause cancer. Then X is “undetectable garage dragon.” As far as I can tell, there is no way to assign a probability to an undetectable dragon.

Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Sideways Apr 7, 2009, 3:12 AM
1 point
in reply to: steven0461’s comment on: Rationalists should beware rationalism
The rational way to establish the probability of a hypothesis is by testing it.

If a hypothesis is untestable in principle then its probability is zero, or undefined if you prefer. There’s no way to assign any probability to it.

If it’s impractical to test a hypothesis—e.g. if it would cost a trillion dollars to build a suitable particle accelerator—then the hypothesis stays in limbo until its proponents figure out a test to perform. At some point a probability can be assigned to it, but not yet.

Either way, if you’re using “likeliness” to mean “probability” then it seems to me that testable hypotheses are “more likely” than untestable ones—insofar as we assign a probability to one and assign no probability to the other. If Bayes’s Theorem keeps returning “undefined”, you’re doing it wrong.

Sideways Apr 4, 2009, 6:30 AM
1 point
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: On dollars, utility, and crack cocaine
Countries that rely heavily on foreign aid risk becoming self-stabilizing systems in which increasing foreign aid to Hypothetistan reduces the incentives for Hypothetistanis to be productive, instead of providing capital they need to act on those incentives. This is by no means a complete explanation—I’m just explaining the analogy between self-stabilizing systems more explicitly.

Sideways Apr 4, 2009, 5:02 AM
8 points
on: On dollars, utility, and crack cocaine
IAWY right up to the penultimate sentence. Humans continuously modify their utility functions to maintain a steady level of happiness. A change in your utility function’s input—like winning the lottery, or suffering a permanent injury—has only a temporary effect. The day you collect your winnings, you’re super-happy; a year later, you’re no happier than you were when you bought the ticket. If you’re considering picking up a crack habit, you had better realize that in a year your baseline happiness will be no higher than it is now, despite all the things you’ll sacrifice trying to be happy.

Supplying yourself with cocaine and money isn’t an effective way to achieve a goal of happiness, just like supplying a country with foreign aid isn’t an effective way to improve quality of life there. The rational thing to do is to grab the levers of your hedonic treadmill and set it where you want it to be. But it’s risky to monkey around with such things—which is why I’m interested in That Which Must Not Be Named. I have no personal stake in Eliezer’s mission, but his methodical approach to studying utility functions suggests what parts of your utility function you can safely alter.
What links here?
- PhilGoetz's comment on Incremental Progress and the Valley by Eliezer Yudkowsky (Apr 5, 2009, 2:48 PM; 2 points)

Sideways Mar 31, 2009, 5:22 PM
11 points
on: The Benefits of Rationality?

No, feelings won’t do. If feelings turn you on, do drugs or get religious. Rationalism needs to verifiably bring external benefit.

I couldn’t disagree more. Since becoming a rationalist my repertoire of feelings has measurably improved. I’m now capable of being delighted by things that wouldn’t have interested me a few months ago. In certain situations I used to feel an overwhelming, paralyzing fear that rationality has cured me of. This is a huge verifiable, external benefit for me.

Since becoming a rationalist, my job performance has improved, and I spend twice as much time (yes, I’ve kept track) doing the things I’ve always wanted to, but was previously kept from doing by akrasia or poor time management. I don’t know if that’s as “awesome” as a martial art, but I definitely consider it a WIN.

If anyone’s interested, the four major influences on my rationalism are Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Moshe Feldenkrais’s writing on body awareness, P.J. Eby’s mind hacking techniques, and OB/LW.

Sideways Mar 29, 2009, 10:47 PM
3 points
in reply to: RobinHanson’s comment on: Deliberate and spontaneous creativity
Thinking new thoughts (as opposed to cached thoughts) is risky behavior, if e.g. it makes you a crank, but I don’t think it can properly be called a bias.

Most thoughts are cached thoughts, or put together from other cached thoughts like Tinkertoys; most new ideas are heard from others rather than invented. Genuinely new thoughts are rare, even if they’re less rare in the young than the old. To my mind their rarity increases their value: the ability to invent new thoughts is precious.

In writing fiction I’ve practiced techniques that reliably induce creativity: brainstorming, freewriting, random association, and so on. These are non-methodical in character; they’re not processes you can use to produce a result, but processes that put you in a state that allows you to produce the result. They are basically irrational. Does that mean creativity is a failure mode of rationality, or are there techniques a rationalist can use to produce new thoughts?

Sideways Mar 26, 2009, 4:08 PM
0 points
in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: The Good Bayesian
I’ve been upvoted at least once in the interim, so I suspect that it’s the same bug after all: my net negative post is contributing the 2^32, and my upvoted comments are contributing the 47. I have nothing like the programming skill needed to confirm this.

I’ve been thinking about Talisman’s post further, and I think my education is to blame. It’s been so heavy on persuasive writing and rhetoric that I’ve gotten into the habit of overstating my own confidence and hiding the chain of reason justifying my opinions, as a writing style rather than a style of thought.

Whatever the case, this may be my last comment. With a karma score that high, I’m sure to transcend the cycle of reincarnation! Nirvana by divine software bug is unorthodox, but I’ll take what I can get.

Sideways Mar 26, 2009, 4:30 AM
1 point
in reply to: talisman’s comment on: The Good Bayesian
On reflection I agree with you that my language was ill-considered. I’m not going to edit the original post, because there’s no point pretending I didn’t make the mistake.

Incidentally, since creating this post, my karma has gone from 45 to 4294967341. I would guess that this post was downvoted to a negative number, and it broke some sort of counter. I don’t know of any better way than a comment to report the bug, so there you have it.

Sideways Mar 26, 2009, 1:05 AM
4 points
in reply to: topynate’s comment on: The Good Bayesian
Theodicy is the defense of God-belief against criticism, particularly the problem of evil. Theology—religious people, left to themselves, trying to figure out God—doesn’t warp rationality nearly as much as the strategies religious people use to protect their religion from criticism.