I think my answer would be “I would have agreed, had you asked me when the coin chances were .5 and .5. Now that they’re 1 and 0, I have no reason to agree.”
Seriously, why stick with an agreement you never made? Besides, if Omega can predict me this well he knows how the coin will come up and how I’ll react. Why then, should I try to act otherwise. Somehow, I think I just don’t get it.
I don’t have much of a vested interest in being or remaining human. I’ve often shocked friends and acquaintances by saying that if there were a large number of intelligent life forms in the universe and I had my choice, I doubt I’d choose to be human.
This has been voted into the negatives, but I’m not sure its so basically bad as an idea. If we can set up a system where all of the students, teachers, and any other staff, are all in continuous rationality competitions with each other, then this would quickly cause one to hone their skills.
For example, maybe the teacher of a class is chosen from within a class and has to fight (metaphorically) to maintain that position. Maybe the choice of whether you are teacher, student, principal, cafeteria cook, or janitor depends on the outcomes of numerous rationality contests between members.
And note that I don’t necessarily mean that cafeteria cook or janitor would be positions that go to the losers...
Well, there’s always the idea of using fMRI scans to determine if someone is thinking in ‘rational’ patterns. You stick them under the machine and give them a test. You ignore the results of the test, but score the student on what parts of their brains light up.
You’d have to define ‘cheated on’. A fair number of the most rational folks I know live in non-traditional marriage arrangements.
I agree. The only solutions to this that I can see is to either not let students know when they are being tested, or to have a system of continual testing.
A friend of mine, the most consistently rational person I know of, once told me that his major criteria for whether a piece of information is useful is if it can allow him to forget multiple other pieces of information, because they are now derivable from his corpus of information, given this new fact.
I have a vague feeling that there should be a useful test of rationality based on this. Some sort of information modeling test whereby one is given a complex set of interrelated but random data, and a randomly-generated data-expression language. Scoring is based on how close to optimal once gets on writing a generator for the given data in the given language.
Unfortunately, I think this is someone one could explicitly train for, and someone with knowledge of data compression theory would probably be at an advantage.
Well, you asked for DUMB ideas, so here’s mine. It has the advantage that I’m sure no one else will suggest it. This is based on an accidental discovery (so far as I know, unpublished) that one can compare two arbitrary documents for similarity (even if they are in different word-processor formats) by running them both through a recognizer built out of a random state machine and comparing bit masks of all the states traversed. The more common they are, the more states will be traversed in both.
So, lets assume we have a panel of highly rational individuals which are our control group. We generate a random multiple-choice questionnaire consisting of nonsensical questions and answers. Things like:
1) How Green is the Smell of Bacon?
a) 7.5
b) Neon
c) Introspection
d) Larger
You then do a correlation over how your panel of experts chose their answers and see if there is a common pattern. You then score students who take the test based on how similar to the common pattern they are.
Assuming this idea works at all, the advantage of this is that it would be extremely difficult to game. The disadvantage would be that it would penalize those who are significantly more rational than the ‘norm’. It would probably also require the panel to be similar to each other in cognition. There is also the general problem of not knowing if you’re really testing for what you think you’re testing.
Frankly, I don’t know if I’d be more happy if this was tested and shown to be workable, or if it turned out to be a really stupid idea.
You decided to try achieving that “non-rational” goal, so it must be to your benefit (at least, you must believe so).
Yes, exactly. The fact that you think its to your benefit, but it isn’t, is the very essence of what I mean by a non-rational goal.
Actually, I find I have the exact opposite problem. I almost never vote. Partly that’s because I read Less Wrong through an RSS feed that doesn’t even show the vote totals. I only ever vote if, like now, I’ve gone to the actual site in order to comment.
Even then, I find that I am comparing the quality of Less Wrong posts and comments against the entire corpus of what I read on a daily basis, some of which is great, and some of which is dreck.
So, I tend to only vote when the quality of what is written is extremely good—enough so that I want to ‘reward’ it—or extremely bad, so that I want to punish. The vast majority is in the middle and so I don’t bother to vote.
I am replying to my own post here, because I’ve been fascinated how the score on this post keeps changing. It was at +1 immediately after I posted it, then dropped to −2 within seconds. The next time I checked it was at +1 and I voted it down to −1. Now its back up at +1. There may well have been intermediate ups and downs I missed. To bad I can’t see a history of the voting.
I don’t really have any ideas other than the “negative net sum” worth I mentioned above, but then that just begs the question of what metric one is using to measure worth.
Heh. No need. Even I voted it down! (It was an experiment to see if one is allowed to vote on one’s own posts. It seems we are.)
No, I don’t think that Death is conflating them at all. He is saying that Mercy, Justice and the like are human constructs and are not an inherent part of the universe. In this he is completely correct.
Where he goes wrong is in having only two categories “Truth” which seems to include only that which is inherent to the universe and “Lies” which he uses to hold everything else. There is no room in this philosophy for conjecture, goals, hopes, dreams, and the like.
Sadly, I have met folks who, while perhaps not as extreme in their classifications as this, nevertheless have no place in their personal philosophies for unproven conjectures, potentially true statements, partially supported beliefs, and the like. They are not comfortable with areas of gray between what they know is true and what they know is false.
I think the statements of Death are couched to appeal more to their philosophy than ours, but perhaps that is because Pratchett thinks such people more in need of the instruction.
I am, by trade, a computer programmer, and flow is a common part of my day. Programming is an inherently rational activity as a computer is as strictly rational a beast as you can imagine, and does only and exactly what you tell it to. I thought it might be interesting to relate my experiences of flow to these 8 criteria:
Clear goals and expectations about the task at hand.
While this is not actually as characteristic of programming in general as one might expect, I certainly find that the periods of flow are when I have a concrete concept of what the next part of a program to implement is, and how it should tie in to what already exists.
Direct and immediate feedback.
Of all the points above, this one is the one I’m least sure of. Certainly the dictum of “Compile early and compile often” is a good one, and a computer delivers brutally honest feedback, but still its quite possible for one to be in a flow state for three or four hours before one reaches a point at which the code might arguably be capable of compiling. Certainly its not feedback from the computer that sustains the flow during these intervals. On the other hand, there is a certain amount of internal simulation of what one has just written than one does, where you run through the code in your head and imagine what a computer would do with it, and there is a definite satisfaction to getting to the end with a result consistent with what you are trying for.
A high degree of concentration.
This is definitely the case. I believe the book “The Psychology of Computer Programming” by Gerald Weinberg ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Weinberg ) makes a good case for programming to be as difficult a mental task as brain surgery or rocket science.
Loss of self-consciousness.
Altered perception of time.
These two, I think, go hand in hand. When there is nothing but the code in your head, then there is no other perception, either of self or of time.
Challenge proportionate to your skill level.
I’m not completely convinced of this. I have gone into flow when writing yet another instance of some piece of code I’ve written a thousand times, where the challenge is practically non-existent. This might be because one gets into the habit of flow as part of programming and one gets an almost Pavlovian response set up.
I am reminded of a research study I read about where they were studying the conditions under which human beings switch from sugar burning (which is the default and provides short-term energy) to fat burning (which is how the body sustains extended efforts). They put typical folks on a treadmill and saw how much exercise it took to have them switch metabolic modes. When they tried a professional athlete, they were surprised to discover that the switchover occurred the moment they pointed him at the treadmill. Merely anticipating exertion was enough to trigger the switchover.
But, on the third hand, I do know that I use moments where I am doing rote work to reexamine how I’ve always done things, to see if there is some reformulation of the assumptions inherent in what I am doing both in the small “Is this really the most efficient way to write this loop?” and in the large “Is iterating twice over this array really the best way of calculating this result?” This bears fruit often enough that it continues to be worth doing.
Feeling of control over the situation.
When one is programming, one is in total control, for good or for ill. When it works, you are the one that made it work, and when it fails, there is no one to blame but yourself.
Activity is intrinsically rewarding.
Again, I’m not sure how rewarding the act of coding actually is. There is a huge reward in having coded something and seeing it work and express your thoughts in the way you imagined. If it wasn’t for that bit though, I’m not sure how rewarding the work would be. Its true that part of it (the problem solving) has the fun nature of puzzles, but I don’t go into flow while problem solving, but when implementing the solutions I come up with.
EDIT: I had to remove the numbers in front of the items since they kept getting auto-changed to the same number “1”.
While I don’t necessarily agree that Man needs lies, Terry Pratchett made a very good argument for it in Hogfather:
Death: Yes. As practice, you have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
Susan: So we can believe the big ones?
Death: Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing.
Susan: They’re not the same at all.
Death: You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder, and sieve it through the finest sieve, and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet, you try to act as if there is some ideal order in the world. As if there is some, some rightness in the universe, by which it may be judged.
Susan: But people have got to believe that, or what’s the point?
Death: You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become?
Hmm. This is a simple question that seems difficult to articulate an answer to. I think the heart of my argument is that it is very difficult to achieve any goal without planning, and planning (to be effective) relies upon a true and consistent set of beliefs and logical inferences from them. This is pretty much the definition of rationality.
Now, its not the case that the opposite is random activity which one hopes will bring about the correct outcome. To be driven by emotions, seat-of-the-pants decisions and gut-instincts is to allow an evolutionarily-derived decision-making process to run your life. Its not a completely faulty process, but it did not evolve for the kinds of situations modern people find themselves in so, in practice, its not hard to do better by applying rational principals.
Yes, I suppose I should. By a non-rational goal I meant a goal that was not necessarily to my benefit, or the benefit of the world, a goal with a negative net sum worth. Things like poisoning a reservoir or marrying someone who will make your life miserable.
What effect do down votes have on karma? For instance, before writing this I’m at 19 points. This post should then, I think, put me at 20. But if people believe (arguably correctly) that this post is an attempt to game the system, will I instead of ending up at 20, end up at 17 or 15 or 3 or something?
And if Omega comes up to me and says “I was going to kill you if you gave me $100. But since I’ve worked out that you won’t, I’ll leave you alone.” then I’ll be damn glad I wouldn’t agree.
This really does seem like pointless speculation.
Of course, I live in a world where there is no being like Omega that I know of. If I knew otherwise, and knew something of their properties, I might govern myself differently.