Douglas Knight: for me, thinking of “bias” (as used on this blog) as a result of heuristic processing is moderately useful ’cos (a) mainly, it just gives a general framework, a set of very concrete metaphors and therefore heuristics (and therefore biases) that I’ve worked with over the years; (b) it suggests that the problem of bias can be ameliorated but not solved, because you’ll never get perfect heuristics and you’ll never be able to do all the computing that’s required to do without heuristics; (c) ah, well, I forget what (c) was gonna be. But it’s useful for me, and I wanted to know if anybody here would point to a reason why I shouldn’t use it. Nobody did, yet.
When you speak of the cost/value of “overcoming” heuristics, that’s interesting...it jars slightly, which is good. I’m used to ideas of balancing out heuristics, of using meta-heuristics (i.e., explicit knowledge of the bias introduced by a particular heuristic) and such for overcoming the bias of a heuristic, but overcoming heuristics...strange. I’m not sure why that jars, but I thank you.
My mention of people-shredders was merely to distinguish that kind of torture, punitive/deterrent torture, from interrogative torture. The distinction matters because when I see people (say, Max Boot) defending practices which others class as torture, they aren’t defending punitive/deterrent torture (or confession-inducing torture) at all; they’re defending “interrogation techniques”. Posts such as this one, I believe, lose some of their impact because they don’t go as far as they could in achieving clarity; the people who might be criticized will, if exposed to this post, think of it as a straw-man argument: “That’s not me at all”. BTW, the people-shredders specifically may never have existed; if I’d remembered that as I typed, I’d have used Saddam’s deterrent amputations instead:
nine Iraqi men whose right hands were amputated in 1995 on orders of Saddam Hussein as punishment for their alleged crime of dealing in American dollars.In any case, I don’t think it’s worth attacking this kind of torture except in a context where someone’s defending it; if Joe Schmoe defends an interrogator who tries to track down a house where IEDs are being made, Joe is not going to recognize himself in this criticism (nor should he.) It might be relevant in a discussion of the US prison system and its acceptance of prison rape, but even then, I don’t think that a defender of that system (I’m not one) would recognize his own motives in O’Brien’s. Having made that distinction, I would then drop the term “torture”, as I said, because it does not help clarity; “pro-torture” and “anti-torture” have non-empty intersections. And my proposal may well be too detailed...but our current attempts to regulate interrogation are even more detailed, and I think they’re detailed the wrong way. Whatever. The principle, I thought, was pretty simple: everything done by X should be documented, X must have voluntarily had it done to him first, and the documents should after some time-lapse be public so that X and his commanders are accountable. And I thought it an interesting kind of principle, in that it avoids the current kind of detail. Okay, probably not.
Yes, of course Winston “survives”, in a sense. He’s not executed. I was remembering, quite probably misremembering (can’t find my copy, I think my eldest son took it years ago) a passage in which execution is represented as too easy: first he has to Love Big Brother, and then after that it doesn’t matter if he’s executed or not. Something about dominance, as I tried to say. (But is the Winston at the end...hmm. Is that survival? Maybe HA would consider it so; personally I felt that Winston the person had been destroyed. The politics of personal destruction, as it were. Unless I’m misremembering quite drastically, which is always possible.)
I guess we’re not disagreeing about much, at this point, though I think that you’re basically more optimistic than I, and this might cause us to form different conceptions of the “overcoming bias” enterprise. I agree that we’re not Eurisko (and suddenly I’m remembering Lenat’s talk at IJCAI-77, explaining AM’s fixed-heuristics problem that then led him to Eurisko...I was a graduate student) but my feeling is that we don’t in general even have the choice of using a given heuristic less: we don’t in general have the choice of becoming a less initially biased person. Sometimes we do, and it’s worth a try, I’ll admit that. In general, however, I don’t think much of my own rationality in speech or action or even writing: it’s mainly in proofreading, especially shared proofreading, that we have the chance to overcome our biases. For this purpose, it’s perfectly possible to say “this is a valuation by prototype” or whatever, and then think a meta-thought about errors found in association with that heuristic. (Nor do I really believe that we commonly have heuristics that aren’t associated with bias—systematic error—it’s just a question of identification and of doing the best we can. Not error-free, but error-correction.
Of course in order to do that, you need to be conscious of your heuristics, which isn’t always possible either, but when you try to explain your opinions to somebody else, sometimes you notice the rule of inference you’re applying, and then take a step backwards. And another. And another, until the metaphor falls off the cliff. :-) But until transhumanism actually works, or until Lenat successfully mixes Eurisko and Cyc (and, as he said in 1977: “It’s our last problem. They’ll handle the next one”), I think it’s the best we can do, and I get the feeling you think we can do better. But I have no confidence in such feelings.