Zubon
- Zubon's comment on Rationality Quotes Thread November 2015 by elharo (Nov 15, 2015, 5:06 PM; 5 points)
Yes: what we learn from trolley problems is that human moral intuitions are absolute crap (technical term). Starting with even the simplest trolley problems, you find that many people have very strong but inconsistent moral intuitions. Others immediately go to a blue screen when presented with a moral problem with any causal complexity. The answer is that trolley problems are primarily system diagnostic tools that identify corrupt software behaving inconsistently.
Back to the object level, the right answer is dependent on other assumptions. Unless someone wants to have claimed to have solved all meta-ethical problems and have the right ethical system, “a right answer” is the correct framing rather than “the right answer,” because the answer is only right in a given ethical framework. Almost any consequentialist system will output “save the most lives/QALYs.”
Any games you’re looking forward to? I’m curious about Pathfinder card game (new stuff coming, never played original), City of Gears, and Die! I was using the BoardGameGeek Origins preview to scout new releases.
ETA: Gen Con preview live
Meetup : Gen Con: Applied Game Theory
This being Less Wrong, this might be the point where you bring up whether P=NP and that solutions are often much easier to verify than compute. Easier does not necessarily mean easy or even within human cognitive capabilities. And if it does in whatever example comes to mind, just keep pushing to harder problems until we need not only tools to solve the problem but also meta-tools to tell us what our tools are telling us. And you can keep pushing that meta. (Did I mention that Blindsight is a very Less Wrong book?)
We trust our tools because we trust the process we used to develop our tools, and we trust the previous generation of tools used to develop those tools and processes, and we trust… At some point, you look at the edifice of knowledge and realize your life depends on a lot of interdependencies, and that can be scary.
And then I trust Google Maps to get me most places, because I know it has a much better direction sense than me and it knows things like construction and traffic conditions.
“If you could second-guess a vampire, you wouldn’t need a vampire.”
-- an aphorism in Blindsight by Peter Watts, page 227
In Blindsight, a “vampire” is a predatory, sociopathic genius built through genetic engineering. They have human brain mass but use it differently; take all the brain power we spend on self-awareness and channel it towards more processing power. The mission leader in Blindsight is a vampire, because he is more intelligent and able to make dispassionate decisions, but how do you check whether your vampire is right or even still on your side? Like Quirrelmort, they are always playing at least one level higher than you.
The synthesist quote is the first time Blindsight brings up the problem of what to do when you build smarter-than-human AI. The vampire quote approaches it from a different angle, with a smarter-than-human biological AI. Vampires present a trade-off: they cannot rewrite their source code, so they cannot have a hard takeoff, but you know they are less than friendly AI.
(If you know what is wrong with the above, please ROT13 your spoilers.)
And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can’t understand their analysis and you can’t verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith —-
—- Or you use information theory to flatten it for you, to squash the tesseract into two dimensions and the Klein bottle into three, to simplify reality and pray to whatever Gods survived the millennium that your honorable twisting of the truth hasn’t ruptured any of its load-bearing pylons. …
I’ve never convinced myself that we made the right choice. I can cite the usual justifications in my sleep, talk endlessly about the rotational topology of information and the irrelevance of semantic comprehension. But after all the words, I’m still not sure. I don’t know if anyone else is, either. Maybe it’s just some grand consensual con, marks and players all in league. We won’t admit that our creations are beyond us...
Maybe the Singularity happened years ago. We just don’t want to admit we were left behind.
-- Siri Keeton explains what a “synthesist” does in Blindsight by Peter Watts, page 35-37
Blindsight is an amazingly Less Wrong book, with much discussion of epistemology and cognitive failures, starting with the title of the book. It is some of the hardest science fiction in existence, with a 22-page “Notes and References” section walking through 144 citations for the underlying science.
Pushing a related quote to a comment… Pushing discussion to another comment...
To match action to word, here are some of Ken’s specific examples of vague legal claims, presumed meritless until actual examples can be cited (in reverse chronological order):
Vagueness in legal threats is the hallmark of meritless thuggery.
-- Ken White from Popehat
Ken wants you to be specific because a vague claim is usually a meritless claim. Not citing a good example implies that there are no good examples.
It’s accurate but not very precise, in the same way that the story about how there are wet streets and rain is true but misses the inner connections. Many people fail to get the distinctions between programmers, artists, and designers, because they want designers to fix bugs, just shift staff to design, etc. And testers are nowhere in that simplified model. So people have enough of an idea to get the wrong idea.
Many game developers have a shaky idea of how game development works once the team is larger than can work in one room. That becomes project management, and if you ever want to to see the planning fallacy in all its glory, follow game development and the timelines of when things will be ready. Showing off my own availability bias, the first example that comes to mind is this game, which was “two months from beta” three years ago and has yet to release. Heck, last week’s big story in game development was the PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight, a major release that had to be taken off the market and is now labeled as available this fall. They had to revise the release date after releasing.
According to a distinction that originates with Aristotle himself, his writings are divisible into two groups: the “exoteric” and the “esoteric”. Most scholars have understood this as a distinction between works Aristotle intended for the public (exoteric), and the more technical works intended for use within the Lyceum course / school (esoteric). Modern scholars commonly assume these latter to be Aristotle’s own (unpolished) lecture notes (or in some cases possible notes by his students). … Another common assumption is that none of the exoteric works is extant – that all of Aristotle’s extant writings are of the esoteric kind.
Stronger point: since we are at Less Wrong, think Bayes Theorem. In this case, a “true positive” would be cancer leading to death, and a “false positive” would be death from a medical mishap trying to remove a benign cyst (or even check it further). Death is very bad in either case, and very unlikely in either case.
P (death | cancer, untreated) - this is your explicit worry P (death | cancer, surgery) P (death | benign cyst, untreated) P (death | benign cyst, surgery) - this is what drethelin is encouraging you to note P (benign cyst) P (cancer)
My prior for medical mishaps is higher than 0.5% of the time, but not for fatal ones while checking/removing a cyst near the surface of the skin. As drethelin’s #2 notes, this is not binary. If it is not a benign cyst, you will probably have indicators before it becomes something serious. Similarly, you have non-surgical options such as a cream or testing. Testing probably has a lower risk rate than surgery, although if it is a very minor surgery, perhaps not that much lower.
If the cyst worries you, having it checked/removed is probably low risk and may be good for your mental health. But now we might have worried you about the risks of doing that (sorry) when we meant to reduce your worries about leaving the cyst untreated.
Me, I’m comfortable having somewhat meandering discussions. One of our meetup best practices suggests that groups have more success (measured in terms of interest and retention) with a project or something specific to do rather than socialization. Maybe we cut in the middle of that with a discussion group rather than resembling a cocktail party. I am also concerned that having something that looks like a homework assignment would cut against our “all are welcome” goal.
So perhaps I could rephrase it as “what do you (general you) want from a meetup?” The link has some ideas that have worked nicely elsewhere.
Comment troubleshooting comment, for your testing convenience.
Michigan Meetup Feedback and Planning
It’s not that easy to get data about this but as far as I understand prison workers unions are a significant political player in the US.
An incomplete accounting suggests that prison guard unions outspend private prisons, which could reverse “This incentive is strong for public prisons and doubly strong for private prisons.” So whatever negative effects one expected from private prison political advocacy, at least double that. (The important part isn’t “sides” on that but rather the magnitude of political lobbying.)
(I feel I should note that public unions will spend effort lobbying to increase workers’ share of the prison costs, not just to increase the number of prisoners or guard jobs. I could not tell you the breakdown between advocacy for “tough on crime” and for more pension protection.)
6. Let it go
A perspective on relationships: selective memory helps. If you focus on disagreement, you will notice disagreements everywhere. if you focus on commonalities, it will feel harmonious. How much you agree may not be so important as how much it matters to you that you agree.
Echoing “details needed” on the method of measuring “commercial sexual violence against poor kids.” Some agencies have reduced reported crimes by reducing reports rather than crimes or otherwise changing the map rather than the territory.
Assuming that question away, related measurement question: do efforts that reduce commercial sexual violence against poor kids generalize well to reducing other crimes, and would we expect these results to replicate and generalize in other communities? Pilot programs (that we hear about; publication bias) are often the best case scenario for program effectiveness, rather than results we can expect elsewhere.
… which is a lot of words to ask how serious we are about the “and possible” in Nancy’s one-sentence summary.
Am I on a remotely right track here?
That sounds like a subset of neurotypical behavior. I’m neurotypical and from the very first sentence (“Neurotypicals like social mingling primarily because they play a constant game of social status points, both in the eyes of others (that is real status) and just feeling like getting status (this is more like self-esteem).”) I found it contrary to my experience. Which is not to say it is wrong, and it certainly looks like behavior I have seen, but it kind of suggests that there is One Neurotypical Experience as opposed to a spectrum.
That is reading the initial “neurotypicals” as “all/most neurotypicals” as opposed to “some neurotypicals” or “some subset of neurotypicals.” I think you are trying to describe typical neurotypical behavior, so I would read that “neurotypicals” as trying to describe how most neurotypicals behave.
But I am not the most central example of a neurotypical, so others may find it a more accurate description of their social experiences. I don’t like social mingling, and I avoid most games of social status points. My extroversion score is 7 out of 100, which is likely a factor in not seeing myself in your description of neurotypicals.
2. Does the statement “nerds / neckbeards often have poor social skills” unpack into “people on the spectrum not even noticing that neurotypicals don’t just mindlessly follow social customs, but they are involved in a status micropayment exchange” ?
There seem to be several assumptions built into that unpacking. For example, it suggests that all/most nerds are on the spectrum. My characterization of neurotypical socialization would include mindlessly following social customs as well as enjoying the social game. I don’t think highly social neurotypicals would describe their behavior as a “status micropayment exchange”; that seems like the wrong metaphor and suggests the dominant model as a fixed-sum status game, whereas many (most?) social interactions have no need for an exchange of status points.
Even when a social status point game is in play, I would expect more interactions to involve the recognition of point totals rather than an exchange. “Mutual reassurance or reinforcement of each others status” seems on point.
If the above is the start of a hypothesis, it seems to me that it links greetings and status point exchange too strongly. Greetings are rarely an occasion to gain or lose points, although they may be occasions to discover the current score.
“Pinging” is a metaphor I have seen used productively in these attempts to explain neurotypical social behavior. The greeting is a ping, a mutual recognition that someone is there and potentially responsive to interaction, potentially also exchanging some basic status information.
During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, “I can’t understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It’s all so complicated.”
“No,” she said, “what you mean is not that you can’t understand it, but that you didn’t invent it. You didn’t figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you’re a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you’ll understand it very easily.”
I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it thinking it, was too difficult.
Richard Feynman uses the try harder in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (“The 7 Percent Solution” in chapter 5)