The Craft and the Community: Post 28 – 30

28. Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories

If Yudkowsky had merely written that “we overestimate the degree to which other people understand our thoughts and folks in general overestimate how much they understand what the other person is saying” I wouldn’t have been very impressed.

But he elaborated on this advice with several posts (such as illusion of transparency, inferential distance, and double illusion of transparency) and explained in detail the underlying, general cognitive mechanisms which allowed me to develop a deeper understanding. Which in turn makes it more likely that I remember this advice and also use it.

This is the signature style I want to convey from all those posts that entangled cognitive science experiments and probability theory and epistemology with the practical advice—that practical advice actually becomes practically more powerful if you go out and read up on cognitive science experiments, or probability theory, or even materialist epistemology, and realize what you’re seeing.  This is the brand that can distinguish LW from ten thousand other blogs purporting to offer advice.

He concludes:

…practical advice really, really does become a lot more powerful when it’s backed up by concrete experimental results, causal accounts that are actually true, and math validly interpreted.

29. Less Meta

Yudkowsky is afraid that the recent posts have gotten a bit too meta. Therefore he (contrary to Newsome ) recommends to talk about the object level, i.e. the boring and practical stuff.

30. Go Forth and Create the Art!

(This is the last post of the last Sequence and boy, I’m glad it’s over! Don’t get me wrong, I mostly enjoyed reading the Sequences, but after a while writing comments and summaries really got on my nerves. )

After he laid the groundwork, Yudkowsky hopes that others will be able to improve their rationality on their own, and maybe even create different styles and new rationality skills.

I suspect—you could even call it a guess—that there is a barrier to getting started, in this matter of rationality.  Where by default, in the beginning, you don’t have enough to build on.  Indeed so little that you don’t have a clue that more exists, that there is an Art to be found.  And if you do begin to sense that more is possible—then you may just instantaneously go wrong.  As David Stove observes—I’m not going to link it, because it deserves its own post—most “great thinkers” in philosophy, e.g. Hegel, are properly objects of pity.  That’s what happens by default to anyone who sets out to develop the art of thinking; they develop fake answers.

He concludes:

…My last essay on having a secret identity was not well-received, so let me try again:  I want people to go forth, but also to return.  Or maybe even to go forth and stay simultaneously, because this is the Internet and we can get away with that sort of thing; I’ve learned some interesting things on Less Wrong, lately, and if continuing motivation over years is any sort of problem, talking to others (or even seeing that others are also trying) does often help.

But at any rate, if I have affected you at all, then I hope you will go forth and confront challenges, and achieve somewhere beyond your armchair, and create new Art; and then, remembering whence you came, radio back to tell others what you learned.

In essence:

Step 1. Reading LessWrong.

Step 2. Rationality and stuff. Or something.

Step 3. Achieving godhood.

Easy as pie!

 

The Craft and the Community: Post 25 – 27

25. My Way

More gender-talk. Yudkowsky’s style of rationality is distinctively male cause, um, he himself is male.

I say all this because I want to convey this important idea, that there is the Way and my Way, the pure (or perhaps shared) thing at the center, and the many paths we take there from wherever we started out….

…Even so, you should be aware that I have radioed back my description of the single central shape and the path I took to get closer.  If there are parts that are visibly male, then there are probably other parts—perhaps harder to identify—that are tightly bound to growing up with Orthodox Jewish parents, or (cough) certain other unusual features of my life.

26. The Sin of Underconfidence

There are three great besetting sins of rationalists in particular, and the third of these is underconfidence.  Michael Vassar regularly accuses me of this sin, which makes him unique among the entire population of the Earth.

Haha, that’s probably true.

When subjects know about a bias or are warned about a bias, overcorrection is not unheard of as an experimental result.  That’s what makes a lot of cognitive subtasks so troublesome—you know you’re biased but you’re not sure how much, and you don’t know if you’re correcting enough—and so perhaps you ought to correct a little more, and then a little more, but is that enough?  Or have you, perhaps, far overshot?  Are you now perhaps worse off than if you hadn’t tried any correction?

You contemplate the matter, feeling more and more lost, and the very task of estimation begins to feel increasingly futile…

And when it comes to the particular questions of confidence, overconfidence, and underconfidence—being interpreted now in the broader sense, not just calibrated confidence intervals—then there is a natural tendency to cast overconfidence as the sin of pride, out of that other list which never warned against the improper use of humility or the abuse of doubt.  To place yourself too high—to overreach your proper place—to think too much of yourself—to put yourself forward—to put down your fellows by implicit comparison—and the consequences of humiliation and being cast down, perhaps publicly—are these not loathesome and fearsome things?

My scores on PredictionBook indicate that I’m overconfident. And contra Yudkowsky, I also believe that overconfidence is more dangerous and “sinful” than underconfidence. Sure, you may miss some opportunities and don’t grow and learn as fast as you could, but it’s better to drive a bit longer than to crash and burn, so to speak.

Maybe even more important: PR matters. Modesty is good, arrogance is bad for your image. Of course, being underconfident in public, while being overconfident in private reeks of double-think – no wait, it is double-think.

Whatever, I try to err on the side of underconfidence. Not least because, so far I’ve changed my mind so often and therefore the Outside View simply demands that I assign low probabilities to many of my current beliefs.

27. Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism

Very relevant post in light of the recent discussions on LessWrong about exclusiveness vs. inclusiveness.

Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves.

Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is happening even now.  It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of speech they saw ongoing.  But into this garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little—or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting.  (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions—for then the fool dominates conversations.)

So the garden is tainted now, and it is less fun to play in; the old inhabitants, already invested there, will stay, but they are that much less likely to attract new blood.  Or if there are new members, their quality also has gone down.

Then another fool joins, and the two fools begin talking to each other, and at that point some of the old members, those with the highest standards and the best opportunities elsewhere, leave…

That’s admittedly a good point, but still – it feels a bit censorshippy and cultish.

However, when I think about my university it seems like Yudkowsky is right. I just don’t go to lectures in which the prof asks too many questions and allows too much discussion. The niveau just goes through the floor and you can’t stand listening to all the nonsense spouted by your fellow students.

(OTOH, I also don’t go to lectures where nobody talks aside from the prof…)

Anyway, why does Yudkowsky favor stricter communities?

…Maybe it’s because I grew up on the Internet in places where there was always a sysop, and so I take for granted that whoever runs the server has certain responsibilities.  Maybe I understand on a gut level that the opposite of censorship is not academia but 4chan (which probably still has mechanisms to prevent spam).  Maybe because I grew up in that wide open space where the freedom that mattered was the freedom to choose a well-kept garden that you liked and that liked you, as if you actually could find a country with good laws.

He concludes with some remarks on karma and voting-behavior:

…I really do honestly think that if you want to downvote a comment that seems low-quality… and yet you hesitate, wondering if maybe you’re downvoting just because you disagree with the conclusion or dislike the author… feeling nervous that someone watching you might accuse you of groupthink or echo-chamber-ism or (gasp!) censorship… then nine times of ten, I bet, nine times out of ten at least,it is a comment that really is low-quality.

You have the downvote.  Use it or USENET.

The Craft and the Community: Post 23 – 24

23. Bayesians vs. Barbarians

Yudkowsky thinks that a country full of rationalists could win in a war against barbaric, um, barbarians that believe in an afterlife and God and stuff. He mentions several things, I’m too lazy to elaborate on, because we’ve talked about them already too much like iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, one-boxing in Newcomb, building institutions that lead to the right incentives, etc.

Meh, I don’t know. With the current emotional make-up of the average human I guess rationalists – ceteris paribus – would really be at a disadvantage if they had to fight against, say, Islamic fundamentalists.

Whatever, here’s the ending of the essay:

I say all this, even though I certainly don’t expect rationalists to take over a country any time soon, because I think that what we believe about a society of “people like us” has some reflection on what we think of ourselves.  If you believe that a society of people like you would be too reasonable to survive in the long run… that’s one sort of self-image.  And it’s a different sort of self-image if you think that a society of people all like you could fight the vicious Evil Barbarians and win—not just by dint of superior technology, but because your people care about each other and about their collective society—and because they can face the realities of war without losing themselves—and because they would calculate the group-rational thing to do and make sure it got done—and because there’s nothing in the rules of probability theory or decision theory that says you can’t sacrifice yourself for a cause—and because if you really are smarter than the Enemy and not just flattering yourself about that, then you should be able to exploit the blind spots that the Enemy does not allow itself to think about—and because no matter how heavily the Enemy hypes itself up before battle, you think that just maybe a coherent mind, undivided within itself, and perhaps practicing something akin to meditation or self-hypnosis, can fight as hard in practice as someone who theoretically believes they’ve got seventy-two virgins waiting for them.

Then you’ll expect more of yourself and people like you operating in groups; and then you can see yourself as something more than a cultural dead end.

So look at it this way:  Jeffreyssai probably wouldn’t give up against the Evil Barbarians if he were fighting alone.  A whole army of beisutsukai masters ought to be a force that no one would mess with.  That’s the motivating vision.  The question is how, exactly, that works.

And Yvain nails it yet again:

“IAWYC, but I think it sidesteps an important issue.

A perfectly rational community will be able to resist the barbarians. But it’s possible, perhaps likely, that as you increase community rationality, there’s a valley somewhere between barbarian and Bayesian where fighting ability decreases until you climb out of it.

I think the most rational societies currently existing are still within that valley. And that a country with the values and rationality level of 21st century Harvard will with high probability be defeated by a country with the values and rationality level of 13th century Mongolia (holding everything else equal).

I don’t know who you’re arguing against, but I bet they are more interested in this problem than in an ideal case with a country of perfect Bayesians.”

24. Of Gender and Rationality

Why are there so few female rationalists (under 5% on Lesswrong)? Some reasons:

(7)  We could be looking at an indirect sex difference.  The obvious evolutionary psychology hypothesis behind the imbalanced gender ratio in the iconoclastic community—the atheist/libertarian/technophile cluster—is the idea that males are inherently more attracted to gambles that seem high-risk and high-reward; they are more driven to try out strange ideas that come with big promises, because the genetic payoff for an unusually successful male has a much higher upper bound than the genetic payoff for an unusually successful female.  It seems to me that male teenagers especially have something like a higher cognitive temperature, an ability to wander into strange places both good and bad.  To some extent, this can be viewed as a problem of authorial style as well as innate dispositions—there’s no law that says you have to emphasize the strangeness.  You could start right out with pictures of a happy gender-balanced rationalist unchurch somewhere, and banner the page “A Return To Sanity”.  But a difference as basic as “more male teenagers have a high cognitive temperature” could prove very hard to address completely.

(8)  Then there’s the hypothesis made infamous by Larry Summers:  Male variance in IQ (not the mean) is higher, so the right tail is dominated by males as you get further out.  I know that just mentioning this sort of thing can cause a webpage to burst into flames….  The remedies …are (a) continue the quest to systematize rationality training so that it is less exclusively the preserve of high-g individuals, and (b) recruit among prefiltered audiences that have good gender balance.

Wow, I’m impressed. I really thought I had to list those anti-PC reasons myself. Yudkowsky mentions of course lots of other reasons, most of them cultural in nature. And although most people would characterize me as a genetic determinist I also believe that our culture indoctrinates women to be more agreeable, conservative and conformist, you could say, more boring. (Unfortunately, most men prefer such women, don’t know if that’s for cultural or genetic reasons.)

It’s true that women score higher in Agreeableness (one of the Big Five) which is probably mostly caused by genetics. Nevertheless, there is a lack of female rolemodels in science and philosophy (FWIW, the only cool and famous female scientist/public intellectual I know of, is Susan Blackmore) and the drive to imitate one’s heroes is probably fairly important.

But fiction is probably even more crucial in determining one’s character and passions. But fiction really sucks when it comes to cool females.

For example, I know almost no movies that portray strong and rebellious female heroes with the notable exceptions of  Tiger and Dragon, Sucker Punch and Kill Bill.

The whole fantasy genre is even more problematic. Just think about the bosses of famous computer games:

Diablo: Baal, Diablo, Mephisto and Duriel vs. Andariel (which is the weakest boss). Lame.

Baldurs’s Gate: Sarevok and Jon Irenicus? Both male. (And most heroes are male too: Drizzt Do’Urden, Elminster, etc.)

Lord of the Rings is even worse: Sauron, Saruman? Male. Gandalf, Aragorn? Male. The whole fucking Fellowship of the Ring? Male.

(Sure, there are Galadriel and Eowyn. But these gals are secondary characters, at best.)

And Science Fiction is not much better.

Anyway,

..I would like to once again point out that individual IQ differences, whether derived from genes or eating lead-based paint as a kid, are already as awful as it gets—nothing is made any worse by talking about groups, since groups are just made out of individuals.  The universe is already dreadful along this dimension, so we shouldn’t care more whether groups are involved—though of course, thanks to our political instincts, we do care.

Well, if you’re male and heterosexual you actually do have a problem (if you want to rational girlfriends, that is). A fucking huge problem, I would like to add.

So, what can we do about that?

Assuming you want to do something about it. If you’re asexual or gay, you probably don’t mind. But greater female participation could have additional benefits:

Maybe there’s a critical threshold and once, say, there are more than 10% females, lots of women feel more comfortable and thus participate which would increase the amount of rationalists in general. Or, with the words of Yudkowsky: “…I am maintaining my phrasing of my goal as create rationalists not create female rationalists. But if half of the audience is being filtered for some silly avoidable reason, then I want to fix that.”

Furthermore, higher female participation would fight the stereotype of “male, nerd and weird” and so probably improve our image.

Anyway,  here’s a good comment by Anna Salamon:

“I was talking to my brother the other day about the blinders that come from hanging out only with math/physics/compsci nerds. And he suggested that yes, it is valuable to expose oneself to many types of people, but looking for “normal people” or “non-nerds” is the wrong way to do it; normal people are boring. The thing to do is to find people who share some other kind of passionate interest — people’s whose enthusiasm for public speaking, or windsurfing, or whatever it is has driven the creation of their own interesting, idiosyncratic culture.

As a student, I participated in a (fairly small) number of programs for women in math. The programs were all lousy. I love it when I find other women I can really talk to — it makes me feel more at home with myself, my gender, and my ability to learn to think. But these programs weren’t like that. These programs were blah. “Adding more women” is a boring aim, like “meeting normal people” or “meeting non-nerds”. Usually it’s achieved by taking whatever it is that might make the program distinctive (e.g., math talent, or an analytical/argumentative spirit) and watering down that distinctiveness until more women are involved.

I don’t know if there’s a viable alternative here, but it’s worth asking if we can find something distinctive and interesting that:

1. Usefully adds to, compliments, or extends the existing OB/LW content base, and
2. Automatically includes more women in its set of skilled/passionate practitioners, without need to water down its distinctiveness or its virtues.

Pjeby, elsewhere in this thread, suggested that instrumental rationality (using rationality to achieve visible, concrete aims) might be a useful, distinctive skill-set that naturally includes more women among its passionate practitioners. Another candidate might be rationality components that emphasize inter- and intra-personal skills, such as emotional self-awareness. (I’m fairly lousy at that one myself, but understanding one’s own motives is clearly part of making good decisions in the face of human biases. And stereotypes suggest we might get better gender-balance here.) Anyone have any other suggestions?”

I, for one, have started to write encouraging replies to female commenters that post on the “Welcome to Less Wrong”-Post. I borrowed the strategy from Konkvistador. (It’s funny, folks who are the most politically incorrect about sex and gender, i.e. who have the most accurate maps of reality, are often nicer to women than the guys from the thought police.)

 

 

 

The Craft and the Community: Post 20 – 22

20. Beware of Other-Optimizing

‘ve noticed a serious problem in which aspiring rationalists vastly overestimate their ability to optimize other people’s lives.  And I think I have some idea of how the problem arises.

You read nineteen different webpages advising you about personal improvement—productivity, dieting, saving money.  And the writers all sound bright and enthusiastic about Their Method, they tell tales of how it worked for them and promise amazing results…

But most of the advice rings so false as to not even seem worth considering.  So you sigh, mournfully pondering the wild, childish enthusiasm that people can seem to work up for just about anything, no matter how silly.  Pieces of advice #4 and #15 sound interesting, and you try them, but… they don’t… quite… well, it fails miserably.  The advice was wrong, or you couldn’t do it, and either way you’re not any better off.

And then you read the twentieth piece of advice—or even more, you discover a twentieth method that wasn’t in any of the pages—and STARS ABOVE IT ACTUALLY WORKS THIS TIME.

At long, long last you have discovered the real way, the right way, the way that actually works.  And when someone else gets into the sort of trouble you used to have—well, this time you know how to help them.  You can save them all the trouble of reading through nineteen useless pieces of advice and skip directly to the correct answer.  As an aspiring rationalist you’ve already learned that most people don’t listen, and you usually don’t bother—but this person is a friend, someone you know, someone you trust and respect to listen.

And so you put a comradely hand on their shoulder, look them straight in the eyes, and tell them how to do it.

But the problem is that your methods for dealing with e.g. akrasia often don’t work for others, be it for genetic or psychological reasons. Thus it is written:

Beware of Other-Optimizing.

On a related note: Many people believe that their own mental structure or personality can be generalized to apply to everyone else’s. Yvain coined this the Typical Mind/Psyche Fallacy.

Similarly, most folks, especially diet-gurus, think that their own methods are the only right and true and awesome ones. This is the Typical Body Fallacy. Just because you lost 50 pound and felt great when you ate 65% fat, doesn’t mean that the same applies to me (it doesn’t).

21. Akrasia and Shangri-La

Yudkowsky talks about the Shangri-La diet by Seth Roberts. Although it’s probably one of the best methods for losing weight, it didn’t work for him.  (For me neither, or to be more precise, only to a limited degree. It really reduces your appetite, but apparently your metabolism goes down, too. Of course, I try to reduce my body fat percentage from ~15% to under 10%, which is way harder than losing fat in the 30%-range. Anyway, pretty off-topic.)

In conclusion: Beware of other-optimizing, people are really different. (But if you want to lose weight, just ask me! I know definitely more than 15 different methods, and employ probably 7 of them simultaneously   )

22. Collective Apathy and the Internet

Yesterday I covered the bystander effect, aka bystander apathy: given a fixed problem situation, a group of bystanders is actually less likely to act than a single bystander.  The standard explanation for this result is in terms of pluralistic ignorance (if it’s not clear whether the situation is an emergency, each person tries to look calm while darting their eyes at the other bystanders, and sees other people looking calm) and diffusion of responsibility (everyone hopes that someone else will be first to act; being part of a crowd diminishes the individual pressure to the point where no one acts).

Actually, I believe this is a myth. The probability that a given individual person will help goes down, but not the probability that at least somebody helps. (At least I think so, but the key take-away is: Don’t trust psychology research. )

 ….people seem to have a hard time reacting constructively to problems encountered over the Internet.

Well, I disagree and just quote this comment by Yvain:

“Blink. You read Reddit, right? Have you never noticed that every time there’s an outrageous story, everyone on Reddit bands together and does something about it? Dusty the cat? The ReMax debacle? That woman who got her cruise cancelled and the Redditors sent enough to get her a new one? Also, http://www.cracked.com/article_17170_8-awesome-cases-internet-vigilantism.html . This is pretty impressive. If I’d, say, put a big poster up in a school about Dusty the Cat or ReMax, I doubt the students would have been able to mount half as coherent or overwhelming a response as the Internet did.

And Anonymous versus Scientology was pretty impressive too.

All of these have some things in common. They’re responses to a single outrageous incident, they’re things that the mainstream media doesn’t cover, and they don’t take a huge time commitment to solve. So there is a big difference between them and, say, fighting world hunger.

But what I gather from these examples is that anonymity and the bystander effect do not suddenly change the incentive structure for people online. Possibly the best known Internet action-taking campaign ever was the anti-Scientology one perpetrated by…Anonymous.

I would suggest we shift our inquiries in the direction of why the Internet is so good at Dusty the Cat style operations and so bad at end world hunger style operations. I think it probably has to do with the way people use the Internet itself: short attention spans and novelty-seeking.

On the other hand, the Internet can pull through for people long-term: witness Howard Dean, Barack Obama, Ron Paul, and “netroots”. So maybe it has more to do with the fragmented nature of the Internet. Reddit is a natural place for Ron Paul fans to get together and organize Ron Paul related things, but there are lots of fragmented communities and none of them is specifically focused on world hunger. Nor would a sudden interest in solving world hunger on one community’s part spread to another.

I don’t know. Don’t have a specific answer. Just think we need to shift direction away from “Why is the Internet so bad at this?” because it isn’t.”

 

 

 

 

The Craft and the Community: Post 16 – 19

16. Selecting Rationalist Groups

Many rationality techniques are individualistic. And Yudkowsky also admits that his whole writing is skewed towards individualism.

But “group rationality” is also important. If you are only effective and rational when you’re alone you probably won’t achieve much in life. And there is rationality stuff that deals with more than one person like e.g. Aumann’s Agreement Theorem.

17. Incremental Progress and the Valley

At any given point in your life, it may be the case, that improving your rationality makes you less happy and productive. But, eventually, you’ll overcome the “valley of bad rationality” and things will get better (or so Yudkowsky argues).

…once you sort yourself out a bit and you aren’t doing quite so many other things wrong, striving for more rationality actually will make you better off.  The long road leads out of the valley and higher than before, even in the human lands.

The more I know about some particular facet of the Art, the more I can see this is so.  As I’ve previously remarked, my essays may be unreflective of what a true martial art of rationality would be like, because I have only focused on answering confusing questions—not fighting akrasia, coordinating groups, or being happy.  In the field of answering confusing questions—the area where I have most intensely practiced the Art—it now seems massively obvious that anyone who thought they were better off “staying optimistic about solving the problem” would get stomped into the ground.  By a casual student.

Yudkowsky is probably right, but sometimes I have the feeling that Lovecraft was right. Maybe, just maybe, knowing “was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhält” will destroy your mind.

18. Whining-Based Communities

A somewhat Randian rant:

If you consider the reasonableness-based conception of rationality rather than the winning-based conception of rationality—well, you can easily imagine some community of people congratulating themselves on how reasonable they were, while blaming the surrounding unreasonable society for keeping them down.  Wrapping themselves up in their own bitterness for reality refusing to comply with the greatness they thought they should have.

…And maybe it’s all true.  The government does impose taxes and barriers to new businesses.  There is racism and sexism.  Scientists don’t run out and embrace new ideas without huge amounts of work to evangelize them.  Loyalty is a huge factor in promotions and flattery does signify loyalty.  I can’t back religions on that divine plan thing, but still, those wealthier than you may have gotten there by means more vile than you care to use…

And so what?  In other countries there are those with far greater obstacles and less opportunity than you.  There are those born with Down’s Syndrome.  There’s not a one of us in this world, even the luckiest, whose path is entirely straight and without obstacles.  In this unfair world, the test of your existence is how well you do in this unfair world.

…I earlier suggested that we view our parents and environment and genes as having determined which person makes a decision—plucking you out of Platonic person-space to agonize in front of the burning orphanage, rather than someone else—but you determine what that particular person decides.  If, counterfactually, your genes or environment had been different, then it would not so much change your decision as determine that someone else would make that decision.

In the same sense, I would suggest that a baby with your genes, born into a universe entirely fair, would by now be such a different person that as to be nowhere close to “you”, your point in Platonic person-space.  You are defined by the particular unfair challenges that you face; and the test of your existence is how well you do with them.

I agree to a large degree with this, but please don’t make the opposite mistake and become a self-righteous asshole that has no compassion for the victims of this world.

19. Mandatory Secret Identities

Among the failure modes of martial arts dojos, I suspect, is that a sufficiently dedicated martial arts student, will dream of…

…becoming a teacher and having their own martial arts dojo someday.

To see what’s wrong with this, imagine going to a class on literary criticism, falling in love with it, and dreaming of someday becoming a famous literary critic just like your professor, but never actually writing anything.  Writers tend to look down on literary critics’ understanding of the art form itself, for just this reason.  (Orson Scott Card uses the analogy of a wine critic who listens to a wine-taster saying “This wine has a great bouquet”, and goes off to tell their students “You’ve got to make sure your wine has a great bouquet”.  When the student asks, “How?  Does it have anything to do with grapes?” the critic replies disdainfully, “That’s for grape-growers!  I teach wine.“)

Similarly, Yudkowsky argues that rationality teachers should excel also in real life, e.g. be a good programmer, university professor or something like that. I don’t know, Yvain makes a good counter-argument:

“What does this post even mean? I don’t have access to my own respect function, and I don’t know if I’d mess with it this way even if I did.

If you were to say tomorrow “I’ve been lying about the whole AI programmer thing; I actually live in my parents’ basement and have never done anything worthwhile in any non-rationality field in my entire life,” then would I have to revise my opinion that you’re a very good rationality teacher? Would I have to deny having learned really valuable things from you?

Or would I have to say, “Well, this guy named Eliezer taught me everything I know, he’s completely opened my mind to new domains of knowledge, and you should totally read everything he’s written – but he’s not all that great and I don’t have any respect for him and you shouldn’t either” when referring people to your writing?

Or to put it another way…let’s say there are two rationality instructors in my city. One, John, is a world famous physicist, businessman, and writer. The other, Mary, has no particular accomplishments outside her rationality instruction work. However, Mary’s students have been observed to do much better at their careers than John’s, and every time the two dojos go up against each other in Rationalist Debating or calibration tests or any other kind of measurement, Mary’s students do better. Wouldn’t it be, well, irrational for me to go to John’s dojo instead of Mary’s? Would the Bayesian Police have to surround Mary’s dojo and make sure her students don’t say nice things about her or pay her more money than John is making?”

Yeah, I agree with Yvain. Let’s formulate it this way: If somebody tries to teach you something about rationality, but totally fails at everything else you should at least become suspicious.

 

 

The Craft and the Community: Post 11 – 15

11. Church vs. Taskforce

Yudkowsky elaborates on the last post and advocates the establishment of rationalist task-forces and communities. (With task-forces he means small and maybe only short-lived communities that were created for a specific reason.)

Yeah, a genuine rational community would be awesome, no doubt. The first problem is of course, that there aren’t many Lesswrongers around (definitely under 100 in Germany) and the second big problem is that rationality is a rather broad topic. There are many rationalists with whom I wouldn’t want to become friends, although most Lesswrongers are of course significantly more interesting than the average human.

Nevertheless, what’s the purpose of a Lesswrong meetup? Discussing some ideas and rationality techniques? You could also do that on the internet, probably even more efficient. And just creating a community for its own sake, feels kinda awkward. That’s a big problem, and I don’t know how to solve it.

But I would love to find some/more like-minded people in real life. And the best strategy for finding folks with similar interests is of course “creating” them, namely through  propaganda meme-spreading.

So what are the best strategies for doing so?

At first, I thought about infiltrating atheistic communities, but this constant religion-bashing is kinda boring and the average atheist is probably only a little bit more rational than the average believer, especially in Germany, where the majority is already atheistic.

Then I thought about infiltrating psychedelic communities like “Land der Träume”, a german drug-forum. Those people are interesting, although a bit insane, but I find that somewhat attractive. But convincing hippies that rationality is awesome is probably pretty hard.

Another way is finding interesting people at your university, which is also rather difficult and I lack the motivation to speak with hundreds of people til I find someone with potential. (I don’t only mean IQ of 120+. That’s really not that hard. Problem is, most intelligent people are just plain boring. They are interested in e.g. computational models for cell migration in three-dimensional matrices but don’t have a clue about philosophy, drugs, evolutionary psychology or cosmology… )

And the only German transhumanistic organization that I know of, (http://www.detrans.de/) is also quite lame. Seems like all of the member are first generation transhumanists and nobody mentions Yudkowsky, Bostrom or Hanson.

Maybe I should try it with Science fiction conventions. I’ve never been at one, so I don’t know how cool the typical attendees are, but it’s probably worth a shot.

But as much as I want to spread the word I should be wary of evangelism; Here’s a good discussion between cousin_it and cyphergoth:

cousin_it: “You’ve nailed exactly what worries me in your comment and the original post. You see, belief systems that aim for self-propagation are prone to turn really icky over time. A scientist doesn’t want above all else to spread the scientific worldview, a painter doesn’t set out to make everyone else paint, even a pickup artist has no desire to make all males alphas – they all have other, concrete goals; but religious or political views have to be viral. There’s any number of movements whose adherents have a priority of spreading the word, and right now I can’t think of a single such movement I’d want to be associated with.”

cyphergoth: “Like violence, there are understandable reasons to be squeamish about evangelism, but if you forswear it, you hand victory to those who do not.

Rather than not talk about it, we should analyse the bad consequences we fear from evangelism, and try to figure out how to get the good things while avoiding the bad things. This may not have been done before, but it would be a mistake to be so stuck on the outside view that you come to believe that only what has already been done is possible.”

cousin_it: “My examples indicate it’s not necessary to hand victory to others. Science didn’t spread due to evangelism, science spread because it works. Art spreads because people love it. This is the standard we should be holding ourselves to.

Evangelism is the equivalent of proactive sales with an inferior product. A good evangelist/salesman can push through negative-sum deals, actually destroying total value in the world. If you’ve spent time in the IT industry, you recognize this picture.

Eliezer said repeatedly that rationalists should WIN. Great, now won’t anyone take this phrase seriously? I don’t want a rationalist technique to make myself pure from racism or somesuch crap. I want a rationalist technique to WIN. Fo’ real. Develop it, and the world will beat a path to your door.

Right now you (we) have no product, and preaching is no substitute.”

True, most of my self improvements were either produced through quantified self techniques which are at best a subset of rationality or are intangible (like changes in my world view).

12. Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes

It is a non-so-hidden agenda of this site, Less Wrong, that there are many causes which benefit from the spread of rationality—because it takes a little more rationality than usual to see their case, as a supporter, or even just a supportive bystander.  Not just the obvious causes like atheism, but things like marijuana legalization—where you could wish that people were a bit more self-aware about their motives and the nature of signaling, and a bit more moved by inconvenient cold facts.  The Institute Which May Not Be Named was merely an unusually extreme case of this, wherein it got to the point that after years of bogging down I threw up my hands and explicitly recursed on the job of creating rationalists.

…. Atheism has very little to do directly with marijuana legalization, but if both atheists and anti-Prohibitionists are willing to step back a bit and say a bit about the general, abstract principle of confronting a discomforting truth that interferes with a fine righteous tirade, then both atheism and marijuana legalization pick up some of the benefit from both efforts.

Yeah, a bit more sanity would help a lot of my pet causes.

13. Helpless Individuals

Yudkowsky argues that most people don’t donate to specific scientific projects because e.g. “studying the genetics of trypanotolerance in cattle” doesn’t generate as much fuzzy feelings as saving a cute puppy from a rare disease.

>Science gets funded, but not by individuals.

14. Money: The Unit of Caring

In our society, this common currency of expected utilons is called “money”.  It is the measure of how much society cares about something.

This is a brutal yet obvious point, which many are motivated to deny.

With this audience, I hope, I can simply state it and move on.  It’s not as if you thought “society” was intelligent, benevolent, and sane up until this point, right?

I say this to make a certain point held in common across many good causes.  Any charitable institution you’ve ever had a kind word for, certainly wishes you would appreciate this point, whether or not they’ve ever said anything out loud.  For I have listened to others in the nonprofit world, and I know that I am not speaking only for myself here…

Many people, when they see something that they think is worth doing, would like to volunteer a few hours of spare time, or maybe mail in a five-year-old laptop and some canned goods, or walk in a march somewhere, but at any rate, not spend money.

Yeah, working a bit overtime and donating the additional money helps your favorite cause more than volunteering whole days. But working overtime sucks and volunteering makes you feel good.

There is this very, very old puzzle/observation in economics about the lawyer who spends an hour volunteering at the soup kitchen, instead of working an extra hour and donating the money to hire someone to work for five hours at the soup kitchen.

There’s this thing called “Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage”.  There’s this idea called “professional specialization”.  There’s this notion of “economies of scale”.  There’s this concept of “gains from trade”.  The whole reason why we have money is to realize the tremendous gains possible from each of us doing what we do best.

This is what grownups do.  This is what you do when you want something to actually get done.  You use money to employ full-time specialists.

Of course, these principles only hold true, if you really want to help your cause. This is however seldom the case. Charity is about signaling virtue, not about helping.

15. Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately

Another great post, just two quotes:

I recommend that you purchase warm fuzzies and utilons separately.  Not at the same time.  Trying to do both at the same time just means that neither ends up done well.  If status matters to you, purchase status separately too!

If I had to give advice to some new-minted billionaire entering the realm of charity, my advice would go something like this:

• To purchase warm fuzzies, find some hard-working but poverty-stricken woman who’s about to drop out of state college after her husband’s hours were cut back, and personally, but anonymously, give her a cashier’s check for $10,000.  Repeat as desired.
• To purchase status among your friends, donate $100,000 to the current sexiest X-Prize, or whatever other charity seems to offer the most stylishness for the least price.  Make a big deal out of it, show up for their press events, and brag about it for the next five years.
• Then—with absolute cold-blooded calculation—without scope insensitivity or ambiguity aversion—without concern for status or warm fuzzies—figuring out some common scheme for converting outcomes to utilons, and trying to express uncertainty in percentage probabilitiess—find the charity that offers the greatest expected utilons per dollar.  Donate up to however much money you wanted to give to charity, until their marginal efficiency drops below that of the next charity on the list.

….But the main lesson is that all three of these things—warm fuzzies, status, and expected utilons—can be bought far more efficiently when you buy separately, optimizing for only one thing at a time.  Writing a check for $10,000,000 to a breast-cancer charity—while far more laudable than spending the same $10,000,000 on, I don’t know, parties or something—won’t give you the concentrated euphoria of being present in person when you turn a single human’s life around, probably not anywhere close.  It won’t give you as much to talk about at parties as donating to something sexy like an X-Prize—maybe a short nod from the other rich.  And if you threw away all concern for warm fuzzies and status, there are probably at least a thousand underserved existing charities that could produce orders of magnitude more utilons with ten million dollars.  Trying to optimize for all three criteria in one go only ensures that none of them end up optimized very well—just vague pushes along all three dimensions.

 

 

 

The Craft and the Community: Post 7 – 10

7. You’re Calling *Who* A Cult Leader?

Yudkowsky doesn’t worry anymore when people accuse him of being a “cult leader” since he learnt that even fairly normal folks like Paul Graham were accused of leading a cult.

Yeah, it is true that some accusations (e.g. the ones of those Rational-Wiki guys) are over-blown. Furthermore, every cause wants to be a cult. Political or religious parties are the obvious examples.

But I also see signs of cultishness in contrarian and independent-minded (that doesn’t mean those guys are rational. They just invent lots of bullshit on their own) groups like e.g. psychedlic hippies. Folks get quickly annoyed by criticism of e.g. Terrence McKenna – which of course is understandable cuz Terrence McKenna was a pretty cool guy.

And so it’s no surprise that LW shows also signs of cultishness, probably even more than most groups. I mean, it’s mainly focused on the writings of one guy and maybe even more importantly, many lesswrongian ideas are inherently cultish. There is no possible way to talk about things like FAI, the singularity, cryonics or x-risks in a manner that doesn’t activate your cult-detectors.

Btw, there was a recent post on Lesswrong that called for even more exclusiveness. I can understand the motives but I really wish Lesswrong would become more inclusive because I don’t know of any other public forum that discusses ideas like FAI, the singularity, x-risks, etc and I don’t want to drive away folks that disagree with the local dogma. Of course, there are some cool blogs, but it’s rare to see genuine and long discussions happen. It’s mostly just a short back and forth.

OTOH, I don’t think group think is a big problem. Criticism by folks like Will Newsome, Vladimir Slepnev and especially Wei Dai is often upvoted. (I upvote almost every comment of Dai or Newsome if I don’t forget it. Dai makes always very good points and Newsome is often wrong but also hilariously funny or just brilliant and right.) Of course, folks like this Dymytry guy are often downvoted, but IMO with good reason. Well, if I thought group think was a big problem I probably wouldn’t write these summaries, right? Only true cultists read the Scripture of our Great Leader twice in less than a year and write hundreds of posts about it.

8. On Things that are Awesome

There is nothing wrong with finding something awesome. What kind of things are the most awesome? Yudkowsky thinks people and works like e.g. books or music:

What chiefly conveys to me the experience of the awesome is to see someone—pardon me, see someone’s work —that is way above me.  My most recent experience of the awesome was reading the third book in Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series, and realizing that although I want to write with that kind of emotional depth, I can’t, and may never be able to in this world.  I looked back at all my own tries in (unpublished) fiction, and it paled to grey by comparison.  It was the same way with reading Hofstadter the first time, and thinking that I could never, ever write as well as Gödel, Escher, Bach; or reading Permutation City, and seeing how far above me Greg Egan was as an idea-based science fiction writer.  And it would have been the same way with Jaynes, if that time I hadn’t been thinking to myself, “No, I must become this good.”  This is also something of a reply to Carl’s comment that we may feel freer to admire those who do not compete with us—for me, the experience of the awesome is most strongly created by seeing someone (or rather their work) outdoing me overwhelmingly, in some place where I have tried my hand.  I don’t think there’s anything unhealthy about making this a basis of admiration.

9. Your Price for Joining

Most of us are not willing to join a cause that doesn’t agree 100% with almost anything we think. But often this is an irrational decision. You can reach your goals more effectively if you team up with people even if they only share 70% of your goals and use seemingly ineffective methods.

Yudkowsky has obviously SIAI in mind. Many people have problems with SIAI’s strategies (like me) but does this mean one shouldn’t support it (assuming one agrees with its broad mission, i.e. FAI, hard takeoff, etc.)? Problem is, there are very few good transhumanistic  organizations out there. FHI is presumably the only alternative because most of the other orgs are of rather questionable value like e.g. humanity+, Kurzweil’s movement, IEET or the Lifeboat Foundation. Obviously, things would change if folks like Wei Dai or so founded a new organization that e.g. focuses on WBE or something like that.

10. Can Humanism Match Religion’s Output?

Most atheists don’t donate as much money to altruistic causes as e.g. Catholics do. So Yudkowsky asks if and how rationalists could match the output of the Catholic Church without implementing all this religious stuff. But maybe religious folks have a genuine advantage?

Now you might at this point throw up your hands, saying:  “For so long as we don’t have direct control over our brain’s motivational circuitry, it’s not realistic to expect a rationalist to be as strongly motivated as someone who genuinely believes that they’ll burn eternally in hell if they don’t obey.”

This is a fair point.  Any folk theorem to the effect that a rational agent should do at least as well as a non-rational agent will rely on the assumption that the rational agent can always just implement whatever “irrational” policy is observed to win.  But if you can’t choose to have unlimited mental energy, then it may be that some false beliefs are, in cold fact, more strongly motivating than any available true beliefs.  And if we all generally suffer from altruistic akrasia, being unable to bring ourselves to help as much as we think we should, then it is possible for the God-fearing to win the contest of altruistic output.

Hehe, maybe Roko’s basilisk could help you with that. Anyway, the fear of eternal damnation is probably not that motivating, if you think about it. The human motivational system doesn’t “scale”, so to speak. Saving 1 human life or saving 1 million human lives feels almost the same. So why are religious folks more motivated?

Really, I suspect that what’s going on here has less to do with the motivating power of eternal damnation, and a lot more to do with the motivating power of physically meeting other people who share your cause.  The power, in other words, of being physically present at church and having religious neighbors.

This is a problem for the rationalist community in its present stage of growth, because we are rare and geographically distributed way the hell all over the place.  If all the readers of this blog lived within a 5-mile radius of each other, I bet we’d get a lot more done, not for reasons of coordination but just sheer motivation.

Good comment by infotropism:

“So inasmuch as possible, we’ll need real world meetings : humans are social beings, and it was customary to see, hear, touch, smell even, people who’d be in your group in the environment of adaptation. Do we have any rationalist bonfire in preparation ? Excursions ? Doing sport together ? Watching films ?

It’s pretty difficult to bond as strongly – and more importantly, as richly – to other people if you don’t meet them in real life. That bond is what makes us work together so well, what can oil a well working machine. Families, groups of – real life – friends, are not uncommonly the starting point for successful ventures.

And I think it’s not just the meeting in real life part. We need to build up a link, to feel the presence of the other, as another human being, as we would a friend. We need to share activities outside of just meeting an planning stuff.

We need to get to know and like each other on that fundamental level, by using the goddamn social machinery that’s in our head. We’re human beings before being rationalists, and we need to use that to our advantage, down to the last bit of it, rather than constantly forgetting about that fact. We run on corrupt hardware, we aren’t rational, disembodied pristine minds. If we deprive ourselves, as well as our community, from that social background, then we will not thrive, and may even wither.

Side question, do we have anything secular, not religious, that looks like religious institutions ? Like, non religious monasteries where people would study, work together, live together ? The closest thing I can think of is the academia, but the academia doesn’t seem like what I have on my mind.

What about religious feasts, celebrations, rituals even ? Do we have a lot of non religious rituals around, that could be recuperated, or at least inspire us ? We could use that, at least on a human level, it’d help foster people’s willpower, brighten the fire inside. So long as we can direct that energy towards rational goals, and keep watch for any sign of becoming cult-ish, couldn’t we benefit from such things ?”

Hm, should I organize another LW-meetup? Maybe in the summer.

3. Epistemic Viciousness – 6. Tolerate Tolerance

3. Epistemic Viciousness

Many martial arts gurus would totally lose in real fights.

Some of the reasons why this can happen:

• The art, the dojo, and the sensei are seen as sacred.  “Having red toe-nails in the dojo is like going to church in a mini-skirt and halter-top…  The students of other martial arts are talked about like they are practicing the wrong religion.”
• If your teacher takes you aside and teaches you a special move and you practice it for 20 years, you have a large emotional investment in it, and you’ll want to discard any incoming evidence against the move.
• Incoming students don’t have much choice: a martial art can’t be learned from a book, so they have to trust the teacher.
• Deference to famous historical masters.  “Runners think that the contemporary staff of Runner’s World know more about running than than all the ancient Greeks put together.  And it’s not just running, or other physical activities, where history is kept in its place; the same is true in any well-developed area of study.  It is not considered disrespectful for a physicist to say that Isaac Newton’s theories are false…”  (Sound familiar?)
• “We martial artists struggle with a kind of poverty—data-poverty—which makes our beliefs hard to test… Unless you’re unfortunate enough to be fighting a hand-to-hand war you cannot check to see how much force and exactly which angle a neck-break requires…”
• “If you can’t test the effectiveness of a technique, then it is hard to test methods for improving the technique.  Should you practice your nukite in the air, or will that just encourage you to overextend? … Our inability to test our fighting methods restricts our ability to test our training methods.”
• “But the real problem isn’t just that we live in data poverty—I think that’s true for some perfectly respectable disciplines, including theoretical physics—the problem is that we live in poverty but continue to act as though we live in luxury, as though we can safely afford to believe whatever we’re told…”

4. Schools Proliferating Without Evidence

 

Remember Rorschach ink-blot tests?  It’s such an appealing argument: the patient looks at the ink-blot and says what he sees, the psychotherapist interprets their psychological state based on this.  There’ve been hundreds of experiments looking for some evidence that it actually works.  Since you’re reading this, you can guess the answer is simply “No.”  Yet the Rorschach is still in use.  It’s just such a good story that psychotherapists just can’t bring themselves to believe the vast mounds of experimental evidence saying it doesn’t work—

—which tells you what sort of field we’re dealing with here.

And the experimental results on the field as a whole are commensurate.  Yes, patients who see psychotherapists have been known to get better faster than patients who simply do nothing.  But there is no statistically discernible difference between the many schools of psychotherapy.  There is no discernible gain from years of expertise.

And there’s also no discernible difference between seeing a psychotherapist and spending the same amount of time talking to a randomly selected college professor from another field.  It’s just talking to anyone that helps you get better, apparently.

In the entire absence of the slightest experimental evidence for their effectiveness, psychotherapists became licensed by states, their testimony accepted in court, their teaching schools accredited, and their bills paid by health insurance.

You just have to love psychologists. The question is of course: “Is Lesswrong any different?”

5. Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate

Ah, great post. There is another reason why rationalists aren’t as effective as they should be. We are too contrarian, we can’t cooperate. I often enjoy disagreeing with the majority and sometimes I feel like a stupid brainwashed cultist when I endorse more idiosyncratic/bizarre ideas backed up by only little evidence like FAI, cryonics, etc. Furthermore most of us don’t enjoy social interactions and are introverted. I’m probably an exception that proves the rule. Of course, these days I don’t enjoy most social interactions but that’s because most people are stupid or boring. In my youth I was rather extraverted. Anyway, the takeaway:

Our culture puts all the emphasis on heroic disagreement and heroic defiance, and none on heroic agreement or heroic group consensus.  We signal our superior intelligence and our membership in the nonconformist community by inventing clever objections to others’ arguments.  Perhaps that is why the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/Silicon-Valley/programmer/early-adopter crowd stays marginalized, losing battles with less nonconformist factions in larger society.  No, we’re not losing because we’re so superior, we’re losing because our exclusively individualist traditions sabotage our ability to cooperate.

6. Tolerate Tolerance

Yudkowsky admits that he is very intolerant of others tolerance:

The danger of punishing nonpunishers is something I remind myself of, say, every time Robin Hanson points out a flaw in some academic trope and yet modestly confesses he could be wrong (and he’s not wrong).  Or every time I see Michael Vassar still considering the potential of someone who I wrote off as hopeless within 30 seconds of being introduced to them.  I have to remind myself, “Tolerate tolerance!  Don’t demand that your allies be equally extreme in their negative judgments of everything you dislike!”

Personal Bla: I’m also very intolerant. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very libertarian and believe that everyone can do whatever he wants as long as he doesn’t hurt anybody without the consent of the victim.

Yep, I mean it. I just read the new and great book “The Righteous Mind” by J. Haidt. As you probably already know he postulates that there are 5 moral (now 6 to be precise) dimensions. Liberals value harm and fairness whereas conservatives also value sacredness, authority and loyalty.

There was a funny passage in which Haidt tried to show that even liberals value things like sacredness. He described the “Rotenburg Cannibal” Armin Meiwes who basically ate another guys’ penis and skin but with the consent of the guy. And then Haidt wrote that of course also liberals think that this should be illegal and Meiwes should go into jail or at least in a psychiatric ward. Sorry folks, I beg to differ. Sure, it’s pretty disgusting (although quite hilarious) and I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable smoking a joint with this guy, but he did nothing wrong and you can’t punish him for that. Srsly.

Anyway, back to the topic: I’m pretty intolerant in a social sense. Other guys have to be  intelligent, funny and interested in most of the stuff I like (which pretty much excludes 99,99999% of humankind) or else I can’t build a friendship, even a superficial one, with them. If other people don’t understand me I feel more alone than when I’m really alone. One of the most depressing things is a conversation in which you find out that the other one just can’t understand you because the inferential distances are just to great, be they of an intellectual (in the IQ or knowledge sense) or moral nature. And the bar for romantic relationships is even higher cuz the girl has to be (in addition to the above mentioned qualities) beautiful and anorexic skinny or else she would disgust me sexually. But I’m still hoping for a drug that makes me gay or rewires my sexual preferences. Or somebody just eats my dick and I would lose my need for romantic relationships altogether. Just kidding.

 

 

 

 

The Craft and the Community: Post 1 – 2

1. Raising the Sanity Waterline

Even if we eliminated harmful and insane practices and beliefs like e.g. drug-criminalization or the Blank Slate Dogma (Yudkowsky bashes religion, I however really love to bash those two, as you may have noticed by now), there still would be a lot of other problems left. Those beliefs are merely symptoms of a disease that goes much deeper. I’m speaking a bit hyperbolic but as a general rule it’s accurate:  Humans are crazy.

Not everyone, and not batshit-insane like the inner circle of a psychiatric ward, but nonetheless…

Anyway, so merely treating the symptoms wouldn’t be as effective as curing the sickness. So Yudkowsky thinks that general rationality skills like Occam’s Razor, Mysterious Answers, Bayesian notions of evidence, etc. could be panaceas and raise the sanity waterline, so that crazy beliefs go “underwater”.

Sounds like a nice strategy and would get rid of loads of bullshit at a single blow. Problem is of course that many forms of madness are incurable. In addition to that, most people have IQs below 100 (only European countries have IQs of around hundred and China has an average IQ of about 105, but e.g. even the USA has something like 94 since its population is only 80% white or so and African or Latin American countries score one whole SD below the mean) and probably only a fraction of those folks can understand more complex stuff about rationality.

2. A Sense That More Is Possible

Most aspiring rationalists just don’t seem that impressive. Sure, they have probably ~2 SD above average IQ, and aren’t obviously crazy but that’s about it.

The problem is that there aren’t systematized practices or courses that allow you to level up in rationality. And developing the stuff on your own or reading some stuff by Yudkowsky only works to some degree.

The conclusion:

Why are there schools of martial arts, but not rationality dojos? … Is it more important to hit people than to think?

No, but it’s easier to verify when you have hit someone.  That’s part of it, a highly central part.

But maybe even more importantly—there are people out there who want to hit, and who have the idea that there ought to be a systematic art of hitting that makes you into a visibly more formidable fighter, with a speed and grace and strength beyond the struggles of the unpracticed.  So they go to a school that promises to teach that.  And that school exists because, long ago, some people had the sense that more was possible.  And they got together and shared their techniques and practiced and formalized and practiced and developed the Systematic Art of Hitting.  They pushed themselves that far because they thought they should be awesome and they were willing to put some back into it.

Now—they got somewhere with that aspiration, unlike a thousand other aspirations of awesomeness that failed, because they could tell when they had hit someone; and the schools competed against each other regularly in realistic contests with clearly-defined winners.

But before even that—there was first the aspiration, the wish to become stronger, a sense that more was possible.  A vision of a speed and grace and strength that they did not already possess, but could possess, if they were willing to put in a lot of work, that drove them to systematize and train and test.

Why don’t we have an Art of Rationality?

Third, because current “rationalists” have trouble working in groups: of this I shall speak more.

Second, because it is hard to verify success in training, or which of two schools is the stronger.

But first, because people lack the sense that rationality is something that should be systematized and trained and tested like a martial art, that should have as much knowledge behind it as nuclear engineering, whose superstars should practice as hard as chess grandmasters, whose successful practitioners should be surrounded by an evident aura of awesome.

And conversely they don’t look at the lack of visibly greater formidability, and say, “We must be doing something wrong.”

“Rationality” just seems like one more hobby or hobbyhorse, that people talk about at parties; an adopted mode of conversational attire with few or no real consequences; and it doesn’t seem like there’s anything wrong about that, either.

Good comment by Vladimir Golovin:

“Because they don’t win? Because they don’t reliably steer reality into narrow regions other people consider desirable?

I’ve met and worked with several irrationalists whose models of reality were, to put it mildly, not correlated to said reailty, with one explicit, outspoken anti-rationalist with a totally weird, alien epistemology among them. All these people had a couple of interesting things in common.

On one hand, they were often dismal at planning – they were unable to see obvious things, and they couldn’t be convinced otherwise by any arguments appealing to ‘facts’ and ‘reality’ (they universally hated these words).

On the other hand, they were surprisingly good at execution. All of them were very energetic people who didn’t fear any work or situation at all, and I almost never saw any of them procrastinating. Could this be because their minds, due to their poor predictive ability, were unable to see the real difficulty of their tasks and thus avoided auto-switching into procrastination mode?

(And a third observation – all these people excelled in political environments. They tended to interpret their surroundings primarily in terms of who is kin to whom, who is a friend of who, who is sexually attracted to whom, what others think of me, who is the most influential dude around here etc etc. What they lost due to their desynchronization with factual reality, they gained back thanks to their political aptness. Do rationalists excel in political environments?)”

Here is my theory that explains why rationality isn’t effective in the real world:

The first and biggest part is of course that seeing the truth actively destroys your passions and motivation. Lovecraft was right and I have to quote him:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Probably the greatest problem for our (maybe only my motivation, YMMV) is that life has not inherent meaning. There is no great conflict, no higher purpose, no clear Good vs. Evil; it’s more like Evil vs. Evil or hypocrites vs. hypocrites. Once you’ve eliminated the Story Bias (as Tyler Cowen calls it) you just can’t take idealism and romanticism – which were essential parts of my identity – seriously anymore. Which obviously leads to akrasia in many of us. I mean, what would Frodo do if it somehow turned out that Sauron is actually a nice guy and had good reasons for his actions?

Once you realize that your goals, thoughts and behavior are shaped by evolution and that most people are evil and hypocritical by design, you just come to the conclusion: “Fuck this shit” which – in my humble opinion – is an entirely rational and understandable response.

Secondly, even if you somehow manage to remain idealistic and passionate, you still have to acknowledge that the world is really complicated. Even if you e.g. are convinced that x-risk-reduction is the right thing, you don’t know how. Donating to SIAI? Oh, but Yudkowsky seems a bit overconfident, FAI is probably too hard anyway, etc. so it’s probably better to follow e.g. Wei Dai’s singularity strategies like cloning thousands of Van Neumanns or uploading them or whatever. (Wei Dai actually declined to author some academic papers on UDT because he thinks it might increase the risk of UFAI.) So what looks like a safe and reasonable strategy? Basically just talking, reading and encouraging discussions until you know more about what the right strategy seems to be. Which may take a long time.

Thirdly, rationality is probably positively correlated with procrastination. Some people are just energetic, happy and have lots of will-power and stuff. I don’t know, maybe there is something like “practical” rationality that can help you with these sort of things but genes seem to play a big role here. Of course, taking drugs can help, too.

Fourthly, you become ever more confused about the basic metaphysical stuff like reductionism/physicalism or ethics, especially ethics in a Big World. You aren’t even sure if your model of the universe makes sense on the most basic of all levels. You don’t know how to reconcile utilitarianism with infinite worlds, etc. etc. Just read the above quote by Lovecraft again, or better yet, memorize it and chant it everyday.

Fifthly, just thinking about things consumes precious time and prevents you from achieving real world success.

Sixthly, an accurate assessment of the chances of success often induces doubt and inaction which leads to greater variability of outcomes among non-rationalists. Nobody would run for president, play the lottery, start a religion or try to become the next superstar if they were not deluded and vastly overestimated their chances of success.

Which leads us to the last point: The average rationalist is way cooler than the average non-rational person. Admittedly, that doesn’t mean much, but we shouldn’t fall prey to base rate neglect. There are probably less than 10000 rational people in the world, so of course there are more amazing non-rational folks out there. Only because Sparta lost  doesn’t mean that the average Spartan warrior wasn’t formidable. And on that self-congratulatory note, I would like to end this rant.

 

Evolutionary Psychology Posts

Three posts about evo-psych. You probably noticed that I don’t care about those ridiculous numbers anymore.)

Informers and Persuaders

Writing abstract and using polysyllabic words is a good way to signal authority, severity and intelligence. It’s also easy. Writing colorful, passionate and concrete is hard.

The style of most science papers is therefore pretty horrible.

Cynicism in Ev-Psych (and Econ?)

Yudkowsky thinks some economist (like Hanson) are too cynical in their explanations of human behavior. They misunderstand Occam’s Razor and postulate only a few motives that suffice to explain every human behavior like e.g. self-interest.

But the human brain and human motives don’t have to be simple and he quotes Cosmides and Tooby:

“The science of understanding living organization is very different from physics or chemistry, where parsimony makes sense as a theoretical criterion.  The study of organisms is more like reverse engineering, where one may be dealing with a large array of very different components whose heterogeneous organization is explained by the way in which they interact to produce a functional outcome.  Evolution, the constructor of living organisms, has no privileged tendency to build into designs principles of operation that are simple and general.”

Yudkowsky adds:

One consequence of this is that it’s more parsimonious – under the evolutionary prior – to postulate many smaller simpler adaptations than one big clever complicated adaptation.

One simple way to signal quality X is by having quality X.

The conclusion:

By and large, evolutionary psychologists don’t expect people to be clever, just evolution.  It’s a foundational assumption that there’s no explicit cognitive desire to increase inclusive genetic fitness, and no reason to think that anyone… would explicitly know in advance which behaviors increased fitness in the ancestral environment.  The organism, rather than being programmed with machiavellian subconscious long-term knowledge, is programmed with (genuine) emotions that activate under the right circumstances to steer them the right way (in the ancestral environment).

Of course, most people are nevertheless quite evil.

…from an ev-psych standpoint, we can expect a lot of cynicism to be, in general, justified.

The Evolutionary-Cognitive Boundary

We have to distinguish between two levels of evo-psychological explanations.

Most parents love their children (let’s say the majority. Once, I underestimated the rate of sexual abuse and I want to play it safe). They really do. Of course, the emotion of parental love did arise because it was adaptive. We only have it for evolutionary reasons. That doesn’t mean that people somehow unconsciously don’t love their children, or only love their children if they reproduce, etc. (Obviously, there are evo-psych. reasons for why step-parents are more likely to abuse their “children”, etc. ) These are all evolutionary-historical reasons.

But there are also evo-psych. explanations on the cognitive or subconscious level. When people suck up to high status folks for example they’re usually aware of what they are doing, lest they totally suck at introspection.

An Especially Elegant Evpsych Experiment

Post about a nice experiment that illustrates the distinction between the evolutionary-historical and the cognitive level.

Hilarious passage:

Parents do not care about children for the sake of their reproductive contribution.  Parents care about children for their own sake; and the non-cognitive, evolutionary-historical reason why such minds exist in the universe in the first place, is that children carry their parents’ genes.

Indeed, evolution is the reason why there are any minds in the universe at all.  So you can see why I’d want to draw a sharp line through my cynicism about ulterior motives at the evolutionary-cognitive boundary; otherwise, I might as well stand up in a supermarket checkout line and say, “Hey!  You’re only correctly processing visual information while bagging my groceries in order to maximize your inclusive genetic fitness!”